The MMO genre is stagnant.
Even those games that during the pre-release hype promise "revolutionary gameplay" and vast new worlds to explore all end up being rehashes of ideas already in play.
It's obvious that incremental changes simply aren't happening fast enough to divert the genre in a new and interesting direction so I have to have to wonder: When will we see an MMO that completely changes the industry?
In short, where is the Wii of MMOs?
If there is one thing my recent Age of Conan review demonstrated it's that hardcore MMO gamers can immediately discern and recall at a moment's notice the minute differences that separate Age of Conan from other MMO
titles, specifically Blizzard's World of Warcraft.
Just take a look at the comments. You'd think I'd murdered the parents of a large swath of our readers for all the flak I drew after I dared mention the lack of innovation in Funcom's title.
What these erudite MMO fans don't quite grasp however, is that they are the vast minority. To the hoi polloi these differences are functionally invisible.
That echoes the way gaming in general was perceived by the public at large only a few years ago. Sure, the internet was filled with those who'd devoted their lives to the Church of Mario and could rattle off every character present in each incarnation of Mortal Kombat (and the differences between the various flavors of Sub-Zero), but to your average mother of two the board at GameFAQs may as well have been written in Latin for all the sense they made.
That all changed when Nintendo launched the Wii. Not only did the company capture the technological cachet usually reserved for Apple's latest iDevice, they also earned the affection of the masses. Now grandparents are playing Mario Kart Wii along with their six-year-old grandspawn and Nintendo is making cash hand over diamond-studded fist.
With the release of Age of Conan, Funcom delivered an enjoyable, solid MMO experience. It offered players a new world to explore, an innovative combat system and reams of backstory courtesy of Robert E. Howard's Conan novels and the empire based on them.
To the average person however, a large number of whom had been draw to the MMO genre by World of Warcraft's ease-of-use and accessible art style, Age of Conan is just World of Warcraft with larger breasts and copious amounts of blood.
It's a clever move on Funcom's part – after all, the hardcore MMO fan is stereotypically a young adult male with adolescent fantasies and tastes. The game's promotion of its PvP system plays into this demographic as well: Traditionally speaking, those young males are bursting with levels of testosterone that make them apt to slay each other.
Sadly, this sort of thing totally ignores the average person. You won't see grandparents who've never played an MMO before lining up to snag a copy for themselves.
If this trend continues – and all indications are that Warhammer Online, the next big MMO release, will do nothing to end the ongoing stealth facsimile – there's got to a breaking point. Even the target demographic will eventually tire of minute changes and when that happens, who's going to prop up the MMO industry?
What MMO developers need to focus on, before gamers abandon the MMO genre en masse, is finding a way to radically change the game. Elves and swords are not the only way to craft an MMO (they just can't be) and while I realize that the huge budgets necessary to create these things force publishers to stick to "safe" development plans, someone out there severely needs to create an MMO the likes of which we've never seen.
Now I have no idea what this MMO will look like, and I don't think simply adding motion sensitive controllers will work in this instance, but developers are intelligent people. If they have the skills to craft the kind of network code that allows worlds with thousands of people in them to not completely collapse, they can come up with some novel ideas on how the genre is supposed to work.
Or maybe they don't. In which case, Blizzard will continue making more money than anyone, every other MMO will be considered a relative failure, and I'll continue receiving hate mail for stating the obvious.
Image: GROGG/Flickr
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