Why the WoW killer never happened?

[zorkuus]

WoW is 10 years old. No new MMO is going to have 10 years worth of content on release, even though the expectation is (unfairly) there.

Well... it's not so unfair. Why would you want to play an "unfinished" product when there's one out there that's "finished"?

[Deleted]

True, but when I played star wars, I don't think I knew a single character, so yeah, although there is an existing universe, the story was disconnected from that.

.......

Maybe I should have been clearer then, Wow actually used all those Lore characters it had previously built up.

Safe to assume you never played either of the KotOR games then?

[Rassium]

Safe to assume you never played either of the KotOR games then?

Given that only one was considered "canon", I don't think it matters if he played the better one.

[klogaroth]

It's all about timing.

I don't think there have been many better timed games ever released in any genre.

MMOs had existed before, but anyone playing games back then knew that an MMO was going to look like ass and it was most likely going to be very laggy on your 56k modem.

Throw out a game set in a world that people already care about just as MMOs no longer need to look terrible and decent internet is becoming widespread and you've got a pretty good chance that anyone interested in playing an MMO is at least going to give it a try. Plus theme park MMO vs sandbox MMO.

There won't ever be a WoW killer as such. If MMOs remain popular enough for there to be a next big thing it won't be "like WoW, but better". A next big thing will be something else. Either a completely different game design, or something that will use the next step up in technology to do things that WoW just can't do.

[Gnomorepuns]

The main reasons that WoW killers don't work are because half of them are released unfinished (rushed) and they all start with 1/10th the amount of content that WoW has. Also, WoW is a very comfortable game. It's like an old slipper.

Being the type of gamer that is the majority of the wow player base today that is completely correct; the only killer that will be the end all be all in wow is wow itself. And that will happen when the console gamer gets too bored with what they wanted and goes and ruins another game. That or when wow just becomes too outdated; if that ends up being the case id be all for a wow 2 to continue the story with a highly updated engine.

[jasdasm]

WoW has the best Combat "feeling" just like Quake HL CS UT still are better Games than todays Releases.

[Imnick]

You know how everyone talks like they could design a better MMO than WoW in a weekend?
Turns out they're wrong and successfully designing a game which is supposed to have an infinite lifespan and indefinite post-game support and expansions is hard, who knew.

[Rassium]

You know how everyone talks like they could design a better MMO than WoW in a weekend?
Turns out they're wrong and successfully designing a game which is supposed to have an infinite lifespan and indefinite post-game support and expansions is hard, who knew.

It's that and most of the people who shit-talk games in general just say things like "What were they theeeenkeeeeng? If I were developing a game I'd just make it fun! No bad parts!"

[Deleted]

Nothing has been able to bring down WoW, just like in early MS times, nothing was able to bring down crappy Windows.

Why?

WHY???

Because they both are casual friendly and "easy to use" I guess? For the windows part, I remember those years back when "you geeks" as you describe the more advanced computer users all went for Linux. Even then I spent quite some time behind pc, but honestly I was used to windows and linux was just annoying to use. (bare in mind I was like 14-15? back then) And I remember lot of my m8s trying it out, more of to show off how good they are behind the keyboard, but pretty much all of them just installed windows back within 1-2 weeks.
Also when you mention crushes of old versions? I don't really remember many of them honestly. My windows crushed more times when I was using winXP and win7...

And similar goes for WoW. It's casual friendly (more and more with each new expansion), so that's where most numbers are from imo. And honestly, as much as someone wants to pretend other mmos are better; Wow has it's problems, but it has still by far most to offer

[Zoneseek]

I find the idea of a "wow killer" silly. It will never happen. There's room in the MMO space for multiple big players, and one game doesn't have to kill another to be a success. I don't know why this is such a thing in the MMO genre. When blizzard announced heroes of the storm, did people expect it to be a DOTA killer or LOL killer? No, and it won't be. It will just be another MOBA in the genre's space. What MMO did WoW itself kill exactly? There are still retail EQ servers, DAOC servers, hell there is still a retail presence for Ultima Online circa 1997 and it still has a monthly sub to boot. If the MMO giant WoW didn't kill off any of those old games, how does anyone expect any game to come along and "kill" wow?

