I want to make it clear that I do plan to purchase and play WAR when it comes out. As a matter of fact, I already have some money down on a collector's edition, if the guy at the gamestop understood what I said.
My recent posts here and on other sites might suggest that I'm hoping WAR will fail. This is not true and therefore, wanted to clarify a few things. The honest truth is, I'm hoping WAR will not only have a successful launch but do extremely well in the MMO community. If it beats WoW then great, because either way, I'll be playing the top two MMO's out there. I'm just annoyed at everyone saying it is going to be better than WoW without the benefit of actually hands on game play.
Video and still images, especially those released by the designers themselves, can't always be trusted and those in the beta can't speak for all of us till we get our grubby little hands on the game. Besides, beta players can only report on what they have seen, not what might or might not be fixed by the time the game goes gold.
I just want to get a nice influx of news and information, without all the hype. Sure, it looks great, sure the concepts of open questing look awesome, but you can't compare any of that to WoW till the finished product is sitting on your desk top. You just can't. The hype for AoC was huge, the launch was spectacular, but the game isn't doing so well, players are still having to deal with bugs and issues that existed at launch which have yet to be corrected. How many that endorsed the pre launch hype are still playing?
Look at EvE. It sneaked in under the radar, and has successfully carved out a nice portion of the MMO pie for itself, and from the blogs I read, its only getting better. But before last year, I didn't know anything about it. Why does every big name MMO have to adopted the philosophy of pre release hype to the point where the community becomes a feeding frenzy?
I'm just puzzled.
I agree that the hype can be dangerous. I agree that it often doesn't serve the game well, and there's a backlash possible. AoC is a great example.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I've played WAR, and I'm still excited. You can click back to May in my blog and see how I felt about the AoC beta. WAR's quite different, in my opinion. I think it has a much higher chance for success.
But that doesn't invalidate your point! Marketing should be reality-based, but I suppose that wouldn't be quite a profitable in the short term. In the long term, I think some restraint and honesty would beneft a company, but that's just so not the way business is done, unfortunately.
Part of the feeding frenzy has to do with the fact that we still only see a handful of big releases a year, into a market that's starving for new content, either from their existing game or a new game. That doesn't help the situation.