Isn't ArchAge aiming for release next year? I can see that being a huge suprise hit. Great sandbox features piled with themepark features. It looks amazing. 

Also I'd put TOR above GW2 based purely on hype from all over, not just here.

Is GW2 launching in Asia? Because that will give it a BIG advantage over TOR.

In the west i see it being: (Top 3 only)

SW:TOR

GW2

WoW 

Overall I'd go:

WoW

GW2

SW:TOR

I see a few people saying "im worried about the Community of GW2" but if im being real honist with you, im more worried about if GW2 does well and DOES "beat WoW" that means alot of the WoW community will come to GW2 and THAT is bad imo, dont get me wrong i know not all wow players are the same and i wont try to lable them all the same, but come on guys, even your cant say that WoW does not  hold the largest community of MMORPG Dickheads that just play to fuck everyone elses fun up.

1- WoW: face it, Blizzard will keep on milking your pockets. Of course some will leave but mostly for Diablo III. Its ultimate demise will be either one of the second place games, WoW's Sequel or World of STARCRAFT in 2015 with 3 faction PvP (one can dream)

2- GW2 or SWTOR... hard to tell, both have big shoes to fill GW1 has a loyal fanbase that dream of the sequel 24/7 and Star Wars must be one of the (if not THE) biggest IP in the gaming/movie world. ultimately, second place will go to GW based on the number of players they draw away from Rift, Aion and AoC. while SWTOR will draw from WoW and LotR. Starwars fans are drawn to big IP names (Warcraft, LOTR, EQ, Sony, Apple... you know BIG names) and they are also at either end of the demographics (young and old)

3- SWTOR or GW2... well obviously there is a possibility for some F2P, but those are mostly populated by people waiting for something other than WoW to seize their attention, either because they don't like what's currently on the market or because they played it over and over... or their just Broke. And for the big playewrs, people with no money are just not interesting.

actually if you are talking only sub numbers then World of Warcraft will have MUCH MUCH lower numbers once SWTOR/GW2 hit simply by way of migration. Those same people will leave WoW to play the newest greatest. This combined with blizzards new system of standards and practices and lack of speed in churning out content for end gamers will most likely destroy the game population.  Not to forget that LOTRO is releasing their expansion and DDO is as well so LOTRO should be in the 3 slot easily.

"WoW's Sequel or World of STARCRAFT in 2015 with 3 faction PvP (one can dream)"

sorry folks it's never gonna happen they said it over and over and the Titan project is actually a whole new ip not based on any others.

Finally, with their management as it is they simply don't have the drive to provide games with fast quality content and they really don't care about the majority of their players it's pretty obvious they don't when they wait until they lost 1mil subs to actually put in cosmetics for RPers after HOW many years?

Originally posted by Morfeus641

Sure. I'll elaborate.

1) A fulfilling experience without quests, and without resorting to making the players make their own fun. The quest experience in MMORPGs was a direct answer to the void of MMO spaces that offered little beyond grinding for solo players. It is perhaps over-iterated at this point, but GW2 offers a bold departure---No quests! Still fun! Lots to do! How fulfilling exactly will it be to "wander the land exploring, and stumbling upon dynamic events"? I wonder. RIFT promised that rifts were the most amazing thing ever, but actually they are pretty formulaic, and after a week I started taking pains to avoid them just so I could get on with my day. Will GW2's dynamic content be the same?

2) World vs. world vs world PVP. Interesting. Will it matter? Will it be epic, or merely instanced? What is the purpose of doing cross-server PVP this way? What if your opponent servers are low-population? Is there a queue? It seems a risk. 

3) Underwater combat. They've spent a surprising amount of time on this. They've clearly invested a lot of development effort into it. Why? It's never been a forte of MMO play. Historically underwater combat is buggy, annoying, difficult to manage, and less fun than standing on the ground. So why develop this to the extent they have? Nobody I know enjoys it. Let's assume that they've made it more fun than it's ever been before---will that matter to players? Or will they continue to avoid underwater combat in droves simply because dealing with the Z-axis is annoying?

