Totally not competing with WoW, except we totally are.

It seems to be fashionable these days to basically rewrite WoW, with some changes, and then claim they are not competing with WoW. Except, you know, they want a few million of their subscribers to switch over, and they have added lots of things to their game to explicitly make it similar to WoW, like a solo-focused leveling path followed by a level-cap instance and raiding game. Even EQ2 gave that a go with their latest expansion. AoC is essentially the same. WAR will be essentially the same. All these games claiming to be about not competing with the behemoth, trying their best to be able to fill in the blanks in this sentence: “We’re just like WoW, except for ____________ (insert feature here)”.

So color me shocked when I loaded up the Wizard101 beta and said to myself, OMFG… this is NOTHING like WoW. These people are NOT competing with WoW. They could give a flying fish whether any WoW players like their game. They have packed more innovation into this one game – this one game FOR CHILDREN – than I have seen in the “grown up” MMO world in years.

KingsIsle, creators of Wizard101 and likely recipients of J.K. Rowling’s curses as she wishes she’d licensed Harry Potter for an MMO sooner, have to be laughing at all the WoWs and AoCs and WARs and EQ2s that just keep remaking the same game, year after year. Sometimes something new comes out and it’s just a slap on the head moment – oh, so this is the kind of game you make when you REALLY don’t care about competing with WoW, you just make the best and most innovative and most fun game you can.

I am hoping Wizard101 does well. I am hoping Chronicles of Spellborn, also with a semi-innovative (though not as much as W101) combat mechanism, does well. But mostly, I am hoping the folks at 38 Studios DON’T. REMAKE. WOW. NOW WITH NEW FEATURE X.

Cuz I won’t play it. I already played WoW. It was called WoW.