How big of a threat is Rob Pardos new MMO to vanilla?

[MoanaLisa]

I think Blizzard would feel threatened if Pardo didn't admit that he wanted to create 15-20 person dev teams. That's simply not enough for an MMO. I'd say 50-60 is at least what you need. That was the size of the WoW team during 2004.

Blizzard isn't threatened by anyone or anything. In fact, they would welcome a little competition in this market as competition is good for everyone. The problem with MMO's is that as a genre they are going the way or RTS games. If Pardo could bring something new to the market that would increase interest all around in MMORPG's they would welcome that with open arms.

Despite how forum wars work, game designers and management are well aware that a success for one game raises the interest level for all games in that genre. The competition between game design studios is generally friendly and very respectful. Both for the reasons stated above and because these people never know if they might be working somewhere else in a year or so.

[Pickynerd]

A mobile mmo?

Oh yeah, huge threat... /sarcasm

[NomCarver]

I'd be surprised if they are just 'getting ideas'. Riot Games invested heavily into them. Based on their talent, I doubt it will be like Vanilla. I think they are smarter than to just make a game copying the vanilla feel. I do, however, like the idea of making games that bring large communities together. With the tech of today, I think they could start something really big.

[Nomads]

Thats what people said with the introduction of TBC stuff. Heroics are too hard, raids are too easy, loot is too easy to get, flying ruined the MMO aspect etc.

Every year theres a new wow killer or wow is going to die because of X changes and subs will all go, and yet I still see lots playing, and there is bulk conversation on fan sites and the official forums which i a good sign of health.

Not saying I like any/all or whatever of changes. But I still find enough enjoyment in the game to play casually.

Well, that's largely due to Blizz regularly shrinking their servers since Cata. Free transfers, battle groups, cross realms, and now visibly seeing players from other realms wherever you go.

If they didn't do all that you would literally see your server dying around you as more and more players leave the game. They've lost MILLIONS of subs. The fact that you don't feel that just shows they're good and keeping ahead of it.

[Netherblood]

None of Wildstar was that hard if you had hands and weren't in the bottom 30th percentile of functioning human beings. It was killed by people softened by today's gaming ethos that everybody should be able to participate and everybody deserves free gear.

Of-course it wasn't hard compared to current top end WoW PVE, but it was harder than what majority of players do and not just the top end players. The biggest problem was actually time investment required. People seem to forget WoW got so popular because it was a casual game, even Vanilla WoW was super casual compared to other MMOs available at the time like L2 and EverQuest. And recently FF14 had huge success being a casual MMO and having a lot of end game content for non raiders who don't play a lot. Legion actually replicated that model in a way and had success with it. I just think in the west the demand for hardcore time consuming MMOs is low.

I think classic WoW will do alright due to nostalgia feelings and the WoW IP, probably maintain a few hundred thousand subs. I doubt a new mmo following same model can succeed.

[Loxotron]

Star Wars The Old Republic
RIFT
Guild Wars 2
TERA
FFXIV
The Secret World
Black Desert
Blade and Soul
Archeage
Age of Conan
Warhammer Online
TESO
Wildstar

Probably missing a few Kappa

Age of Conan for me was one of the best on par with WoW, maybe even better in many aspects.

[digichi]

The whole thing is ridiculously well designed. Modern WoW doesn't hold a candle to vanilla's world building, even if it's more convenient, action-packed, and gratisfying. Sure the graphics are nicer and the quests more varied, but the world building... modern WoW loses big time. And it's certainly not the art team's fault. It's all about the game designers.

i snipped most of it, but I agree with a lot of what you wrote.

The 1-60 game had you exploring a rather large world (larger and more varied than continents you get in any expansion pack, available straight up). You just can never replicate the experience of the base game in any expansion. You were literally taking zepplins/boats all around the world, running for a large chunk of it, and bumping into other players in unlikely places (going through a journey of 30+ varied zones). It's very hard to replicate that.

Speaking of Pardo, it really seems he wanted to put an emphasis on the "RPG" aspect. There was a talk where he said it was important to him to really sell the class fantasy through mechanics in a game like WoW, and then he put a picture of what looked to be a player's interface during a raid (with all the addons and what not) and dubbed it a fail on that aspect. I thought that was pretty powerful because it was clear that, from a creator's/ designer's perspective, sometimes you never quite hit what you were originally going for and its hard to be 110% satisfied with it (even if a large chunk of others enjoy that output.)

