Do you think Blizzard will ever take the MMO out of WoW, leaving just the RPG?
The end game focus seems to be shifting for many people. Sure there are lots of folk out there beating their thick virtual heads against the virtual boss brick wall, but the explore, quest and lore mentalities have become more prevalent on many blogs lately and I am going to assume that this is a sentiment felt wider than the blogging community.
The end of the WoW as we know it
Over the year plus I have been blogging the concept of WoW being replaced or the servers being closed down has come up reasonably frequently.
Normally the focus of those discussions is what will be the WoW killer, or what will you do with your last 5 hours in the game.
It’s all about the end, never the beginning.
A new beginning
So after reading a post the other day about the awesome quest lines (Cranky Old Gnome) and some bizarre out of time theories on the time warp continuum from Klepsacovic, I started thinking that the day the servers die could be the day the clients come alive.
One step back for one step forward
WoW was a ground breaking MMO, maybe because it’s a summer holiday camp for MMO players (or Tourists), but whatever the reasons, people love it and I dare say will continue to love it come the day the we read the blue post asking us to return our authenticators to sender.
We already know there are those highly illegal private servers which allow you to be player, boss and GM all in one. (I wonder of people who run private servers have issues with delays on tickets. Think they tell themselves to clear their WTF folders?).
So we know WoW can be run “standalone”. I wonder if 12 months before the end if Blizzard will start working on its last WoW boxed product. Removing the MMO, tweaking the game and players run free.
Free to do as you please
You can already solo most of the WoW content anyway, but what if the game was changed so it was a complete narrative path. So you follow the muddied time lines from the beginning through to the end.
Solo Onyxia…? Anyone can!
Of course there will be the instances and raid to tweak. With nobody to assist you they will need to be tweaked so you can beat the solo, maybe not on the 1st attempt, maybe not on the 50th, but they can remain as end game goals.
Not level dependant
The thing is that there will be less reliance on levels per se, it will be more about the content you have cleared. If you have cleared Westfall then you will be powerful enough (and eligible) to teach Van Cleef a lesson. If you have proven yourself as a hero in Northrend, then you will be ready to solo Wrathgate.
MMO, Mini Multiplayer Online that is
Another option is to limit the team sizes in the same manner as Starcraft and Warcraft. People can play with 4 mates, via a LAN or online with BattleNet.
WSG isn’t dead, there’s just less of us.
That way you could still pwn in the Battlegrounds, but it would be a little like unreal tournament. Smaller teams playing off against each other.
Win-Win-WoW
Blizzard gets to sell one last box set, maybe charges for access to BattleNet if you want that feature, but can retire Old MacDonald’s server farms.
We get to quietly wander about Azeroth with the time and the energy to enjoy the quest lines, knowing if we get tired of dying to the whelps, we can put the game side for a week or two without having to buy a new game card.
We get to play with the few mates we get to keep after the servers grind to a halt, reliving those wonderful fail wipes for eternity.
We get to truly appreciate the lore of Warcraft by following a time line that is relevant to the events, and if it was all phased, actually get to see the difference we make when we accidentally kill Lil’ Timmy while trying to take his pea shooter.
Just a thought…
Gnomer and Out!
PS: Yes, Shameless. I am Shameless… Sylus wants you to know about his blog (as opposed to ForTheHorde), so I am shamelessly plugging on the basis that no one else has… 
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2009/10/01/solo-wow-one-day/
Yes! A gnomageddon pitch for me blog! Thanks bud, now I promise nit to punt your gnome!
Ahhh not one, but 3….
I have already deposited the 2nd one…. a little closer to your home… and the 3rd will be unleashed in a few hours…
I’ve been thinking for a while now that a solo WoW RPG would be a very smart move on Blizz’s part after the MMO runs its course, as it inevitably will. I would think it wouldn’t take too much tweaking to turn at least the solo-questy part into something that could be played on a home computer. I know some people who would definitely buy it! They like the sound of the game but don’t do MMOs for one reason or another–money, time, or whatever.
I doubt they will do it.
It would take a fair amount of effort to rejigger the end game to work solo. Enough work that if there were enough folks that wanted to buy that last box then there would be enough folks to justify at LEAST one realm sticking around collecting $15/month from the folks who still love WoW more then whatever Blizz is trying to sell that year.
I expect that at some point when WoW does begin to wane Blizz will get good at doing server merges and the game will continue to be playable for 5+ years as it fades out. When active development stops the cost goes down (no paying for new art, new code for new buffs and debuffs, no testing of new encounters). No new development means no new bugs, so the cost of bug fixing will go down a lot (sure there will be the same bugs that it had for a long time, but if they weren’t important enough to fix before do you think they will fix ‘em when the product is on life support?). No new development is also no new nerfs/buffs to fine tune things. Even product support costs will drift downwards (they tend to spike up with new releases, and scale directly with number of players anyway).
So when WoW does someday stop being under active development and go onto “life support only” the cost drops a lot, leaving your $15 a month to go farther. So they could actually keep a server farm afloat with fewer players they they currently need to keep it profitable. The main reason to do server merges is to keep populations high enough that things don’t seem too depopulated (lower electricity bills, more physical space to expand other servers into and maybe some reclaimed hardware will just be icing on the cake).
I bet WoW on life support would be profitable with less then 1% of the current population.
Hey Stripes, yes you are right even if they only get 1% of the current player base then they will still pull in money on a legacy system.
With the move to Battle.Net they could also make an inclusion if you have all the other products.
I guess the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” would be the simplest model.
[...] on another occasion when the death of wow was imminent), about whether they would ever turn WoW into a single player game when they shut down all the servers (OMG, I had a quick scan when I hunted for the link… I [...]