The MMO world today + 3 months
Posted August 26th, 2008 by Ripperjack
It is always fun to look into the future and see what may or may not happen.
So with the current state of flux in the MMORPG gaming market, lets take a stab at where we may be at the end of 2008. I will start this exploration into the future by taking a look the future of, arguably at best, the top 3 MMO titles today.
#1 World of Warcraft
The game that keeps on keeping on. Even with the release of Warhammer
in but a few weeks, the short term outlook for this game is pretty
stable. Sure it might loose a few thousand players to Warhammer, as
they have a look at the next new shiney, but overall it is just
business as usual. Battlegrounds will be fought, factions will be
ground, phat lewt's will be dropped, all in all nothing really will
happen with WoW, up until very late into November.
Wrath of the Lich King will not so much as grow the existing fan base, but more keep the numbers already there playing. This will I predict keep WoW at the number 1 spot up until the end of 2008.
#2 Warhammer
WAAARRRGGG comes September 18th. EA/Mythic have pretty much hyped themselves into a corner on this one, so the game is going to be released then... come hell or high packet loss. From my experiences of beta and the preview weekend to date, the first month of Warhammer is going to be busy, buggy, laggy but playable. Unlike that "other" recently released game, I don't expect most of the problems from the code base itself, just the sheer amount of players trying to cram into the Tier 1 RvR areas from day 1.
So during the end of September up until mid October, until the peak load player base begins to move into Tiers 2 and 3, expect a lot of spawn camping, laggy RvR combats and "barrens chat" chatter in general chat. Through to the end of October and onward to the end of the year, things will clam down. Guilds will get established and Warhammer will settle in the number 2 spot, right at the heals of Warcraft, ready to pounce into the number 1 spot in 2009, once the WoW diehards see how AWSOME Warhammer is implemented the RvR and meaningful PvP content.
Expect to see the first Tier 4 City siege around mid October, with the first level 40 characters hitting the server 2 weeks after release, and if your server has Koreans playing on it... much, MUCH sooner.
#3 Age of Conan
Even in my wildest forum troll dreams, could I not see how BAD this game has faired in the current MMORPG market. Funcom really shot themselves in the foot this time, and I very much doubt they are going to get out of this hole, without the help of the XBox 360 release. So to that end I predict September to be the "darkest before the dawn" month for them. Most of the disgruntled player base, already pissed off with the failure of the much anticipated PvP patch to make an appearance, will migrate to Warhammer in a heart beat. The players who are left, will see their servers critical mass of players fall below the level required to keep the game enjoyable, and will really question their decision to pay yet another $15 dead money.
October will bring news of server mergers, but weather or not this happens really comes down to what is happening with the XBox version of the game. November will mostly likely be a quiet month, as the devs decided to abandon any further development of the PC client, and shift all efforts into getting the game prepped for the XBox 360 ASAP. Toward the end of December, I for see announcements for the XBox version, to be released "soon" in 2009.
The last hope this game has for survival as to get onto the XBox, sooner rather than later. However, with their ineptness they have displayed over the past three months, in delivering a stable game client, I have to concede it will take them until 2009 to make this a reality.
Month by month predictions for the remainder of 2008.
September
The month of WAAAARRRRGGGG! Warhammer will dominate this month, with ALL other games taking a back seat to it. Don't expect much from anybody else during this time.
October
The month of shock and awe. As gamers recover from the Warhammer phoneme, other gaming companies will take stock of what they need to do to stay alive and try to hype-strike they way back. Expect the same old Age of Conan tripe about Direct X and "new content" and some more "exclusive" deals from Blizzard to keep you in WoW. Other games such as Fallen Earth, Stargate Worlds and other [Insert name]-Free-To-Play MMO's to pretty much be silent during October, as they have nothing to say... so why put your foot in it?
Aside from this some good offline games, such as Fallout 3, are released during this month, but really... who has time of off-line content these days.
November
The Lich King Strikes Back. The first half of November is going to be a slow buildup to the orgasmic hype explosion, of Wrath of the Lich King. Pretty much any gaming web site that has had anything to do with Blizzard will pretty much become an extension of the WoW official web site, with the amount of advertising material, that Blizzard is going to dump onto it. Returning player offers will be posted, "invite a friend" scams will be expanded, and every effort to entrench their established player base, from their arch enemy Warhammer, will be taken to ensure that little Johnny will keep playing WoW over Christmas, rather than get his mummy to purchase that new shiney brown Warhammer box, that has just appeared in mass at his local EB Games store.
December
WoW and WAR head to head. All other games might as well go on holiday, as the forums, review sites and associated web based media are all about doing apples to oranges comparisons, between Warcraft and Warhammer. I don't expect much else to be of importance to be announced in the MMO world, other than these two games, so brace yourself of all things WAAARRRGGG and WoW.
So there you have it. Expect Warcraft and Warhammer to pretty much dominated the MMORPG market for the remainder of this year... period. Everybody else might as well let the marketing departends go on holiday over the next few months, as there will be no way they can compete for the Blizzard vs. EA/Mythic fight that is ahead of us.