SWTOR is taking a mild risk---that simply adding voiceovers will be enough to spice up MMO play. GW2 is taking a much greater risk by radically changing so many systems at once. I applaud them, but I know from experience that, as George R. R. Martin would put it, "words are wind." We'll have to try GW2 to see if ArenaNet's ideas are worth the effort spent talking them up. 

 1) Unlike rifts, DEs are the open world content, we know there's going to be 1500-1600 of them at least. You no longer have a situation where you were planning on questing, but a rift got in your way so you had to deal with it.
 

So instead of looking at DEs like they're random things, imagine a world where any traditional leveling type quest any other game offers is instead done by a DE. At the very least they're more immediate, you don't have to pick it up or turn it in, you can jump in late or leave early and still get partial credit based on how much you participated. The events scale up with more players and are purely cooperative. There's no spawn tagging or needing everybody to collect 10 objects off the ground. They've actually built the game from the ground up to make PVE griefing impossible.

Unlike rifts or PQs where people do them and scatter to do something else, the events chain together so people will just naturally fall into mobs (not saying groups because they don't have to group) of 5-10 people just following a chain. The events run on cycles and the game automatically scales you down in power when you do one so that nobody can grief them. The beauty of this is that it lets you repeat any content in the entire open world of the game. Group with anybody from your friends list no matter how badly you've outleveled them.

To me, that they change the world is the least interesting aspect of them, though I do love that they can be failed. You can do things with DEs that you can't easily do with quests, like have the event fail when bandits burn enough hay bales.

TL:DR Immediate, visual, repeatable, failable, community building instead of isolating. They're a truly amazing concept.  (edit: rereading it, this is a bad explanation.  Please watch this if you haven't.  It's long, but an excellent comprehensive explanation with a Q&A  http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic )

2)  Unlike having 3 factions all on the same server, doing cross server first and foremost makes the PVP much larger. If a server has 1000 people who want to PVP, instead of dividing them up into 333 vs 333 vs 333, GW2's PVP is 1000 vs 1000 vs 1000.

There is no queue, and no limit to the number of people who can participate. The matches last for 2 weeks and take place across 4 huge zones (one for each server that can be invaded, as well as a central one to fight over). Part of the central one has been leaked and it looks like it will be enormous.

At the end of the two weeks, servers are pitted against new servers based on W/L record and active population. Instead of fighting the same people all the time, you fight them for a while and then get to experience new players with new tactics. Reseeding the servers makes the fights more balanced. If your server wins, you get matched up with other winning servers and the next match will be harder. Also the W/L record gives you something concrete to fight over. They're no longer like BGs where if you lose so what just start another one. I can see some serious call to arms going on in the cities, trying to get people to come turn things around. No queue and no player limit, remember. Epic.

3)  Part of it really is the introduction of an underwater breathing mask that is automatically equipped when you go in the water.  It's a small change but with huge consequences.  It's leading them to try giving people underwater weapons they automatically switch to, underwater versions of skills (fire magic that boils water or vertical nets), underwater races with towns.  Enemies who use different skills whether they're underwater.  Skills that mess with the Z axis.  Even a whole concept of danger level related to depth.  The further down you go, the tougher it is.

They've said that in other games underwater combat has always felt tacked on. So part of it is probably just an attempt to try to make it a full part of the game. ArenaNet is not afraid to take risks with this game, whether it be DEs or more active combat or deemphasizing the holy trinity. Underwater combat can be considered another such risk. It might not pan out. We'll have to wait and see. If people don't like it, then they took a chance and they'll know not to put as much effort into expansion content.  Hopefully I've managed to convey that they're making it a whole underwater experience, not just above ground combat but with a Z axis.

 I apologize for the length, but those are some good questions and I tried to give them the respect they deserve.

Pretty easy to make a list when the criteria for ranking isn't given.  I can only think of two non-subjective metrics of success.  The main one is total subscribers.  I'll be shocked if WoW doesn't keep the number one spot for at least a few more years.  The other one is number of new subscribers added next year.  Some reasonable criteria needs to be used for that though, such as subscribing and being an active player for at least 3 months.  If you are going by that then I could see ranking TOR and GW2 above WoW, but it sure would be nice if you told us what you used instead of making us guess.

