Will SWTOR outdo WoW?

Raphael

A point someone made to me recently about why WoW managed to hold fast against all comers is pretty good - People try out the new flavour of the month MMO, enjoy it for a while, but ultimately switch back because "All my friends play MMOs".

It's been my experience, and YMMV on this, but MMOs have a tendency to be bad games, as games. I mean, I've played WoW - as games go, it isn't nearly as fun as any regular RPG worth its salt. But people play it because even though the game itself was meh, the MMO aspect is great fun - I may not have enjoyed playing it, but I enjoyed playing it with people.

This makes the biggest strength a game can have the fact that, as I mentioned, everyone plays WoW. So all the people you can play your not that good game with are over there, playing that one. And if you're gonna play a not great game, you play the one your mates play.

What makes SWTOR interesting, is that Bioware seem to be trying to make a game that is in and of itself enjoyable. Whether this will give it enough staying power to build up a big enough player base to develop the large community an MMO needs to stay afloat, remains to be seen.

From what I've seen, TOR's gonna have a huge RP community - the Galaxies one is coming in, a lot of people are leaving WoW for it, the Rift RP community are only hanging on there by a thread, as there's little game support, list goes on. But that said, RPers are a minority of MMO population, so that won't do it alone.

The Single player, Bioware fans who pick it up, and they may be a big group, will play for a while at least, because if the game is KotOR good, people will hang on long enough to at least finish a class story, if not several. And some of those will get hooked and stay.

PvE/Raiding types, I can't see making the shift atm. With only 1 operation at launch, that group either won't bother, or will buy, level up, do eternity vault, then get bored and wander off if there's not something new soon. Balls firmly in Biowares court there, if they can churn out endgame content fast enough, then this might go well.

PvPers, who knows. It's not a style of game I know, but PvP in TOR seems to have some interesting things.

Eve Players? They'll just keep playing Eve. Eve is a totally different kettle of fish from everything else, and no one's trying to do the same thing they are.

IQDENIED

Raphael wrote: »

A point someone made to me recently about why WoW managed to hold fast against all comers is pretty good - People try out the new flavour of the month MMO, enjoy it for a while, but ultimately switch back because "All my friends play MMOs".

It's been my experience, and YMMV on this, but MMOs have a tendency to be bad games, as games. I mean, I've played WoW - as games go, it isn't nearly as fun as any regular RPG worth its salt. But people play it because even though the game itself was meh, the MMO aspect is great fun - I may not have enjoyed playing it, but I enjoyed playing it with people.

This makes the biggest strength a game can have the fact that, as I mentioned, everyone plays WoW. So all the people you can play your not that good game with are over there, playing that one. And if you're gonna play a not great game, you play the one your mates play.

What makes SWTOR interesting, is that Bioware seem to be trying to make a game that is in and of itself enjoyable. Whether this will give it enough staying power to build up a big enough player base to develop the large community an MMO needs to stay afloat, remains to be seen.

From what I've seen, TOR's gonna have a huge RP community - the Galaxies one is coming in, a lot of people are leaving WoW for it, the Rift RP community are only hanging on there by a thread, as there's little game support, list goes on. But that said, RPers are a minority of MMO population, so that won't do it alone.

The Single player, Bioware fans who pick it up, and they may be a big group, will play for a while at least, because if the game is KotOR good, people will hang on long enough to at least finish a class story, if not several. And some of those will get hooked and stay.

PvE/Raiding types, I can't see making the shift atm. With only 1 operation at launch, that group either won't bother, or will buy, level up, do eternity vault, then get bored and wander off if there's not something new soon. Balls firmly in Biowares court there, if they can churn out endgame content fast enough, then this might go well.

PvPers, who knows. It's not a style of game I know, but PvP in TOR seems to have some interesting things.

Eve Players? They'll just keep playing Eve. Eve is a totally different kettle of fish from everything else, and no one's trying to do the same thing they are.

Good points in there, but you went abit off topic as you never gave your opinion or whatnot as per thread title..:P

Raphael

Did drift off a bit at the end there, didn't I. What I was trying to convey is it depends on whether A) the game is good enough to make people play it in spite of it now having WoWs playerbase and endgame not sucking. Personally, I don;t see it toplling WoW, but I could see it grabbing a chunk of marketshare and becoming no. 2 - if nothing else, I can see it holding a big-ish playerbase (2m+) long term

Topple WoW? Nope. Sit underneath it and survive nicely? Maybe.

