Mass market MMORPGs

Content is king! Much of the quality, and the success that followed from that quality, of World of Warcraft can be explained by the amount of work that went into creating that virtual world. Every zone is hand-crafted, every mob hand-placed in some semblance of fantasy logic, and for each of the little corners of a zone there seems to be a quest or other reason to go there. The huge amount of work that went into WoW cost a huge amount of money, estimated to be around $50 million. By getting millions of players, that bet paid off, and Blizzard is reaping over $500 million of profits per year. And that is good, because profits like these encourage other game companies to invest similar huge sums of money into games. Of course you can make a bad game with lots of money, but it is reasonable to assume that Blizzard doesn't have a monopoly on good game design. If you look at smaller games, you often see great design ideas, and a lack of execution and polish, which is directly related to a lack of money. I mean, I love Pirates of the Burning Sea, but it sure could have used another couple of programmer and game developer man-years to polish it up.

Large investments in MMORPGs are only possible as long as you can expect large returns, which means large number of subscribers: mass market MMORPGs. That move towards the mass market comes with a design cost, as the only way to attract large numbers of subscribers is to make your game accessible for everybody. You need to lower the barriers to success until people who aren't very dedicated can overcome it. And you need to design your game in a way that people don't really need other players to advance. The original Everquest is a great game, but it clearly showed the limits you can reach with a game that needs hard work and a group to advance. World of Warcraft got 20 times more subscribers by appealing to all those people who would never have had the time to succeed in Everquest.

It is easy to deride the mass market game as being carebear or trivial, their players as soft or spoiled. But in any hobby there is only a small number of truly dedicated people willing to go to enormous lengths to achieve the ultimate result, and a much larger number of people that are just pottering around for fun. What I am not sure about is whether everybody realizes how the fact that you want a game to succeed and attract many players (and thus be financially successful and not shut down after a few months) clashes with some very reasonable wishes towards game design. My post yesterday on how I don't believe that Warhammer Online will manage to introduce meaningful PvP is based on my assumption that EA will want WAR to be a mass market game, not a niche game for hardcore PvP fans.

In a mass market game communities tend to be less tightly knit, have less cohesion. In Everquest a players reputation was still taken very seriously. You couldn't steal from your guild and expect the next guild to still invite you, like in WoW. The concept of gaining epics in one guild, making you strong enough to leave that guild and join the next more powerful one, was unheard of. You couldn't even switch servers at that time, not to mention changing your name.

Dark Age of Camelot never had more than a quarter of a million of subscribers, about half those of Everquest. It is by many considered to be the best PvP game ever. But can you translate the PvP concept of DAoC into a mass market MMORPG? Or will WAR get stuck somewhere in between two goals that are impossible to reach at the same time: having great and meaningful PvP, and appealing to millions of players? I can easily imagine WAR to come true with all their promises of PvP greatness, but only reaching a quarter or half a million of subscribers, because meaningful PvP means that the players who aren't serious about PvP and just want to play around for fun will get their nose blodied and quickly give up on the game. I can also easily imagine WAR going for the mass market, stressing soloable PvE more, and making PvP fighting for keeps a fringe activity for the top guilds (just like PvE raiding is a fringe activity for the top guilds in WoW). I can't see how WAR could reach both. I don't see how meaningful mass market PvP could happen. I think the best the PvP fans can hope for is having a great PvP sub-part of WAR for the hardcore, but structured in a way that the majority of players can live without it. It will not be "meaningful" in a way where you can really dominate another faction, because the majority of that faction will simply be able to ignore the fact that their side is losing.