I’ve been playing MMOs for around 12 years, and having seen the rise and fall of a number of promising upstarts, I’ve yet to find an MMO that appeals to the Western market as much as World of Warcraft. Now, having played WoW off and on for the last few years, I believe it’s time to find something else to play.
Looking at today’s market, there is nothing currently out or in beta that rivals the amount of content WoW has. Yet more and more MMOs are announced and launched every year, and, one after the other, they fail to knock WoW down a notch.
The latest MMO to catch my eye was Aion. I started out with the Beta, released last autumn, and played it for a few months. I found Aion excelled over WoW in graphics quality and the PvP system, but it fell short in every other area. There is a distinct lack of meaningful quests in the game, and while publishers NCsoft claim to have ‘Westernised’ Aion from the Eastern releases, it still feels like a grind-fest. Now, as a 3year veteran of Lineage, I can understand how this may appeal to some people, but appears as lacking to most Western online gamers.
The issue with the MMO market today is that a handful of large corporations are now hopping onto the bandwagon hoping to make a quick buck. However, they seem to be doing so ill-prepared for what the market demands, and so it makes me wonder if any of the devs working on these games have even played the market leader.
If these companies (including THQ-Ice and NCSoft) want to topple World of Warcraft from the top spot, they need to take a leaf or two from Blizzard’s approach and do extensive market research. The main reasons WoW keeps its player-base large and growing is due to its expanding content, and the ever-evolving gameplay. With the newest expansion soon to be releassed, I am looking forward to seeing the world changes from the point of view of a Level Artist. The opportunity to explore new terrain, as well as a wealth of new races, will have millions of WoW subscribers eagerly awaiting the next big chunk of content for them to feast upon.
However, there are also a large number of users getting restless in Azeroth, and would like to play something different. Even if they do branch out to other MMOs, users soon return to WoW as they find their game of choice is merely a novelty, with very little substance to offer a long term subscriber. MMO publishers then lose a paying customer within a short space of time, as is the case with so many recently launched MMO’s causing them to either fade away or become yet another Free to Play casualty.
When will this era of underdeveloped MMOs end? When will the developers, and more importantly publishers, realise that Western gamers don’t want to stand in a field/cave/temple all day grinding the same monsters until they finally gain a level only to rinse and repeat somewhere else? They want challenging content that will keep them interested day after day without feeling like they live in a world of never ending monotony.