Is Warhammer going to do well, yes, how well, only will know when the game comes out. I say it will break 1 million subscribers. If they do the subscriptions counting like WoW, they will probably break 4 million subscribers.

If anything, there shouldn’t be an end-game and no level cap. Sure, the hardcore would become very powerful in the game, but knowing that there are people with a higher level than you shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the game. The only problem would be balancing PvP (and, for fuck’s sake, NO CHAOS PVP only, like lineage 2).

First and foremost this means reducing the time-to-end-game by at least an order of magnitude and providng people with something to actually do when they get there. In fact, leveling up should be treated more like an extended tutorial, a SP game within the game that gently exposes people to working with/against other players. If a class-based game, expect that devoted players won’t want to have to decide between classes except perhaps which to try first, and making it much quicker to max out a character helps in this regard.

Make the end-game revolve around player conflict, not gear and economy. The only hard part here is how to a)emphasize player conflict without frustrating/disinvolving the less-skilled/time-strapped players, and b) introduce an element of persistance and progress to invest players in-between playing sessions.

Don’t make players be encyclopedists/trivia-mavins, e.g. ‘What mob do I kill in what zone to farm ingrediant x to make thing-a-ma-jig y that gives me a +3 sta upgrade’.

Farming for gear is bad. Farming for quests is worse. Farming for single-use items is evil. (I mean both farming for these things directly or farming for gold for these purposes.)

Favor quest-quality/diversity over quantity. Perhaps each level can have one single quest that is class specific. Sure that means everyone ends up doing the same small set of quests, but this is no loss when the alternative is meaningless quests. Those players who want to spoil the story elements will do so, but at least this way, those players not inclined to do so might actually get a story worth not spoiling.

Fill the world with mini-games that utilize the core-mechanics (a la WoW’s battlegrounds), and make sure players don’t have to wait forever to find opponents/teammates).

Get rid of fillers (like eating/drinking and no-skill farming/gathering).

Aside from all this, obviously you must meet par with Blizzard on two things:

Shiny. (fun look/sound, but don’t require cutting-edge hardware)

Accessable. (easy to get into)

So I think the path is pretty clear, though as I admitted, discovering how to fill in that blank of ‘what to do in the end-game’ isn’t going to be easy. If EA doesn’t interfere, WHO might just do it. If not, I imagine Blizzard itself will take things along this direction, either by making a WoW sequel or changing WoW.

[...] This hasn’t been met with much bliss in the press, mainly because EA have a tendancy to buy up and then scrap long-term MMO because they don’t have the market knowledge to back it up (aka: Kesmai syndrome). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesmai http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/20/ea-buys-mythic/ [...]

We could all have lost confidence in UO at that point. But in context, it came across as rather inspiring.

OWO was just a domain name that Origin bought to host UO servers, at a time where there were hopes of making more than one virtual world. We ran it as a rogue domain with a rogue FAQ that quite horrified the marketing department.

The initial money for UO, legend has it, came directly from EA with a “special projects” sort of check provided by Larry Probst. It was relatively little — $1m, I think — and Richard Garriott is the one who went to bat to get it.

I’d say the real decline of these types of games shouldn’t be blamed on whichever monolithic corporation is at the top of the food chain (really they’re more interested in bottom lines than lines of code or dialog). Problems arise when internal management tries to meet that bottom line and hit an arbitrary date on the fiscal calendar by any means necessary often sacrificing potential for money in hand.

It also seems to happen when the development team no longer has their hand on the rudder, and it’s turned over to a “live” team and the original vision, passion and drive is lost, diluted or just heads off in a different direction from what the playerbase originally signed up for.

Whether it was a contractual obligation to EA rather than a real desire is something I don’t know. Or rather, how the scales tipped on the subject. It seems obvious from various sources that some people at EA didn’t believe in the idea of UO, but I doubt everyone was unified in their thinking.