World of Warcraft – which has many fans on the Train2Game forum – is the “touchstone” of Game Design for all MMOs. That’s the opinion of Bioware who are developing their own MMO in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Bioware’s Greg Zeschuk hade the comments while speaking on a panel at the DICE summit in Las Vegas.
“It is a touchstone. It has established standards, it’s established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that’s pretty dumb,” said Zeschuk.
“If you have established standards, WoW established them.”
World of Warcraft certainly does have an established audience of over 12 million subscribers, many of whom rushed out to buy the Cataclysm expansion within its first month on sale.
The Bioware developer also told the audience that despite the rise of casual gaming, triple A titles were still viable and he pointed to World of Warcraft being the best example of this.
“Bigger does work. Big has worked and frankly, WoW is the biggest. On a pure revenue basis it’s probably the biggest game ever by a country mile. It generates so much revenue it’s an incredible international business unto itself. How do we compete with that? It’s an interesting challenge.
He continued. “In some ways they [Blizzard] cracked this market wide open. Obviously Star Wars is a very big licence and it’s something that when done right – and it’s something we did right with KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) years ago – it’s an incredible force multiplier on your efforts. We’ve added things so that anyone that plays it knows it’s a BioWare game.
“It’s not like we’re actually going out there to beat anyone, we’re going out to place. The audience will tell us if we have a place,”
Blizzard’s Mike Morhaim was also on the DICE summit panel and suggested that other good MMOs would be good for the genre as a whole.
“BioWare is a great developer and obviously Star Wars is a very strong licence. We think it’s good for the MMO genre for additional MMOs to come out that are actually fun and good to play,” he said.
“I don’t know that it serves the genre very well when MMOs come out and have all sorts of problems and players leave in frustration.
“Hopefully, new players will come in, experience it for the first time and find out that maybe they’re fans of the genre. If they get frustrated and leave maybe they won’t give the genre a try at all.
“So, do a good job” he told Bioware.
The Bioware Game Designers will be hoping they are doing a good job, with publisher EA recently stating Star Wars: The Old Republic will need 500,000 subscribers to be profitable.
So Train2Game, do you believe that World of Warcraft is the touchstone for MMOs? Can Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic come close to its standards? And do you agree that if one game is particularly good, it can encourage you to play others of the same genre?
As usual, you can leave your thoughts here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum. You can also let us know what you think via Train2Game on Twitter.
Train2Game, in association with DR Studios and the University of Bedfordshire, will be holding a Game Jam at the end of March. For more information, see the official Train2Game Game Jam website or the Train2Game Game Jam Facebook page
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