The whole thing makes no sense and people should lose the mentality that one mmo has to kill another mmo to be a success. It doesn't, and it wont.

[Deleted]

IMO every other mmo has all about look at me, WOW is the only one that is about heres how I play.

Every other mmo has put too much effort into its visuals which is strange as most peoples machines from the looks of it are toasters so I actually have no idea why people bother with ZOMG graphics if they don't even have the machine to run them.

So you have a case of people unable to run the games to there true fidelity and then comes the lack luster gameplay, slower pace, the combat not thought out and the dungeons pale in comparison to wows dungeon boss design.

If people ever take a look back and notice that blizzard encounter designers are very clever and theres a reason why they have clever people, they pay them and probably pay them a lot more then other mmo devs do who prob spend more money on the graphic designers then encounter designers.

[unbound]

There are a number of reasons that there is no WoW-killer.

The Rise:
- WoW came out when the MMORPG market was still relatively small. Lineage and Lineage 2 were the only MMOs with large numbers of subscribers at that time.
- WoW had the IP that was recognized by millions of players of their previous games (no other MMO at that time had that advantage). This gave them instant access to a player base no other MMO could accomplish at that time.
- WoW has (and still does) steal the best ideas from other games. WoW launched with some of the best features of other games all in one place. There are almost no features of WoW that weren't developed earlier by other companies.

The Competition:
- Most competitors didn't have the resources to put together a true WoW killer.
- Most competitors didn't understand that they needed to steal the best ideas from many other places to succeed.
- Most competitors didn't have the instant fan base to pull into their MMO. The closest were SWTOR and LOTRO which are movie fans (not game fans).

Inertia:
- Most current MMO players started with WoW, so the majority will not easily be swayed into a different MMO no matter how good it is. This is the same reason that people with the smart phone they started out with don't really give the other brand a real opportunity to prove themselves.
- Most players feel guilty about leaving behind something they spent so much time on and have various things they earned just go away.


In regards to subscription numbers, part of those numbers are a game. Even at it's peak, WoW only ever really had about 8 million actual players. The extra 4 million or so (at that peak in BC and initial Cata) is how their accounting department deals with time cards, etc (e.g. buying the game gets you 1 month and they include that in their numbers even if that game is never installed). If you do the math from their financial statements, you can confirm this yourself. Currently, at WoD launch WoW was really less than 7 million players, is under 6 million per their latest financial statement, and likely is much less than 5 million actual players right now.

[danildoen]

Wow's killer is WoW itself. It will eventually kill itself and no other game will kill it.

[LaserChild9]

WoW is 10 years old. No new MMO is going to have 10 years worth of content on release, even though the expectation is (unfairly) there.

Well... it's not so unfair. Why would you want to play an "unfinished" product when there's one out there that's "finished"?

Why does any new MMO need to compete with 10 years worth of content? Lets be honest, most of that content gets breezed through on the way to the level cap now . All any new MMO needs is to compete with the current wow Expac and the content within that. Yes wow has 10 years worth of raids to go back to once you have leveled and are bored with the current endgame, but no MMO can compete with that unless they can release new content faster.

Safe to assume you never played either of the KotOR games then?

Nope, I'm just speculating on what I do know, and I did not know any of the characters in SWTOR. Thanks for the info.

[Zigrifid]

Wow will never die from another game for 1 simple reason , its very new-player friendly game,its a comfortable game for people unlike other games and when i see people saying "i will go to <randomname> mmo cause its hard and WoW is now casualified", im sure 100% that they are coming back.WoW will only die if blizz shut down the servers .

[melodramocracy]

Why am I writing this thread?

A couple of days ago Microsoft announced the end of Internet Explorer. This led me to think about why things in the software industry are the way they are.

Very few people now seem to remember how miserable Microsoft products were exactly 15 years ago. Yes, I'm talking about the age of Windows 98, and later Windows Me and Windows 2000. When MS released Windows 8 people complained how bad it was. They were wrong. Sure, it was different, it forced us not to use Start Menu and tried to cultivate some new habits. However, Windows 8 was NOT bad in a sense Windows 98/Me was. Early Windows was horrible. It was sluggish, it was crashy. The first thing one had to learn on the computer was how to Save his document. Save a lot. Save a lot - Windows can always crash when you don't expect it.

