Gamespot ARR article. HOW DARE YOU DOUBT OUR YOSHI-P!!

[fusional]

it's still a standard MMO.

which is exactly what it takes to be successful, no matter how much people cry for something different. because you know what keeps happening to games that actually are different? they either fizzle out immediately, or are relegated to niche titles that support only a tiny tiny (and very particular) demographic of MMO gamers.

developers know this. they've collected and analyzed the data. why do you think swtor and gw2 went out of their way to market themselves as something they essentially weren't? why do you think they spent so much of their budget on a relentless marketing push that sold their games as "genre-defining", "revolutionary" and the like when in the end they were just like everything else but with a new hat... (which they also tried to say was *not* a hat, but something entirely new! ...nope. still a hat.)

people don't know what they want, and can't see the forest for the trees. ultimately *what the MMO is* has much less impact on the game's longevity/success as *how well it executes* what it is. content (and plenty of it, for every demographic you're targeting) built around a successful gaming core is what determines whether an MMO lives or dies.

devs lose sight of this trying to chase the dragon of "wahhh we want something different wahhhh" and the finished product ends up being either completely hollow or disappointingly one-dimensional. because in reality, in the structure of an MMORPG, there's not too much you can really change without it losing the identifiers of an MMORPG. but they want an MMORPG. so all the devs can do is rely on smoke and mirrors and hope the players are fooled long enough to pay.

and then they come to their senses after a few weeks or months and migrate on the greener pastures, asking for the same thing, and the cycle perpetuates. because the games which *are actually different* are overlooked, or are "too different"... and developers take notice of that, too.

and you can't really blame developers, either. they're stuck forever trying to cater to an entitled audience who says one thing but means another. who says they want X only to flip tables and storm off when they're given X. "well what i MEANT was i wanted Y!" and then they're given Y. and the process repeats. just look at our own 1.0 for evidence of that.

they want something familiar which is at the same time different and unique, and that's like catching lightning in a bottle. and you know what's especially funny about that? WoW was familiar, and it wasn't terribly different or unique. and yet in spite of that- it's the most successful MMORPG ever made.

why?

because, just like i said- *what* it is wasn't relevant. what mattered was how well it executed what it was. and it did it better than any other MMO ever made. and magically... 10-11 million subscribers, even at a time where people are claiming f2p is "the future"

tl;dr people don't know what they want or why they want it, they don't know what they like or why the like it, they'll say one thing but do another, and have absolutely no idea what works or makes a game successful. and developers are left trying to read their minds to build the next smash success, because most of the input they get is trash.

it's amazing they get anything done at all.