The Wow Killer

If you are familiar with online gaming, you probably have heard of World of Warcraft (commonly known as Wow). If you play MMOs, you are probably quite tired of terms as Wow-clone, Wow-killer, Wow is way better, LOLWOWCLONE LOLOLOLOLOLOL. If you play Wow you are already hating this post, please don’t yet.

I’ve never played Wow, I can’t say it’s a bad or a good game simply because I’ve never played it; it just doesn’t get my attention. Yet always I read something about Wow a strange hate goes through my nerves, which isn’t normal given that I am hating a game I’ve never touched. It took me quite a while to determine what was exactly what made me want to punch people that defend Wow.

The Wow-tard

Now, I’m not saying that everyone that plays Wow is just a mindless drone that dedicates himself to play a game that drains his life; we all have different ways to throw our lives through the drain, and playing a game is just another way to do it. The problem comes when another MMO appears. Many of us have expectations on xyz game, we are just seeing and loving what we see and suddenly it appears.

WOWCLONE / WOWKILLER

These two terms while having way too different meaning are more than enough to detonate a flame war with mortars, bazookas and whatnot.

Trolls that trash other MMOs and defend Wow are frequent and damn they are annoying. They give arguments that imply that your current favorite game is just a copy of Wow (Aka Wow Clone), and that just being interested on a game like this makes you a complete retard.

Some people with the need of feeding the fire may reply. “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, THIS IS THE WOWKILLER”. The Wow killer oh dear lord, that fabled game of the legends that will break away the Wow reign of horror and bring balance to the force.

For no reason at all I call both of these people Wow-tards.

Wow Clones

MMOs that play similar to Wow are normally labeled as  Wow clones; sadly most of them play similar to Wow. They ARE MMOs after all and even worse, many are 3D Fantasy MMORPGs which you could say is one of the most famous settings for MMOs.

MMOs that play different  from Wow are labeled as Wow clones as well, by Wow-tards.

So who in here is to blame? Gamers? Developing companies? Wow-tards?
You can’t blame the gamers, because it is true that some mechanics commonly used in MMOs share similarities to World of warcraft. It is worth reminding people that Wow wasn’t the first one to implement these systems, it’s just the most famous MMO nowadays (to the point it is pop culture).

You actually can’t blame developers either. To justify this argument I’m going to quote a game developer that is currently working on a MMO. For objective purposes I’ve removed the name of the game he is working on, but you can click the source at the end of the quote.

GameSpy: Here’s kind of a high-concept question: A lot of MMOs are – well, how can we put it? They’re World of Warcraft copycats. What is it about this genre that causes it to (largely) stagnate for years on end?

Eric Flannum: Although I’m not sure I’d go so far as saying most MMOs are “World of Warcraft copycats,” I think some amount of stagnation is definitely going on in the MMO genre. Having gone through development on the first game and with what we’ve experienced developing [Insert-Game-Name-Here], there’s actually a pretty simple explanation for this: Developing an MMO is hard. I mean, really hard.

I’ve worked on a lot of different types of games, and while all of them present challenges, none of them compare to the difficulty of developing an MMO. You have complex network models to deal with. You have to create enough content and systems to support players getting not just 20 or 40 hours (which is a long time for most games), but hundreds or thousands of hours of play out the game. You have to deal with the community aspect of the game. The economics and balance of the game become much more involved in an environment where you have thousands of players interacting. The list goes on and on.

You don’t see a lot of companies taking many chances, because developing such a complex game is not only hard, but also very expensive. Add to this the fact that you have a clear “number one” game that’s making a ton of money. From that viewpoint, it becomes very easy for a company to become conservative and not take any chances that could cause the game to take longer to develop – or even risk it becoming a failure when it does launch.[...]

Source

As for Wow-tards… well it’s not like they are even trying to make a point.

The Wow Killer

This is the biggie. After you think about it for a while, you’ll notice that there is no reason for wanting any game to kill Wow. Even if “Lady Gaga Online” becomes the new best MMO and it takes over Wow… will anything change? What would stop people from coming and saying GAGA CLONE to any other incoming MMO ? Or even worse, what would stop people from calling LGO a Wow clone?

So here it is. The Wow killer won’t be an MMO, it will be a collection of MMOs. This MMOs must have two characteristics.

1) Their gameplay mechanics will differ from the vast majority of current MMOs. The more the better.
2) They will be successful and they will call the attention of masses.

Which is the point of this? At some point we will start getting lots of new MMOs with better gameplay mechanics. When you see a new MMO people will say “This game is a Wow clone.” at which people can actually respond: “Naaah I feel it’s going to be a bit more like ZYX game, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

This is it. I am just tired of Wow being the only way to measure MMOs. What we really need is MMOs that break the rules and that work well; that way we will get to see new parameters, new ways to see MMO playing and even better, this is the way in which the MMO genre will move on from the mud trap it has been for the last years. People don’t need to stop playing Wow, it has only 11 ~ 12m suscribers and considering there are billions of people in the world I don’t see why we should depend on the exact same playerbase that has supported that game for years.

The End

Last part and best part: It is already happening.

Lately there have been MMOs that are really trying to break pieces of the old school MMOs, and many more are incoming that try to do the same. We have games like “Divine Souls”, “Vindictus” and the incoming “Tera”, and “Blade and Soul” which some people are already labeling as Action MMORPGs; we have the incoming monster of “Star Wars The Old Republic” (SWTOR) which will probably be the most heavily voiced acted MMO in the History, trying to put a story into MMORPGs.

Last but not least we have my personal favorite: Guild Wars 2 (GW2), that MMO I hope you have heard about. This last one is not only trying to change gameplay and add a story, but is also trying to change the tank/healer/DPS trinity into something that will seemingly work. I would also like to mention RIFT that while not being THAT different, it made really good impressions in the MMO market.

If these games and the many more coming deliver, we will have the genre back to its tracks advancing as it should, and we will be finally be able to forget what was a Wow Clone.

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