WoW vs Next Gen MMO part 1

No I am not talking about Windows on Windows. I am refering to the hugely succesfull World of Warcraft. Released in 2004 it has dominated the Massively Multiplayer market ever since. Many games have tried to topple that empire and non have succeeded. So what is it going to take to be the next best thing and hopefully have a shot at winning over the market?

To answer this question we must look at 2 things. We must look at why other games have failed and we must look at what WoW did right. Lets start with the bad.

One of the key problems that a lot of MMOs seem to face is being released to early. This causes a variety of large problems. The first problem being a lack of polish. Features in the game that were added late tend to not have as much testing done to them. Interfaces feel clunky. Graphics clip through walls or have other odd behavior that distract from the game.

Another major problem that releasing early can cause is a lack of end game content or content in general. Developers tend to assume that they will have the time to add content before players get to that point. They always underestimate the speed at which power gamers and the not so power gamers will actually attain reach this content or rather lack there of. This causes players to get frustrated and leave the game. As the power gamers leave that greatly reduces the active community for the casual gamers as well.

More to come on this subject in part 2...


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Crysis on an iPhone?

I just got done reading this article off of http://arstechnica.com and let me tell you the concept is pretty cool.

But what could the consequences be. The casual gamer is arguably one of the largest audiences for hardware vendors. These are the people who buy last years latest and greatest video card once the price has dropped to an affordable level. They don't upgrade their hardware every 3-4 months but instead tend to be running on systems that are 3-5 years old.

If suddenly there was a large server farm in the internet cloud that I could connect any PC up to and get an experience that is on par with a 4 month old computer would a person ever upgrade their hardware? My guess is that they wouldn't. They will happily pay a monthly fee and not have to worry about the technical details about the hardware they are running on. The trick will be to charge enough money so that not everyone just jumps on board this system.

If something like this was free or so cheap that it might as well be free then hardware manufactures will see vastly plummeting sales. A server farm which will be able to optemize load across many machines will likely not lead to as many sales as it did in the past.

However the benefits for game companies could be dramatic. Suddenly an entirely new market of people gets opened up for the top of the line games. I can now create a game that pushes the limits of computing and not have to worry if my hardware requirements make it too restrictive to play. The possibilities are large...