Computer geeks like me started using GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and alternatives. And we saw for ourselves how things could be in a better way. Even those who continue using Windows and tried some browser alternatives - like Netscape, they say that there are better products.

But those like me were the minority. Do you know what made me wonder about the majority of people?

Everybody was bitching about how Windows was bad ... and yet they continued using it!!!

Nothing has been able to bring down WoW, just like in early MS times, nothing was able to bring down crappy Windows.

Why?

WHY???

Windows has more or less always had enterprise level dominance, at least in terms of what we'd consider "modern" end-user computing (say, 1995 onwards). That, coupled with support from 3rd parties who actually make the apps that matter, trickled down to the home environment.

Sure, there are many things about Windows that did, and still do, suck. But if you want the absolute highest degree of app options and availability (again, the things that actually matter, and need an OS to begin with), there's simply nothing remotely close to it.

In terms of Windows 8 and the hatred for it.... completely justified. Windows 7 still has very good support, works as people expect it to, and doesn't foist some random vision of 'evolution of the desktop' to mimic a half assed mobile OS across a screen size that by no means requires that sort of limitation.

Add to that the fact that very few people want to be bothered being early adapters, dealing with possibly questionable drivers, etc etc, especially when MS has a fairly consistent history of only getting an OS 'right' after a service pack or 2. I saw no reason to switch to 8, and while I'll keep tabs on what is coming out next, I'll only hop off W7 when I'm given a solid technical reason to do so, and I simply don't see one yet (but I also do much more than just gaming).

As far as 'WoW killer', it's generally a self fulfilling bullshit forum meme that has no real bearing anywhere, much like declaring MMO's 'dead' while they're still profitable. In the grand scheme of things, very few titles have actually completely shut down.

One thing I will say is that plenty of gamers seem to have a) a double standard of claiming to want an experience different than Warcraft, and then bitching when this different experience is actually... different, and b) a terribly shallow sense of MMO history, when they declare some new game to be a WoW clone, seeing that everything in vanilla WoW was more or less lifted from prior titles.

[zorkuus]

Why does any new MMO need to compete with 10 years worth of content?

They do, if they want to dethrone it.

All any new MMO needs is to compete with the current wow Expac

Content in this context is more than just the stuff you play at a given time, it's the overall package, the overall presentation. How the game feels to play, combat responsiveness and so on...

[Deleted]

Nope, I'm just speculating on what I do know, and I did not know any of the characters in SWTOR. Thanks for the info.

Would probably be why you knew no-one from SW:TOR

[Terridon]

OP is one of those people that believe that complaints nessesarely is the majority because they're the loudest.
I use linux and have done for many years. Prefer that, but still use windows on my gaming computer since it's far easier to get things to run. WoW being one of them that is, or at least used to be, fucking annoying to get running on linux only.
But i know a lot of people that is very satisfied with windows. It runs and is easy. The part that you can fix pretty much everything in linux doesn't matter much since it's far more complicated than people will usually bother with.
You can fix a programs code since it's opensource? 99%(statistically proven ever-correct number) of the users will never use this "feature", and thus it's pretty useless for them.

WoW is fine. Trying the games people go "omg dis so much harder than wow" and you have god damn telegraphs of red all over that you can just sidestep.
Wildstar for instance? people didn't do more than 50% of the damage they were supposed to with a freaking few buttons, all the same while they talked about how god damn fucking easy wow was.
Always like that. Not saying wow is hardest game eu world, but seeing people that can't even get proving ground gold in mop, going "i play X because i enjoy a real challenge"...

<Please insert ongoing rant for as long as you please>

[Halbrium]

Anecdotal "I quit threads mean nothing". There are thousands of people quitting every week, and thousands re-subbing. You wouldn't have time to read all the "I quit" threads if everyone who quit posted them, that doesn't mean the game isn't thriving.

From my perspective, there is no other game that does raiding in a persistent world better. I could see someone who just quests being disappointed. I would suggest Dragon Age: Inquisition.