We all know how everything gets compared to WoW. It’s a given. It happens. It’s probably unavoidable now. When I posted about Rift, and when I post just about everything, there was a big debate over whether it’s a “WoW clone” and what exactly constitutes being like WoW. It stood out to be yesterday that there seems to be quite a variety of definitions for a WoW clone. Some people call games WoW clones because of the graphics or the instancing.
On one hand you have a game that took what worked in the years before it and then streamlined it all. That’s the 2004-2005 WoW. This era of WoW was about the world and adventuring within it to find the nuances that Blizzard created for players to find and appreciate. Yeah, it streamlined games like EverQuest and DAOC, but there wasn’t much to complain about the game given how it was polished up compared to what we’d played prior.
Then came the era of raid progression from 2006-2009. This is where the treadmill of getting gear to get gear came into play and it all became about doing raids. This is where the raiders vs. the casual arguments gained momentum. From Burning Crusade and into WotLK Blizzard clearly identified their game as a game of raiding content.
2009-Present could best be categorized as the “Era of Convenience”. This is when everyone sits in Dalaran and just warps out to the instances. No one leaves the capital cities for anything. Leveling is done quickly and without thought. Raids are easier, streamlined, and no longer just for the hardcore audience. Everything feels easy and carries with it little meaning or importance. It’s still fun, but missing that spark of life.
When someone says that a game is a “WoW clone”, to which version of WoW are they speaking? I would say that all of them have their pluses and minuses. My favorite would be the original era or “vanilla” pre-MC/BWL raiding. The world was emphasized more, things felt simpler but were more difficult in their simplicity. I do not believe that one can look at a game that shares similarities with the original releases of WoW (or other versions) and start talking about it negatively or even positively as though it shares commonalities with all versions of WoW — the game has just evolved way too much to make a generalization without specifying.
Very good point, but unfortunately someone will always come in and say that nostalgia is the only reason we liked a previous game… which is just stupid. 5 years from now nostalgia will be used to justify why over 10 million people miss WoW.
The new WoW is the very reason I don’t like it. I don’t like sitting in Dalaran waiting for my instance to pop. It doesn’t feel like a MMO. It feels like an online game with a chat room, that being Dalaran.
The new WoW is very friendly to my play schedule though. I’m sure if I wasn’t so burnt out on MMOs in general and hadn’t been playing them for over 10 years this WoW would be amazing.
The last few years it has felt like Blizzard has just been toying with the WoW community and using them as a giant target marketing group. It feels like all these changes and updates are just to see what the players like and dislike with the intent of putting it in their new MMO.
My first comment on Rift was a scatter shot that got caught up in me gripping about WoW.
I don’t believe that video of Rift showed off its best side to the critical MMO gamer. That’s what some people had a problem with. It showed all the flashy, “new-school” mechanics that people have all seen dozens of other times before in 2009-Present WoW.
We know this about Rift from watching the video:
They have public quests, instances and talent trees. Great?
I loved Vanilla WoW. It was still really streamlined like you put it, compared to other games, but there was still a sense of world. There were players of every level, everywhere. Even when I was a level 16 in Vanilla, I actually felt like I was at least semi-useful in the world.
Coming back and leveling my orc Mcface there was some nostalgia, but it felt empty. Leveling up feels like a required single player experience just to get into the game, where as before it was tedious at times, but it was nice to know everyone you saw around you was a main at a low level, not just someones 17th alt.
I’m not so sure its worth separating out the Vanilla and raid progression times. I think in late vanilla, TBC there certainly was more of an emphasis on it than extremely early, but the raiding end game was there very early on, and was the definitely the (often unattainable) goal for lots of people to be able to raid 40man instances.
@Mala: Yeah, MC was there from the beginning. However, I don’t think Blizzard realized from day one that they wanted their game to focus solely on funneling people towards that goal.
It probably wasn’t until after the MC raiders took off that Blizzard took this route.
Here’s what I see in Rift that I see in WoW. The items that I am listing are items that I first experienced in WoW and not in any other MMORPG.
Instanced 5 man dungeons and Instanced raiding.
