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World of Warcraft is currently the most popular MMORPG in the world, with over 11.5 million subscribers and an estimated 62 percent of the MMO market – a huge achievement given how saturated the market is. Its two expansion packs were huge hits, and the third will only increase the juggernaut's popularity even further...
Was this some sort of cosmic fluke where everything just fell into place for game developer Blizzard? If you look back at its track record, with consistently successful games like Diablo, Starcraft (a game that so captured South Korea that there are TV channels devoted to it) and the original Warcraft games, then no – this is not a fluke. From its humble beginnings as a gaming developer who primarily just ported games over to the Amiga and Mac platforms, Blizzard has always pushed for quality. But what does Blizzard do to keep producing such amazing games? What is it about their products that drives fans and critics crazy with excitement at the mere mention of their names? This isn't a complete list or anything, but still we're going to look at five big reasons why Blizzard blows the competition away. 1. Perfecting the genre If you really wanted to nitpick at Blizzard's products, one thing you could say is that they're not completely innovative. Everything they do has technically been done before, but it's just that they do it better. The original Warcraft (1994) borrowed heavily from the RTS dynamics set by the genre-defining Dune 2 (1992), but added a whole bunch of additional elements like unit special abilities, different resource types, and different mission types.
Diablo (1996) was a genre-defining action-RPG, but it too borrowed heavily from the random-dungeon crawling elements of Rogue (1980) and the best elements from the mess that was Ultima VIII (1994), such as the graphics and the point and click combat. Even Blackthorne (1994), one of the earliest Blizzard games, was highly reminiscent of platform adventure games such as Flashback (1992) and the classic Prince of Persia (1989).
For the mega-hit World of Warcraft (2004), Blizzard sat and watched the fledgling MMORPG genre grow and develop with games like Ultima Online (1997), Everquest (1999) and Dark Age of Camelot (2001) revealing all the technical and fundamental issues that would arise from a virtual world populated by thousands of players. They noted down all the problems, figured out solutions for them (Rest XP is an ingenious way to keep casual players coming back to join their hardcore friends), and packaged it together with the already famous world of Azeroth and its iconic characters to create arguably the best MMORPG to date. Is it a bad thing, to copy and improve on someone else's products? Not really. The gaming industry is full of sequels, derivatives, and outright clones. Blizzard's games differ in that they are rarely just clones. They tend to improve on every aspect of the gameplay. While Blizzard will probably never come out with a truly original game like Katamari Damacy (2004) or Seaman (1999), their innovation comes from taking an existing idea and perfecting it. 2. Games with personality What's one of the first things seasoned gamers do when they boot up a new Warcraft or Starcraft game? Repeatedly click on the various units and critters to hear all the whacky things they say. You know how it goes: you click on the foot soldier once and he asks “Sire?” Click on him a few more times and he gets irritated to the point where he asks “Why do you keep touching me?”
If it's one thing about Blizzard games, it's that they put a lot of effort into giving their characters a lot of personality, and gamers respond very well to this. In Command and Conquer, you click on faceless and anonymous tanks. If it dies, it dies and you just don't feel much of an emotional attachment to it. In Warcraft and Starcraft, however, clicking on a unit brings up a mini portrait and enough voice samples to give every unit a personality. And when a unit has personality, you'll sympathize with it and do your best to keep it alive. And this is something that Blizzard has been doing from Day One. If you look back at Blackthorne, Blizzard put aside a button to make your character point his shotgun behind him and fire blindly. Not only is this probably the first time blind-fire has been instituted in a game (over a decade before Gears of War), but it makes your character an absolute bad-ass! This move has no functional purpose in the game, but I can fondly remember using it to finish off a bad guy anyway, just because it's freakin' cool.
