Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The fall of World of Warcraft

The fall of the behemoth known as 'World of Warcraft' will not happen anytime soon.

However, I recently cancelled my subscription (on the day patch 2.3 came out) related to three specific things:
  • Lack of solo/5-man party progression path that did not involve MORE grinding/redudant runs of the same content. This is outside PvP/Arena solo advancement -- some people enjoy that, some do not.
  • Only other upgrade path was raid/10/25 man content. This brings in the social aspect and challenges related to 9/24 other people, everyone on at the same time, AFK, paying attention/situational awareness, and simply getting INTO the raid based on the necessary class makeup and possibly policies and/or personal preferences of the people putting the raid together, and of course everyone sufficiently geared/prepared for that raid content.
  • Been playing it for a long time (3rd day after it came out...I was trying when it initially came out, but really couldn't play until I choose one of the new servers that got rolled out).
My only regret really isn't necessarily what was lacking in World of Warcraft, but rather any substantial competition/alternatives. This is where I am going to bring up one that actually COULD have challenged Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Star Wars Galaxies.

Why bring up Star Wars Galaxies you may ask - it's pretty much dead, no one is creating new characters there, and Sony itself has somewhat given up on it.

Because: Star Wars Galaxies, pre the Combat Upgrade patch, had a well known genre that wasn't the standard dragon/dungeon/magic commonly seen in MMOs. Character progression started very simply, then bloomed into a complex system of choices and options, professions (the crafting was awesome!), and even non-combat progression. And, of course, it was Star Wars!!

If anyone was to topple the mighty World of Warcraft, it would be a re-creation of a Star Wars MMO with Lucas Arts involvement, not some other crappy (no offense, but really) game developers/designers with the same initial ideal and scope of eventual complex progression and the hope (not garanteed-in-two-months) of possibly unlocking Jedi powers IF you so desired (but non-Jedi still being quite capable and, at times, preferred).

Will it come to fruition? Not likely, but hopefully someone will take this as a que :-)

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