There's a lot of interviews and dev vids where they talk about the dev of vanilla, and how they made a lot of world building sacrifices in favour of gameplay. Like the rested system- where initially, if your player got tired, you would actually gain less experience than normal until rested again.
It's quite insightful as to how strictly they first approached the world building (as they even considered day and night cycles, where at night time, you would have to carry a torch around.) Of course if they were going that hardcore, what they settled for was still quite effective on its own.

It's clear that the original dev team had a their own conflicting views of what they wanted WoW to be, and ending up settling on those ideas to create that base game.

With a team like that i think they had some strong world builders who fought for that aspect a lot more than one might today (before the game became more 'defined'.) I think the game world has been been so strongly established, that now and the games systems seem to be the larger focus, or draw point. I think the lore still tries to explore new things, but without 60 new levels and 20 new zones, it's hard to recreate vanilla magic ^^

[Deleted]

if you want something of the scale of WoW vanilla, it will take at least 4 years just to get an announcement of what the game will be about, not the actual game. OP thinks a game like WoW can be done from scratch in 1 year apparently.

Don't worry, OP is the same person who thinks it takes a week to port WoW from one engine to another.

[Ishayu]

There is, actually. Everquest, on a progression server. Far "harder" and grindier that WoW vanilla ever was. I still remember the comments by ex EQ players who were in the original WoW alpha, marvelling at how easy it was to lvl compared to EQ. See this for example, it still is quite an entertaining read today: https://www.graffes.com/forums/showt...e-Alpha-Tester

EverQuest is nothing like WoW. Indeed WoW was created by designers who were frustrated with EverQuest. I don't like EverQuest myself. It's too long and devoid of content, and it's ugly.

One of the things they did to the levelling to make it better in WoW than in Everquest was indeed to make it shorter, because it was too long and devoid of content in Everquest. That doesn't mean that making it even shorter afterwards was a good move. Do you understand that? Shorter != better in all cases, even if it did in one particular case.

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And that's where we disagree.

You say they're for "different audiences", but we're 13 years down the line, not 30. Loads of people having arrived later on, enjoy and "handle" Classic just fine. Loads of people that played Classic, didn't prefer it to later iterations.
I just wanted an immersive RPG with an MMO element, and WoW has kept me hooked for almost 10 years straight. Not even sure what this "action game" is supposed to be, but it feels like a meme at this point and I've never sought out such titles.

As for you railing at people saying that Vanilla would have no redeemable qualities if it was released today... Well, it has redeemable qualities as evident by the fact that Blizzard sees a demand for it. It's still being released as Legacy content though, AKA as was, for that reason.

If you think the current version of WoW is an RPG with an MMO element, you completely deluded. The whole thing a smothering of instances. The game has almost no relevant open world content and it is exceedingly rare to meet and make friends with people organically through the game world. And that's not an opinion, that's a fact.

I do not deny that there are players who arrived later who like classic better, nor do I deny that there are players who played classic but didn't like it, only to come back and like a later version. I didn't claim either audience went away, I claimed that WoW changed from catering more to one to catering more to the other.

Glad we agree on what I'm railing against.

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Nah, we don't know how he left Blizz, but we know how he's fired from Red 5, his own studio, and his employees quite universally hated him.

Rob Pardo has never been in Red 5, that's Mark Kern. Pardo left in 2015 to form Bonfire Studios, which is after Mark Kern was ousted from Red 5. Stop defaming Rob Pardo please.

Oh, and by the way, sometimes people who are right get pushed out by people who are wrong. Firefall is dead and buried, and with good reason: It went to shit. Maybe Mark Kern was right, and his employees disagreed and ousted him? I suspect that might have been the case.

[Deleted]

EverQuest is nothing like WoW. Indeed WoW was created by designers who were frustrated with EverQuest. I don't like EverQuest myself. It's too long and devoid of content, and it's ugly.

One of the things they did to the levelling to make it better in WoW than in Everquest was indeed to make it shorter, because it was too long and devoid of content in Everquest. That doesn't mean that making it even shorter afterwards was a good move. Do you understand that? Shorter != better in all cases, even if it did in one particular case.

I was just pointing out that in fact there is a game quite similar to WoW classic that you can still play today, when you said there is nothing like it. Now you say it's completely different (?), but then admit that it was created by designers frustrated with EQ: which is true, both Pardo and Kaplan played a lot of Everquest and were GMs of the same EQ guild where they claimed many world-firsts, they actually met there. Whether you like EQ or find it ugly is completely irrelevant, although I doubt you played it for long when you say it is "devoid of content": EQ basically started the very concept of raiding that WoW followed to the letter. Without EverQuest WoW wouldn't even exist, and even if EQ was released in 1999 it's STILL getting new expansions every year.