Global Cooldown
Quest Hubs designated by a symbol over the quest givers head.
Green, Blue and Purple items.
BoP and BoE items.
Talent trees (Although they are combining them in a new way.)
I’m tired of instancing and I’m tired of games being a loot pinata. WoW based their loot system very much on Diablo. In no other MMORPG before WoW did loot fall like skittles from the sky. Now every MMO does this.
I’m also tired of being lead around by the nose from one TASK hub to the other. I want real quests with real items that will last me more than 1-2 more levels.
Again, Devs are building theme parks for us to play in and I’m looking for a World.
Instanced 5 man dungeons and Instanced raiding. – SWG had 5 man instances.
Global Cooldown – SWG , but not sure before or after it was in WoW.
Quest Hubs designated by a symbol over the quest givers head. – SWG had these.
Green, Blue and Purple items. EQ had a loottable from mobs, some better then others, just no colours.
BoP and BoE items. EQ with NO-DROP, NO-RENT items.
Talent trees (Although they are combining them in a new way.) -EQ had Alternate Advancement points, in pre-NGE SWG this filling of skillboxes was the way of leveling up.
(and its why I’m looking forward to RIFT)
WoW streamlined these, but its not unique to it.
@Lodau
Never played SWG so I didn’t know about their 5 man instances although I did play CoH which was heavily instanced but it also included complete zones much like AoC.
Green/Blue/Purple items do not compare at all to EQ. I’m playing P99 right now and yes there are different tiers of items but it is not the same as the loot pinata of WoW where a billion green items drop from the sky, a bunch of blue and a few purples. These items then become useless and can be upgraded in 2-3 levels. On P99 right now, until I get to do Fear/Hate/PoSKY I’m probably going to be keeping the same items I have right now. In fact at level 46, I still have 2 slots that don’t have magic items.
AA’s are NOT the same thing as talent trees. Talent trees, IMO are much more like DAoC’s spec lines. Where each class had 3 different spec lines they could put points into. Talent trees are a much different from the spec lines though of DAoC.
@Damage – i understand fully that you are tired of these, let´s call them theme-park-mmos, i feel the same. Unfortunaly, companies are usualy only interested in making those, it´s where the money is. I would prefer a great sandbox game anytime, but i can´t think of an interesting one, well except EvE…but that game sucks the life out of me.
Anyway, there is still a lot we don´t know about Rift and i´m still curious.
@Keen – i think you are right with the MC raids. If i remember correctly, the very first things i heard about WoW were words like “pvp here, and there..and war and horde vs. alliance”…at the begining it sounded a lot like a pvp game. Then they changed that into pve and later into raids are our end game.
I don´t know, when i think about the term “Wow clone” i usualy think of a game that just is so streamlined, repetitive and easy that it gets boring fast. That´s kinda what i think of WoW, especialy since WotlK. There is no challenge in it, everything form 1-80 is unimportant and it´s always the same. It´s all smoke and mirrors, they really have mastered this.
This is why the game is waning on me…I am tired of playing Guild Wars….the dungeon finder is nice but its taken away so much from the game.
What ever happened to immersion and exploration….
So far only G&H has gotten me some of that feeling back…
Most of this is “Achiever” stuff, thouhg. WoW is the ultimate Achiever’s MMO and maybe one of the reasons it’s so successful is that by appealing primarily to the Achiever archetype you bring in the maximum number of obsessive, completist personality types, who by definition will be easier to hold.
WoW even today offers a good deal of value for the “Explorer”. You could sit in Dalaran and warp to instances, but you don’t HAVE to. The world is still there and you can still explore it. Of course, it takes a LOT less time to explore all of WoW and be ready to move on than it does to “achieve” everything WoW offers up to snag Achievers. There’s a reason they invented the “Achievement” system and called it that!
Cataclysm is going to offer a brief window of a few weeks or months for Explorers, but then it will be back to the Achieving game again.
To be short and sweet: QFT.
