The MMO market today is one of iteration, often at the cost of innovation. There are those who argue that MMO developers are at fault for attempting to replicate systems and mechanics that have been popularised by other titles in the field; it’s certainly true that developers and designers often choose to follow the well-trodden path set out by others, but is that because they lack imagination, or could gamers be responsible – almost entirely – for the current stagnant state of the genre as a whole?
Aside from a few novel and niche titles that often launch into obscurity, the MMO genre is one rife with homogenisation. Each new title that comes to the fore has pandered to the same tired and generic formula that has been in play since EverQuest’s release over a decade ago. World of Warcraft has set the standard for that formula for the last 8 years, and there are few signs that its dominance is going to wane any time soon. If we look back and really scrutinise MMO titles of the past decade, we can see that there have been few willing to take any steps away from the mantra Blizzard has enforced over the genre. Even with their slight alterations and superfluous additions to the status quo, titles like Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Star Wars The Old Republic are guilty of sticking tooth and nail to the road set out before them by SOE and Blizzard. It’s worth noting that they’ve all suffered for it; 3 out of 4 of those titles are now F2P, and Warhammer Online is all but dead in the water. Even Guild Wars 2 – with its “we’re really different” sales pitch – represented a step away from the genre busting, mould breaking ambitions of Guild Wars, in favour of a more homogenised “World of Warcraft” affair.
You would have thought that with every subsequent failure, the next game in the queue would learn some lessons. Sadly that’s not the case, and often titles find themselves failing under the same terms that beleaguered their predecessors. “No dungeon finder?” is an oft chanted criticism of new titles, closely followed by, “there’s no content at end game.” These assumed faults and missteps are attributed to tired development teams, put down to a lack of time, or are covered by a myriad of other excuses and charges; I think there’s more to it than that. Gamers are quick to blame the development teams for the failures of their games, often accusing developers and designers of insulating themselves from the comments and criticisms that their fans have to offer; again, I think there’s more to it than that.
Gamers demand many things from MMO developers, transparency being chief amongst them. We want to be included at every level of development, from the conceptual phase right through to launch day. More importantly, we want our words and our opinions to have an impact on the direction these games take. When Star Wars The Old Republic first appeared in the wild in 2008 (yes, it was that long ago) it was laboured by a moderation team that refused to facilitate key aspects of the community surrounding the game, not least the discussion of the direction the MMO would be taking. Eventually, under an unquantifiable weight of community pressure, they relented, and the official forums were subsequently filled with pages and pages of criticisms, comments, wish lists and demands. For every demand, there was a gamer (or a hundred) who thought they knew best. It shouldn’t surprise us then that former Bioware developers have gone on to say that the noise generated by the community actually made them feel bad about the game they were making.
Whether or not Star Wars The Old Republic is a bad game, it should be clear to any MMO aficionado that MMO communities have a huge role to play in the development of the games they champion. In turn, they place huge burdens on the people hard at work designing and developing those MMOs; these teams are expected to have particular types of content and systems in place simply because the community demands it.
You don’t really get that sort of behaviour, or interaction, in any other area of the gaming market. Whilst developers will often engage fan sites and communities on a marketing level, it is less common for developers to include the community in the actual conception and development of their games. Take The Elder Scrolls, for example: Bethesda certainly play ball with the myriad of fan sites gathered around their colossal RPG franchise, but they definitely didn’t include them (to any major degree) in the conception and development of Oblivion or Skyrim. Whilst Bethesda will work with mod developers (in a very “hands off” way, having experienced this myself), and often take the good ideas presented in modifications for their own downloadable content, they don’t entertain or involve those developers – or anyone else in the community – in a direct (or, arguably, meaningful) way. It seems they are sure of the games they wish to make, and involving the community any further would merely add noise to their ambitions and ideas.