Now a lot of other gaming companies have also tried to make their characters cool as well, but most of the time their efforts end at giving the character long hair and a bad attitude. For every genuinely awesome character like Prince Arthas or Sarah Kerrigan, there are at least twenty forgettable wannabes like Ayumi from X-Blades (2007) or any Final Fantasy protagonist after FFVII (1997). Infusing game characters with personality is not a science but an art, and Blizzard's ability to do so is almost sublime. 3. Delays are a good thing A game that showed a lot of potential during its development phase can end up on the retail shelves as a total piece of crap. Quite often this is due to a big rush to get the game out by some set deadline or holiday season, resulting in a stillborn product with bugs and unrefined gameplay. Franchise games often suffer from this problem, as they're expected to release a new title every year. Blizzard differs in that they rarely announce any expected release dates, so that they can refine a game until it is absolutely perfect (or close enough). And theirs is a lengthy process that can often take years and years. Starcraft began development in 1995, but the game took so long to come out that some hardcore forum fans banded together and labeled themselves “Operation: Can't Wait Any Longer” and wrote lots and lots of fan stories about a game that hadn't even been released yet.
The game eventually came out in 1998, and was well worth the wait. The extended development time gave birth to a game that was not only revolutionary in scope, but also managed to finely balance three vastly different factions (most RTS games at the time had difficulty balancing two similar factions). If that felt like a long time, then World of Warcraft would be something else. This mammoth game took half a decade to develop, with many other MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies (2003) popping up and dying during WoW's development period. Another developer might've panicked and decided to rush their title out in case the MMO wave died down, but Blizzard held their ground and patiently refined their game. The overwhelming success of WoW shows that their patience paid off. Of course, infinite patience is not always a virtue, as evident in the tragic tale of Duke Nukem Forever, which began its development in 1997 and hadn't released anything by the time they ran out of money in 2009. 4. Nothing but perfection Have you played Warcraft Adventures or Starcraft: Ghost? You probably haven't, because those games were never released. Another reason why Blizzard's games are so top-notch lies in their willingness to cancel a game if it does not meet their demanding standards.
Warcraft Adventures was an adventure game based on the rise of the Orc chieftain Thrall, and was in development for a year or so before it was canceled. Rumors persisted that the game was almost completed at the time of cancellation, but Blizzard simply did not want to release the game because they didn't feel it was good enough. Make no mistake about this: funding a game's development for a year would cost you a lot of money, and the Warcraft franchise was so popular then that releasing a substandard game would still rake in enough money to turn a profit. But that's not how Blizzard rolls, and so they made that tough decision to cancel an almost-complete game.
This practice was repeated during the development of Starcraft: Ghost, a third-person stealth game which would be the first Blizzard title developed primarily for the console market. Blizzard sub-contracted two different studios to help design the game, and created a new cinematics team to provide CG cutscenes that were of a higher quality than anything they'd made before. Fan excitement was high, but after five years of development, they pretty much announced that Ghost was canceled because it didn't meet their expectations either. Not all companies would be able to pull a stunt like this. Games like Daikatana (2000) or the 2006 version of Sonic the Hedgehog should really have been canceled when every sign pointed to the game's concepts not working out as planned. They say that you're only as strong as your weakest link, and Blizzard certainly subscribes to this doctrine! 5. Everyone is invited This isn't exactly a reason why Blizzard games PWN, but it is still indicative of the culture over there and how Blizzard is a company that thinks highly of its fan base. Back in the 90's when Blizzard was starting out, the PC had become the dominant gaming platform and the Mac was getting hit hard for not being able to keep up on a gaming level. Hardly anybody bothered to program games for the Mac market anymore... that is, except Blizzard. Games like Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo were all released on the Mac platform (albeit a few months later than the PC versions), and later games were even sold in a way that the same disc could be played on a Mac or PC.
Mac users were not only able to play Blizzard games… they could also play Blizzard games with PC users. Mulitplayer modes on games like Warcraft III and Starcraft were cross-platform compatible, so Mac users could easily Zerg-rush a PC Protoss base in an all-night LAN party or over Battle.net. When Blizzard allows you to keep gaming with your friends like that, how can you not like them?? There are many other reasons why Blizzard products do so well in the gaming market, such as the afore-mentioned Battle.net service, their unique art style and the gripping franchise storylines laid out by ace scribes such as Chris Metzen. But these are the five most outstanding reasons in my mind.
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Comments
Hah, seriously? comparing maple to wow? just based on subscriptions? Don't be naive, ive played both and maple has absolutely nothing on wow in terms of gameplay, class design, world design, QUESTS, raiding and community.
Maple story is for kids! And wow has a far bigger market share! Try a REAL MMO for once!
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