People call games “WoW clones” all the time, but for a variety of different reasons. It seems silly, almost. If you think about the game in all its forms over time, as you have briefly outlined, WoW has at least touched on a feature, mechanic, or quality of what makes different MMOs, MMOs. So it’s kind of silly, almost pointless really, to use the term “WoW clone” at all without qualifying your meaning. And if you must qualify, then you could just go with your qualification instead of using a term that needs qualifying.
After reading that back, I think I need to qualify what I just wrote…
@Damage
The green/blue/purple items, didnt know you ment it THAT way, you are right tho, WoW drops are pretty crazy. Most of them only good for (dis)enchanters too. It’s sad that gear doesnt mean the same it used to. (But as someone who loves to get better gear, i won’t complain too hard)
AA’s are not the same indeed, but they are a way to differentiate your toon from others besides just level and gear is what I ment, like talents were ment to be. Too bad most games I played ended up having a cookie cutter setup for the different roles.
Just started P99 last night myself, but only a lowbie in Gfay at the moment :). It feels good to be back tho.
@Bhagpuss
/Totally agree.
What did I dislike about the Rift video?
1) He jumped down from the city into the water some 20m. I’m ok with the possibility, but not ok with the fact that a developer does this when he introduces us to the game. It feels stupid. Unimmersive.
2) The talent trees are very standard with a little twist that, in my opinion, runs danger to make them inferior to the ‘standard’ ones. And I am in no way in favour of the ‘standart talent tree’. Feel free to change it, but not like this. It will end in cookie cutter speccs XOR impossible to balance.
3) He said that in the city there would be the ‘mailbox, bank, trainers’. OK?? That sounded as if these things were a given in MMOs. As if a MMO without trainers would be impossible. Absurd” It was in the beginning of the video and I instantly thought: WoW-clone!
4) He told us that Dungeons would have 5 players and raid 20. As if every MMO needs to have a strict differentiation between the two. Excuse. Just like with ‘mailbox, bank, trainers’, MMOs do not necessarily need to have “dungeons and raids”.
5) When he introduced combat he used an invinsible char. Now, that shows that he considers the concept of risk to be totally unimportant. Well, I don’t !!
6) The dungeon he showed us appeared scripted a lot. He praised it. If that goblin would attack us from above, because he is smart enough to do this, I’d call it a small revolution. This way it feels cheap.
7) Pushing enemies back and that charging them? Sounds like ‘concentrated coolness’. What about a loud “Halleluja” whenever you do it? Wouldn’t that be even cooler? Or some lighting flash on the screen? “Concentrated coolness” is problematic.
Give me my explorer content!
I’m all achiever-ed out.
I don’t agree with what you said about wow being completely easy I like where it is now, decently hard but facerollable with the 30% buff lol but it’s only easy if you want it to be… Like heroic modes or even turning off the buff and trying this stuff.
While “Era of convenience” may be true, I’d argue that “Era of Choice” may be more on point, culminating in ICC, which is the ultimate expression of that design. ICC is both the hardest and easiest end-game raid ever offered in WoW. ICC at full difficulty (heroic mode, 0% buff) is more difficult than any endgame raiding content released by Blizzard, bar none. Harder than Sunwell, harder than MC, etc, and that’s backed up by the numbers. You can count on 1 hand (maybe 1 finger?) the number of times Lich King has been killed on Heroic with 0% buff. Even at 30% buff, only about one half of a percent of guilds have killed LK 25 heroic. By contrast, ICC at 30% buff on normal mode is probably the easiest endgame raid ever offered.
Blizzard is evolving this game into a “psuedo-sandbox”, and Wrath was another part of that evolution. WoW is what you make of it, now more than ever. “E-Sporters” have arena and arena tournament. Group PvPers have Wintergrasp and BGs (and soon rated BGs, Grim Batol, and new BGs). Duelists are alive and well in the sewers of Dal. Achievers have 10k achieve points to get. Soloists have how many thousands of quests to complete and loads of factions to max out? Collectors have hundreds of pets and mounts and full sets of T2 armor. Hardcore raiders have always had a spot at the table, but Wrath created a spot for “non-hardcore” raiders (I don’t like “casual raider” as a term, as raiding to me is more than causal play). Casual players can use RFD/LFD to queue up for instances and reach a reasonable level of gear over days/weeks/months in 30min chunks of time, and without having to commit to a raid schedule or guild. The economists have the AH minigame and a professions system to support it. And RPers? Hell, they make their own content.
