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World of Warcraft, the MMO that defined the genre for at least half a decade, is continuing its steady decline, with another large number of players leaving in the past few months. In the last quarter, as many as 1.3 million players closed their subscriptions, ending their time in Azeroth.
This of course doesn't stop it being the most popular subscription MMO out there, with pretty much everyone else having to run a free to play mechanic in order to keep their game world alive – though the now 8.3 million players isn't as impressive as it once was. Half a decade ago, the concept of 10 million or so players all gaming away in one digital world was impressive, but now if you look at the likes of League of Legends, which has more than that each month and WoW stops being quite so impressive.
Left it a bit late to begin levelling there mate… Source: juanpol
Still, it'll certainly go down in history was one of the most successful games ever. For almost a decade, Activision/Blizzard has raked in over $100 million a month, just from subscriptions to the game – let alone the money made by the original purchase of the box and discs.
KitGuru Says: It'll be several years more before we begin discussing the true end of the World of Warcraft, but perhaps something else will bring the death blow that ends Azeroth once and for all. Most likely it'll be Blizzard's next big MMO, Titan. People would probably feel quite comfortable having spent years within one of the company's worlds, to begin anew in one made by the same people. Blizzard could even offer incentives for it. Bring some of your equipment with you, that sort of thing.
The game has grown stale for most who have played it for a long time, and the idea of a subscription based game is a put off for most people in these times of economic struggle. I think they should go back to the drawing board, revise the current market and release the next generation of MMORPG. They are the most experienced team in the market, and they do have the opportunity to push the genre forward if they wanted too. I would certainly try it if they bought a truly new experience to the table.
What the genre doesn’t need is another gear grind MMO – we already have Rift, WoW, EQ, GW2 and others. Get to max level, grind repetitive environments to get marginally better gear to make the grinding marginally easier to be able to raid for even more marginally better gear to make those encounters marginally doable. The first months into such a system are great fun but as the system repeats for the next expansions the fun dies away.
EVE seems progressive by these standards although still following the same model – grind for currency, spend currency on bigger ships to earn more currency, blow up those ships in epic lag fests and then repeat. At least there is a big spreadsheet based economy to keep people interested – if you like that sort of thing.
EvE manages to keep the fun with controllable parts of space – a concept worth exploring in future MMOs. The jeopardy of losing something you have worked hard over makes the player more emotional invested in retaining it.
Rift feels progressive bringing all the gaming experience of the typical MMO archetypes to any one character with the soul tree system. This triples to the time sink available as all three archetypes can be worked on but the premise of the gear grind is still there.
The EvE jeopardy concept can be applied to any MMO arena if the prize for maintaining an objective is worth reaching for. The gear grind and PvP leaderboards all have their place but if the goal is for groups of players to work together to achieve something which they personally get benefit from and which can benefit the larger area it will draw more people in or convince more people to maintain that activity. The challenge lies in making that activity, although repeatable, fun and dynamic enough for the mix of player ability; from the keyboard turning hotkeyphobe to the multi box, everything hotkeyed, twitch reflex 3000 APM gamer.
Titan has big boots to fill, genre defining boots at that, but at the same time needs to be different enough from the WoW gameplay mechanic to justify creating a sequel.