I was reading Openedge’s comments about Lord of the Rings Online, and remembering claims by a Turbine exec that LotRO was destined to overtake and surpass WoW, which seems unlikely to me. A EA exec thinks WAR will be huge. Everyone thinks the magic formula is to copy WoW, then change something to make it different.
People claim other MMOs don’t get a lot of traction unless they more or less copy WoW.
Why not go all the way, and make an exact copy? Oh, change the names of the races and the models and anything that is copyrighted, trademarked or patented, but otherwise, make it identical. Identical enough so that all WoW add-ons work with it. Identical enough so that even if Hunter becomes Tracker, they still do all the same things.
Blatant, unashamed copying.
Happens in the real world, all the time. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, all as identical as they can be, right down to the trays. The path to success is not by being different, but by being a 100% compatible drop-in replacement.
WoW players no longer have to wonder, with these games, if they will like it. It’s the same thing. They KNOW they will. Just with different looking toons, areas which are a little different (but not too different), lore which is pretty much what they are used to.
Maybe the problem with WoW-likes isn’t that they are similar to WoW, but that they aren’t similar ENOUGH.
23 thoughts on “Why not make a MMO EXACTLY like World of Warcraft?”
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Picasso said “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
Turbine is a good artist. They copied some stuff. They made a decent game. People said it is WoW in ME.
Blizzard is a great artist. Blizz stole stuff wholesale from other games and somehow made it their own, so now companies are accused of copying from them.
Could you provide a link to Openedge’s comments to which you refer? Thanks.
I’m a big fan of Lotro, and they do a few things that I think are improvements over WoW. I much prefer playing it to WoW. But I’m a Tolkien geek from way back, I’m sure that’s a factor.
I for one do not think WoW was so very revolutionary. They made graphics that would play smoothly on everyone’s computer, and made it so you can play the whole game solo. These are not small things, but hardly a big revolutionary change from EQ, or EQ2, which launched first.
That, and they are funny.
But also notice how Burger king’s advertisements focus on the minor differences between Burger King and McDonald’s. Wendy’s current slogan is even “Not fast food.” I think you could do it as long as the advertising made it clear that it was the same thing “But different and better.”
I also think that the growth of the fast food industry had a lot to do with the changing eating habits of Americans. There was room for several big chains with only minor differences in quality and menu. I’m not at all sure there is room for several games the size of WoW that only have minor differences. Maybe in a few years when the Runescape crowd gets older.
Of course what constitutes a “minor” difference in design also varies strongly from one observer to the next. I find accusations that LoTRO and WAR are WoW clones to be somewhat ignorant (or at best willfully reductionist), but there are many that feel that way.
@Toldain: I personally found WoW to be as much of an improvement over EQ as cotton briefs would be over wool ones. Maybe only an evolutionary step forward, but I’ll take it.
Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
@Yeebo: I’m not surprised with the wool-cotton thing. But many of the improvements in WoW aren’t original to WoW. Furthermore most of the changes were logical responses to play issues. I interviewed with a gaming company that wanted to make a game that was “like Everquest but without all the irritating stuff”. It’s in a gaming companies interest to make a game that appeals to the “two-hour” player. Which means forcing them to spend less time to accomplish something. Many of the improvements in WoW and EQ2 flow from this idea.
Long corpse runs are a pain in the butt when you can only play for an hour or two. So they were removed. Likewise with waiting 20 minutes just to get started on the long boat ride to the other continent. I don’t really miss that at all. And having to wait ten minutes between fights to regain mana. Ugh. Those things needed to get ditched, from a financial perspective.
The fundamental roleplay/combat structure is still there.
Which is not to say that EQ2 didn’t totally blow it and make a game that people really kind of hated initially.
@Toldain: I totally agree that many of the “improvements” that WoW made were pretty obvious. Many of them had even been done in games in between EQ and WoW (for example the AC II UI). But I would argue that WoW was the first MMO to put enough small upgrades together in one user friendly package that it felt like a step forward for the genre to almost everyone.
Blizzard has always been a company that steals fun ideas and makes a ton of money bringing them to a larger market. Look only from Rogue to Diablo. Lot’s of companies try to do that, but they don’t seem to have as much of a knack for figuring out what ideas are worthy of theft.
@Toldain — it’s linked in the post.
What I was getting at is, you make a WoW 1-1 compatible, a feature in WoW has equiv feature in your game. And then you innovate. Blizz is too large to make fast updates or to innovate much? Fine, Game B takes up the slack, gives everything WoW has and then just keeps adding more — but the important thing, it has everything WoW has. Maybe you can even import your character from WoW with all gear intact, perhaps with different names or slightly altered appearance.
