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While World of Warcraft could easily be considered the most successful subscription based MMO ever made, not everyone thinks that's a positive thing. One ex-Blizzard developer believes that making the game so accessible, killed the idea of a traditional MMO.
Mark Kern is the man behind this statement and he believes that the problem was making the game so easy for people to pick up and play. While that is an important part of game development, the knee jerk reward system built into the game meant that a lot of the traditionally rewarding activities of an MMO – levelling up, getting new gear – became too regular and weren't earned properly.
Real men don't need starter areas. Source: BnS Dojo
“We laboured over the user interface for [World of Warcraft], going through many iterations, to find one that would be easy and intuitive for players new to the genre,” he said in a blog post on MMORPG.com (via Shacknews). “We created a massive number of quests to lead the player through the world, making sure that they never had to think about what to do next.”
This meant a lot of new players entered the game, but as he puts it: “at what cost?”
“Sometimes I look at WoW and think “what have we done?” he said. “I think I know. I think we killed a genre. … It's not the end game that we should be worried about, it's the journey. An MMO should be savoured, a lifetime of experiences contained within a single, beautifully crafted world. The moment to moment gameplay should be its own reward. You should feel like you could live your whole life there.”
Of course there are many players that do feel that deep connection to the game. It's something that's heavily parodied in all sorts of media, from stand up routines to The Guild web-series. But perhaps he has a point, is the modern MMO landscape, too easy?
KitGuru Says: What do you guys think? Do you old school Everquest players miss the days of yore where MMOs were harder and less easy to pick up and play?
having recently gone back to try out wow after not playing it for 2-3 years :o. i found it way to lazy i,e there are big arrows pointing to where you have to hand in or even find your next quest, gone have the days of puzzle solving or decrypting quest hints. it is now just a point and click game with No real rewards. after playing for just 2 days i lost count how many times i leveled my char. i can remember when it used to take a week just to get 4 levels now you can get almost 20 levels in 24 hours. boring and dull and certainly not worth the £8.99 monthly sub.
It all went downhill when Ultima Online decided to be newbie friendly and went chasing mass subscriptions rather than storytelling and building big events
WoW just build on that and is just MMO equivilent of Candy Crush Saga now
I tried it after getting nagged to and it just seemed souless and with little to do but grind dungeons and chase loot
Every genre with relatively few players gets “ruined” when it starts appealing to the mass market, gets lots of games, lots of players and makes lots of money.
Blizz shareholders just wanted more money, they don`t give a **** for game and gamers. Instead to keep ppl in game without PAY migration with merging low pop realms to one, they wanted ppl to PAY to migrate from dead realms to overpopulate others. There are dead because there is no Guilds, no friends, no one with you can play, just some random kids and “bots” who join and leave and don`t tell anything in chat, no social life at all. Epic gear are in boxes everywhere on maps, lvling is retarded fast etc…
Now they have worst game in history of MMO.
While 3 years have passed since that article published, I have to add that yes, he is right.
I stopped WOW because it stopped being challenging, what is the point to do this or that, if everybody can do it and it is so easy to be done?
It was much more rewarding if I had to travel the whole world just to level up my professions, it was much more rewarding if I had to travel the whole world to get my aquatic druid form.
It was so much more rewarding to leveling into a world that was ready to punish you for every mistake you made, so once you succeeded it felt that you really did something that mattered, you got that stupid recipe that nobody have in your guild because it was to hard to get, you where someone!
He’s right. I was playing EQ2 when WoW was released, had played EQ before that. Once WoW was out EQ2 started getting dumbed down, group content became solo content and much of the challenge of the pre-raid game mechanics was gone.