I thought I'd posted in this thread, but it appears I'd just
thought about posting in it.
While I can't claim that I was desperate to see WoD released, I am nonetheless very disappointed that it won't become a reality now. Other than really enjoying VtM:Bloodlines, I had no strong WoD associations, but I thought that this was an important game in the MMO space. The entire genre suffers with its demise.
WoW has won. Essentially every MMO is WoW. To the extent that if you ask someone to describe an MMO, they would most likely describe the key features of WoW. Certainly the big publishers and the investors are only interested in backing a game that might look superficially different, but basically is WoW. You make a character and inhabit a server identical to many other servers and run backwards and forwards over a small area of the gameworld completing largely nonsensical quests for NPCs until you level up enough to move to another area to run backwards and forwards completing the same quests as everyone else. Death will only ever be an inconvenience at most. No one will ever loot your corpse. PvP will only ever be in some special area set aside for the purpose and will always be meaningless. If I sound slightly scathing, it's because I
loathe this species of game. Rats in a fucking maze.
Historically, the early MMOs weren't like this. They don't have to be like this now. Eve was influenced by the mechanics of Ultima Online, but neither of these games have influenced subsequent MMOs. The runaway success of WoW has seemingly closed down any interest in this approach to a game. The budgets are so large, that no one wants to take the risk on a moderate success or a niche MMO: they all want the next WoW. They all fail. People will take a look at your expensive game for a few months, but they generally seem to conclude that they preferred WoW and go back to it, or perhaps that they have seen it all before. Then your big shiny game goes free to play and relies on tawdry microtransactions to pay the bills.
WoD was maybe, just maybe going to be the exception. It should have been the next sandbox where player agency was king. A place where your character could die permanently. And someone takes your stuff. Permadeath for fuck's sake! That's properly bold in the 21st Century, where all of us gamers are mollycoddled children with too many toys. Like Eve, what the players did would matter, would have consequences. People would tell stories about it afterwards.
The weird thing is that the success of DayZ illustrates that there is a strong desire to play sandbox PvP games. The continuing relative success of Eve shows that you can build quite respectable company developing a niche sandbox MMO, even if CCP's hubris has seen them overreach. I don't understand why people aren't jumping on the bandwagon. The Elder Scrolls Online, while perhaps not a candidate for the sort of hardcore permadeath-dealing sort of game I'm after, is still a massive missed opportunity in that it is the perfect fit for an open world sandbox. It's utterly incredible that you can make Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim then think that another boring WoW clone is going do justice to your IP.
So yeah, I still have a slight MMO itch. I know I can't go back to Eve - you can never go back, only forwards - but I still long for the same sort of experience and I've been waiting years for something interesting to come along that cites Eve or UO as an influence overtly or otherwise. WoD looked like it could have been that something that might just scratch that itch. Looks like I'm going to be waiting a lot longer now.
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Topic: CCP Cancels World of Darkness (Read 7808 times)