MMO developers would do well from studying Bethesda’s example, as it’s clear to me that the influence communities have over the genre is disproportionately large. Players are, as mentioned, quick to blame developers and designers for the failures of the genre, but there is cause to believe that perhaps it’s the level of engagement that we as gamers demand of MMO studios that is causing a large swathe of the problems these titles seem to face. We demand end game content, so developers make games pitched at end game content. We demand dungeon finders, so developers make sure those dungeon finders are in their games. We demand loudly, and developers feel obliged (perhaps even bullied) to deliver.
Of course we’ll never stop demanding (as that’s what consumers do best) so there is only one thing for it: MMO developers should stop pandering to the demands of gamers, and start having more confidence in the ideas that they come up with, ideas that don’t necessarily operate with the boundaries of our expectations. Perhaps then we will have a vibrant, varied and rich MMO genre in place of the stagnation we enjoy now.
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9 Comments
Great article Matthew, and I totally agree with you. I’ve been a part of SWTOR since it’s ALPHA test stage (and to this day, I still pay for a monthly subscription to the game). I personally think SWTOR is an awesome game. I don’t understand all the hate it gets (but that’s me). Undoubtedly, ANYTHING that comes out post World of Warcraft has an uphill battle to contend with which is really sad IMO. The alpha and beta days of SWTOR are sorely missed. The community didn’t bitch and complain but offered up solid info to the DEV team. When the game went retail, if a group of gamers weren’t complaining about having to pay a subscription fee, they were complaining about something else which really made me not want to be part of the community anymore. Everyone seems to have forgotten that WOW didn’t get to a “comfortable place” over night. MMOs mature over time (and I don’t mean the MMO genre, but each individual game itself). But everyone-and-their-mama cried foul at SWTOR and by ANY standard, it was/is at least better than (if not completely DESTROYS) WOW. Putting the sole blame on Bioware is just wrong. Gamers and more importantly – EA not standing behind Bioware and putting pressure on them to cater to gamers is what crippled SWTOR. All MMOs have a 4-part cycle – 1) the retail hype phase – EATM runs out and buys it because its new, 2) the falling away phase – those not really into the grind (DUHHH… it’s an MMO) stop playing/cancel their subscription, 3) the solidifying phase – when the DEV team has the time to really push the game into the vision they initially had for the game [this is the most crucial part of any MMOs growth and ONLY the most dedicated & patient DEVs/Publishers will survive this phase , and 4) the dedication phase – can also be called the “payoff” phase. There’s a steady subscription profit for the game and enough gamers are playing it that the dev team can concentrate all their focus on real new game content and not feel pressure to create stop-gaps for whinny gamers. I think if the SWTOR dev team would have been allowed by their EA overlords to make the game they wanted to, things would have turned out different for SWTOR. And going F2P was just the last nail in the coffin of wrong turns SWTOR has made. Sorry for the long comment, but I’m real passionate about this game.
The Old Republic failed because it is WoW in Space. You cannot copy another game almost completely, insert a license, and expect people to get very excited about it. I subscribed, it sucked, I unsubscribed. In fact, it made me just want to go play WoW oddly enough, which I hadn’t played in over 18 months.
I believe it failed because it was too much like WoW. At the end of the day it was WoW dressed up as sci-fi complete with the endless treadmill gear grind of the raid which everyone knows is designed to keep you in the game paying a subscription fee. They also failed to solve the problem of what to do at end level if you’re not into or not doing PvP or raiding. Both WoW and SWTOR have failed at this, SWTOR with its rail shooter space battles, which once you’ve done them a few times they turn out to be nothing but a short term gimmick that you quickly lose interest in and WoW with its unoriginal crass attempt to cash in on Pokemon. I stopped playing, even though I had 4 months left on my subscription, because I was bored to tears. I still love the look of SWTOR, the game solved quite a few problems WoW suffers from, updated graphics, making questing interesting and at times challenging, story immersion, a system that encouraged alts but even with all that, its still WoW. I still wont ever go back to WoW’s ezymode snoozefest but unless SWTOR can come up with some long term alternative to PvP and Raiding I cant go back to that either. My suggestion would have been an Elite style system to replace space battles, similar to Chris Robert’s upcoming Star Citizen.
