[MUD-Dev2] Fallen Earth

[Mike Sellers]

Damion wrote: 
> > Okay, the first easy question:
> >
> > If I'm already playing WoW, or have played it in the past, 
> > why would I play Fallen Earth instead?
> >
> > And if I played WoW and didn't like, why would I play this game?
> >
> > MMOs have their 800 pound gorilla and it is (still) WoW.  I've been 
> > amazed at the number of MMO pitches that have no answer for this 
> > question, and don't even consider it worth asking to themselves.
> 
> How different does an MMO have to be before it's *different 
> enough*?  

Excellent question.  So far, I don't think we know -- at least not in the
traditional, heavy-client fight-and-loot kinds of games.  

> Are MMOs the only game genre where the existence of 
> one market leader means that no one else should ever do any 
> features that are at all similar?

No, but other markets with a single dominant player or solution (e.g.
Windows) are similar.  Other products, even arguably better ones, may come
along, but they have to either draw away customers currently dedicated to
the de facto solution, or be sufficiently different to draw in new customers
and be disruptive in the marketplace.  As the leading product becomes more
dominant, this is increasingly difficult to do.  It sucks, but it's hardly
original to MMOs.  

> Not to say that every game should be a WoW clone, but I've 
> seen way too many MMOs come on the market with way too much 
> half-formed wild-assed experimentation that turned out to be 
> broken, unbalanced, not well thought out or just plain not fun.

Yeah, that's the risk of innovation. It *might* catch on, or it might not.
There are ways to mitigte this risk, but they increase production time and
cost (in any product).  

> The fact that FPSes and RTSes tend to be similar is not a bad 
> thing.  If you've played Quake or Starcraft, you pretty much 
> know how to play Unreal and Command and Conquer.

And yet even at their height of popularity, Quake and Starcraft didn't enjoy
the kind of near-total dominance that WoW does in the core-heavy-MMO space.
Similarity in products isn't a bad thing at all (Coke vs. Pepsi, McDonalds
vs. Burger King) -- but as one product dominates, being similar is
commercial death.  


Mike Sellers