What if WoW never existed?

Since people are kind of blind when it comes to the industry and tend to focus only on their self-centered views/needs/desires, I suggest this video to everyone:

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/video-game...never-existed/

The entire video is very educational and informative, but if you want to jump straight to the point it's around 21:40


I was going to post this in the Xbox-Huge-Ascended-Gear-Argument-Thread but I decided to put it here as it's off topic from that one, yet still relevant to GW2 because people are complaining that GW2 is becoming a WoW clone.

This video is extremely informative and insightful on how WoW has changed the industry. Both the good and the bad. A lot of people don't actually realize that without WoW we probably would have never gotten GW2, or any other big "Triple-A MMO".

People always fall back on the default that "every MMO since WoW has been a WoW clone or failed or both". Which is true and false at the same time. The reality of the situation is that Blizzard showed investors how successful MMO's can be. Without WoW (or whatever would have taken the place of WoW), MMO's never really seemed that lucrative and developers were never given the necessary funds they required to introduce things like Story. Removal of "The Grind" for more meaningful content since grindy MMO's were the easiest to make. But the same argument can be made that Blizzard hurts other developers because of the hold they have on the MMO market.


Without creating a Wall-O-Text that no one will read, I'll simply leave it at this. Things will always get worse before they get better. GW2 may inevitably fail, as is the risk that all MMO's take (even before Everquest and WoW were ever a thing). But if people are going to fall back on the argument that "GW2 is turning into a WoW clone because they introduced a gear grind", then at least take the time to educate yourself on the industry and reconsider if it's worth it to you to hurt a game you love because they decided to introduce a new gear set with some higher numbers on it.

I mean that seriously. Is this one change really worth forsaking a title that most of you have played non-stop since release? Because if and when it turns into a "WoW-Clone", it will be the people that said "Yes" that helped push it down that road.

I moved it to Offtopic other games, because though it applies to Guild Wars 2 in an indirect way, it's not news about Guild Wars 2.

I haven't watched this yet, but I disagree with something you said in your statement. You postulate if it weren't for WoW we wouldn't have AAA MMOs at all. I don't see how anyone can claim this, since no one knows what would happen if WoW hadn't come out.

The gaming industry is like a rainforest. It has different niches and if something becomes extinct, something moves in to fill those niches. If there's a niche, some bright spark will fill it.

If Blizzard didn't create WoW, which was heavily influenced by EQ, then someone else would have created an MMO that might or might not resemble WoW at all. And that MMO might have been successful in a different way, or in other ways. Maybe the path to today would have been a more gradual climb with more progression in the genre. We simply don't know. There is no way to know.

I'll watch this when I get a chance though.

It was suppose to be in GW2 General but I'm dyslexic and clicked the wrong forum. Blegh.

It's still not really about Guild Wars 2, though, even though it pertains to it. Other video games if really the proper place for it.

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Originally Posted by Vayne

but I disagree with something you said in your statement. You postulate if it weren't for WoW we wouldn't have AAA MMOs at all. I don't see how anyone can claim this, since no one knows what would happen if WoW hadn't come out.

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That's not what I was saying, it's not that we wouldn't have them but more so that we wouldn't have the ones that we were given. Like Guild Wars, for example. Which tried to do something new, may have had to do something else entirely.

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Originally Posted by Vayne

It's still not really about Guild Wars 2, though, even though it pertains to it. Other video games if really the proper place for it.

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Originally Posted by Fey

Without creating a Wall-O-Text that no one will read, I'll simply leave it at this. Things will always get worse before they get better. GW2 may inevitably fail, as is the risk that all MMO's take (even before Everquest and WoW were ever a thing). But if people are going to fall back on the argument that "GW2 is turning into a WoW clone because they introduced a gear grind", then at least take the time to educate yourself on the industry and reconsider if it's worth it to you to hurt a game you love because they decided to introduce a new gear set with some higher numbers on it.

I mean that seriously. Is this one change really worth forsaking a title that most of you have played non-stop since release? Because if and when it turns into a "WoW-Clone", it will be the people that said "Yes" that helped push it down that road.

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K. lol

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Originally Posted by Fey

That's not what I was saying, it's not that we wouldn't have them but more so that we wouldn't have the ones that we were given. Like Guild Wars, for example. Which tried to do something new, may have had to do something else entirely.

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Guild Wars 1 came out the same time as WoW. If WoW hadn't come out at all, I wonder if Guild Wars might have had a bigger player base, and the entire genre might have evolved more slowly but differently. I mean Guild Wars was released about six months after WoW. It was obviously in production before WoW was released.

So if WoW had never been released, what would have happened? Would we have better MMOs than we do now? I think the answer is probably yes, from my point of view. Certainly they'd be different.

But since Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I've liked to date, it's entirely possible that I'd like the MMOs better if WoW had never come out and more, it's entirely possible I wouldn't have had to wait 7 years to find one I could play.

It's nice to be able to read something again that Vayne and I agree on, for a change :)

Whenever this argument comes up, people tend to forget that WoW was, for all intents a purposes, as Vayne mentioned, a copy of the Everquest model.

