>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base.
I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs. At the time MMO developers were doing a lot of interesting things with games like DAoC, Star Wars: Galaxies, Anarchy Online, etc. There was something for all tastes, in particular games like SWG were starting to feature persistent player-build towns, non-combat focused professions that actually made sense to use, interesting skill systems and a more social experience.
At the time WoW felt like a return to the old days of Everquest, only even more simplified and polished (which makes sense since some of the same people were involved). There was even a sort of a competition (more of a shouting match) between Everquest II fans and WoW fans before either game got released as to which would be the future of MMO games. We all know how that fight went.
What I and many MMO fans at the time failed to understand is that WoW wasn't for us. It was for people who had never player a MMO game before. It wasn't an attempt to get MMO fans invested in Warcraft, it was a brilliant move to introduce all the Warcraft fans to MMOs (and the marketing material at the time was very clear about it). It was all designed from the ground up for people who had never even known that MMOs existed, since the MMO market was pretty small back then, and what little there was was pretty divided.
This is also why many people these days have fondness for "Classic WoW," because it was their first, and you never forget your first. Incidentally my first was a pretty shit game called The 4th Coming and I still remember it fondly, while ignoring most of its faults (what kind of casual needs an interactive map anyway, just look at this still picture that roughly resembles the world and navigate using landmarks, much more immersive that way). This is also the reason why all the WoW clones never caught on. The people making them (or changing their game to be more like WoW, looking at you New Game Experience) failed to realize that most WoW players don't really like MMOs, they like WoW, specifically.
Writing this has made me feel pretty old, but I very clearly remember scoffing at WoW players as casuals and their game as an Everquest clone. Here I was playing much better games like UO and SWG and they didn't even know better. Well, time passed and now I'm the one that didn't know better, but I'm still kinda bitter that the success of WoW massively contributed to the death of the type of MMO I liked, and even if it looks like WoWs influence over the newer MMOs is slowly fading, I don't think I'll ever get to enjoy any new MMO the same way I enjoyed the originals.
I find it interesting that MMORPGs didn't actually develop in the direction that MMORPGs portrayed themselves as. The idea of an MMORPG was to be an entire world and the player would simply be a participant in it. Ultima Online, at first, tried to have some form of an ecological system where carnivores eat herbivores etc. This didn't work out, but you can clearly imagine that the goal was to create a world. However, somewhere between that and modern day MMOs things seem to have changed. The goal doesn't seem to be to create a world, but to simply provide a multiplayer game with a bigger map. It's as though it's meant to be social media with a game attached.
I'm not sure if I worded things correctly, but it just seems to me that MMORPGs aren't trying to build a game world anymore.
Oh people tried. It's just that the effort required to develop these kinds of game worlds relative to the amount of fun gained is often very poor. That's not to say it's nonexistant, it's just that its easy to say something like "I want NPCs to go about their lives in the world convincingly and be affected by player actions", but it's quite another thing to program such a system, pay voice actors, hire writers to write thousands of possible permutations of dialog, with high chances of it ending up having little concequence for the players except as an idle curiosity while they wait for something else.
I would call those "scaling issues". Let's see if deep learning advances along the lines of gpt2 can start solving them. I think that we will know the answer in 5 years.
> I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this. I find it extremely humorous all the people saying WoW is too spoon fed and they want Classic for a "real challenge".
I remember many friends not wanting to touch WoW because of how themepark it was when it came out. They wanted something _more_ challenging that what they had experienced, not less.
I remember MMOs where you printed out a generic map and had to navigate the world like you would in person (well... a person without a gps these days lol)
My first MMO was ultima online, followed by Ashrons Call (Darktide), SWG, AO and shadowbane, and I’m enjoying the hell out of classic WoW.
I think the GP is absolutely right, Blizzard went to far with their streamlining, and every other MMO copied them.
For me the key difference between modern and classic wow is the design approach to challenge. In classic you go at things expecting to fail, in modern you go at things expecting to win. The difference this makes is that classic makes you happy while modern makes you sad when your expectations aren’t met.
Part of what makes that possible is the player freedom. You can make different builds, you can approach content differently and you can overcome challenges your own way. It’s like Blizzard, and I think modern game design in general, forgot that being challenged and figuring things out is fun.