[ls-]

Rob Pardo has never been in Red 5, that's Mark Kern. Pardo left in 2015 to form Bonfire Studios, which is after Mark Kern was ousted from Red 5. Stop defaming Rob Pardo please.

Why tf are you talking about Pardo now? We're talking about Mark Kern.

Nah, that's one and only Mark Kern

Err... sauce?

I know he got banned from Twitter briefly, but afaik he left Blizzard willingly because he got so burnt out on WoW's infamously long crunch period. In fact, a large part of Blizzard left them following the release of WoW - they were very exhausted.

Just a reminder what we're talking about.

Oh, and by the way, sometimes people who are right get pushed out by people who are wrong. Firefall is dead and buried, and with good reason: It went to shit. Maybe Mark Kern was right, and his employees disagreed and ousted him? I suspect that might have been the case.

Yeah, sure. Kern is a martyr. Lmao.

[stomination]

WoW is fine bro. Theres a lot they got wrong with legion but there’s also a lot they got right. I’m not gonna argue because it’s a dead horse and people will always repeat “WoW is dying” even though they sold more copies of legion than any other expac aside from Wrath and is doing better than WoD (which means above 4-5 mill subs).

Either way, whatever you wanna believe is g. We’ll see what happens with next expac and see where everything goes. Vanilla is coming out eventually as well so that’ll boost sub numbers by a ton as well for a short while and it’ll at least hold a good amount. WoW isn’t gonna go anywhere anytime soon.

Well technically when someone says wow is dying they are right.


Because the moment something is born it starts dying.

[MoanaLisa]

Why tf are you talking about Pardo now? We're talking about Mark Kern.

The thread is about Pardo and his new venture. If this turns into a thread about someone else it will get closed for being derailed.

[Taeldorian]

Well technically when someone says wow is dying they are right.


Because the moment something is born it starts dying.

Well if you look at it that way then everything’s dying but that’s not really a nice or fun way to look at things imo, but yeah technically that’d be right.

[mickybrighteyes]

One of the things they did to the levelling to make it better in WoW than in Everquest was indeed to make it shorter, because it was too long and devoid of content in Everquest.

this is a scary notion after playing through vanilla wow.... after lvl 40 you were struggling to find quests.

[Deleted]

this is a scary notion after playing through vanilla wow.... after lvl 40 you were struggling to find quests.

True, the "Forties" were considered the levels were you had to grind killing mobs in vanilla WoW because the zones back then were pretty unfinished and quests were few. Which is quite similar to what you got in EQ, where you didn't have the concept of an NPC with a big yellow mark floating over his head (you had to talk to the NPC first and MAYBE you would get a quest, or maybe not). In EverQuest thought you had epic quests for each class that were much more involving (and time consuming) than any quest in WoW. But not everyone likes levelling by questing anyway, I remember many guides about where to grind mobs of the appropriate level even in vanilla WoW. If you wanted to skip questing in vanilla you could. To say that EQ was "devoid of content" though is heresy, especially at endgame.

[Wildmoon]

People really put too much emphasis on individual developers's ability to influence the chance of a game being successful. Rob Pardo is a great developer but the same is true for many who have failed before him including many ex-blizzard developers.

The whole culture and practices of a company is really the most important driving force behind successes to me.

[Ishayu]

this is a scary notion after playing through vanilla wow.... after lvl 40 you were struggling to find quests.

It was much, MUCH worse in Everquest. And honestly, if you're willing to do some dungeons or just have some rested XP, vanilla wasn't that bad.

I do think there were too few quests in vanilla though, but today I think there are way too many for too little playtime. 7.3.5 attempts to adress this with level scaling, so we'll see how that works out.

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Why tf are you talking about Pardo now? We're talking about Mark Kern.




Just a reminder what we're talking about.



Yeah, sure. Kern is a martyr. Lmao.

Right, got those mixed up. I didn't say Mark Kern is a martyr, but the game Red 5 were making definitely failed without him. Whatever you may think of his attitude and personality, there is no doubt he is a very competent game designer.

[wizbangz]

Yeah. Hmm, I wonder why Titan failed while Rob Pardo was project lead.

https://vimeo.com/61687949/description

you do realise overwatch is project titan right?

[Deleted]

I don't even know what it is, but I can assure you that it will be as much of a thread as any other MMO has been to WoW, even if it's vanilla we're comparing it to.

Which is to say not at all.