You take all that, and then you say, okay, we have everything WoW has — EVERYTHING. We even brought your characters into our game. Now here’s the fun stuff. You want appearance armor? We’re adding that. You want mentoring? We’re adding that. And so on.
But the barrier to entry is zero. Zip. Same game. Just different enough in art and lore to avoid a lawsuit.
Coming To America For The Win
Sounds like forking 🙂
You watch that kind of talk round these parts…
Thanks for the link, Tipa. It looks like maybe a fair bit of what interested you has been deleted. Oh yeah, executives definitely think like that, and Blizzard’s slowness to market creates a sort of opportunity. An opportunity say, for a company that releases a new dungeon on the week after Labor day in a live update. 😉
But that’s not going to get us new gameplay, not in and of itself. For example, I did 10 of the new harvest quests tonight and got myself a commendation. Really, that’s kind of grinding for a new reward, not new gameplay. Perhaps some of the encounters in the new dungeon will have new twists to them, that was true of RE2. But maybe not the radical departure you are looking for.
I think you are right to think small in what you are looking at. Like looking at indy films for quirky offbeat stuff. Smaller budgets allow bigger risks.
I’m not in the camp that thinks LOTRO will overtake WoW. I like LOTRO a lot, and I’ve learned that that’s a good indicator that something will NOT be broadly popular. Nevertheless, there’s an approach in LOTRO that I really like.
Global revenues
McDonalds (2008) $22.796 Billion USD
Wendy’s (2006) $2.439 Billion USD
Burgerking (2007) $2.234 Billion USD
It is a well known principle of business that the hardest way to compete with a dominant market player is to try and compete head on offering a similar product. Copiers can usually own expect to get a small segment of the market. It may be possible to make a profit in that small segment but they are still only getting the dominant players leavings.
Dislodging a dominant player is a very difficult problem to tackle because the dominant player has all the cards, they have the audience and they have the money to invest in development and marketing.
You need only to copy WoW’s quality of execution – that’s what most people don’t seem to get – WoW isn’t successful because its a “good” game but because its polished to near perfection.
Seems one of the blogs did not take well to my “rabble rousing” and deleted all of my comments. Very fascinating.
I guess I have been harsh in my criticism of LOTRO. But, the game has not proven its worth at all, yet the fans still think it is the most incredible thing. And just like WAR, any negative comment is frowned upon. But, it is deserved in my opinion. LOTRO may be a WoW alike, but I do not think it is a good one.
And personally, if you can’t handle discussing the subject on your blog…don’t blog…(poor Dragonchasers)
As to your comment about the WoW alikes., look at Runes of Magic first.
100% looks the same, but with SOGA models (lol). They have no qualms of being exactly like WoW.
But, lets be smart about it also. Lets “IMPROVE” on the WoW formula.
Housing? Yup, we got it
Dyes? Yup we got it
Dual Classing? We got it.
Oh, did we mention we are F2P? (which is my only issue. They need some money, so hopefully they offer incentives for payment to progress their development. This one could be good.)
And recently MMOGamers discussed Aion and NCSoft.
When you look at it, it looks totally different than WoW. Yet, NCSoft has no issue embracing the WoW heritage. Even reviewers are willing to go that step..
This MMORPG might look like a World of Warcraft copycat, but there’s more going on here than meets the glazed-over eye
And that is the catch. Maybe don’t try to stray from WoW. Embrace it, and then hook the player with more unique features (I mean, real flight in Aion…hello)
As to LOTRO, they are a wanna-be? That is their problem, and they are not a good one. Steefel thinks he can match WoW as a world class MMO, but, I honestly think the Asian market will burn through those 50 levels of boredom and ask “What now?”.
(PS: And if you must delete me, please let me down softly…/*sniffle)
It’s not that LOTR was too much like WoW or too different. They just made some decisions which turned me off the game. I also think their IP was a little too restrictive on the gameplay mechanics. In all honesty for an IP that was the birth of the fantasy genre it had too little magic and other qualities that I’m used to seeing in modern fantasy. There was also less emphasis on dungeon crawling which is one of my favorite things to do in games.
I thought WoW and Warcraft stole most of their lore from Warhammer. And the best thing about Warhammer is their developers. They’re passionate about the game, and want to eliminate stupid things like killing 20 bears on the way to the quest giver, who tells you to go kill 20 bears. In War, the devs were talking (I don’t know if it’s implemented, I’m not in beta -_-) about making it so that if you kill any random mob, there would be a quest giver that would reward you for it, and notice that you have bear guts all over your blade as you talk to him.
