The Eventual End of Azeroth
February 3rd, 2010 | 
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(No the Picture doesn’t have anything to do with the post, I just like my turtles.)
Here I am sitting in yet another meeting, much of the meeting doesn’t apply to myself, but here I am. So what am I doing to keep myself mentally sane?? Yeah, I’m hand writing a post for my WoW blog. We’ll see if I can get off my rear end and actually get this typed into the computer. We’ll see. Wow, these parents are a little upset, very interesting, I’m very glad that I’m not the one running the meeting.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking. I try to avoid it, but sometimes I do think. When is World of Warcraft going to end and what are the players going to do. WoW can’t last forever, eventually it’ll have to come to some kind of conclusion, right? (Unlike this meeting, which is looking like it is going to last indefinitely). But with a game as popular as Warcraft, its life span will likely be very long. We have already had 5 years and we can probably easily be having 5-10 more. Maybe 10 years is excessive perhaps. Right now the technology is already outdated. Newer games are looking pretty good (have you seen any videos for Aion?). More and more games are likely going to siphon off players, come on its bound to happen. Some day another game with eventually exceed WoW in their number of subscribers. Someday.
However, I don’t think WoW will die at this point, just because someone has more subscribers, duh. There are people playing Ultima Online and the first Everquest aren’t there? MMOs don’t die so easily (unless they suck to begin with and were never able to get a following). When do you think blizzard would finally pull the plug on a dying MMO? Are they going to let the game go for the next 15-20 years?? Are they just going to wait till the game is no longer making money, I guess that would make sense.
Well, then there’s always the talk of the next blizzard MMO (which may very well take them 10 years to get finished with). When do you decide that the newest game out there will pull you away from Azeroth? Is it the graphics and playability? I personally think that one thing that keeps you and me in a particular MMO is the relationships that we’ve forged. I myself don’t feel that I’ll leave WoW for a long long time. Not until the people I play with leave. Maybe if my guild on my home server told everybody, “hey were moving to X MMO for Y reasons, go buy an account and come join us.” At that point I would strongly consider it, and maybe if the WoW twitter world all decided to up and change MMOs. I guess there would have to be one bad @ss game out there for such a migration to happen. (And the meeting is still going strong, almost an hour long with no end in sight).
I also wonder, if eventually I’m going to leave WoW, then why am I bothering with all of this work. Ha! I guess you should be enjoying your self as you go, enjoy the journey kind of thing, and I have, I really have. Anyway, what’s your take on this? How much more life do you think Azeroth has for us? What would pull you to a new MMO?
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I hope by “looks good”, you only mean aesthetically, because holy crap is Aion a complete dung heap game-wise.
I think that the social pressure to stay in touch with your in game friends is the big reason behind battlenet.
I am betting that Blizzards next gen mmo will have the capability to establish friends lists as well as chat between games. That way people can set up a mirror guild/clan/gang whatever it’s going to be called in the other game.
Once they figure out how to make the friendships both cross server and cross platform they will have found a way to keep the social aspect there even as people slowly move to the new game.
There will not really be WoW subscribers anymore so much as Battlenet subscribers.
See, blizzard is ahead of our time, thinking as such, their going to make it easy for us to move to their new MMO. Of course I hope they’ll let me transfer my characters over too and convert all of my gold to the new currency >_< … probably not.
@Rilgon, I only sad video of Aion, haven’t tried it myself. Game play is critical. Nothing else out there has even made me slightly tempted to leave wow, I think only the MMO blizzard comes out with next will.
I think as long as WoW is profitable they won’t kill it. As for their next MMO, I hear rumors it’s going to be different then WoW, but there’s always rumors…always
I don’t see WoW going away any time soon.
You can look at games with even less of a social feel to them such as Diablo II which came out around 1999 that are still kicking strong. Heck, I was playing D2 up until I made the switch to WoW back in 2008.
I wouldn’t hesitate to say that WoW will still be kicking strong in 10 years. It will definitely lose some players over time just like any other game would, but there won’t be a massive jump over to a single game that becomes the “WoW Killer” unless the new Blizzard MMO turns out to be something like World of Starcraft, which would likely kick STO in the teeth.
Fifteen years, twenty, whatever it ends up being I’m sure WoW will still be around for many years to come.
@psynister Oh, I’m sure, but all good things must come to an end sooner or later. I don’t know if it can last 20 years. Maybe it can, maybe we’ll be telling our grand children that we remember back in the day when old Arthus was causing a mess for the first time in Northrend. lol, who knows.
I think WoW itself still has a few years in it, but for me, personally, it depends on how they handle Cataclysm. I haven’t liked a lot of the changes in Wrath but it’s still been enjoyable. Cataclysm for me is going to make or break the game, especially with all of the hunter changes, which I can’t know if I’ll like until I try them.
If I played another MMO, it’d probably be LotRO for a bit at least. Tried it before and it was pretty good, nice community, etc. Tried Aion, it’s really pretty and they had some good ideas.. but that doesn’t make an awesome game sadly. I’d like to see some improvements there, perhaps I’d reconsider if the game wasn’t so based around PvP and the levelling was more fun.
@Rivs That’s what I think too, as long as WoW is making money they’ll keep it around even if its as old as sin. And the new MMO is going to be completely different I’ve heard as well.
@Jaedia I hope Cataclysm is great. I don’t think Blizzard will mess it up. I do fear that they like to “dumb down” everything to the point where is over simplified, half the fun is the challenge, but I guess I shouldn’t complain, a lot of their changes are in my favor as a casual players.