Methionine

As expected Blizzard have announced that a large content patch is due to be released around the same time that TOR launches.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/WoW-world-of-Warcraft-MMORPG-Mike-Morhaime-Cataclysm,13177.html

Raphael

Methionine wrote: »

As expected Blizzard have announced that a large content patch is due to be released around the same time that TOR launches.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/WoW-world-of-Warcraft-MMORPG-Mike-Morhaime-Cataclysm,13177.html

I am surprised. This is my surprised face. You can tell because it is so surprised.

ZeitgeistGlee

I have to admit, I'm always left curious as to why people believe WoW is so insurmountable. Surely if TOR launches well, is developed well and continues to grow in population and content then it would only be a matter of time before WoW's age catches up with it.

From what I can see having played a large variety of MMOs over the last few years one of the sole reasons WoW is still the market leader is no MMO has yet come out that remains successful enough to challenge it. Even Blizzard admit they are losing subscribers because expansion content is no longer entirely satisfying the player base.

Likewise WoW's greatest strength has been its ability to take and adapt successful aspects of failed challengers into its own make-up in order to draw those players into the game. If TOR can essentially do the same while staying successful, well.

Lister1

Arent the majority of WoWs userbase playing on fairly limited machines? Percentage wise there is probably a fairly small share that would have a computer capable of running SWTOR. I've always assumed that Blizzard tend not to lose market share to other games due to this...

Sonics2k

Lister1 wrote: »

Arent the majority of WoWs userbase playing on fairly limited machines? Percentage wise there is probably a fairly small share that would have a computer capable of running SWTOR. I've always assumed that Blizzard tend not to lose market share to other games due to this...

That has always been one of the focus' for Blizzard. They try to ensure as much as possible that computer's going back a long time can run WoW, at least on lowest settings.

@ZeitgeistGlee
People say WoW won't die, because no matter the -current- state of the game, it still has a huge and loyal player base who won't be quitting anytime soon. Mainly due to the social aspect and friends they have made over the years.

It's also because it's been able to withstand so much from competitors, critics and even the media, that people have got this built in idea that WoW has become an invincible game.

Frankly, the whole debate on SWTOR vs WoW is pretty pointless. We don't really know a huge amount of stuff to do with TOR yet, beside's the official sneak-peeks and the occasional beta leak.
Frankly a lot of the beta leak stuff seems a bit phony, far to much "omg everything is perfect nothing is wrong!!11"

Raphael

In fairness, the requirements for TOR are very low.

ZeitgeistGlee

Sonics2k wrote: »

People say WoW won't die, because no matter the -current- state of the game, it still has a huge and loyal player base who won't be quitting anytime soon. Mainly due to the social aspect and friends they have made over the years.

Frankly, the whole debate on SWTOR vs WoW is pretty pointless. We don't really know a huge amount of stuff to do with TOR yet, beside's the official sneak-peeks and the occasional beta leak.
Frankly a lot of the beta leak stuff seems a bit phony, far to much "omg everything is perfect nothing is wrong!!11"

Hmm fair point. I suppose I'd look at it from the idea of the big group of friends maybe 2 or 3 would start playing TOR and hopefully convert over the rest little by little for something new with also as Raph pointed out huge RP and social opportunities. As I've said before TOR isn't going to just bull-rush and topple WoW at release but rather chip away at it over a few years until it surpasses it.

Can't comment on the beta as sadly I've not got an invite yet (touch wood) but given the length of development time and the fact any version shown at events this year has been stated to be quite polished I'm not surprised people are being very positive. I'm sure there are issues, but like Rift I expect TOR to come out a lot more polished than MMOs in the preceding years have.

Lister1 wrote: »

Arent the majority of WoWs userbase playing on fairly limited machines? Percentage wise there is probably a fairly small share that would have a computer capable of running SWTOR. I've always assumed that Blizzard tend not to lose market share to other games due to this...

BioWare were always keen to say that TOR will run the same types of machines that would run WoW. Looking at the tech specs on the back of my preorder case, it's certainly not going to stress any gaming machine bought in the last two or three years.

OS: Win XP/Vista/7
CPU: Dual Core 2 GHz or higher
RAM: 1.5 GB (2 GB recommended)
HD: Unknown (Speculated to be 25-35 GB)
Optical Drive: 8x DVD-ROM or better
Video: ATI X1800/nVidia 7800/Intel 4100 or better. (256 MB minimum Video RAM, Shader 3.0 or better fully compatible graphics card)

To me that's basically any PC bought in the last two years will play it fairly decently. Just a quick afterthought, Mac users running a Windows boot are also supposedly fine if they have comparable specs.

