Last week, Wolfshead’s thoughtfully written and nicely crafted article about Why the MMO Industry Needs a Real Cataclysm set me to thinking. First of all, I don’t have nearly the industry pedigree that he has. Second of all, he took an idea from mid air and fleshed it out with cogent arguments. Third, it was thoughtful and passionate. Good on him. Let me tell you why he’s wrong.
He’s not wrong for the same reason Tobold says he is in his rebuttal Blizzard and McDonalds. Tobold’s rebuttal is also well written and uses an analogy that is very apt to rebut the ideas that Wolfshead presented. Don’t misunderstand, Tobold is right on, but his analysis is different from mine and is largely from the company’s point of view.
I wanted to address this even before Tobold did, but his article got me wanting to post.
Let’s look at this from a player’s point of view first. Then I’d like to address the evident contempt that is out there for Blizzard from others in the development community.
First Wolfshead starts out with a section called The Farmville Curse. I couldn’t agree with him more on that point. Those aren’t “MMOs” and I think I would say that Facebook games in general are pushing the definition of “game” to it’s limits. I have no argument with him there.
All of us love our games (I assume you do too, and that is why you are here) and most of us want exciting new games to come along. We want them fun, we want them nuanced, we want them polised. Oh, and we want them right damn now. Why does it take so long to develop a game anyway? While I suspect that most of us have ideas why games take so long, I think that most of us don’t really think about some realities that govern whether a game is polished (seemingly a large yardstick for measuring the success of a game), fun, and attractive to us. I don’t think most of us have any idea of the scope of these games or the resources required to develop or operate and manage them.
So when the PileFlanet (Yes, I did that on purpose) beta came out for Champions online, I took advantage of the membership I’ve inexplicably maintained for the last few years and downloaded and installed the game. I got my key, activated my account, patched (I won’t bitch too much except to say that didn’t go well) and tried it out. I made a few characters, cool, and tried to play. Meh.
When we are talking about the events in MMO history that have caused a company to become reviled among the player base, the Star Wars: Galaxies NGE is frequently brought to the forefront. SOE still hasn’t lived down the whole debacle. It’s not even entirely clear that it was their idea, as I hear a lot of people who should know such things point their fingers at LucasArts. SOE would still be to blame for the timing, just days after an expansion shipped that a large percentage of their player base paid for. SOE or LucasArts, it’s hard to argue against that event being the nail in the coffin of SW:G’s hopes of world dominance.
In addition to the huge changes coming to the game world, it appears that WoW 4.0 is going to bring some pretty substantial changes to the way the classes work. I’m going to reference an article that I’ll link from the live blog at Blizzcon’s Class, Items, and Professions Panel today. Here are the major points…
After watching the road littered with the bodies of the would-be kings of the MMO world over the last few years, and seeing the size of the PC Game section at the local Fry’s and Best Buy shrink and get less interesting, I have come to wonder what Will Be Next. While Tarkheena and I continue to play World of Warcraft, and enjoy it, I long for something new and exciting like most of you probably do. Run-on sentences aside, the outlook for the Next Big Thing is bleak.
In the 
One of the big problems that Mythic has had with Warhammer is that when one side (almost always Destruction) has greater numbers the other side levels faster because they have more readily available opponents. This is specifically true in scenarios.
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