I guess you could use a scale between Darkfall and WoW. Darkfall, niche by design, focused clearly on what it wants to be with no accomodations to soften the experience, and WoW, which wants to be the market leader and does so by trying to accomodate the widest variety of people.

Maybe we will see more striation in the market as more MMO’s try to target a specific demographic instead of all the bodies they can.

Yeap, the waiting to group was horrid in FFXI, but once you got going, its one of the more fun stuff in the mmo genre.

FFXI is weird. The core gameplay is still pretty difficult for new and casual players, but the hardcore in it just seem to steamroller it to a high level. So any change to make it easier would be viewed by them as WoWifying it.

It needed to be done though. FFXI had a ton of poor design decisions. One of the better neckpieces in the game came from a mob called argus. He wasn’t tough at all, a too weak to a capped player, but once he was dead, he would respawn anywheres from 18-30 hours. That means to camp him, you needed to wait often 12 hours straight in the same place, camping that mob. And he only had a 20% chance of dropping it.

What’s worse is that he was a shared spawn, so he might not even show up, instead a different mob with a different drop may spawn, and if it did, you’d have to wait another 18-30 hours to try again.

They fixed him by letting his prize drop in other instances, but a lot of the changes in ffxi were designed to make bad decisions like that a lot easier to deal with. Some remain still, and some just made the game easier for players overall, but I think they have a long way to go till they become a wow clone.

Basically, you formed up a six person group and you fought tough elite mobs. Everything you fight would be considered a boss-fight difficulty in other MMOs. You don’t go into a fight if you don’t have the perfect group make-up, and you certainly don’t attempt to kill anything with five people.

The feeling of FFXI (at least when I played at US launch) was very different from WOW like games. FFXI gameplay may sound boring because it’s just killing things for xp, but the combat itself was very fun and extreamly challenging.

I’ve heard that it’s possible now to kill some things solo. If this is true, FFXI has changed from what I knew.

So, yes, WoWification on a massive scale. Given the game was bleeding subscribers like a gutshot hemophiliac it apparently seemed like a worthwhile gamble at the time to the suits, but after two years of live release you don’t get to scrap your entire design and try again.

Now, I’ve never played FFXI and I barely touched EQ2, but I suspect those games were already pretty close to WoW, compared to SWG. I doubt the changes to those games were nearly as drastic as the NGE was. (Holy initialisms, Batman.) So while people may grumble that EQ2 or FFXI are getting too much like “easy mode” or “WoW” or what-have-you, it’s not nearly the same scale as the utter redesign the NGE brought about.

Based on the comments from Dblade and Julian, it also sounds like the changes were for the better, while still allowing the games to be distinct enough (decidedly not becoming WoW) to maintain their own playerbase. A Good Thing, in my book.

(I want more games to nick ideas from City of Heroes, personally. Sidekicking/Exemplaring and the Looking for Team interface spring to mind.)

In general, I like the changes I’ve seen over the last 5 years, so if that’s happened because of WoW then WoW has, on balance, been a positive influence.

As for niche games having to follow this model, well clearly that isn’t true now and will become less true in the future. There are already a ton of MMOs out there that haven’t really reacted to WoW, many of which have been around for years; A Tale in the Desert, Ryzom, Monsters of Mirth, Rubies of Eventide, Istaria…all of those continue to exist as if WoW had never happened, and there are many, many more, and more still on the way.

The sky isn’t falling.

Yeah, I guess it’s okay to ask ourselves and be concerned about all these titles “pulling to the same side” and blurring differences, but on the other hand I think much of that pulling is necessary. Do we really -want- to go back to the good ol’ days of supermegahuge grinding? Ginormous zones with little in them and their biggest challenge being their size? Actually -needing- spreadsheets to have a chance at being efficient? Arcane mechanics? Fascist death penalties? Forced grouping?

I’m not gonna say WoW solved everything, but it did solve a few things. If nothing else, by force of successful example. Not all of WoWification is bad.