It wasn’t the “Warhammer 40K MMO needs just one million of WoW’s players” line from Danny Bilson’s ebulliently gleeful speech about the game THQ plans to publish that caught my eye. Every game that comes out admits they’d be happy to get just ten or twenty percent of World of Warcraft’s player base.

And if a million people each send me a dollar, I’ll send you all a little booklet explaining how to become a millionaire. (Please enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope).

Here’s the line that got me:

“I’m a diehard MMO player myself - going back to EverQuest. I’ve spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I’m going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It’s very friendly to the WoW player.”

Seems to me that WoW fanatics aren’t looking for a new game. Two things about competing with WoW. The first is, nobody makes a better WoW than Blizzard. You can’t out-WoW WoW. Second is, the only WoW players you have a HOPE of keeping are the ones that are sick of WoW in particular and all WoW-like MMOs in general.

By making a game (or rather by publishing it in THQ’s case) you hope appeals to WoW fanatics, you’ve already lost twice over before you ship your first box.

He does go on to explain how Warhammer 40K will differ from WoW.

“The brand is fantastic - it’s so deep and so wonderful,” he said. “There’s just so much for us to play with. There’s more vehicles in our thing [than WoW], the combat’s completely different; you can get four guys in a tank and go.

WoW is not exactly known for its vehicular combat, though Lake Wintergrasp has some. I’m not sure how much “In Warhammer 40K, Battlefield 1942 meets Lake Wintergrasp!” will grab the WoW folks, but at least it’s different. I’m sure THQ will at the very least grab 10% of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning’s player base.

Doesn’t matter. People play WoW because they want to play WoW. They don’t build checklists of dream features that include “multi-person vehicular combat” and “war everywhere, all the time”, tote up the checks and having compared all the offerings, choose WoW. They play because it’s WoW.

It’s just like that legendary

that got that Best Buy guy fired. (An annotation on the video says he got offered his job back, so yay)

Anyway. The reality is that a successful subscription MMO these days gets about 150-300K subscribers. I don’t see any reason why the Warhammer 40K MMO won’t do at least that well once it settles down.

150,000 subscribers is a success. 300K is a WILD success.

Enough about that.

The other reason new MMOs have such a hard time making the splash they feel they are owed is because WoW has done a really good job at setting the bounds of the discussion. There’s now a mental list of “must have” features without which no MMO can possibly succeed. Get ready to nod your head as you agree with every one.

Modern-era MMOs are required to:

  • Have luscious, colorful epic vistas

  • Be able to run on nearly any computer or operating system (‘runs on a toaster!’)

  • Always have a clear progression path to max level

  • Offer clearly marked quest hubs that lead the player through the content in the local area

  • Allow solo gameplay

  • Make most content easily consumable in half hour chunks

  • And above all, polish, polish, polish.

Well, hard to argue with that list, ain’t it. Those would be the MINIMUM for any MMO that would hope to compete with WoW, and you could probably double the size of that list without thinking too hard about it. This is the world as WoW would have you see it.

Problem is, good games can take that list, achieve every bullet point and add some neat bits nobody else thought of, and they still don’t get their measly million subscribers. If that list were any indicator of the required minimums for an MMO, they’d be doing better.

The problem is, that list is a recipe for enjoying the World of Warcraft, no more, no less. It doesn’t say a thing about any other game.

I like World of Warcraft, but I like other games, too, and a lot of those games don’t stack up very well on that list. Take my new obsession, Fantasy Earth Zero.

  • Dated, half decade old polygonal graphics - Runs only on Windows (as far as I know)

  • Has a clear progression to max level: keep playing battlefields

  • Few quests outside of the tutorial.

  • Can’t solo battlefields. You can solo some PvE maps until the progress of battle turns them into PvP maps, but the best xp is in the tactical PvP.

  • Battles are usually about half an hour, so it gets this one.

  • The game is about as far from polish as you can get. And yet, it works, and it’s fun.

If a game is fun, everything else is negotiable.

Blizzard would have you believe the mythical bar that is set at such a high level that only WoW can cross it is stored in a vault in Irvine, but that’s just them trying to define the MMO genre in ways only WoW can match.

Everyone has their OWN bar. It’s totally absolutely positively fantastically RIGHT to enjoy WoW. It’s a fun game and there’s lots to do. But claiming to have made a logical decision to play WoW based on its feature set is like writing a classified job ad that only matches one person – you’re just shutting out applicants and games you might enjoy just as much, merely because they can never exactly meet some list of arbitrary specs.