Dustaz

Here we go again, a new mmo comes out and as with any discussion about "wow killers" everyone is missing the point.

The reason wow became such a behemoth was it was the first mmo to become mainstream in terms of gaming. It targeted and succesfully captured people who not only had no interest in mmos, but had no interest in rpgs. It was new and fun and it had a bajillion quests to keep you interested rather than just grinding on mobs. It was based on an existing IP that a lot of people were familiar with and it was VERY easy to get into. It was the first mmo to cater to a casual audience and not just the hardcore grind associated with mmos up to that point. It redefined the genre and to a large extent created its own fanbase. People migrated in droves from FPS, RTS and any other type of game community under the sun. People who had never once considered playing an mmo before. Its this fanbase that newer mmos hope to tap into.

They might do it as well, wow's popularity is waning because it this point blizzard have taken the fantasy mmorpg as far as they are clearly willing to take it. They aren't going to shake things up radicially, probably due to titan, but more on that later. Other mmos will take some of its customer base but none will ascend to the position of wow, because they are mmos

The key here is that the "wow killer" wont be an mmo. It will be another game type altogether. Just as wow took its fanbase from everywhere else, something different will lure people away from wow. As a previous poster said, LoL and HoN and the upcoming dota2 have a much bigger chance of being the new wow than a new fps. Already LoL has become so massively popular that its only real competitor, Heros of Newerth, has had to convert to freetoplay to compete with it.

Blizzard aren't thick and they know all this. Wow stopped evolving this expansion because in the short term Diablo 3 is coming out but in the long term Project Titan is probably what they're pinning all their hopes on. Rumoured to be a MMOFPS, this is what i see as the real wow killer. If a company can succesfully mix and mmo with really good fps gameplay, that really will change everything and move the goalposts and blizzard are probably the company to do it.

If that happens, then sw:tor and any future mmos can try all they want, but things will have moved on and the mmmo will be a far smaller piece of the market.

IQDENIED

Dustaz wrote: »

The key here is that the "wow killer" wont be an mmo. It will be another game type altogether.

So what you are saying is... people will pay monthly subs to play an offline game? interesting...





And tbh you said mostly what I posted previously in this thread çept you elaborated more on the points, idea ninja :P

Dustaz

IQDENIED wrote: »

So what you are saying is... people will pay monthly subs to play an offline game? interesting...

Im not saying that at all. People don't pay subs for lol or sc2 which are two pretty huge online games at the moment. Obviously blizzard will be hoping that Titan will manage to persuade people to keep paying a sub, but riot have a fairly decent business model going with a F2P game that people literally THROW money at in microtransactions. Valve and many others make a tidy sum from DLC for their games. Blizz can smell this and so have enabled real money auctions in diablo 3. Expect to see a whole lot more of this sort of thing happening.

And tbh you said mostly what I posted previously in this thread çept you elaborated more on the points, idea ninja :P

I've said pretty much the same thing in the past. Its hardly the most original thought in the world.

uncle_sam_ie

I think GW2 will be the next big mmo and not Swtor. Going to play both though. The waiting is killing me.

fiinch

shut up everyone. counter strike 1.3 will take it's revenge and come back to kill wow. shut up!

nesf

I don't know, as a lapsed WoW player (on and off since launch) a lot of my guildies who I'm still in touch with are going to be playing TOR and hoping it'll be good enough to play for the long term. Cata has been a bad expansion for us in many respects. I think TOR will have its chance to pull people away from WoW but it'll only get one chance to do it. If what happens with Star Trek Online happens (i.e. release a mediocre game but patch it into a good one later on) then they won't make any sizeable dent in WoW's subscription base.

I think casual content will be key. WoW has the hardcore raid stuff but so much of the game is pick up and play these days. Between heroics and battlegrounds there's quite a lot to do even if guildless. If TOR can offer a solid endgame experience for casual players they could take a good sized chunk out of WoW's subscription base. Attracting the hardcore players will be much, much harder to do I think. Blizzard has years of designing high level content under its belt and knows how to push the right buttons (though some complain about Cata). I think back to all the mistakes made with Vanilla endgame content and worry that TOR will make similar mistakes.

All that said, it's Bioware and if they deliver what they promise in terms of the single player aspect of the game then I can see myself subscribing for a fair while even if only to level up an alt of each class. If they can give me a fun, bug free experience in pick up pvp and pve then I'll probably stay longer.