That said, I think the idea of calling any new MMO hitting the market a “WoW Clone” is pretty much silly. No one is coming to market at release with the breadth and depth of playstyle choice that WoW offers, which to me, has really become its defining quality as a product; moreso than its combat system, moreso than its race/class system, moreso than its leveling system. And no one WILL come to market with such a product because it would be practically and logistically impossible to do so. At this point, you’d need SEVERAL years to create such a product, not just a few. You’d need an ARMY of dev/qa/art resources to produce it, not just a battalion.
@Cindir:
– WoW doesn’t offer a credible open world. Open world mobs are actually unable to kill some classes at all!
– WoW doesn’t offer any challenge outside of the very last instance and arena. That is 1% of the game, at best!
And:
A very hard raid that is a copy/paste of the easiest raid out there is a completely different feature than a very hard raid that is exclusive. I’m not in favor of either, btw.
But you need to acknowledge that these are different features!
In trying to cater to everybody, WoW is stopping to cater to anybody.
You want a good PvP game ? WoW is 5/10.
You want a good PvE game? WoW is 6/10.
You want a good virtual world ? WoW is 1/10.
You want a good economical simulation? WoW is 3/10.
You want instant action? WoW is 8/10.
You want a dragon flight simulator? WoW is 4/10.
This works only until there is some competition ..
WOW has a very defining signature which includes graphics, interface, minor and major gameplay features that have become the norm for the industry. Together these features make up the WOW recipe which is so apparent in the so called WOW clones.
If new games start sharing these features – they are quickly labeled as clones (instancing, skill trees, AH, quest givers with whatever symbol over their head, same type of quests, battlegrounds and controlled PVP, etc.)
There used to be a time when people designed something different (UO, DAOC, AC, EQ) and games looked and felt different…new games make a pitstop at the WOW CLONE STORE…pick up a number of features…then try to put their own spin on it. The more budget a game has the more likely it seems to be that it makes the WOW pitstop since more $$$ means you need to be assured of financial long term success (tailored after another financially succesful MMORPG).
After reading some responses…I definitely know what people mean if they say “WOW CLONE”…but I wonder if it is harder to understand the term WOW CLONE if you havent played MMORPGS before WOW (UO, AC, EQ, DAOC)…if WOW was your first MMORPG…you would have a hard time understanding how WOW changed the initial MMORPG landscape and what features are “typical WOW features” that didnt exist before…seeing these features in new games makes it feel like a clone…it is sad if you feel like an MMORPG historian 🙁
I suspect that a lot of people throw around the term “WoW clone” without really thinking about it’s meaning. To most readers though, I reckon it conjures thoughts of being incredible casual to play, heavy on quest grinding, very stylised and easy to run graphics, high polish and very accessible and “easy” gameplay.
Funny thing is though, WoW didn’t really invent anything or bring anything massively new to the genre, it just took all of the existing components, cleaned them up a bit, and released them in a very user-friendly and appealing package.
@WFS: Well, yeah you could claim that of any feature in any game.. but I would say that committing to a quest-based leveling system was a new idea on a systematic level. The major MMOs at the time offered the grind-style leveling with a couple of quests thrown in here and there for epic gear or flavor. The MMO gospel of the time was that you kill thousands and thousands of mob to level to cap, and i think wow tried to, and successfully did, break that mold.
Like Argorius said. To me, a “wow clone” is something that is trying to reach players on a look-and-feel level more than anything. To invoke that feeling of familiarity, they hope to cash in on the % of players that it appeals to. Of course this includes a lot of elements like quest-hub-leveling, colored-item-hunt, minimap-in-the-corner, etc.
I’d feel better if people used “themepark mmo” as the derogatory term rather than “wow clone”, but don’t pretend that you’re using the word “wow clone” in any other way than trying to bash the game you’re talking about 🙂
@Nils, i think you’re looking at it from a very egocentric world in which every other person shares your opinion and playstyle.
