It finally forced other companies to adapt and ditch their fucked UIs and controls. It forced them to completely revise the games’ flow, it forced them to finally NOTICE the gigantic elephant mistakes in the room.

Without a WoW MMO game companies would sit back doing nothing at all, milking old, obsolete concepts. Still using unoptimized, poor clients with terrible UIs, a slev of /slash commands and opaque, overcomplicated game mechanics for a small niche of geeks who still have to suffer poor support, unstable clients, and poor quality overall.

WoW has been so good that its HUGE progresses now are so standard that they became invisible to all players and most of the dedicated bloggers. It became a canon of expectations.

Don’t balme WoW for the lack of variety and plenty of copycats. Because that’s a problem outside of WoW, a problem that was there before WoW. Without WoW we would have the same lack of variety but poorer quality overall.

Don’t blame WoW for incompetency and lack of creativity outside it. WoW is one game and its duty is to do its task the best way possible. And it did.

As people get bored of WoW (like I did), my thirst for MMO was still there and thus, I actively started searching for a new MMO to play. What I am trying to say is that as WoW gets subscribers, there are subscribers that leave it, wanting to play a new MMO.

This is as you can see, a good thing!

Lets be realistic here, though. There are a TON of fun games out there, and WoW has really shown developers the potential of an MMO (although using it as your textbook is much better than carbon copying it). More games than any of us can realistically play given a limited amount of time. And there’s only more to come. Will there be flops? Sure. Will there be more hits? Most definitely.

And in the meantime, we can all go play WoW.

Good because it made the MMO genre very famous. Everybody knows about WoW and by extension, everyone started to wonder what these MMO games were all about. It’s also good for Dev Studios (even tho they would tell you it’s bad :)) because by becoming the Emperor of the Easy Gameplay, WoW prevented other Devs to do the same easy thing over and over, they’ll soon have to come up with better ideas, and take some risks to walk paths where WoW hasn’t gone…yet. Will they go there? That’s the question…which leads me to my “Bad” point

Bad mainly for niche games because everyone suddenly realised “omg, these WoW guys make so much money.” And so they want to do the same. And they’ll fail, and meanwhile, the small independant studio who are trying to do something for a niche market, or try to get ahold of 300K players will have one hell of a hard time to get published. And when they will self-publish, people will discard most of them saying; “damn crappy products…the graphics are aweful”.

This actually FORCES innovation because most people a) don’t have that much confidence in their ability to maximize this platform; and, b) don’t have access to an IP that resonates with gamers as strongly as Warcraft-from-Blizzard does; and, c) don’t have the guaranteed worldwide reach that VUG does.

Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Star Trek, Huxley, Pirates of the Burning Sea, these are big-budget games all trying something different, some because of nacent creativity, and some because of WoW. Heck, even Pirates of the Caribbean is a pretty different experience play-wise.

But that’s just the AAA DVD-ROM purchase-at-retail variety.

The REAL innovation is coming from the Web/Web 2.0 crowd, the folks who’ve figured out ways to make massive online persistent world communities for less money than Blizzard spends on a free content patch. These people are not bound by the expectations of hardcore gamers who’ve been around since people still argued whether Lineage 1 was relevant. These experiences are not targeting players who don’t do anything unless it’s 3D Elves and spells. And they aren’t bound by a business model for a group of people that still think RMT=microtransacations=profanity.

We talk about the difference between “game” and “virtual lifestyle” while ignoring the vast majority of MMOs coming are virtual lifestlye. But they’re browser-based or not sold at retail and therefore fall below the conventional radar.

Which is a shame.

Mark