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Originally Posted by I'm Rich Bitch  I think the failure of Fury will give Game Makers and the people who fund them more ammunition to make more WoW clones for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we can look forward to more "holy trinity|auto attack|LFG|level based|grinding|wood elf|half elf|dark elf|flying elf|high elf|low elf|bad elf|elf this|elf that|bad orc|good orc|flying orc|poop in sock raiding|kill 10 rats or boars|tank and spank" MMORPGs forever. This will eventually kill the genre due to lack of innovation.
It is sort of ironic that the amazing success of WoW will probably kill the genre because no one will think outside the box. They will just try to copy WoW and hope to get a small percentage of their customer base. The biggest game out next year, WAR, will use this approach. |
Blizzard themselves are working on their own new MMO so I think your predictions of MMO innovation death is premature.
Most of the smart game devs I know realize the real lesson from WoW is that post 2005 a successful MMO has only 1 shot at success - at launch time. It must be complete, well thought out [designed], and obvious where the game is going to be 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years down the road.
Redoing classes days or weeks before launch (Fury), insanely buggy content (Hellgate), incomplete game (Tabula Rasa) are all recipes for abject failure. The only really good non-Blizzard MMO launch imo of the last 2 years has been LOTRo, although its more of a niche product.
Sadly few companies have the cash or management talent to take the time to see a MMO to a truly successful launch. Tabula Rasa or Hellgate could have been insanely great games, given another 6-12 months bake time. WoW launched prematurely as well, v1.0 had huge issues, but their competition at the time was EQ. Now any new MMOs competition is WoW, so they have to be better.
