My affair with MMOs has always been a schizophrenic one. In part, I am enthralled by their concept. I’ve always wanted to be part of a massive experience, one in which many players come together to complete a goal. But the mechanics of MMOs frustrate me, and I’ve come to tire of the lack of original thinking in the genre. Everquest is nearly 9 years old now, yet MMO combat still focuses on the same stat-based third-person combat, and MMO advancement is still about killing wombat after wombat on a months-long journey towards the top. All of my MMO experiences end the same way. One day, while I’m on another quest to kill thirty scary skeletons who, coincidentally, look like larger versions of the dwarf skeletons I plowed through five levels before, I realize I’m not having fun anymore. That playing the game has become a stagnant experience. I close the game, I open the account manager, and I cancel my subscription.

Ah, those dreaded words! The cancellation page for World of Warcraft appears amusing, with its animated GIFs pleading “Please, No! Won’t you come back!?” But like many jokes, the jest is partially based in truth. Watching Funcom’s stock tank after Age of Conan failed to captivate its initial player-base at first felt vindicating, but then sympathy took hold of me. Hasn’t the genre become a graveyard? While WOW rakes in millions of dollars every month, most other MMOs have been forced to pick up the scraps, and many MMOs have been flunks. Asheron’s Call 2, Vanguard, Age of Conan, and Tabula Rasa were failures. Others, like Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest II and Eve, have managed to forge followings large enough to keep afloat and earn limited amounts of acclaim. Yet they pale in comparison to WOW, a game which is estimated to have 10 million subscribers. EQ II, by comparison, has approximately 250,000. This sort of failure isn’t rare in the gaming industry; countless so-so shooters come and go every year. But what marks the failing of an MMO as memorable is that these games are designed specifically to carry a large, devoted fan-base for years. While an average shooter would consider itself fortunate to earn a dedicated fan-base of 30,000 players for three years, an MMO with the same fan base would be considered a massive failure.

“While WOW rakes in millions of dollars every month, most other MMOs have been forced to pick up the scraps”The fact that the market for MMOs seems risky, and is dominated by one particular game, is often used as justification for the ways in which each new MMO seems to mimic those before it. Many would argue that it isn’t reasonable to expect a company to spend millions of dollars on a new game which goes into uncharted territory. This seems a decent point. MMOs do tend to have high budgets, and they do tend to spend a long time in development. They need to generate large amounts of pre-release hype, and they need to attract large, dedicated followings to be profitable. In spite of this, a few nagging bugs and some serious balance issues are not only considered excusable, but expected, due to the difficulty of testing these massive games. How can a developer justify a game which takes risks, abandoning the paths well-worn by World of Warcraft and its infinite cash caravan? Building a game meant to mimic WOW seems difficult enough! Isn’t it in the best interests of the would-be MMO developer to think up a game that is sensible and accessible, tapping into a broad, proven fan-base?

That would seem to be the logical conclusion, but I think the truth is far different. The problem with the stagnant MMO market is that with a few exceptions, the MMO concept is based entirely on game-play designed to keep players hooked. This hardly seems to be problem. Hell, its every businessman’s dream. A good subscription-based MMO is like a magazine or TV series in that it keeps the audience coming back time and time again, but it is unlike the previous categories in that keeping an audience addicted doesn’t necessarily require the creation of entirely new content for every “episode”.

Unfortunately for investors and businesses betting on the creation of their own cash-cow, these games also have a unique trait that TV shows and magazines don’t share; the audience rarely needs the services of more than one MMO. These games are designed so that gaining all levels, skills, and gear requires a massive amount of time, and this investment of time makes it difficult for the player to quit to play another game once they’ve reached the top. There is a “Keeping Up With The Joneses” quality to them which makes playing two games at once feel ineffective, as by splitting the time playing the player ends up being only an average player in both, rather than a very good player in one. The subscription system also encourages exclusivity. After all, if you’re a World of Warcraft player who decides to dabble in Everquest II, but you end up playing EQ II only a few nights out of an entire month, you don’t have the chance to pay less for that subscription. Keeping with one game feels like the better value, both in terms of the levels and gear you receive in exchange for your time at the computer, and also in terms of the amount of money you need to spend each month. MMOs like WOW also have another unique aspect which separates them from most forms of media; the process of their creation never quite stops. This doesn’t necessarily mean that new content is added constantly, but it does mean that balance is tweaked, servers are made stronger, and the client is made to run smoother and more reliably. WOW, as it stands today, is seven years in the making.