People forget that Everquest came out in 1999, while World of Warcraft was announced almost 2 years later, and wouldn't come out until 2004, which was the same year Everquest 2 hit the market. In point of fact, Blizzard canceled their plans for a Warcraft action game and chose to pursue the MMO angle instead purely because of Everquest's popularity. Now, because of the release schedule, Everquest fans were torn, many continued on with Everquest 2, but other moved to World of Warcraft. This occurred because unlike Everquest, the Warcraft franchise had a 3 game fanbase (4 if you count Starcraft) that was coming with it, thus the prospect were more players, and more friends. Everquest 2 only had its own fanbase and the general word of mouth created from the first game. Thus at the end of the day World of Warcraft came out on top over Everquest 2.

But they weren't really all that different. If World of Warcraft hadn't existed, Everquest 2 more than likely would've been the dominant MMO, as Everquest had been before it, and given that the times were already moving more towards online gaming, its more than fair to say that Everquest 2 may have had a similar presence that WoW has had over the years. Not quite as strong or as quick, because it didn't have the extra push and fanbase that came with the Warcraft title, but it still would have been there. Guild Wars, and all the MMO's of 2005 and likely 2006 would have still happened, as well, and who knows what would've caught on or not after that because, lets be honest, WoW has controlled the MMO market through fan loyalty for years after its time has gone (the game is completely obsolete in terms of graphics and design), but people still need to realize that WoW didn't create the market, it merely boosted it.

In all reality, very little WoW did was innovative in any way. Has its utilization of things made them a standard? More than likely, but to think that the world of MMO's or games in general would be significantly different today if WoW didn't exist is misguided at best. Somethings would be different, for sure, and some games may or may not exist, but WoW is not the father of the genre, nor is it the pinnacle. Of course, Everquest isn't the father of the genre, either... in fact, the genre has been around for about as long as the internet has been easily accessible in one form or another, but at least Everquest was the first one to take it and do something significant that could garner mass popularity. So the real question should be, what would the MMO and online gaming landscape be like if Everquest never existed?

Maybe Asheren's Call would've become popular... who knows?

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Or here's an even better question... what if AD&D: Neverwinter Nights never existed?

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Also, just for the record, aside from Guild Wars 1 and 2, I have also played Asheren's Call, Everquest, Everquest II, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Lineage II, ArchLord, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Matrix Online, Lord of the Rings: Online, D&D Online, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online, Free Realms, and a few others can't recall the names of right now, and the only ones that were worth my time were GW1, GW2, and DCUO... and DCUO was only worth my time because I'm a DC fanboy, not because it was a good game.

The MMO genre is full of crap.

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Originally Posted by Lucread

Now, because of the release schedule, Everquest fans were torn, many continued on with Everquest 2, but other moved to World of Warcraft.

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I've never played WoW, but I did play EQ2 for a while after playing EQ1 for several years. EQ2's problems were that its graphic requirements were substantially higher than WoW, and it removed many of the fun parts of EQ1. It was the best of the MMOs I tried around that time, but I couldn't see any reason to leave EQ1 to play it.

Most of the people I knew who left EQ1 for WoW did so because of screw-ups on Sony's part in the raidization of EQ1, and because WoW was apparently a more polished and faster-paced game. Sony's destruction of EQ1 by listening to the 'Must have raids! Must have raids!' fanatics is the reason I'm concerned about Anet listening to the same people in GW2. In the early years of EQ1 there were a few raid zones which provided gear only a little better than you would find elsewhere, but pretty soon expansions were coming out where most of the content required a raid and the gear made players massively more powerful than the casuals. Then when most of the raiders moved on to WoW, they were left with a game based around 50+ player raids with few raiding guilds.

Anyway, I'd better get to work :).

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Originally Posted by Edward M. Grant

I've never played WoW, but I did play EQ2 for a while after playing EQ1 for several years. EQ2's problems were that its graphic requirements were substantially higher than WoW, and it removed many of the fun parts of EQ1. It was the best of the MMOs I tried around that time, but I couldn't see any reason to leave EQ1 to play it.

Most of the people I knew who left EQ1 for WoW did so because of screw-ups on Sony's part in the raidization of EQ1, and because WoW was apparently a more polished and faster-paced game. Sony's destruction of EQ1 by listening to the 'Must have raids! Must have raids!' fanatics is the reason I'm concerned about Anet listening to the same people in GW2. In the early years of EQ1 there were a few raid zones which provided gear only a little better than you would find elsewhere, but pretty soon expansions were coming out where most of the content required a raid and the gear made players massively more powerful than the casuals. Then when most of the raiders moved on to WoW, they were left with a game based around 50+ player raids with few raiding guilds.

Anyway, I'd better get to work :).

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I'm not convinced Anet is listening to those people, and I've yet to see any raids in this game. Again without a holy trinity, how could you really even have a raid? It would be a zerg, nothing more nothing less.

I can still see Anet going to ten man content, because they had 12 man content in Guild Wars 1. In fact, I can't really tell the difference between a raid and the Guild Wars 1 instances The Deep and Urgoz's Warren. Twelve man elite content that did require some degree of coordination. How is that not a raid?

Raiding in itself isn't really the problem, it's gear grind that's the problem. As long as they don't gate content it'll be fine.