Originally posted by Sethron

I see a few people saying "im worried about the Community of GW2" but if im being real honist with you, im more worried about if GW2 does well and DOES "beat WoW" that means alot of the WoW community will come to GW2 and THAT is bad imo, dont get me wrong i know not all wow players are the same and i wont try to lable them all the same, but come on guys, even your cant say that WoW does not  hold the largest community of MMORPG Dickheads that just play to fuck everyone elses fun up.

WoW has the most dickheads because it has the most players...period.  Some of the nicest, coolest people I've met in gaming have been from my time playing WoW.  But when you have a large population, you're going to have more trolls and griefers than other games.  I've played tons of other games besides WoW, and found just as many jagoffs in terms of percentage of population in this games.  Fact is, you're playing a video game, which automatically means you are going to have a segment of the population that doesn't deal in reality and is sorely lacking in social skills anyway.  This goes for any MMO.  

I agree.  It is unfortunate that SWTOR will [probably] be so popular though, because I've seen the demo and there is NOTHING new brought to their table.

GW2 all the way for sure!  No arguing there.

WOW #1 alaways wow rulez!

I've just renewed my sub to Aion but i still havn't played it.. Don't know what i was thinking to be honest..

I think the list is spot on too.

Originally posted by VaultFairy

I've just renewed my sub to Aion but i still havn't played it.. Don't know what i was thinking to be honest..

 

I think the list is spot on too.

 

I get the same feeling when I play wow after wating a video of GW2.

Originally posted by just1opinion

Originally posted by Chilliesauce

If we see in terms of sheer popularity i would still keep WOW on top. It will always be the most talked about and most popular MMO.

 

This will only remain true if no other company spends the prime time advertising dollars that Blizzard spent and spends.  Now....that is possible, since they spent multiple fortunes on advertising, BUT.....as soon as another GOOD game spends that kind of advertising money.....it will be talked about just as much as WoW is now, if not as much as it used to be.

 

THANK YOU!!!

THANK YOU!.

Finally someone else gets it! I can finally take off my "wow is only popular because of advertising" shirt and go home....i can finally go home...

---

Originally posted by Diospyros
Pretty easy to make a list when the criteria for ranking isn't given.  I can only think of two non-subjective metrics of success.  The main one is total subscribers.  I'll be shocked if WoW doesn't keep the number one spot for at least a few more years.  The other one is number of new subscribers added next year.  Some reasonable criteria needs to be used for that though, such as subscribing and being an active player for at least 3 months.  If you are going by that then I could see ranking TOR and GW2 above WoW, but it sure would be nice if you told us what you used instead of making us guess.

---

The problem is, if you were to use any objective criteria for success...the "top 10 list" of MMORPGs would likely only be 3 or 4 games long next year. Actually, maybe only two.

Most MMORPGs suffer from what the conventional wisdom in the genre considers the "new normal" success, which is large box sales, and then a huge drop-off in active accounts over the following months, eventually stabilizing at niche subscription numbers ~200k and high turnover. All the games on the list other than 3 or 4 are going to be in that boat (or are already there...perhaps using free play or other gimicks to prop up numbers), and there's nothing "top 10" about that at all. It's just squeaking by and keeping the lights on.

Maybe he was talking about polish? Most Polished MMOs? That's more important than quality or game play or longevity now-a-days, isn't it? (sarcasm)

I think success in the MMORPG genre should be based on:

-Player retention - if you're supposedly creating a living, breathing immersive world for players to get lost in and tons of content, and you can't keep players interested for more than a month or two... I wouldn't call that success. If I were a dev, I would want to know how many people were still having fun and loving my game 6 months or a year later. I would want to measure average /played times in the hundreds of hours, not the tens. Creating a thriving community surrounding your game full of people who are connected and excited about their characters and the world...THAT"s success.

