World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is clearly the most successful MMORPG of all time in the West, and this didn’t happen by chance. WoW was able to build on the strong Warcraft brand as well as Blizzard’s still very good reputation at the time. Additionally, the focus on accessibility and PvE content, which was still uncommon in the genre at that time: WoW ran with its timeless comic look even on old machines and could even provide great enjoyment for solo players.
After 2004/2005, many developers and publishers followed this theme park blueprint, and in most cases failed. WoW was simply too dominant. Moreover, the increasingly spoiled genre fans tolerated the usual start-up issues of MMORPGs less and less.
After countless failures, a drought period followed the peak phase of the genre since 2015, which continues to this day, as far as ambitious theme park MMORPGs from the West are concerned. Over the past eleven years, the focus has been more on sandbox and PvP experiences, as these are easier to finance. Or on games from Asia, which tend to go overboard in terms of complexity with the sheer volume of systems, features, and currencies.
What WoW has impressively demonstrated to us since 2004 still holds true today: If you want to address and excite the largest possible audience for your MMORPG, you must focus on maximum accessibility and offer a diverse theme park of content, with the emphasis on PvE and PvP content being more optional in nature.
A new MMORPG with ambitions should therefore do exactly what WoW did in the early 2000s: Focus on the core theme park MMO experience, create maximum accessibility for it, and cut out all the baggage that the decades-old, established online role-playing games (including the modern WoW) suffer from. Oh, and a well-known universe that has many fans helps, of course.
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