Which is great, if you’re Blizzard. They saw it first. They recognized that the only thing keeping Everquest, Ultima Online, or Asheron’s Call from being successful was that they only tried to appeal to people who were already serious gamers, and that all of those early games had numerous technical flaws which made them prone to frustrating crashes, glitches, and lag. Good for Blizzard. But like a bug-zapper, World of Warcraft burns in the night, attracting hoards of companies hoping to emerge from the abyss of gaming obscurity and become a (nearly) household name. And like a bug-zapper, WOW toasts those poor companies, sending their remains sailing back into irrelevance. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Blizzard is better than everyone else, although they are one of the better names in the gaming industry. It just means that Blizzard was there first. And because the kind of game they made is a game which only becomes stronger as time passes, they have a massive edge over everyone else looking to make a similar MMO.

“Like a bug-zapper, World of Warcraft burns in the night, attracting hoards of companies hoping to emerge from the abyss of gaming obscurity”Let us take Lord of the Rings Online for an example. It had an excellent, smooth launch. Its game-play is accessible and its game-world is based off one of the most popular fantasy franchises in history. Its classes are solid, it launched with enough content to keep even a hardcore player occupied for months, and it included a few new ideas that hadn’t been seen in other MMOs. Yet it remains an obscure game, with only eleven servers and a player-base which is just breaking 100,000. It has met this fate because, as good as it is, it is the same kind of game as World of Warcraft. The interface, graphics, combat mechanics, and advancement system all have obvious similarities. It doesn’t matter if WOW’s launch had more bugs, or its servers crashed more often. That was years ago. Now, in the present, WOW is nearing its third expansion. The servers are extremely stable and bugs are few. There is more content than in any other MMO, including excellent classes, wonderful gear, and numerous encounters for high-level players. More importantly, the players of WOW have had time to cement themselves in the game. With each passing month, with each new piece of armor, with each new ability, the chances of the player-base leaving for a new game (but similar) game, like LOTRO, become less. After all, leaving means starting a new character in a new world. All of the player’s previous achievements - which the player probably spent months or years earning - go away.

No new game came compete with that. It just isn’t possible. World of Warcraft has made the rules for its kind of MMO, and as long as other MMOs insist on playing on its turf, they’re going to lose. Trying to create a game that taps into the success of Blizzard is a recipe for failure.

So where does the MMO industry go from here? That is hard to say. I have been playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning since its release, and I have been pleasantly surprised by that game. I wasn’t expecting a great deal. At first glance, it appears to be the same as any other MMO. The interface is the same, the way characters look and move is similar, and there is a significant leveling and itemization element. Yet it moves away from World of Warcraft by focusing heavily on PvP and RvR combat, and by constructing both PvP and PvE encounters in such a way that a player can log in for an hour and still manage to complete an objective. It also focuses less on the idea that players must reach maximum level before they can expect to participate in groups and in PvP, and instead tries to create an environment where the player is dealing with the meat of the gameplay from the very first level. I do not have the slightest thought that WAR may de-throne WOW from its position as the titan of MMOs, but I believe the game will be a great success, and that it will carve out a subscription base large enough to be considered a great success. It will attract a different kind of player, and in doing so it won’t have to worry about defeating WOW. Other MMOs should take note of WAR’s example. It hasn’t completely re-written the genre, but it has departed from some of its core assumptions in a way that will help it stand out from the crowd.

But more radical departures will probably be required as the genre move forwards. It is hard to say what the departures might be, because there doesn’t appear to be any MMOs on the horizon which promise to offer a dramatic departure from the genre’s standards. This is unfortunate for the companies and investors involved in those games, and unfortunate for players - but one can always hope. The next leap in the genre will probably be one that no one sees coming.