-Targeted market - If you are clearly creating a game targeted at WoW's 11 million subscribers, and you end up with 300k... sorry, you're not a niche success, you're a mass-market failure. You can't shoot the wall behind the target and then claim you were aiming at the wall. Target audience matters. You have to measure the players you ended up with against the players you were intending to target...it's really the only honest way. Did you honestly tell the money men at the beginning of this journey that you were going to stabilize at ~200k subscriptions with high turnover? I'll bet you didn't.

-Subscription / active population numbers that INCREASE over time, not decrease (goes along with the first two nicely. Sure there's only a few games in this genre that can ever boast this type of graph (one that goes up), that should definitely be a part of considering a game a success. People should not only want to play your game for a long time, they should be wanting to get their family and friends and coworkers involved. That's a social game.

If your game doesn't stand up to those standards, I would not call it a success.

At the moment in the genre, people really have very few good choices. Getting some of those desperate people to try your game by offering free trials doesn't show ANYTHING about the quality of your game. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Keeping players (and gaining more) is a much better sign, and so few games can claim to be doing that.

Wait until there's some real quality competition, and then we'll separate the successes and failures much more easily. There's going to be three or four games next year that could be real successes...and then there's going to be everything else (i.e. the post-WoW graveyard of games just keeping the lights on). The Everything else category is growing ever larger, but none of the games can really be called "Top" of anything. The best failure isn't really a category that makes any sense.

Hopefully the number of games in that REAL success category will increase over time (as developers learn from the last 6 years and stop making the same mistakes, or are lead by the nose towards innovation by companies like ArenaNet), but as to the crop we're looking at now, most of them don't have a chance of being anything other than what they are.

That ended up quite a bit longer than I intended. Sorry.

I agree with the whole list except for Tera.  Tera so far has been some what of a flop in Korea.  I would put Archeage or Planetside 2 in its place.

I see TSW growing more than GW2 and SW:TOR, it will launch weaker, and get momentum.

I'm too lazy to look it up. What was the reason for SWTOR not releasing in some form of asian markets? And if I'm wrong about it completely, and they will be, then I apologize.

I think that the list looks very good. Still, it is difficult to imagine WoW not being on number 1. They really have to lose a lot of subs to SWTOR to drop 2 places.

Im looking forward to GW2 myself. But I find it difficult how to measure its success compared to subbased games. A game that doesnt need a sub, will always sell extra boxes because of that. You also cant really compare boxsales to amount of subs.

As for The Secret World and possibly ArcheAge. Im kind of sceptical about Funcom and the way the state they release their games in. ArcheAge I expect to be a nichegame, especially if it stays open world PVP.

Then Planetside 2 is a fpsstyle game and made by Sony (also not a great quality release record), so even if they release in 2012, I dont expect they will get a large amount of subs .

Originally posted by Master_M2K

I approve of this list. However with Rift, I think it should go below The Secret World, because in-game I've been in so many conversations with people saying how they can't wait for one of the big 3 (GW2, SW:TOR, TSW).

Also regarding SW:TOR and GW2. The reason I agree with their positions on the list is because there is no doubt that SW:TOR will be hugely popular in the US and Europe. It will likely do better than GW2 in at least one of those continents. However GW2 will have something SW:TOR won't have... an Asian market, alongside the US and Europe. I say this because GW2 is aiming to be a highly competitive, highly skill-based, e-sport and it is no secret that a lot of Western games that have that sort of format appeal to the Asian market (Starcraft, Diablo & Dota-styled games).

So if NCSoft heavily markets GW2 to the east (focusing on the PvP) and NCSoft West markets it well over here, then we could get a highly successful game that will at least trump SW:TOR.

 

You beat me to it.  I'd put the list as GW2, TOR, TSW, then the rest.  People are sick of WoW and company.  In fact, I might even put TSW before TOR for the long haul.

Originally posted by rpgalon

I see TSW growing more than GW2 and SW:TOR, it will launch weaker, and get momentum.

Yeah that would be nice. It is really something different and I hope they will succeed. But with past releases it showed that if the launch is weak, it never recovers to full potential. So Funcom better do its best to avoid this scenario again.