Multiplayer online role-playing games started back in the days of mainframes, text-based terminals, and Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. It was not until the rise of both the personal computer and the Internet that these adventures moved forward into a graphical world. Early experiments such as LucasArts' Habitat, released in 1985 on the Commodore 64, showed some of the difficulties involved in bringing a large number of players into the same online world. Issues such as player-versus-player killing, bug exploits, and the fact that players would blast through new content much faster than the developers could create it, became standard problems that each online game developer would have to solve.
With each new technological advance, the population of online worlds increased. 3DO's Meridian 59 (1996) passed the 50,000 subscriber mark, and Richard Garriott's Ultima Online (1997) reached the 250,000 subscriber threshold in six years. Sony's EverQuest (1999) would double those numbers.
The big surprise, however, was Blizzard's World of Warcraft, released in 2004. It quickly surpassed all its rivals in subscriptions, passing the six million mark in February of this year. Now, according to the web site MMOGCHART.com, it has hit a new milestone by moving past the 50 percent mark for market share of massively multiplayer online games.
How did the game get to be so popular? It's hard to pin the answer down to any one thing, but Blizzard has certainly been the most successful at figuring out what people like about the genre and then broadening this appeal to include as many players as possible. One innovation that Blizzard brought to the game was the idea of "rest time," where more casual players can gain experience faster after being away from the game for a few days. Another thing that Blizzard does well is handling small details: the game has, for example, the best-looking "mini-icons" (used to indicate items in your inventory) of any game that I've seen, and the various armor sets are beautifully detailed. The more imaginative art styles used in the game, as compared to competitors like Everquest II have also been cited as a factor.
But will Blizzard be able to keep up this dominance of the market? One problem that all online role-playing games face is that the casual player will eventually run out of content. I've experienced this myself after hitting the level 60 cap in WoW and not feeling particularly compelled to participate in large raids or grind player-versus-player combat. Could a developer figure out a way to get past this problem? Richard Garriott, who created the original Ultima, Ultima Online, and now is working on a new game called Tabula Rasa with partners NCSoft (makers of the Lineage games, which currently hold the #2 and #3 spots behind WoW in terms of subscribers), thinks he can:
Lineage did something that turned out to be much smarter. They released episodes. The episodes are really the same live team development, but just packaged as an episode. What they'll do is that they'll hold it back. Instead of saying, today there are new trashcans, tomorrow there’s tables, and after that new swords, which everybody thinks is cool, but by the time they see the new sword pretty much everybody else has already seen it too. Statistically, half the people will see every new thing before you.
But if you save it all up as an episode and you release the whole three months worth of work all at once, everybody knows it's coming, everyone gets a chance to get in there, everybody gets excited about it and not only get in themselves, but they also bring new friends who have never played. At that point, we can see that the usage and the sales of the game go up in a big spike, every one of these episodes.
While Blizzard works on the expansion for WoW, Garriott is hoping that games like Tabula Rasa and others will move the genre forward in new directions. Whether or not the next generation of massively multiplayer online games will be able to challenge Blizzard's supremacy remains to be seen.
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