Am I the only one beginning to worry at this point?:

Gamasutra: Blizzard Announces 5 Million WoW Subscribers

Sort of reminds me of the plot for a bad ‘got nuthin’ week on a long-running sci-fi serial. Wedged in between a thinly masked tale about how exploiting indigenous people is Bad Thing, and an episode where an Main Character learns Something Important about Themselves, there will be a silly episode where one of the comedy side-characters finds, or makes, a really cool thing that grows really fast, and it isn’t until it’s almost too late that they realise it won’t stop growing. Hilarity ensues, and eventually, the main characters manage to Shoot it with a Multiphased Dodecahedron Beam, Reason With It, or just shove a nuclear bomb in it’s path and run away sniggering. And then the comedy side character still keeps his job!

I digress, but World of Warcraft is up to five million now and doesn’t seem to be slowing down from what I can see, somehow managing to retain its appeal a year after launch, even without an expansion to help it along. Much of its current peak number success seems to be down to a well managed and effective roll-out into an anecdotally difficult to crack Far Eastern market; China in particular. Seems that very few MMOs manage to bridge the cultural gap between East and West, but WoW is definitely one of them.

Pretty much everyone has had a go at analysing why WoW now claims subscription numbers somewhere around ten times those of it’s nearest equivalent games; EQ2, DAoC, etc, so I’ll not go off on one here, but in one word, I’d say because its ‘easy’, meaning in the sense that the basic gameplay is not difficult, and so eliminates many of the usual frustrations with the genre – mid-session downtime, slow or negligible progress form session to session, content drought and the like. The ever elusive 'fun!'

Good for players, but it does leave a difficult choice for anyone hoping to make any new MMOs. The masses have spoken, and prefer a light, fun, casual experience to a complex, heavy and time-consuming one, such as the first generation of MMOs offered; EQ, AO, AC1, etc.

What do you do? Try to replicate the feel, flow and style of WoW, in the hope of providing a similar experience for fatigued WoW people when they get bored of Azeroth? With that many numbers, there’s bound to be a sizable proportion of floating players who would be quite interested in something similar but different – enough to pay for the development and running of an entire MMO?

Various reports of recent changes in the SOE flock of games of late, seem to hint at this direction (see previous), and many of the upcoming titles cannot afford to ignore this style of gameplay and design – clearly it works. Turbine’s upcoming Dungeons and Dragons Online will, perhaps by necessity, be forced to compete in this class, and will undoubtedly end up having to make sacrifices from it’s original ‘pure’ rulebook form to gain appeal in the MMO market.

Or do you stick to your guns, and hope enough players want the different and novel gameplay unique to your own game, knowing that this proportion of players will be much smaller, but more loyal?

Eve Online, Planetside and Second Life are good examples of this – games that are not immensely successful compared to WoW, and much smaller, but which seem to happily bubble along and are so different to WoW that they have nothing to fear from it. The somewhat lampooned Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is planting its flag firmly in this territory, taking an almost polar opposite stance to WoW, actively promoting the complex and perhaps difficult nature of its gameplay style as a plus point. Undoubtedly many people will relish that, fed up with all sorts of 'dumbing down', but will it be enough?

I see a future of MMO where there exists perhaps two or three huge titles dominating the market, and offering us simple and carefree tasks and rewarding us with a cornucopia of shineys, and around the edges, a cluster of tiny independently successful and unapologetically challengingly alternatives, there for when we want something a bit different, and indeed, frustrating. Then again, I guess this was the case not so long ago, when Everquest was king of the hill.

But things are definitely different since WoW, and now there stands a stark gamble ahead of all future MMO Producers; to actively attempt to emulate WoW – to try and capture and synthesise that elusive element of it’s makeup that is the reason it is so huge, or to actively defy its style and hope enough people feel similarly to want to play your own sort of game instead.

In this is the final week of Asheron’s Call 2, we are reminded that these worlds can die, and although AC2’s problems were largely unrelated to WoW, the stakes of getting it wrong become more visible than ever.

(I lost my login for AC2, but Ethic has coverage…head over for poignant posts of a world at death’s door!)

Interesting times ahead, and some brave new worlds to come…