I’m curious as to why nobody has, to my knowledge, made a niche MMO that has nothing but raid content in it. No levelling, just raiding big monsters with 10/25/40 other people and getting better gear to raid bigger monsters. If niche PvP games can lure in enough subscribers to support themselves, I’m left wondering why there isn’t a niche game for raiders yet.
Have gathering areas such as the cities in Guild Wars, and then portals leading to dungeons with big monsters in them; production costs would be much lower due to not having to generate vast landscapes filled with quests, so you could spend more time on making each raid encounter something special.
I’ve trademarked “Ever Raider” just in case.
For the dungeon-crawling side, there’s Dungeons & Dragons Online and the soon-to-be-dead Dungeon Runners. One could also consider the Diablo series to be something like this, although only with 4/8 players.
I’ve wondered this for a while now as well. If the “endgame” of these MMO things is so hot, why not make a game that dispenses with the undesired leveling grind?
The snarky answer is that players still go through the leveling grind even if they want to raid, and the business wonks want to monetize that.
I do think there is a market for a “raid only” game. It may not be huge, but it’s there.
Shadows of the Collosi?
@Hirvox: Those games both have a lot of minions to mow through before getting to a boss, the instancing is right, but Guild Wars does this well. I’m thinking Nothin’ but Boss, as it were.
@Tesh: It’s probably not a huge market, but if you look at the number of people raiding in World of Warcraft since that facet of the game was made more accessible, you’d only have to skim a small percentage off of that to do very well for yourself. I’m not saying that the development costs would be small, but they’d probably be significantly less than a Quest ‘n’ Grind MMO.
@Zubon: Pff, it scored a measly 90+% on Metacritic, why would any MMO developer sit up and take note of that.
Add me to the players who are puzzled by this.
1) WoW, for most players is now about raiding
2) Levelling is considered a tedious pre-raid chore to be blasted through as fast as possible.
3) There are a real lack of game to hop to if you like raiding and get tired of WoW. Most games have nothing like the complexity or quality of raids. I thought about AoC but the raids seemed terribly short and somewhat buggy when I played it last year. I tried Vanguard but got to about level 17 and decided I really couldn’t be bothered to crawl my way to the level cap alone. EQ2 and Lotro have raids but have the same boring no mates grind to cap issue. Am now, having left WoW to find another game to raid in, playing DDO and Eve.
It will be interesting to see if Blizzard’s next MMO, which has been hinted at – in an incredibly vague way – being something more akin to Free Realms than World of Warcraft, is the sort of game where Questing, PVP and Raiding are separate sub-games that you can take your avatar into, but neither on has an effect on the other two.