(cont'd)
You may interact when you eat a cream puff, you may interact with lemonade when you drink it, but you'll be hard pressed to find a cream puff or glass of lemonade that gives you the same spectrum of emotion as video games do. The depth of interaction from games is unlike anything else in media we use today. A movie, book, or art are crafted in a way so that the director, author, or painter's point of view is cast upon the viewer. Now that doesn't mean you'll agree with it, or even like it, but its what happens. Games, at their very core are built on that relationship between you as a player interacting with the world the game designer built himself. These can illicit all types of emotions, the sadness of watching a beloved character die ingame, the shock of losing to an enemy that you know you could easily beat or have beaten before, the joy when you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat against a human player, the comfort and fellowship of a group of friends, and MMO's only magnify these feelings 100 fold. Even a game like Wurm, which most would agree is massively (for an autist grinder) multiplayer, has created everything from a sense of friendship amongst autists to gut busting laughter at the rage of some fag who has to go and find all of his items in a big scavenger hunt, only to get a message at the end calling him a bitch and forcing him to buy them from a shop owned by the user who offed him, has moments like this.
Now what does this have to do with the above? If you copy the experience from before, with ALL of its flaws and strengths, you already have an experience that people have already dealt with, but worse because they recognize a rehash for a rehash. The reason I brought in the ideas of emotion attached to vidya? It's because an MMO above all else HAS to, and I repeat HAS to foster a sense of community. Why has WoW been doing so shit recently beyond most of all of it's other flaws? It's the loss of the community. Sure you can shitpost occasionally in the trade chat, sure you can actually talk if you spot someone who isn't immediately hopping onto a flying mount because they pressed the wrong button, you might even actually get the group to talk for a second in the dungeon you qued up for. But for all the convenience that their dungeon finder and raid finder has done, it has also effectively made it so that you don't even need to speak to do end game content. What you're left with is an island of self in a void, which is the last feeling you should feel in a game genre about meeting people and working together with those people. But again, shareholders don't really understand that, they just see money and follow trends.
Don't get me wrong, the first thing I'd love to do is get up in the morning and Hop on to say hey to all the anons playing the next actually fun MMO but to see that sort of thing Devs will need to do a few things.
You are not going to have WoW's longevity or success if you go in thinking that's what you'll get. Cliffy B. has already shown us where the next "Billion dollar idea" gets you. And rightfully fucking so. There is nothing wrong with a game that is well done and who's qualities show through to middling success.
This one is probably the toughest. It requires not just flexibility on shareholder, and publisher, but also on the people developing it to try something new. By actually dialing back your ideas of where you want your game to stand, you won't have to try and secure an incredibly large budget from shareholders expecting an incredibly large return. This flexibility in devs is in the ability to properly articulate what makes your game different to the powers that be but also the ability to properly code it in so that it isn't a terrible mess on the day of release and kills your game outright.
This is arguably the most important. Foster a sense of community not only in game (especially in game) but also outside of the game. Make it so that players interact not only because they have to, but because they want to. WoW at this point has become a single player game with really rude NPC's. Strive to make an MMO where people are happy to log in and work together. Host community events, make Inns and taverns more interactive. Make your game more than just, "LFG 1 DPS for Dickgrinder Cave". Take a stance on things that build up the community, and make it a hard stance. Make it so your community remembers your game as more than just, "The next attempt at fastest shut down MMO".