There is certainly a great deal to
find out about this subject. I really like all of
the points
you’ve made.
I played SWTOR for 6 months after it came out and it was a good game in my opinion. When the game was released they had major patches every 2 weeks and content coming out monthly, but as time dragged on the content slowly drained away and the developers stopped talking to the community.
I played SWTOR for PvE, but I ended up doing PvP 99% of my time because it was extremely fun. However, it was a gear grind and they went through different iterations, but the main problem was that once people got all their gear they stopped coming on to play. Once Diablo 3 came out it completely wiped out the PvP community because everyone wanted ranked war zones. Doing 8v8 and having half-pug and half-premade groups was frustrating if the other 4 players were bad.
Once ranked war zones came out it was amazing for about 2 weeks, but then it boiled down to literally only two teams actually doing it. After that I quit.
Story the supposed fourth pillar was never going to be enough to keep people hooked that was obvious no matter how fiercely the story fanboys wanted to defend it, and in all honesty the over arching story lines aren’t that great or original.
Personally i think they got to a point where they had invested so much into it they had no choice but to continue with it knowing it was going to be a lemon. It certainly appears to be an exercise in damage limitation as it stands.
I played this game for three months after I got it for xmas in 2011. I only stayed with it for that long, because of the excellent story with voice acting scenes and great graphics. Many of the environments were extremely sexy and graphically stunning. The rail shooters looked really cool at first but after a while they were just a rinse and repeat drill.
The side quests were terribly boring, gather this, kill this, but you had to do them to level up. There were also a ton of quests that were terribly out of balance, you would get to them WAY before you had enough gear or stats and you would have to go grind a bunch of crap out just to keep moving through the story. There were quests that promoted team play but they just exposed something about TOR, they had a terrible chat system, you couldn’t reach out to anyone outside your immediate ‘planet’ which was a tragedy. You could really build a up a team for one thing while doing something else, with such a small population on any given server it was a waste of time to bother putting anything together. It didn’t take long to end up bored out of my mind with that grind. I also hated the light sabre duel mechanics, and found myself re-playing Jedi Outcast just to have a duel with an action pace.
The graphics were sexy, the cut scenes were really neat, the environments were generally cool, but the game play sucked pretty bad.
Really? You’re going to blame the people who pay money every month in order to play for the failure of SWTOR and other MMO’s? Sorry but I call bull$#!^ on that one.
The fact that people are vocal with their demands for the game in question, one would think, would be considered a godsend as it’s a very unambiguous source of information as to what’s needed in order for people to buy the game and continue playing. It’s arrogance in the extreme to point the finger at the fans of the game as the cause of a game’s failure. SWTOR failed because it did NOT deliver on it’s promise. It is precisely this attitude that alienates people, ‘We’re making a good product so to hell with what you think’, it’s no wonder people left SWTOR in droves. You CANNOT have that attitude and expect people to consistently fork out money to play. It’s suicidal economics, why would players pay for a game they’re not having fun with?
I get it, game developers are overburdened, often a games company is understaffed for this kind of undertaking. However they chose to pursue a project of this magnitude. MMO’s are unique in that it’s a very social activity as opposed to every other genre. Developers who make MMO’s lose the luxary of ignoring the fans because they rely on their continued loyalty to perpetually pay for the privilage to play.
I don’t see how EA’s alienation of the fans, rushed development, using an unsuitable engine and keeping the fans in the dark, WHO PAID REGULARLY TO PLAY THIS GAME is considered permissible but it’s the fans being demanding and unappreciative of a shoddy game that’s to blame? Give me a break
I don’t think there was too much demand; quite the opposite, there was not enough demand as can be quantified by those falling subscriptions. I think that data also shows SWtoR’s ad campaign and propensity for creating hype and word-of-mouth was brilliant.
It’s a shame their game developers were not as skilled nor innovative as their advertising committee.