Update 02/17:

Signore Abalieno was good enough to accommodate me with a response (yay debate), and so I’m updating to respond. I figured I’d just update this post, in case we do some more responding, so the rss feed doesn’t become the ‘beating the dead horse’ show.
Sir: First, due to the contextless nature of interweb communication, I don’t know if you took offense to my poking? I’d like to say that I hope you haven’t. I hope you know I respect your opinion, and just wanted to voice my own two platinum worth of opinion. So, first and foremost - no offense intended. :)

That said …

Then you can argue that this is not going to be the case, that making it a WoW clone means making it MORE successful. I accept that point of view (while disagreeing), but I don’t accept if you say that I’m whining because they didn’t build a game for ME.

Indeed, my apologies. I was assuming that you were talking from your perspective because … well, that’s generally what I do. I can only really speak from my perspective.

What I said is that MEO is another huge wasted potential. And for “potential” I NEVER, in any case, intend a kind of niche and selected audience. I never write with a niche audience in mind and I never mistake my personal preference for what everyone else must like as well. This is valid both for my opinions as for my design ideas. The great majority of things I write here are intended to be in the interest of the majority of people, hopefully, but not obligatorily, including me.

I understand where you’re coming from, and in that sense I agree. If they’d done something really new and different with MEO (like, say, the Metacharacters I mentioned the other day), it’d be mighty fine. I still don’t understand where you’re coming from, from a ‘widespread audience’ POV. In fact, I guess I understand your argument less from the perspective of a wider audience. WoW has proven itself ridiculously popular; it is the mass-market MMOG. Even trying for WoWishness would seem to guarantee a modicum of success in a wide audience. Why try something new and unproven when there’s a proven formula out there to emulate?

And I surely don’t believe that SWG wasn’t successful because NOT COMPLETELY a diku in space. That’s a wrong lesson that you and many others have learnt. Or better, a wrong assumption.

I hope that you’re aware of my opinions on SWG at this point. :) I *loved* the non-diku parts of SWG. I wish more games had dancing Wookies, to be honest. That said, I think that the innovative elements of SWG may have had something to do with its lack of success. Specifically, the differences between Galaxies and previous games probably had something to do with its its initial weak reception.

Above all, I want to make clear that I don’t innovation is an impediment to financial success. Building a game that’s exactly like every previous title only works if you’re EA and making Madden games. That said, I think it’s hard to fault Turbine for wanting to play it ’safe’ with such an important license. As you say, LoTR has a lot of potential.

What’s a better use of that potential? An innovative game that no one plays, or a knock-off that allows them to make some money off of an undoubtedly very expensive license?

I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question … but there you go.

I just wanted to point something out - yeah, maybe Tobold was overstating things a bit in his post on LOTRO. But I don’t think Abalieno has the right to be as snotty as he was today.

You have to have serious talent to shit on so much potential (meaning Turbine ruining D&D, LotR and even their own IP, AC2). And yeah, you deserve NO RESPECT if when you have a LotR license on your hands and the best thing you can think of is making it a WoW clone. And I don’t mean those at Turbine who put their work in the game, I mean those who made the calls. So, again, you deserve no respect.

Turbine, the wither of mmo worlds.

Dude, you do not get it. Massive companies are not necessarily making games for you and me. D&D - yes, that’s a big cockup. By definition, DDO was made for Dungeons and Dragons players … like, say, me. The fact that I don’t like it means they screwed things up there; I can honestly say that I was their target audience.

LOTRO, on the other hand, is aimed at fans of the Lord of the Rings books. That’s their target market; by definition that’s also a mass-market audience. LoTR is the most famoustest of fantasy series, and the movies made fans out of million who wouldn’t have been otherwise. That sounds awfully familiar … perhaps like World of Warcraft? A title in a crowded genre that made fans out of millions who had never been fans before?

I imagine if Turbine had had their druthers they would have liked to do something a bit more ambitious than a WoWalike. But this is not happyfuntime for Abalieno and Michael. This is a hard business, and they’re playing for keeps. SWG took a beloved license, tried to go out on a limb with it, and are now soundly mocked for the attempt. I respect them for having done that, but my respect doesn’t sell boxes or hold up subscription numbers.

LOTRO being similar to the millions-strong leader in the genre is sort of a no-brainer. No, I don’t think that LOTRO is going to make dyed-in-the-wool Massive gamers jump out of their shoes. I don’t really see myself jumping on board with the game fulltime.

That said, we’re just not the audience they’re going for. We are not the folks that are going to make or break LOTRO. And it’s mighty hard to knock a company for aiming high. Better to imitate the current champ than make a game harkening back to the end of the last century, right?