Round 1.... FIGHT! [Play street fighter music]
Okay first off it's WAAAGH. AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A FANBOI OMFG.
Second Warhammer will never ever never ever come close to topping WoW. It's just an inferior game. It is new and it isn't WoW so it will definitely be popular enough and a money maker for Mythic. It is fun enough so it will hold on to subs. It will entertain the PvP Lite crowd who will congratulate themselves on playing a "real PvP game designed completely around PvP omg" even though the Warhammer PvP ruleset is more sissy than WoW's. I see it raping AoC hardcore and if Mythic can deliver massive additional content throughout the first 6 months it will take a bit of market share away from WoW. If they stallout after launch patting themselves on the back WoW will have most of those subs back the second WOTLK hits the shelves. *shrug*
I completely agree that the last hope for AoC will be the 360 release. The game was obviously dumbed down from the getgo to play well on a console and it should be a decent contender in the console MMO market with the only real competition being FF11. I do not think it will take this crown from FF11 since the people who play that game are already completely fucking insane. I think it will make money though. It can WTFPWN EQoA!! OH YEAH. BTW that game is STILL around. It must have like 10 subs or something. It does however play on my PS3 60gb ! I dunno if it will work on the 80gb.
WAAAGH?
That's not how I say it. WAAAARRRGGGG!! That's got more oomph!
First off, I never said that WAR is going to top off WoW right from the bat, The WotLK expansion will see to that. However I do forsee the "time for a change" factor creeping into the WoW crowd, once they see that WotLK is just more of the same, that Burning Crusade offered... which is more of the same of the core game.
So in 2009 there will most likely be a creeping toward WAR as players want a more meaning full PvP experience. However, this is totally dependant on how much Blizzard steals from WAR. Don't be surprised to see future battle grounds with siege hard points and other WAR'ish features. If this is the case, then sure WoW will maintain the edge.
It's not about which game is better, is more about... do you want to play yet another 6 months, of the game you've been playing like... forever??!!
Yeah I was going more for the "no chance in hell will Warhammer ever top WOW" more than any allusions to WoW owning it in the short term with WotLK. Warhammer doesn't have meaningful PvP any more than DAoC does. For PvP to be meaningful in my opinion the players have to actually have some vested and fairly personal interest in what they are fighting for. I.e. Shadowbane PvP = more meaningful because your guild getting it's ass stomped and the town it just spent countless manhours building burned to the ground is not a pleasant scenario. Warhammer PvP objectives are static gameworld objects that auto-reset after a while. At its most base level it is no more meaningful than capturing towers in Eastern Plaguelands in WoW.
To me Warhammer is to WoW what DAoC is to EQ. Both games will have released at a ripe time where the big bad mofo on the market has a ton of players who don't want to give up their MMO addiction but are sick of their current drug. DAoC was pretty much EQ Lite with PvP+ areas. The PvE side of things was a bland and simplistic implementation of what EQ had. It's like they duplicated all of the mechanics but left out the "soul" of the game. In the end adding in PvP+ areas to a crappy PvE game just made for both an extremely mediocre PvE experience and a fairly meh PvP game. Especially considering most combat formulas were originally based around PvE and sucked hardcore for PvP. DAoC was a successful game but it never came close to topping EQ's numbers.
Fast forward like 8 years or something and you have the same exact situation with Warhammer and WoW. Warhammer even looks more similar to WoW than DAoC did to EQ. They built a game with as similar a PvE experience to WoW as they could duplicate again without the "soul". The PvP is basicaly a mishmash of the various implementations of PvP Lite you find in DAoC and WoW (battlegrounds and frontiers/contested areas) with a bit more complex of a score keeping system. Essentially you have the same situation instead of EQ Lite w/ DAoC you have WoW Lite with Warhammer.
Warhammer will appeal to the people who are dying to play something other than WoW, it will ease them in with a familiar feeling world just as DAoC did with EQ and in the end it will disappoint the majority of them when they realize what a shallow copy of WoW it really is. Warhammer is definitely a better game than DAoC I think but I am 100% certain it will share the same fate as DAoC. It will be a successful game but it will still have to sit at the kid's table during holidays.
Mark Jacobs has said he thinks Warhammer will have more subs than EQ at peak but less than WoW. This is a huge range (550kish to 10m) but I think so long as it hits around the 1m mark after release and can hold on to 500k+ subs it will be a decent alternative when WoW has you down. The real telling point is going to be how fast they can keep up with the demand for enhancements to the game as well as additional content for both PvE and PvP. If they can finish out the classes that were supposed to be in, dump in the rest of the capitals for PvP, and clean up some of the general bugginess of the game I think it will definitely be a solid contender for the number 2 western MMO spot AoC claims to have a hold on.
