[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Dinosaurs evolve to chickens, MMOs evolve to massively single-player games

[Vincent Archer]

According to cruise:
> So I suspect the reason for WoW success isn't anything to do with the
> "heretical" idea of solo play and quick missions.

The reason for WoW's success isn't (probably) one thing, it's a combination
of multiple factors, which, strung one after the other, achieved a
multiplicative rather than additive effect.

World of Warcraft benefited from:

1) An extremely familiar setting - it's a standard high fantasy LOTR
   derivative, via the descent of D&D/Warhammer that is easy, not only
   for gamers, but also for reviewers to identify
2) A very polished game at release, with relately few bugs
3) An enormous amount of content from start to end game (no less than 6
   different starting areas, a system designed to get you to move from
   one point to a new, never visited before one every 15mn on the average)
4) A coherent and immediately identifiable art style
5) A skillfully managed buzz ("viral marketing") prior to launch
6) A launch at the right internet era, as broadband was overcoming the
   old modem connection, and people were connecting to the internet in
   the US and europe in droves (number of connected homes were increasing
   by 30-40% per year around 2004)
7) The aforementioned quick-reward scheme
8) A well known company brand (Blizzard) behind it
9) A linkage to an established succesful game IP (Warcraft 1, 2 & 3)

and probably a few additional factors that I'm missing.

I think City of Heroes lacked a few of these. There was little to no
buzz about it; when game mag were making nearly monthly columns about
the upcoming Warcraft game, no one was writing about City of Heroes.
The content also wasn't there (the repetitive missions for levelling
seem about as exciting as Anarchy Online's random mission dispensers).
Besides, who among the gamer population had ever heard about Cryptic
(never made a game before) or NCSoft (outside of Asia, name recognition
is near zero).

The point is, if you remove some of these factors, your potential
following will plummet fast. The content, and ease of getting it, is
probably what has doomed most of the recent AAA games these past
few years. It's like a house of cards: while none of the cards,
alone, makes the house, remove one and you probably end badly.

-- 
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)