Public quests, leveling from pvp being viable and encouraged. Only problem I see with war is there being a lack of PVE. I want to play it!
And about your post.. hmm… Copy WoW exactly, but in a diablo 2 setting (warlocks -> necros, mages ->sorcs, wars -> barbs… rogs ->assassins, druid -> .. well druid! etc).
I’d play it.
Word on the street is that Blizzard had a deal with Games Workshop to create a Warhammer RTS. When the deal fell though, they changed things a bit here and there, made up a new backstory…and viola, Warcraft was born. I personally have no idea if that’s true, just a rumor I’ve seen repeated. If nothing else it’s pretty obvious that some-one on the dev team was familiar with Warhammer.
And based on the McDonald’s vs everyone else numbers cited above, it seems that no-one can hope for more than around a million subs globally by competing with Blizzard on their turf. Of course I think McDonald’s is doing a lot better overseas than Burger King or Wendy’s, so that could account for the disparity in revenue.
@Sean: If I could play WoW in space or some other setting, I’d be on it in a heart beat. They could rip of Warhammer 40K and set it in the starcraft universe, I’d be stoked. It’s not the mechanics I’m bored with (I’ve found Diku MUDs entertaining for over a decade now after all), there’s just not much left for me to explore in WoW. And one extra class (WotLK) doesn’t get me as juiced as an entirely new set of classes and a radically different endgame to mess around with (WAR).
@Toldain:
I’ve playd LoTRO longer than most MMOs because it has a well thought out cohesive setting, it’s among the first with an end game that a casual player can make real progress in, because new content has been added at such a steady clip (so I rarely get bored), and most importantly because of the craftsmanship exhibited in the storytelling. The quality of writing in the quest text is generally is exceptional (at least for an MMO), and the Book Quests are some of the most fun and cinematic quests I’ve ever experienced in a RPG. It’s like playing through a cut scene in FF.
These are things that are important to me, though the masses care little for them. The masses think WoW’s mostly amateurish writing and cobbled together setting are just fine after all. I don’t ever expect LoTRO to be a real mass market success, because the things that really set it apart just aren’t things that most people would ever notice. Even experienced MMO players often dismiss it nearly out of hand because it’s not mechanically very innovative (with a few minor exceptions). And honestly, a cohesive setting and good writing only appeal to a very particular kind of player. I think most of us are already playing.
OK, sorry to spam up this topic with three tangents. I’m done.
Let’s take the idea one step further and allow the “porting” of your character via WoW’s armory to the new game. Attachment to your old character? No problem! Bring him with you!
Sadly, Tipa… I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. Everyone talks about innovation, but consumers really say is MORE WARCRAFT.
… and there’s nothing wrong with that 🙂
The flip side, unfortunately, is that when you’re tired of WoW, you get the feeling you’re tired of MMOs as a genre, since they all copy each other so much.
I have been playing Warhammer and it is a lot like WoW, but better in so many ways. So far, my favorite features have been this.
1. Public Quests – Fun, repeatable quests where everyone works together as a team. Plus when it’s over you get exp and loot for participating. And you get influence points to spend on gear upgrades or potions.
2. Scenarios (Battlegrounds) – Queue from anywhere! When you’re done with the scenario, you zone back into where you left. So basically, you never have to stop questing just to play a BG. Also, you can do a repeatable quest for exp to do the BG, which is good. AND you get XP and renown for playing (renown gives you gear points to spend).
3. Tome of Knowledge – I love the tome as it tracks what I’m doing and maybe someday I’ll read it. It’s too much to absorb right now though.
4. Mobs spawn and then seem to “assault” you to new battle positions. Nice touch, makes you feel more like your in a battle than just a field of never ending wolves.
5. Mana – there is none! woot! Everyone has a rogue like energy bar.
Things I dislike about Warhammer online…
1. Animations – Very choppy animations, mobs kind of teleport between my turret and my character sometimes.
2. Graphics – I have an awesome video card (ati radeon 3870 512mb), 3 gb ram, 2.2ghz dual core AMD processer and a SATA hard drive. I can run other top end games on full settings without any slowdown (for the most part). On this game I get a lot of choppiness unless I turn it down.
3. Graphics… extended – I have an ATI card and sometimes the faces are transparent.. IDK why.
4. Customer Service – Where is it? I can’t find a number to call anywhere. I’m getting ping ponged between EA and mythic for customer service. Not fun.
5. Scenarios – Joining a game where chaos team has all level 9-11’s and the order team is all level 1-7. Matchmaking ftw. Getting utterly destroyed sucks.
Overall, I’m addicted to this game, moreso than spore. Good times!