Magi over at Indicator was tagged by a “Mystery Blogger”, and like any good virus, he went on to infect at a “R” value of 10 other bloggers, including me. I know all this cool science virus fact stuff because we are in a pandemic. Yay for the learning.
The award was created by a blogger named “Okoto Enigma“. Mentioning the tagger and the creator are two of the Mystery Blogger Award rules. There’s a bunch of other rules that I’m not going to follow because I want to get to the fun stuff. You can read all about them at Magi’s post or Okoto’s original post.
Magi chose five questions for his nominees, and this is the fun part…
You have to ban one game for eternity. This game shall never be played or watched again and nobody is allowed to talk about it. Which game do you pick?
World of Warcraft. Now, hear me out.
If instead of games, the question had been “which social media should be never used again and must be forgotten” and then I’d replied, “Facebook”, everyone would be nodding their heads and agreeing, even though Facebook is the largest social network in the world, with billions of users. You might even want to tell me it’s because they are the largest social network in the world, with way too much power, that they should be excised from existence.
Same for WoW. It’s a great game, and millions of players have enjoyed it and millions more still enjoy it. It was the first and maybe best home for a large majority of MMO players. It’s so pervasive that there’s two measures for any new MMO: Is it a WoW-clone, or is it so out of step with reality that it is nothing like WoW?
Prior to WoW, there was huge diversity in MMOs, largely because there wasn’t a good template to work from in 3D games. EverQuest and Ultima Online both had their roots in text-based MMOs. RuneScape was an early exercise in making a browser-based game in Java at the dawn of the web age. Meridian 59 solved a lot of problems in bringing 3D to all computers, even those without 3D hardware. Dark Age of Camelot solved PvP and siege warfare. Shadowbane did player city building. Lineage and Lineage 2 were powerhouses in Asia with their unique take on the MMO experience.
From these first generation and second generation MMOs sprouted hundreds of new MMOs — among them, EverQuest’s bastard child, World of Warcraft.
As any good baby god does, it ate its father. Most of the players and many of the developers went to WoW. As WoW’s insatiable hunger grew, most other MMOs withered. It drew all the oxygen from the room.
It was so popular that even games intended to be a solution to the WoW problem, like Warhammer Online, eventually couldn’t separate itself enough from the behemoth and died. Even today, sixteen years after its launch, WoW continues to dominate. Other MMOs still exist — FFXIV, Elder Scrolls Online are doing well, and EverQuest and Runescape are still popular among their fans. In my experience with FFXIV, new players are either coming from WoW, or older players are returning TO WoW. It’s the elephant in the MMO room.
So, sorry, WoW has got to go. It’s the biggest tree in the forest, and while it stands, nothing else can grow well in its shade.
There were other questions…
How was your day? What have you been up to? Hope you’re well.
My day was fine. Thanks for asking!
If you could take any vehicle/plane/etc. from any game/show/book/whatever to use in our world, what would you pick and where would you go?
The Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I would go everywhere, all at once.
This one’s weird! It’s not a question… it’s an answer! “No, but the raisings certainly belong to this office.” – Find the question that this answer answers!
I used to work for a now-forgotten software company called Digital Research Inc, AKA “DRI”. DRI was started in an old Victorian house in Pacific Grove, California. There wasn’t a lot of space, and they needed to expand the cellar a bit to put in new cooling for the servers. Founder Gary Kildall used to tell a story about the time he promised that everyone who came to work on a certain weekend would get a raise. That was the day they raised the bottom floor a couple inches to accommodate the new machinery 🙂
What’s your favourite Indie title that you personally love that nobody seems to know?
I don’t know if it’s indie or if nobody seems to know it, but I remember back in the day when my son and I together cleared all of Treasure’s Radiant Silvergun for the Sega Saturn. I do see it mentioned occasionally when the discussion turns to bullet hell shooter RPGs. It was just so over the top hilarious, and we had a lot of fun with it.
Thanks for the nomination! I think Magi already tagged most of the people I would have tagged for this, but if anyone wants to take this up, then consider yourself ninja-tagged!
This was the second post of mine in the last couple of weeks to feature a guillotine… why? What’s going on inside your head, Tipa?
WoW is an absolutely valid choice there. I’d say that competition breeds improvement… but there is no competition to WoW as it just vegetates and generates money for Blizzard. I guess FF14 could be considered “competition” for WoW in a way but I don’t know the exact numbers and there are not enough good MMOs out there apart from those, I’ve been told. 😀
Glad to see that you liked the post and that your day is fine. 🙂
Thanks for the writing prompts! I kinda missed Blaugust telling me what to write about each day.