MMOs and the WoW model.

When someone mentions the Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) genre, grinding quests and enemies to level up, gaining new items through killing bosses in dungeons and repeatedly killing eachother in PvP will usually spring to mind. MMOs now have defined gameplay mechanics. But, back when the first MMOs were released these mechanics we all take for granted now weren’t there. Since there was no mould, MMOs at that time took all shapes and sizes. Games like Ultima online, The Legend of Mir and Lineage all had mechanics that we don’t see today. The Legend of Mir had guild run territories, Lineage had player driven politics and Ultima online famously had its non-combatant classes. All three games were also brutally hard on the newer player with open world PvP and free for all looting. These are all aspects that are looked back on with fond nostalgia for many gamers who regard the modern MMO as a disappointment. However it’s important to note that these games weren’t perfect, they were hugely complex, extremely rough around the edges and most importantly focused on grinding experience.

In 1999 a game called EverQuest was released and its mechanics would shape the future of MMOs. Bringing in a 3D world and focusing on group centric experience gaining, it was a massive hit. EverQuest had begun the mould which would lead on to define MMOs as we now know them. The trend in MMOs to accept a dominant mould and follow in it began here, games like Dark Age of Camelot, Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Ragnarok Online and Star Wars Galaxies all based their mechanics off EverQuest. However this mould wasn’t perfect, it still hadn’t tackled the problem of the boring grind for experience, and there was little to no endgame. 

In 2003 Eve Online was released, and was a revelation to the MMO genre. Completely disregarding the conventional mechanics set up by EverQuest, it did away with the traditional levelling system and instead let people pursue different areas of the game. To this day it stands apart from the traditional MMOs and flourishes because of it. A year later another MMO was released that went back to the EverQuest model, but instead of tweaking it slightly to create its own niche, World of Warcraft (WoW) decided to take on the model and improve it. The launch of WoW was as unstable as every other MMO (something many of us have forgotten), however its launch was a success thanks to the low specs it required, the fact that it had a fan base off the back of the strategy games, and also the relative failure of EverQuest 2. Due to all these reasons WoW survived the trickiest part of creating an MMO, retaining a player base after the launch. It now went about its ultimate goal of improving on the EverQuest model. 

The main change was focusing on the end game, rather than the levelling that preceded it. Now when you had reached the level cap you had a multitude of bosses with all sorts of different combat mechanics that required group cohesion to defeat them. In essence it took the focus on the group that made EverQuest so popular, but instead of using that group to level, it took it to the endgame. This proved to be a massive success and introduced the idea of competitive PvE’ing where guilds would race eachother to boss kills. Another massive success was lessening the harshness of levelling. Now because the focus was at the level cap, the process of levelling was made easier, with less experience grinding, a wide spread quest based system and a focus on solo levelling. Mechanics such as losing experience points on death, or massively long corpse runs were also cut in favour of a more casual experience. All this made for a much friendlier approach to levelling and it was a roaring success, breaking all sorts of records for subscribers.

All of these changes effectively meant WoW had improved on EverQuests model enough to consider it their own. Over the years WoW has polished this model to a mirror shine, and it now is pretty much a perfect model for MMO games. Unlike EverQuest it is so polished and perfect that now when other companies try and make their own games off the model by tweaking it slightly to create a niche, they usually fail because these small changes aren’t enough to drag players away from WoW. What does this mean then? Blizzards titan has gone as far as this model can go and any attempt to follow it will at best only result in a player base just able to turn a profit. It’s time developers changed their thinking on MMOs, the EverQuest/WoW model cannot be improved any more. WoW now has five years of development time added onto it and it’s just not possible for a new MMO to challenge that amount of polish. 

If a company wants to create something to best WoW it has to do it by creating something different. The heavy focus on PvP that Warhammer Online had, or the way Bioware will try and use story to enhance The Old Republic are not big enough changes. Developers need to change the core of this model, changes like ripping out the levelling system, or creating a player driven world will attract a player base it just needs to be done well. Some people claim that WoW has taken the MMO as far as it can go, but that’s a narrow way of looking at it, they have taken a model that the MMO has subscribed to for a long time as far as it can go, but the genre itself has many possibilities.