My biggest worry for Warhammer is the same issue both DAoC and Planetside had where people get bored with the meaningless PvP cycle and so much of the PvP areas just sit unused. I remember several months of playing DAoC where the only reason keeps were taken was to gain access to Darkness Falls. A handful of us would just go out, take the necessary keeps and then go fuck off there because there would be no decent PvP to be had. What PvP there was tended to consist of random groups of 2-3 people running around emain with the occasional prime time "get into DF" zerg. All of the neat features like siege weapons and such went unused because it was just more convenient to melee down the keep doors as no one was actually defending. Having all the nifty PvP areas in the world doesn't mean shit if no one uses them. Just look at some of the stupid mini-games in WoW like the previously mentioned E Plague towers. Half of them go unused. *shrug*
i think this sums it up perfectly. The towers in HFP and EPL were cute at first, but there was really no point to capping them in the long run ("oh boy, honor hold / thrallmar tokens that I can buy a shitty trinket with" being the ultimate pinnacle of achievement), and people stopped bothering.
If WAR can fix that problem (and not crapping the game itself, but i don't think it can), then they'd have a winner.
oh, and its a tad hard to spawn camp in WAR due to the mass amount of guards at spawn areas. (yes, even scenarios too.)
Ripper, there isn't a chance in hell Warhammer will EVER be better than WoW. Blizzard allowing WoW to die will be the only way it loses subscribers. Until it either totally jumps the shark (ie flying saucer mounts with lasers) or Blizz pulls the management and creative teams to work on another project it will be number 1.
I realize you want to see the mighty Warcraft fall but face facts, its probably the greatest gaming experience ever created and its players have yet to face the ultimate foe of its lore.
The only game I'll be leaving WoW for will be D3 or some random game to be named that has great PvP and bards :P
I mean better in that in all the things which both games have in common WoW does them better. There are very few differences between the two games. The main differences are as follows:
Warhammer has a scoring system for all PvP throughout the world.
Warhammer allows you to level off of PvP.
Warhammer has Public Quests.
Warhammer has Open Groups.
Of these the only one that makes a significant impact on your gameplay experience is the levelling through PvP. So if you hate PvE to the point that you cannot bring yourself to grind that as opposed to grinding PvP then Warhammer will winout as a "better" game. Aside from that WoW trounces it. WoW has better classes, better mob AI, better storyline depth, better designed quests, better designed world, better pathing, better items, better raiding, better combat, better graphics, WoW runs better, etc etc etc etc.
I played war for a bit more than the preview weekend having bought a CE so I didn't just run around for 15 minutes and claim the game was terrible.
The "It's BETA!" response doesn't hold water this close to release. The game is not going to change dramatically in that time. Mob AI is terrible. Sometimes mobs don't even attack you when you hit them. Other times it takes them 10 seconds to respond. I am sure they will work on fixing pathing but that isn't going to make the game better.
As far as quests are concerned both have the same stupid kill mobs/collect items questlines. On top of those though WoW has quests like the Tirion Fordring line or the random bombing missions and such that I didn't bump into in Warhammer. Even the newbie questlines in WoW seemed more interesting to me *shrug*.
You think warhammer combat is somehow different? It's still the same autoattack+random specials bullshit. You are using a Paladin which is by far the most boring WoW class to play. Try playing a WoW rogue or warrior vs any of the melee classes in Warhammer. Both are far more interesting in WoW. The problem in Warhammer is that there is no serious variety in the abilities the classes have. Every class has a snare, stun, some sort of knockback/down, dots, direct damage, etc. And they are all applied almost exactly the same way. The only real difference in the "style" of the classes is the gimmick by which they gain points to use their abilities. I guess bringing back bard twisting from EQ for the chosen is exciting and all but what else is interesting? I am sure you will love that shammy in 1v1 PvP where you spend 30 seconds just landing all 12762 of your DoTs which won't even kill the person rofl.
There is next to no raiding in Warhammer and from what I have read what there is is pretty simplistic compared to WoW raiding even if you only want to include MC.
Warhammer is just as cartoony as WoW imo it is just a bit darker/grittier looking. There are parts of Warhammer that look okay (the chaos starting area) but for the most part I think it feels less detailed and fairly inferior to WoW.
*shrug* I dunno I am glad you are so into Warhammer but it's an inferior game. All of my RL friends who have tried it came to the same conclusions I did. One of them was even like why would I play this I may as well just keep playing WoW as it's just a crappier version of the same game.
Either way I will be playing at release because I am a sucker for MMOs. Hopefully Mythic will prove me wrong and this will be the greatest game ever. It's just not likely to happen in a matter of weeks.
ths one thing I feel i always need to throw out when arguments veer toward art direction is that WoW nailed what they were going for. perfectly. I read somewhere that they basically wanted WoW to look like the camera was zoomed up to right behind a unit in warcraft 3. they did this.
whether a hand has five individual flexing fingers, oven mit hands with "one thumb and one fingers", or just a squared block of hand at the end of the arm doesn't MATTER.
the soul of a game is the hardest to nail down, and that's what i'll be looking for when i get my hands back on WAR since my last flamefest. I WANT WAR TO BE GOOD. i really hope it is.
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