I think I may have forgotten too, because I’ve been surprised at how well classic holds up in 2019.
I would agree that Classic is a decent experience compared to modern MMOs, even if it's not the style of MMO I prefer.
That said, I kinda understand how Blizzard got to where it is with modern WoW. Blizzard has always been known for taking existing ideas and streamlining them and polishing them as much as possible. That, and not gameplay innovation, has always been their forte. In a way they're analogous to Apple, they take ideas that have been tried by others and combine them into a single polished experience.
Since polishing and streamlining is what they know best, and since it has always brought them success (even the original WoW was very polished and streamlined, or if put less charitably, dumbed down, when compared to other MMOs of the time), it's understandable that when faced with a declining player base they'd continue doing what they know best. Big corporations like that don't really have a good mechanism for changing course and trying something else, so they keep doubling down on their old ways and hoping it keeps working until a breaking point is reached, and then they do stuff like re-release their old games hoping to cash in on the nostalgia.
I think that the "just nostalgia for your formative years" argument, being fundamentally ad hominem (doesn't mean it's not relevant though!) is a little flawed against actual criticism. I never really played MMOs apart from some F2P titles back in middle school, but I believe that "dumbing down" games is a real thing and detrimental to people playing. When I emerge from a longer playing session of some challenging game where I'm really on my own when it comes to controlling it and winning (I'm thinking Nethack, a game way older than me), I feel... not productive, but intellectually capable. No regrets. Whereas after a session of something where 1) the devs really want me to win and God forbid not feel lost or overwhelmed by anything! 2) there's a clear intention to continually suck time and preferably money, I feel dumber myself, my time wasted and sadder about doing anything else. And of course they make it at least somewhat addictive to make it harder to stop.
What I'm saying is games are a significant part of daily life experience for many people, and it's fair to judge how it shapes them. I'm not saying all games should be hard, just that they should provide honest rather than fake challenge on the appropriate level.
Anarchy Online was one the best games I played. It was so challenging and cryptic , learning all the skills to use parts of the environment (computer literacy to use the 'grid'). Also the concepts and writing was really good. Nanoparticles as magic, CPU slots on your belt to hold 'programs' running on you that give extra stats, Implants as an extra layer of armor
I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs. At the time MMO developers were doing a lot of interesting things with games like DAoC, Star Wars: Galaxies, Anarchy Online, etc. There was something for all tastes, in particular games like SWG were starting to feature persistent player-build towns, non-combat focused professions that actually made sense to use, interesting skill systems and a more social experience.
At the time WoW felt like a return to the old days of Everquest, only even more simplified and polished (which makes sense since some of the same people were involved). There was even a sort of a competition (more of a shouting match) between Everquest II fans and WoW fans before either game got released as to which would be the future of MMO games. We all know how that fight went.
What I and many MMO fans at the time failed to understand is that WoW wasn't for us. It was for people who had never player a MMO game before. It wasn't an attempt to get MMO fans invested in Warcraft, it was a brilliant move to introduce all the Warcraft fans to MMOs (and the marketing material at the time was very clear about it). It was all designed from the ground up for people who had never even known that MMOs existed, since the MMO market was pretty small back then, and what little there was was pretty divided.
This is also why many people these days have fondness for "Classic WoW," because it was their first, and you never forget your first. Incidentally my first was a pretty shit game called The 4th Coming and I still remember it fondly, while ignoring most of its faults (what kind of casual needs an interactive map anyway, just look at this still picture that roughly resembles the world and navigate using landmarks, much more immersive that way). This is also the reason why all the WoW clones never caught on. The people making them (or changing their game to be more like WoW, looking at you New Game Experience) failed to realize that most WoW players don't really like MMOs, they like WoW, specifically.
Writing this has made me feel pretty old, but I very clearly remember scoffing at WoW players as casuals and their game as an Everquest clone. Here I was playing much better games like UO and SWG and they didn't even know better. Well, time passed and now I'm the one that didn't know better, but I'm still kinda bitter that the success of WoW massively contributed to the death of the type of MMO I liked, and even if it looks like WoWs influence over the newer MMOs is slowly fading, I don't think I'll ever get to enjoy any new MMO the same way I enjoyed the originals.