WAR and the people who say it's a WoW clone

So Syp pointed out a few WAR negative nellies over at Waaagh today.

Now, obviously everyone isn't going to like WAR and you can't fault them for that. But the one critique that tends to get under the skin of WAR fans is that WAR is a clone of WoW with a few "minor" upgrades.

Part of this, I think, is that there is some perceived rivalry between WAR and WoW fans, but I don't really buy into it. WoW is a fantastic game. If you like PvE raiding and have a schedule that allows it, you aren't going to find a better game, not in WAR or anywhere else. But those two conditions just don't apply to most players : WoW is a great game but it's the wrong game.

So, is WAR a WoW clone?

Now, as a fan of both games, I don't really believe that WAR is a WoW clone, anymore than WoW was an EQ clone. There are a lot of similarities, because they are in the same genre of game (MMORPG). They are actually in the same sub-genres (fantasy, "theme park" MMORPG).

(If you're not familiar with the idea of "theme park" MMORPG's, it means that the user is guided through the world with quests and classes and common objectives, as opposed to a "sandbox" game in which the user can kind of do whatever they want.)

As you'd expect with games in the same genre, there are a lot of shared genre conventions. There are also a lot of "fixes" WoW made to the genre that WAR picked up, as any responsible developer would. In fact, that's a lot of the problem. The games that followed WoW tried to be different instead of trying to be better, and were unfortunately successful in this endeavor. So WAR looks a lot more like WoW than Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, DDO, LoTRO, or AoC did, and that's because WAR concentrated on being better instead of being different.

Now, being better instead of different doesn't mean you aren't different. It means you take what worked in the past (in WoW and DAoC) and you make it different only if you're making it better.

And this is what WAR does. A lot of things look the same, and the things that don't are vastly improved. In fact, WAR has many big new (or vastly improved) features : it has "war everywhere", PQ's, the Tome of Knowledge, a revamped RvR system, open groups, and living cities (a whole living landscape, really). No other "theme park" game has had as many fun things to do before you even hit level 10. By level 10 in WAR I had already done a bunch of quests, helped kill a couple hundred enemy players in scenarios, taken RvR objectives in world PvP, and gotten influence loot by playing in four or five different public quests.

So I guess my real question is : who are the people that say WAR is a WoW clone? They really fall into two categories.

People who don't know much about MMORPG's

On the internet it's always easy to find experts in any given subject. Expertise, however, is much harder to come by.

These people deride WAR by saying it's a clone, but they also said pretty much the same thing about WoW -- that it had nothing new. But anybody who spent much time playing WoW and a previous MMO could spot the differences pretty easily. You can level on your own, and it doesn't take much time to reach max level. When you hit max level you can play with other people who have been playing much longer. There's an easy to understand questing system that takes you on a guided tour around the world. There's an easy to understand crafting system that rewards you instead of punishing you. Combat is fluid and fun. In fact, nearly every bad mechanic in the genre has been worked and reworked until it's fun.

Likewise, as I've mentioned previously, if you spend even a few hours playing WAR you can spot the differences between WAR and WoW.

People who don't care much about fantasy, theme-park MMORPG's

On the other hand, many of the complaints have come from people who have played the game, such as Brent at Virgin Worlds who said

Having taken part in the variety of game play modes that Warhammer Online offers, I can say with complete confidence that this game might as well have been released 4 years ago as it offers us nothing aside from one standout evolutionary concept, the public quest, that moves the genre forward

His primary complaint is that the game is a grind. This is a frequent gripe people have about MMORPG's. But what game does not feel like a grind when it's made to last for hundreds or thousands of hours? And what game that's meant to be fun for five or six hours will still be fun if you spend hundreds of hours playing it? Honestly, no game feels "fresh" longer than an MMORPG -- that's what they're designed for. But even MMORPG's do not feel fresh forever.

Another viewpoint I see a lot is summed up by Richard Bartle who infamously said

I've already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.

(He also goes on to say

Age of Conan -- that's PVP. Wow, gosh, PVP – it's pretty hardcore, PVP, isn't it? No. When you played [older MUDs] you got killed after three months of playing, your character was gone. Yeah, hardcore PVP – yeah, we're hard, aren't we?

Which is another one of my pet peeves -- mistaking bad game design for "difficulty".)

Anyway, the big problem is that people like Brent and Mr. Bartle don't see WAR as revolutionary. And to tell you the truth it's not. But making a revolutionary MMORPG is hard, and making a really good one is just impossible. Just making "evolutionary" changes to standard game mechanics (in any genre) is hard. It's not hard because it's hard to come up with new ideas -- it's hard to come up with good new ideas, and then solve all the new problems those new ideas cause.

The extreme difficulty of solving all those new problems ("small innovation") is what really keeps revolutionary MMORPG's from being good, or even being made in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the people that don't appreciate this fact also don't appreciate the "small innovation" that makes WAR more fun than WoW, and WoW much better than EQ.