After having seen the trailer for Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens, I wonder how long it'll be before we see cross bladed lightsabers in SWTOR. My guess is that it will make an appearance sometime next year in the Cartel Store.
Yeah... This.
Or maybe this one. (From Dorkly.)
***
From what I can tell, the WoW version of housing, Garrisons, is the pet battles of Warlords of Draenor. From what a local friend tells me, it's required if you want to do any crafting, but not as much for raiding at the moment. (She doesn't PvP, so that's an unknown for her there.) You set up shop in Draenor, and you pretty much go to town.
Does that mean that you'll have to start over in a new location with a new Garrison for the next expac, does the Garrison just migrate to the next expac's location (whatever it ends up being) like a gypsy caravan, or does it stay put, permanently set in Draenor?
By integrating Garrisons directly into Draenor, it seems that Blizzard is grounding them in such a way as to make them a permanent fixture of this expac.
Now, add the full Warlords leveling experience + one new expac, L1-105(or 110), and what becomes of the Warlords Garrison? Does Blizz move it out of Warlords entirely, like what they did with most of the Wrathgate event, or do they allow you to have a double dose of Garrison leveling (one in Warlords, one in the new expac)?
Yeah, it's nitpicking, but the design decisions do have a cost, and I would hope that Blizz didn't back themselves into a corner like they did with some design decisions with Cataclysm.
***
What happens in Gen Chat, stays in.... um.... nevermind.
This must have been one of the weirder weeks for Gen Chat topics. Among the highlights were:
Which Spice Girl was the best one overall (don't look at me; I actively avoided the Spice Girls in the 90s).
Will "Han Shot First" be referenced as a joke in the new Star Wars movie?
Who was a better band: Doro or Rammstein?
What song had the most annoying lyrics? (My vote: Careless Whisper, by Wham, although I could be talked into Girl You Know Its True by Milli Vanilli.)
Just when people thought Gen Chat was only good for racist and middle grade humor...
Star Trek Online, LOTRO, SWTOR, WoW, GW2 and Neverwinter all have dropped major expacs (or continuing storylines) in the last few months.*
There were two major AAA releases this year: The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar.
But all I hear from my local friends is about League of Legends. Or Call of Duty. Or Dragon Age Inquisition. Or Assassin's Creed Unity**.
Of all my local friends and acquaintances, there's two people who are playing MMOs, and one is playing WoW while the other is playing Aion. In fact, I have more friends excited about the release of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition than anything MMO related.
This is a far cry from when I first took up WoW back in 2009, when I was occasionally surprised by who I knew who also played MMOs. The majority played WoW, to be sure, but some still liked EQ and other games. We didn't exactly swap war stories, but there was a shared experience that we could all comment on. It also confirmed the size of the playerbase that the WoW commercials of the era alluded to.
Now, it seems that the genre is more of a niche these days than before.
Sure, you've got WoW back to over 10 million subs (for the time being), but how much of that is cannibalization of other MMO player bases is an unknown. I do know of several people who returned to WoW for Draenor (Deftig among them), but WoW doesn't seem to have quite the same mojo outside of the MMO niche than it once did.
***
I think it is telling that the television spots for Draenor are vastly different than what they were a few short expacs ago.
Hard to believe this is an oldie in YouTube years.
Fangs like that, and not one
casting callback for True Blood. Not one!
My wife, on seeing the Warlords trailer, asked me "Are they the good guys or the bad guys?"
I get her point. While both trailers emphasize ACTION!!, the more I watch the Warlords trailer***, the more I wonder whether the trailer is designed strictly for lapsed players as opposed to recruiting new ones.
Contrast these videos with tv spots for some other, newer games:
Didn't I see this during the Super Bowl?
Yes, that really is Kate Upton. Makes me wonder just how
much she got paid to say "Come and play with me!"
Both of the newer games are for mobile devices, true, but both also are attempting to cast a wider net than the WoW commercials. They are aiming for growth and more players (and, in the case of Game of War: Fire Age, sex appeal so blatant that Evony would be jealous), and their tv spots have eschewed the serious grimdark in favor of whimsy.
They stole Blizzard's thunder by co-opting one of WoW's greatest strengths: its ability to not take itself seriously.
In 2007, WoW had ads with Ozzy, Verne Troyer, and William Shatner, full of sly humor and the "you can be anyone you want!" tagline. 2009 saw the WoW Mountain Dew tie-in with two women fighting it out in a grocery store.
Because you can't have enough William Shatner.
And really, you can't have enough Kaldorei
and Orcs fighting it out in the local Mega Mart.
But now, there is no humor in Blizzard's WoW advertisements. It's all uber serious grimdark.
Last I checked, WoW itself still has plenty of humor in it. Why surrender your advantage to mobile games?
***
In the end, I guess you target your audience with what you think will work. Maximizing subscriptions is the game, and investors are a fickle "what have you done for me this quarter?" bunch. Blizzard wants their old subscribers back, and as far as I can tell they're succeeding. But new blood in the MMO genre? Not so much.
I fear that we've reached a point where the MMO market isn't going to change much in size. MMOs will be marketed to those who already play or used to play extensively. New players aren't marketed to, and a lot of really good games will be overlooked because MMOs are no longer trendy.
This December should feel like Christmas morning with the abundance of really good games to choose from, so why does it feel like Jacob Marley needs to stop by?
*There's also a new release for Rift, but I don't play the game.
**I hear about Unity for all the wrong reasons, I might add. The bugginess of the Unity release is so bad it rivals the old Microprose Darklands game for buggy releases.
***You can't avoid the trailer right now on sports channels. It's about as ubiquitous as erectile dysfunction ads.
One of the best things that can happen in LOTRO is an impromptu concert in Bree:
Yes, the mini-Reds are in among the crowd.
I watched my kids having a blast listening to the concert while they tried to stump me with the toons the band was playing. (One of the tunes was Birthday by The Beatles, but I'm old enough to remember THAT one.) This is one of those moments in LOTRO where you just wonder why this has never been appropriated for other MMOs; it brings the world to life in a unique and vivid way.
Five minutes after this screen shot, I had my answer. A troll came running into the midst of the concert, trying his best to disrupt it.*
I shook my head; I could only imagine what would happen if people tried to do this in a game where trolling is far more frequent.
The irony about this is that the Serenity Now Funeral Raid highlights the best and worst parts of MMOs. You have a community getting together to honor one of their own, and you have the community being ripped apart by people who have no sense of respect.
MMOs need more community building, but it also can't be forced. Forced community building goes over about as well as forcing people into dailies just so they can gear up to raid.** Players have to want to get together to do cool things in-game, in a public space, for the culture to change. A friend who used to play MMOs was a member of The Bards of Azeroth (Wyrmrest Accord), who would put on poetry readings in Thunder Bluff. A friend of Navimie's married her real life fiance in-game in 2013. When the old tree form was going away just prior to Cataclysm, there was an impromptu Farewell to the Trees parade.
A spark is needed, but will has to be behind it. The willingness and desire to make a difference, and to keep trying.
Unless all that people want out of MMOs is to kill things. That's fine, of course, but MMOs could be so much more. Why settle?