@St. Pierre: Interestingly in EQ, which is a mob grind style leveling, you don’t have to kill thousands upon thousands of mobs to level. Actually mobs give decent fairly decent xp to level. The reason it took a while wasn’t the grind per say, it was the down time. Mana and especially health regen rates were very very slow so after killing 2-3 mobs you had to sit for anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes.
In WoW we were introduced to Quest grinding and I would actually have to say, you had to kill more mobs in WoW than you did in EQ. This is because you could kill more before you had to rest and with food, you regened at a phenomenal rate, unlike EQ.
Ironically, it was still faster to level in WoW, at release, via mob grinding than it was via quest grinding.
I don’t think the mold was actually broken as you actually killed more mobs in WoW. What WoW did was hide the down time. Instead of just sitting around waiting for your health/mana to regen, now you had to run back to quest givers and to different zones etc…
okay… wow has done most of everything that hasnt and has been done before. Im sick of the wow clone thing… its unavoidable for almsot any game to be compeletlyyy new including wow. If its a clone call it a clone if its a mmo that looks compeltely different but contains instances… sheesh its not a wow clone, done.
Vanilla wow was awesome. And that not a newbie speaking for whom it was first MMO. – It was about 8th or so for me (After AC,EQ,DAoC, SB, and many others). Combat and class mechanics were great and fun (and still probably one of the best in the traditional market), world was polished, vast and worth exploring.
There was “World” feel ,world pvp was awesome , our horde raided iron forge and they raided ogrimmar just for fun. Tarren Mills battles were epic, horde fought alliance in the world not instanced BGs. But then… – then they introduced honor grinds instead of world objectives, they started emphasizing pve raids and concentrating on them.
By TBC game was dead for me – battlegrounds and instances for everything killed it
One of the game I am looking for is JG:E – as they declared it will have no instances!
@Max…my friend just let me know about JG:E…it actually sounds pretty good so far. I am curious what happens with it! Might become the next MMORPG that I bother with 🙂
Why is it only in MMORPG’s the term “clone” turns up?
Is Starcraft a clone of Warcraft?
Is Call of Duty a clone of Mohaa?
This game is just a wow clone!
Max is exactly right. I can’t hear this nostalgia thing any longer. Sure, there’s nostalgia involved, because we are talking about the past. But it isn’t everything!
There are massive differences between Vanilla WoW and WotLK. Just like between original EQ and todays Everquest. It is two different games!
I liked Vanilla WoW more than WotLK. Now, that is my opinion. You are allowed to have another. But don’t tell me that I have to love the DungeonFinder. I don’t. This thing is the pinnacle of a flawed ideology.
Is everyone that is debating the “why is it called clone” serious?
WoW was the first extremely successful MMO. WoW did not clone EQ. They took some features and expanded on them. They added ALOT of content. If you played EQ and WoW you will see that while they both started at the same idea, they took entirely different roads to get there.
The WoW clone is a game whose developers saw how successful WoW was. Instead of taking what works in WoW and what doesn’t, and guess what not everything works, they just took every feature WoW has and reskinned the game.
MMOs can share like features and not be a clone, but the amount of MMOs that came out in 1998 to now that just copied code for code what WoW did makes them clones.
I hate analogies but I’m going to fall into the analogy pit fall.
If you have to write an essay about a subject in school and you use another essay as cited references to argue your idea; that is acceptable by educational standards. If you copy that essay and change a few words in it to make it look like it was your idea; that is called plagiarism.
Luckily I think it is starting to sink in that we don’t want a shitty half ass bug infested WoW clone. We just want a polished, attractive, not to grindy but not too easy MMO. I really don’t think that after 2 ½ years of MMO failure after MMO failure companies would continue to try and clone WoW. Developers aren’t that stupid. Yes WoW is successful; we could try to copy it. Okay let’s look at other people that tried that, did it work? No? Okay let’s not do that then.
Farmville is just a Sims Farm clone…..
