World of Warcraft : Its Own Worst Enemy?

There has been a lot of talk in the gaming news for the past year just how any new MMO game is supposed to compete with the juggernaught that is World of Warcraft (WoW). I will freely admit I have read these articles because they discuss a game market that Max Gaming is actively investigating and to be honest I have to chuckle at the thoughts being thrown out there.

Some of the more common and I feel incorrect ideas include:

- More user control so that you do gestures and it influences the move or attack type that you do. This way after a five hour raid or dungeon run, you can be so mentally exhausted and sick and tired of flailing your mouse around with a Wiimote you won't want to play again for a number of days. (Sorry but I am a fan of the whole, the game does all the nitty gritty crap for you, you just tell it what to do, such as attack, or pick up an object).

- Looking East to Asian influences in order to find your own niche and avoice the beast all together. The problem that I see here is two fold. 1) Asian themes work well in Asia but not elsewhere. 2) Mixed themes just have trouble in both locations (read up on Tabula Rasa for more information, but basicly to sum it up they blew 2 years of development on trying this to find out it wasn't something that would work out well)

- Story! Story is the one word I think people throw around like its some sort of stopgap solution to every problem. Story is a double edged sword and most people haven't really got a clue how to best tame this beast. Yes story is good for creating an interest for the player to keep playing and move forward, so in that regards it is needed. How it is not needed, especially for an MMO, is to make a definative "end game" that the player is seeking to achieve. Why? Well the simple logic is that MMOs should always be evolving and changing, as such if you make the player feel as though they have completed the game, you are giving them a reason to stop playing. You want people to keep playing the core game (not the addons like PvP arenas) because the more people that play and continue to enjoy the game the more your online world feels rich and alive.

So how do you beat WoW?

IMHO you beat WoW in two seperate ways. 1) You create a great end user experiance that is fun and enjoyable by making your game something you can just fall into and play (ie. it should never be frustrating). 2) You simply let WoW continue on its course.

Creating a great game is obvious and its something that every game developer sets out to achieve, but lets look at what made WoW a success in the first place. There really is nothing unique or original to WoW, it is at its heart a rehash of ideas that exist in MMOs that have come before it, the key difference being that Blizzard made WoW an easy product to pick up and get into. The first 30 levels of play are incredibly polished, logical and fun and by that time you have either maxed out your free time and its not the game for you, or you are hooked and enjoy the simplicity and ease of use that allows you to enjoy the game and will continue to pay for another month. As such this is why I say that you have to "create a great end user experiance that is fun and enjoyable". You don't need to reinvent the wheel or even be all that innovative (innovation is a buzz word people), follow the simple lesson that WoW has taught by making a fun, polished experiance that allows the player to enjoy the game world. WoW might do this great, but its not the pinnacle or peak of the mountain, there is a lot of room to improve upon the experiance and playability that they have crafted and make it better.

My second point is probably confusing anyone reading this, "just let WoW continue on its course" likely seems like the dumbest idea in the world, but hear me out on this.

The biggest problem with WoW is its content from 30 to 70. Its difficult and annoying, it runs you all over the world and lets face it, its ok but its not the cats ass of design. At this point in the game theres a huge division between what are termed "casual" and "hardcore" players. Casual players for the most part are stuck in the game world, completing the same old quests, collecting gold and maybe if they are lucky get to do a dungeon run. Unfortunately though when they hit 70, the only thing they really have to achieve is PvP arenas and creating a new character to fill up their time. Hardcore players are the guys that play way too much, they have hit 70 and they have already completed most dungeons multiple times, have the uber gear and are already in the 10 to 25 man raid dungeons.

Unfortunately hardcore players are also the ones that WoW targets far too much and to make matters worse hardcore players only make up a fraction of the subscriber population. Case in point are almost all of the so-called "end game" raids, which take place at levels 60 or 70. Only a small fraction of these raids can be done without completing some overly difficult chain questline that requires an experianced dungeoning crew, something that nearly all casual players cannot do because it requires a different line of thinking. As such casual players are locked out of the epic quests in the game simply because they cannot become "hardcore" players because the seperation between the two groups is too vast.

Another significant problem with WoW is that there is a huge design balance issue with the game which will remind most geeks of the problems Wizards of the Coast has with Magic : The Gathering. What this problem is, is that there is little or no thought put into how changes or things they introduce in expansions will reflect backward onto previous content. For example in WoW there is a saying that "green is the new purple" which refers to the fact that most of the green items, which are less common but good rewards you find from quests or on kills, are better than most 60 level purple items, which were supposed to be world epics. This simple lack of attention has as a result caused much of the old "end game" content to be undesirable, sadly much of this content was stuff that players had never experianced and likely never will with the current design attitudes.

The biggest enemy for Blizzard with WoW is themselves. Yes the game is a beast and a juggernaught right now, but it will not be foreever and the reason for this won't simply be because a better MMO comes out that dwarfs it. It will lose out because a game will come in that will continue to provide the same ease of use and playbility but also better fills the holes that WoW is incapable of filling and thus provide a better fit for "the" MMO that people have to play.