14 DAY TRIAL // What if Activision used all the resources it poured into Destiny to promote World of Warcraft?
It's a simple question that has pretty deep ramifications when you think about it. World of Warcraft is the most successful game the company owns, and has raked in billions since its release.
What's more, the game came out 10 years ago, and it defined a genre. While not the first entry in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game arena, it's definitely the most influential, by far.
All the games that came out after it tried to emulate the engrossing experience it provided, and the masterful craft of the folks at Blizzard. Granted, they had a pretty rich background to fall back on, including three previous games set in the same universe.
World of Warcraft became the gold standard of MMOs
At its peak, World of Warcraft had 12 million concurrent subscribers from all around the world, and Blizzard's magic touch was the only thing responsible for bringing in such a crowd.
The quality of the content, its variety, and the streamlined systems the game employed set the benchmark in the genre and everyone hoped to be able to make the next World of Warcraft, or at least something comparable in value, which would guarantee success.
With the game spanning ten years and four expansions so far, many players came, saw was there was to see, conquered what they could, and moved on. The game has a certain magical quality about it, where even if you decide to quit, you still follow current developments from time to time.
Its biggest strength is decidedly the ability to provide an engrossing and challenging experience that you can share with your friends, no matter what your tea preference is. There is a lot of content for role-players, a wealth of options for PvE, as well as exciting PvP to engage in.
The chilling present
Now, Blizzard itself doesn't feel like the game has the Steam it had a few years back, with its subscriber base falling to "just" 6.8 million, which is still insane if you consider that most of the players interested in the game don't have much to do at the moment but wait for the new content in Warlords of Draenor.
The company, however, still expects the game to go pretty strong, all things considered, and the development team was just recently boosted to over 200 individuals, with Blizz execs stating that they have enough ideas to last them the next ten years' worth of expansions.
Now, the wealth of content that Blizzard is banking on wasn't built in a day, but now that the process has been figured out to a large extent, any new massively multiplayer online video game is expected to have a much better start than WoW did back in the day.
This is also the case with Destiny, which is currently breaking through various records such as the most pre-ordered new IP, the best-selling console game at launch, most people shot in the face on day one, most millions of hours played in the first week and other such coveted nonsense.
Everybody slammed the game for being essentially boring and repetitive, which is worrisome, given the sums mentioned in the media and the marketing efforts behind the game.
The trick is to get people to stick
There is, however, a silver lining. Bungie is just starting expanding Destiny. There are events kicking off every week and two expansions already in the making, and presumably a lot of other surprises along the way.
Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that Destiny has no soul, and no matter how much bling you throw at it, it's not going to scale up to World of Warcraft favorably. Too bad Activision didn't get some guys from Blizzard to board the Bungie train.
If you can't get immersed into the world of Destiny the way you can with WoW, the game is never going to be anything more than a pedestrian MMO that's "more fun with friends" and doesn't have the multiplayer appeal of traditional military shooters.
Still waiting for Titan.