Anyone that calls any game a WoW clone obviously entered the MMO genre with WoW as their first game, and really doesn’t have the knowledge to make such judgements when WoW was actually the one cloning pretty much any and every MMO that existed before it and was released soon after it.
You think it was coincidence that Achievements and Glyphs came into the game right after Warhammer’s release which had Tomb of Knowledge and Tactics.Yep you guessed it, stolen by WoW, just like every single other feature in the game.
Blizzard is a clone and polish powerhouse, which isn’t a bad thing(clearly!) BUT, the mistake of calling any game a “WoW clone” just proves the ignorance of the average MMO player.
This comment is somewhat unrelated to the overall topic, however it’s something I’m quite curious about, and it’s popped up here and there in the comments.
Often I see people say things such as “Pre-level cap is meaningless” I’m curious what makes it so, and what do other games do differently than WoW to make it more meaningful?
When I first played WoW, my mission wasn’t to hit 60. It was always about the now. My mission was often to hit the next level, not worrying about what would happen after that. Or maybe I’d just like to mess around and PvP for a week, get professions up, have snowball fights in town, see how many enemies I could take at once without dying, try to solo instances, etc.
What I’m getting at is, leveling was a blast. I had 30+ days played by the time I hit 60, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Do I do the same thing now when leveling a new character? No, I don’t. However, the game hasn’t changed, I can still do all those things, I could still have an epic, amazing adventure where I focus more on the journey than the destination. The problem is, my mindset as a player, and I’m sure this is the case for most, has completely changed. I don’t spend the time to have another epic adventure, and that’s not the games fault. When I make a new character it doesn’t say “hey, rush to level cap, cool stuff will happen.”
I’m not the best writer, so this may come off as a jumbled mess, and I apologize. My overall point is, is it the games fault for us only caring about level cap, or our own? And what could be done to make the journey more interesting aside for having nothing to do at max level so you don’t care about it?
@Syckoh:
it is not only the games fault, but it is also the games fault.
Blizzard made leveling very fast, thus making it even more unimportant to enchant your equip during leveling, for example. They made the leveling content (mostly) so easy that you wouldn’t have to care about equip at all. You can and do ignore it up to 80.
Blizzard themselves do not want players to explore the low level content. Read their remarks you you see that they basically ignored it for 4 years or so.
That’s why the Cataclysm is important, in the first place.
@Soy-Energiser:
There is difference between merging features of different games into one and copy/pasting one complete game.
I really loved vanilla WoW. It’s the Only WoW I played. Leveling in that game was simply awesome. The instances were really interesting and fun.
And opposed to nils i don’t think that the initial focus of the game was to get players as fast as possible to the endgame. There were some really awesome dungeons and content in the game while leveling.
Even the raid game was great! The problem was they started to focus solely in the endgame raid content and that focus was perceivved by the players. This created and inflated the perception in the playerbase that the leveling content is meaningless.
However, in a game no content should be considered meaningless! That’s just dumb. Or else what is the point of playing it? Might as well give fully formed characters to players and make games with no leveling at all! Just introduce players immediately to the raid progression/arena progression and everything else!
But WoW is a ver impressive game and right now it is finantially impossible to develop a game that will have the width of features that they have.
Games like Rift though look great for me! the graphics are astonishing, they bring a couple of new mechanics but polish what already works. For me that’s a decent approach. It worked with Allods untill they killed the game wiith the cash shop.
I am hopeful that Rift will be Allods done right: with a subscription and without ripping players off!
There’s a bunch of other promising titles coming out as well. The Secret World is very appealing to me: a 3 faction game with a combat system closer to Guild Wars than WoW and set in the modern world is a breath of fresh air and the more mature theme will keep the kids away!
So my last of games that I am watching is:
Rift,
The Secret World,
Guild Wars 2,
SW:TOR.
I think it is brilliant that you separate vannila WoW pre-MC/BWL out. That was an entirely different and better game. The world mattered. The world had a sense of wonder. You could play solo, duo, trio, full group, whatever. You could do quests, dungeons, or crafting for gear. There was TONS of gear variety.
That version of WoW was definitely the best.