MMO Rant #4?

Submitted by Abalieno on December 11, 2006 - 18:08.

Ok, here I poke some fun at Nerfbat.

With a title such as "Please Don't Clone WoW" you would expect a demand of new ideas, new ways of playing, a different kind of involvement with the game world. A radical, different view.

Instead Nerfbat's "Please Don't Clone WoW" is reduced to four points:

1- Less inventory management
2- movable windows
3- A "loot all" button
4- No server queues

In summary, World of Warcraft is not perfect. It is far from perfect. So don’t make a game exactly like WoW under the assumption that they do everything right, because they don’t.

Well, I really hope that the desire for something different isn't reduced to irrelevant (and questionable) details. And I also hope that people notice the much deeper and relevant problems in WoW's design.

If you ask me "what kind of MMO would you make right now?"

The answer would be: a fantasy game. But a fantasy game that feels and plays completely different from all the other fantasy games out there.

WoW has made stronger a dictatorship on the genre. It seems that a fantasy game cannot be different than that very narrow view they have portrayed. It made people blind about what this genre really represents.

I hope that at least Todd McFarlane and Salvatore at GMG open up the genre for something new. They arrived here with a different history behind, and they may have a "fresher", more faithful point of view. At least from them I expect a fantasy world that isn't trite.

Filed in: Ravings

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Re: MMO Rant #4?

furrot on December 11, 2006 - 22:12.

Didn't they add an option to make Auto-Loot the default when looting a corpse last patch? Jeez, I don't even play anymore but I'm willing to read the patch notes or ask someone before writing criticism.

When I read inventory management I didn't expect him to gripe about quest items. I can see how this becomes a problem later in the game when you need different gear sets for encounters but I never found myself saying, "Damn this boar tusk is preventing me from looting this item, damn you quest designers!". Curbing your own greed is hard but when it came down to it I dropped many a quest that I just didn't care about to pick another herb. While some larger quests have quite a few tools needed to complete them some newer quests help you by storing the regents in a container so it only takes one slot for a few tools.

I couldn't tell you how many slots the bank has but you get like 98 unique item slots not counting what you have equipped. That's a ton of shit with no penalty...

Someone give him an award for figuring out that queues suck.

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Re: MMO Rant #4?

Grouchy Gnome on December 11, 2006 - 22:24.

Note that the point of this article isn't actually saying not to clone WoW, it's to point out that World of Warcraft, even in all its splendor, is far from perfect. In addition to it being imperfect, please don't just make a WoW clone. The title was intentionally misleading.

Ryan Shwayder, Nerfbat

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Re: MMO Rant #4?

Cyanbane (not verified) on December 12, 2006 - 06:55.

Honestly, How does the hell anyone pay $12 a month for a game they have to wait 30 mins to get into? If that became and industry standard then I would quit MMOs. I will never understand how people put up with that.

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