My efforts to become a professional Amazon Affiliate continue to be met with zero success. There was not even one pity purchase from the list of books that I have not read. You are a tough crowd.
In today’s random internet musings I want to talk about World of Warcraft.
I love this game and I hate this game. It is only an MMO in the same sense that the automobile is a carriage. Both convey people and cargo, and both are measured in horsepower. I do not consider WoW to be an MMO so much as it is an MMO killer.
For anyone that wants to step up and play the semantics war, just remember that everyone who logs in and plays the story is “The Champion”, and even though there are 10 to 30 of you, only one of you gets the kudos in the cinematic for killing the Jailer at the end of the tier. In essence, playing WoW together is kind of like a bunch of two to three year olds playing. You are not playing with each other, you are playing near each other. You are vaguely aware of other people’s presence, but not really doing anything clever in that interaction.
This burns my fucking soul.
There are lots of things to like about World of Warcraft. There are lots of people who are famous on the YouTubes for this even if they occasionally talk about the warts and the small scars that riddle the game. Something something borrowed power amirite?
The deep truth is that the game has done such a good job of utterly destroying most of the competition that in order to grow they have decided to feast upon the echoes of their past by launching previous expansions as standalone games to recapture nostalgia dollars. Kudos to them for erecting a gigantic moat around their hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into the technology to power their audience.
I am not writing this to gripe about borrowed power, or the fact that “bring the player not the class” only goes up to the point that you do not have warlock soulstones or a heroism in the raid. The latter, at least, can come from three classes. You need very specific buffs that give you benefits that require at least one of a handful of classes. As someone who recruits for my raid team, it is a pain in the ass. Also: Where the hell are you, all you late night warlocks?
I think WoW actually started off as an MMO. You could earn cool things that were exclusive and time limited. I recall the awe of seeing people who timed Zul’aman for their mounts, and seeing someone with a Scarab Lord title wandering around. I soared around Dalaran on my 310 speed achievement protodrake and also spent one month flying around my server as the first person to get the 25-man 3 drake mount from Sartharion.
Then came the day that the first raft of players completed the 365 days of holiday achievements for their purple proto drake.
I logged in that day without realizing what was happening until I set foot on the Dalaran landing pad. There were no less than five people who were glitching their mounts to fly upside down and backwards, giggling and emoting to their heart’s content.
This was the day that I realized that I was no longer the target market of the game and that their focus had shifted. In order to get a 310 speed mount prior to that moment there was a tremendous amount of work and coordination to achieve something magnificent via raiding or player vs player battles.
Now, all you needed to do was to click on a pile of random buttons during all the major holiday events. The fancy mounts reserved for the players who did amazing feats in the game suddenly were joined by a new crop of people: People who could login consistently and click some buttons.
It is interesting to see how each WoW expansion mirrors something happening in other games. The farms of Pandaria were reflections of Farmville and social games. The garrisons were bizarro universe replicas of Dungeon Village. The pet battles were essentially Pokemon fighting games. Even now people make comparisons to Path of Exile and Final Fantasy IXIVVI or whatever number it is up to.
I really enjoy raiding with my guild in WoW. I enjoy the aesthetic of the game and how they have opened up their UI for players to configure and tailor. I admire their on-ramp for new players, and how it gently takes you from “kill 10 bears” to raid readiness. Very few games take you to elder play so seamlessly.
There are many things this game has done in order to wrap thick coils of rope around the neck of the MMO category and strangle the life out of it while staring deeply into its eyes to watch it die.
In 1998 I drafted some interesting game designs for an MMO I wanted to build with overlapping social structures built around competing social dynamics for groups at various sizes. The design called for groupings for families, cities, nations, and religions. Each of these groups has its own goals and sometimes they would be in conflict. The interesting decisions of the game would be for the player to decide how they wanted to align their actions while they played.
Here we are decades later and we are no closer to MMO 2.0 than we were when people made Barrens Chat into a thing. Innovation in MMOs became animation styles for question marks over NPC heads and how to manage instance loot drops with as little drama as possible.
MMOs and social games, to me, should be more about creating reciprocity loops and players managing internal conflict.
I still sit on two interesting design ideas that I would love to experience as a player someday. In the late 1990s during Halloween I was inspired by the monster portals in UO to want to play a game with zero AI critters or monsters. The entire game creature population would be a managed economy that has a stock market for people to trade up their monster types based on earning points for playing roles needed for the game to thrive.
The other design idea is the social mechanic above.
Are there games that have flavors of these out there? Sure. I would love some recommendations for games to examine if you feel they have flavors of these.
I am skeptical we will see successes from ideas like this at scale and that means it is going to be hard to find 20 (or 50?) million dollars to crank out one of these games any time soon.
You might argue that there are platforms out there that give you the ability to implement games like this. Sure. There are. At least four or five people are going to become billionaires off of laying the plumbing so there is more opportunity to create cool, emergent game designs.
These platforms are real and will solve this problem soon. I do not dabble in any of these platforms until it is clear that I can get enough of a pile of cheddar out of it on the way up to pay my Californian-head-of-household bills. I doubt we will see any of that changing any time soon since they are still figuring out their product-market-fit, plus we are in “the difficult times”.
In the meantime, I could use a late night warlock or two if you want to come play WoW with me. I fully intend to enjoy my time inside the monster that is killing the genre that inspired me to become a professional game developer. Eventually WoW will feel a tap on its shoulder and turn to see a grinning competitor staring intently as the loops of rope settle into place.
Thank you for reading along. This is a little angrier and a little darker than normal. If you want to see less of this then go search for last week’s post and buy one of the books I linked. If that does not happen then you can expect a few more game design rants in the coming months. See you soon!
