Yes, I truly believe that World of Warcraft has murdered the MMO Genre of our time and perhaps even that of our children. If you are going to get very upset reading this I suggest you simply close the window and move on, no hard feelings. Better yet, offer your opinion.
How it began:
I remember when WoW first popped on to the scene, people were stuck in the routine of quick round FPS games offering little to no immersion and buggy, ageing MMO’s struggling to pull a crowd together in a market slowly falling away. Then the bright light appeared on the horizon, World of Warcraft! The inherit nature of Blizzard’s Warcraft graphics allowed them to achieve a pretty decent looking MMO without having to re-create the extremely difficult “realistic” form and world, while keeping the game open to most users PC equipment at the time. This was a huge, lore filled, pretty and accessible game being thrust into our faces by a company with a fantastic reputation for looking after its communities. And Blizzard delivered, I mean.. the proof is out there right now, this might be the best media success story for two decades.
The issue however arises in the way it plays, yes there is content, but this is mostly quite linear and even with the resources and skills blizzard has it is difficult to switch away from the quest-instance-daily-battleground routine they have offered players. I venture to say that a good 80% of the userbase is only playing for that next big item and at times ask themselves why they even log in between raids. This is not an issue exclusive to this title, in fact the majority of MMO’s now fall into this category and for the most part they are doing quite well.
And so we come to the big problem:
Why break the mould that works so well? Sandbox MMO’s are all but dead, there are some success stories like EvE Online but this section of the industry has mostly been taken on now by indie companies operating out of a garage in a third world country while the big developers fight over who can offer the shiniest weapons, sparkling skill animations and who can find a new way to polish up that old worn out content into a new charged for expansion so that the drooling masses of consumerism can eat it up.
The MMO world is literally a victim of WoW’s success, this is modern gaming, take it or leave it.
