World of Warcraft: A Jack of All Trades

Wrath of the Lich King is getting close to release and I can tell by the amount of people on the servers that a lot of players are returning to the game. World of Warcraft seems to have a siren's call that the general MMO populace just can't resist. Some think World of Warcraft's continuing popularity is due to it being the first MMO for so many people, but I'm not so sure. I know game nostalgia can be a powerful force, I still find myself playing the original Master of Orion sometimes. However, MMOs are constantly getting more content and changing their mechanics. Unlike a console game you can never go back and get the same experience in a MMO. Instead it seems more likely that people return to World of Warcraft for some other reason.

I like to think of World of Warcraft as the biggest snowball in the history of video games. It just keeps rolling around picking up innovation from other games and making itself larger. Only niche areas like player housing, which Blizzard ignores on purpose, escape being assimilated. This is why making a new MMO with the same scope of content would be so incredibly expensive. And while I don't think it would take a billion dollars, it would definitely require more money then anyone else has spent. Just look at the amount of money EA spent on making Warhammer. It was probably similar to what Blizzard originally spent on World of Warcraft, but so much has been added since then. Warhammer clearly crushes World of Warcraft in a lot of specific PvP areas, but that doesn't seem to be enough to let it challenge Wrath of the Lich King.

Based on recent trends it seems like a decent number of people are leaving Warhammer to go back to World of Warcraft. I don't think its because they are looking back at World of Warcraft through rose colored glasses either. Blizzard does a great job of designing content for all the different play styles that people have. There's quests, dungeons, raids, arenas, battlegrounds, and even an attempt at a Warhammer's RvR zone. All of this content has been slowly improved since the game has been released. It doesn't matter that other games may be able to beat World of Warcraft in one or two areas. The combination of having "decent/polished" content in so many different areas seems to have a cumulative effect on the game's popularity.

There's a common description for hybrid classes in MMOs which goes "jack of all trades, master of none." It's a nice way of saying that you can do a bit of everything, but don't expect to be the best in anything. This sort of reminds me a lot of how World of Warcraft is put together. It's player combat isn't as good as Warhammer, its raiding isn't as good as Everquest 2 and its economy definitely doesn't run as smoothly as EVE Online. Yet for all the problems of being a jack of all trades it seems that it's worked out for the game. There's a finite amount of content in any MMO and players don't like focusing on a single area as much as you would think. Most players want to run dungeons, fight some other players and maybe raid every so often. While Blizzard probably isn't the best in any of these areas they do offer high quality content in all of them.

Based on the success of World of Warcraft and its expansions I can only guess that they have the right idea. Don't spend all your development time trying to be the best in one specific area, just have decent content in all of them. After all sometimes that old saying is worded as: "jack of all trades, master of none, though better then a master of one."