Nael said:
Funny. I see you wearing a hat that says "Leisure". Gaming denotes challenge and competition.
You're
very right on the first part: wearing a hat that says "Leisure". I consider myself something of a conniseur of headgear, and I like to wear whatever is most apropriate to a particular audience.
The fact that you disagree that Gaming <=> Leisure would put you at odds with vast majority of Gamers. For the vast majority of people who play computer games, what they seek is
entertainment.
Most people don't want challenge or competition from their Gaming they want entertainment and pass-times. Challenge and competition require investment that most people aren't really interested in expending into a game.
Pre-WoW MMORPGs fret over Risk vs Reward and get locked into a spiral of dumbing down because their established customer base bleeds away over time and the base of potential new customers is made up largely of people who want less challenge. Put another way, if they want to take a bite out of the other slice of pie, they have to take it with cream and sugar. And its a big pie - as WoW demonstrated.
That's why as, as popular as Chess, Backgammon or Go are, more people play Monopoly or Twister; why online games are full of macro systems, cheats, guide books, and guys playing female characters that perform a jump every 2 seconds.
So if a company is looking to develop an MMO solely as a means to big bucks, they probably want to develop something as close to Simon-Says as possible and dispense with the legacy of MMORPGs like EverQuest and DnDO.
What you term as "Gaming" is a specific niche of Gaming that I think just isn't being served by anything right now. Several game developers have proven that you
can get a respectable userbase - quarter of a million players - if you persue the challenge and competiton angle, but its really hard to get funding just now.
The trouble right now is that the big money sees an SPG scale market with a recurring income - they can spend $40 million and have a beautiful game with sales within an order of magnitude of console development to pay the initial cost PLUS at least 18 months of subs to ice the cake! Its going to be very hard to persuade them to invest in something targetting an EQ2-size or smaller market.
It can (and should) be done - it just needs the developers to have a well rounded and solid design before they seek out funding and perhaps we'll finally see a genuine RPG MMORPG at last.
But - do we really
need an "MMO" RPG? You and I probably wouldn't enjoy sharing the same world space and why should my presence rain on your parade? Is the Diablo/Guild Wars model not a better model for potential online RPG developers?
I honestly couldn't see myself playing a Hackmaster MMO, but Hackmaster online? That I can play with my buddies without meeting Leeroy Jenkins' fourth cousin thrice removed? That I can see.
To my mind, bring on more of the ORPGs - let Blizzard and EA have their Massively games, and ideally stop tagging them as RPGs. That'd be like calling "Smallville" "Superman" when really its "That Dawson's Creek period of Clark Kent's life that he once dreamed over while in a kryptnoite induced coma".
"MMORPG" players hate to lose. They want to be observers with just enough control that they can decide what chapter to see, decide whether Harry Potter should have a pink wand or a broomstick shaped like a dildo. That's the
Mass market in
Massively.
You're clearly not an MMORPG player. Wear the badge proudly. Me, I can enjoy a good game and I can enjoy an MMORPG game, depending on the phase of the moon and the heft of Thor's hammer and I don't have a problem with anyone preferring either or anything in-between - to each his own.
If expressing some insight into how to sell MMORPGs to the masses ranks me as "douchebag" then I'll gladly accept the honorific as readily as I accept "asshat" when a bunny-hopping weenie slams me for airing opinions akin to yours when I find games like LotRO stale and uninteresting: a game that begged to be developed as an RPG but instead threw everything away to suck on the Massive teat.