It seems every big developer these days needs/wants an MMO of their own and often fall flat on their faces... you see the MMO is the most expensive and difficult genre to create a game in. Bioware recently hired 100 new employees and opened up a new studio to work on their new MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic... if that is not convincing enough this game and nearly every other noteworthy game in the genre has a development period of 5 years at the least. That's a lot of time and resources to commit to one release... a release that if you batch... you may go bankrupt.
What is sad is that this has in fact happened and continues to do so. Companies just can not rap their heads around original ideas and when one thing sells everyone freaks out and tries to ride the coat tails. In many cases this works... but seemingly not with MMO. So I ask the gaming industry, please stop pooping out MMO's every which-way. We don't care and we won't buy them. Spend your time and resources producing something good.
I would not condone completely scrapping MMORPGs, but then again I would never play one. The only one I considered was the new Bioware Star Wars attempt - I love Star Wars and Bioware - but I won't play it because I can't see paying monthly or even yearly for a game I won't probably play more than any other RPG (100-120 hours). It seems as if developers are trying to make the game too epic, too grand. I'm all for interactive video games and games that are similar to film (tell a good story, have some kind of coherent narrative, etc, etc.), but I don't want to live in an alternate world. I may one day pick one up, but probably not. And you would think that over a span of 5-6 years that narrative and game-play of these games would be better ( I hear bad things about mechanics and narrative a lot).
ReplyDeleteYeah, as someone who has played WoW for a year (recovering WoWaholic... been clean for 8 months)I can definitely vouch for how horrible the fundamental mechanics of(at least) WoW really are. I am excited for The Old Republic and if I have the time and money (a big if) I will probably try it out. As far as I am concerned Bioware can do no wrong.
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