Do you think WoW will stand up to Star Wars MMO?

Plankeye said:
If I missed it, please forgive me. But isn't the elephant in the room the fact that there was already a Star Wars MMO and it was horrible.
Click to expand...

Actually, there were plenty of people that liked Star Wars: Galaxies. It may not have come anywhere close to WoW in popularity, but that may be partially because it was released over a year before WoW was. Galaxies was set during the reign of the Galactic Empire (from the movies), so I think it had less room to work with because of that. It also wasn't made by as good a company as Bioware. I've seen posts from quite a few people that liked Galaxies, and actually the primary thing that killed it off was a controversial patch that made it more like WoW. In other words, they saw WoW's success and tried to copy it, essentially giving people a game that was little more than a WoW clone. From what I've seen posted by others, Galaxies might have actually been more successful if they had stuck with their original style rather than trying to copy WoW.

TOR, on the other hand, has the opportunity to learn from WoW's success in advance rather than trying to throw things together in a patch. TOR also has a better developer and more room to work because of the setting. Saying that TOR will not be as good as WoW because Galaxies was not is an unfair generalization because of how long ago Galaxies was made and the circumstances it was under.
 
Odale said:
Back to TOR, I don't think it will damage WOW. World of Warcraft has been around for 5 years now, and some people who played it back when I started at release are still playing (beats me how they do it...). That's a huge investment in and a huge attachment to a game. I doubt TOR will "Kill WoW" (which is ridiculous, btw, because in 5 years not one company has managed to significantly dent WoW's player base), even with it being a Star Wars game. World of Warcraft is not just the benchmark, it's much more than that... it is the definition of what an MMO should be. No other game has defined a genre like WoW did for MMORPG's.

WoW is 5 years old and that's ancient! BUT as it gets older it gets better at retaining its players. It's like a virus (like Ebola) if you think about it - the more the environment changes, the more it evolves and mutates!
Click to expand...

WoW is about to the point Everquest was at when WoW was released. The original Star Wars took some people away but that didn't last long. There were other games that came and went. WoW was was everyone was saying would be another of those. Well, Here's WoW and where's everquest? Ultima Online was dethroned by Everquest which was dethroned by WoW. and as far as gameplay and content... I think WoW proves you don't have to have the best of those to be on top. I still think Everquest was a far superior game in gameplay and content both. much more involved with quests, content, factions, and storylines. BUT you could not be a casual gamer and do well in Everquest. WoW is getting to that point also. They keep trying to make things easier to keep the casual gamers. Many of the hard core gamers are itching for more challenging content. We'll just have to see what happens with Star Wars.

Edited to add: EQ is what I really think defined MMO's. look at much of the dev team from wow. They were leaders in EQ.
 
Last edited:
Grimbeorn said:
Actually, there were plenty of people that liked Star Wars: Galaxies. It may not have come anywhere close to WoW in popularity, but that may be partially because it was released over a year before WoW was. Galaxies was set during the reign of the Galactic Empire (from the movies), so I think it had less room to work with because of that. It also wasn't made by as good a company as Bioware. I've seen posts from quite a few people that liked Galaxies, and actually the primary thing that killed it off was a controversial patch that made it more like WoW. In other words, they saw WoW's success and tried to copy it, essentially giving people a game that was little more than a WoW clone. From what I've seen posted by others, Galaxies might have actually been more successful if they had stuck with their original style rather than trying to copy WoW.
Click to expand...

Oh no, I subscribed to the game and it was horrible before the patch.
 
Perhaps that was your experience, but I still know there were plenty of people that liked it. There are lots of people that don't like WoW, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been successful. Regardless, the success or failure of Galaxies really has little impact on TOR's potential.
 
I'd like to go ahead and point out the other giant pink elephant in the room - all of these are personal opinions.

:D
 
Offtopic:

That's a smiley-faced Gordon Freeman emoticon beating a head crab (please tell me you know what he is beating it with!).

My avatar, yes.

/offtopic

Turns out theres a pink mole rat in the room as well!
 
Crowbar!!

And wootness from earlier.... GRIMBEORN SIGHTING!!!!!!!
 
As a 4 Year veteran that raided up to Planes of Time in Everquest here are a few lessons that Blizzard learned and Sony failed miserably...

-You can't balance classes by nerfing one and overpowering the other. A prime example was that in Gates of Discord era there was a patch that nerfed the druids healing abilities and gave shamans a boost.

-Your class abilities and spells shouldn't come from epic mobs that require a hardcore raiding guilds to obtain.

-Releasing new content expansions twice a year is a bad formula. If you update the content you have via patches, it's much more pleasing to the masses. i.e. Look how excited we got when 3.3 came out, then imagine having to pay $30's for it.

-Abilities to define a class while not breaking others. Sony implemented an Alternate advancement system in it's 3rd expansion which allowed players to grind for AAs and spend them in different trees. Now as levels got higher, getting them was easier. But no tree was limited, and it had abilities for everything. So I could be a druid and still nuke like a wizard or mage. Blizzard did an awesome job of fine tuning this into talent tree's imo.

-As worlds get bigger, people need to be able to travel faster so as to spend as much time as possible enjoying the game. Sony didn't add an in-game mount until it's 3rd expansion, it was insanley expansive for the faster ones, and the cheaper one's weren't much faster then a normal walking speed. Taking 2hrs to go from one side of the world to the other because i couldn't find a port was a real pain in the butt.

-Players love doing events that only occur once a year or a few select times a month.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head and im sure they're are others. I don't feel Star Wars will make a major impact into the WoW player base to the point that servers will be consolidated, but I do feel that we will all see a small population decline before the new factor wears off.

Sci-fi mmo's have never lasted at length in popularity, but to date there have only been two successful Sci-Fi mmo's; Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxy's. Three if you count City of Hero's as a sci-fi mmo. I think Bioware will change this for good. One: Star Wars is the worlds largest IP, biggest Fan Base (when WoW release, Blizzard already had a major fanbase with WC title and Star Craft, plus the seething masses of Everquest.)

Bioware is known for making excellent games and releasing them when they are ready. However if Bioware really wanted to dent Blizzards player base they would keep up the Dragons Age series for a few years, then release an MMO based on the game. It'll probably only be the wow killer for me if it's done right.
 
healsalot said:
Blizz is headed in this direction. Something will come out that listens to the players again, meets the players needs, and even if it's an inferior game
Click to expand...

While its quite obvious that at some point the tidal wave that is WOW's populatey will start to wane, I have to disagree with your above statement. I really think that Blizzard spends a LOT of time interacting and listening to players. For example just last week the devs had chat with user submitted questions over twitter ( http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24261119811 ). Secondly, Blue posts ( community contacts for Blizzard IPs) are frequent on the wow boards. A third way this is evident is indirectly -- Blizzard every so often takes the best mods and make them part of the default UI.

WOW eventually go away; already its an old game and eventually users will just want something different. WOW will not go away for lack of Blizzard caring.

As an aside I think either 32 Studios forthcoming MMORPG or Blizzards' nextgen MMORPG will be the death blow for WOW.
 
Having been a long time Blizzard fan, I'll have to say this about them Blizzard knows how to make games and keep people involved with them.

Look at games like StarCraft, Broodwars, Diablo 1, 2, D2exp, Warcraft 1-3, all of these games are 10 years old or older and they still have a relatively large player community fanbase considering there age. As much as I hate to say this about Blizzard they know how to keep people coming back to them year after year even with a Better Business Bureau rating of "F".

Personally I love Star Wars, I'm a huge movie fan..game fan not so much..The only real downfall to WoW that I see in my future is Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top