The alternative title I was considering for today is “only MMOrders in the building.” Today I am going to talk about World of Warcraft. I do not have very kind things to say about World of Warcraft, and I feel a little guilty because they finally fixed my favorite class and spec (Holy Paladin) after seven years. I am actually really enjoying healing at the moment, and unfortunately, I have been planning on dunking on this game since June.
Ultima Online was the game that convinced me I should become a professional game developer. I am humbled to have met many of the key people who brought this incredible product to life, including Raph Koster, whose game I am eagerly awaiting, and Richard Garriott, whose Ultima IV game was probably one of the most influential games I have ever played.
Ultima Online was a wild sandbox game. The violence between players was so intense that you could not really call it PVP. It was called Player Killing (PKing) because it was so savage and abrupt. At the same time as being a deep, deep pool of violent online despair, it also had shining moments. I was briefly a homeowner in the game on a choice piece of island real estate, I was an elected mayor of a player town, and one of the people I met in the game early enough found my behavior so entertaining and “in character” that they could have sworn I was running an in-game event.
Early Ultima Online was really special to me. While there were a lot of exploits and bugs in the game, there were also some fantastic people forming communities and having fun together.
I was privileged to meet a handful of people who were also interested in game development and could see the promise of persistent world games and letting players shape the future of their games.
I was also part of a great mailing list called MUD-Dev at the time. Its administrator was an amazing gentleman who curated a community of craftsmen and theoreticians who were the progenitors of today’s large online games.
While I was going through the polite fiction that I could bootstrap an MMO into existence, or somehow figure out how to raise money, I had no idea that the whole category of games was going to get hit by a truck.
That truck was called World of Warcraft.
Do not get me wrong. World of Warcraft (WoW) was a great game. It still is today. While I did not play it at launch because I was running a startup at the time, I did manage to get into the game during its first expansion, and I absolutely understand the charm and the appeal of the game.
In fact, I still play this game today. I fully intend to stick around to see the day that Blizzard creates its own black swan event and blows the whole game to pieces. It almost did during the Cataclysm expansion and also people had a tremendous amount of rage for the Shadowlands expansion, but the game has endured. You could almost forgive them for what happened in Shadowlands. Between world events and the issues happening at Activision-Blizzard, it was a rough time.
So why am I so butthurt about WoW?
It is because the persistent world sandbox approach to MMOs got brutally murdered when this game went live.
So what does that mean?
The first generation of MMOs had some really wild stuff in it. There are some interesting stories about how they took out the simulated ecosystem in Ultima Online because the real point of creatures in MMOs is to wander infinitely until some PC comes on screen and decides to turn them into experience points and skinned corpses. Asheron’s Call had some neat dynamic dungeon experiments that were fun, even if the game failed because none of us knew what the flying shit an Olthoi was.
World of Warcraft did a lot of things to put players into amazing quests, participate in cheeky stories, and group up into groups of five-ten-fifteen-forty adventures to do some kind of quest…adventure…instance…thing.
In addition to giving people interesting group activities, WoW put people into instances so they could do their content with their chosen team in private. This is one of the places where the game breaks down as an MMO for me.
The other place it breaks down is that ultimately nothing the players do affects the world. Ultima Online was turned into a giant player-owned slum, but it was our giant player-owned slum. Sure, one person gets to be the Scarab Lord, but that is scarcely enough really cool world persistence, especially when the winner of that title decides to delete the game.
Regardless of my opinions of how this really is not an MMO, the game is considered the top-performing MMO game by everyone else— and given the volume of sales, is it any surprise no one really cares?
I mean, when I bought the game, I remember picking up a copy of the box with a sticker that said “Over five million units sold!” Right beside that box was a box that said “Over three million units sold!” and “Over four million units sold!” The game was selling so fast that they had to reprint new stickers. It was a surreal moment to be sure.
The problem now is that WoW created a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar technology mountain that everyone needs to climb in order to be considered a competitor in the category. This is kind of important. I did some research on replicating a billion-dollar mobile franchise that I admire. I am not the first person to do so, and I certainly will not be the last.
I decided to peel back a few layers of the Summoner’s War onion to see what it looked like at launch. If you had to knock off the game today, it would be a ten-million-dollar product. About sixty to seventy percent of that is stuff they added to the game after they found out they had a hit. Once a game becomes live and develops an entrenched fanbase, it erects massive moats to competition through live operations and iterations on elder play.
WoW is in that spot right now. If you wanted to make an MMO today, the amount of stuff you have to pile into the game is being measured against your friendly “kill ten bears” genre champion.
That sucks terribly because nothing that has happened in the game has enriched the category of MMO since 1998. Arguably, it has substantially backslid as an actual MMO. We are still in “MMO 1.0”. The only game that has stretched the genre at all in my opinion is this inscrutable space game called Eve Online that is so obtuse that it boasts of two insane features: First, it has a product integration directly into Microsoft Excel. Second, when you get run over by another player in this massive player-vs-player zero-sum game, the total loss of your ship is so horribly broken of an experience that they boasted at a game developer’s conference that their solution to this is to flag a live operations specialist to help you through your loss and keep playing. If that sentence sounds terrible, it is because even typing it hurts my brain.
If anyone is confused at this point because I am not writing about engineering leadership or mentorship, I do apologize to you. I do have some posts queued up that fall under those categories. I had some kind of obligation to shake my fist at the clouds over two games, and school is still out for summer. My career touches on the games industry from time to time, and I have been paid on more than one occasion to participate at the edge of online games innovation.
Despite collecting some dribs and drabs of coin, I have not yet made a real dent in online game innovation. To be honest, hardly anyone else has either. We have found many more ways to get up to 100 people into a single room and hand them badges, points, and even umbrellas. In WoW, putting 40 people in the same room made everyone tired. They never desired to be as cool as Fortnite. The latest set of instance changes do nothing to give players serious agency in the world. Even the way that the NPCs talk to you reminds you, as the champion, that you are really not playing together but merely playing with yourself. Maybe we shouldn’t repeat that out loud.
After the first decade of “not seeing anything interesting in MMOs”, I have stopped hoarding my late 1990s ideas. Some of them are interesting for niche games, and some of them would be exciting to see operating at scale. At this point, I would just be happy to play a multiplayer game that was as meaningful as Ultima Online felt so many years ago.
So there you have it. Once again, I have sprayed so many words that I am not going to go viral on TokTok anytime soon. I thank you once again for reading along, and I will resume my regular posting of mentorship things and links to affiliate merchandise that no one ever buys. If you do not feel like buying any of the random crummy things that I link to you for affiliate fees, I did write a collection of short stories once while commuting on a train. One of them might even be good. I do not collect an affiliate fee… from myself… if you choose to buy it. You won’t anyway because I am not that good at reverse gaslighting.
I shall see you all next week!
