Making a killer MMORPG 1

So, I've decided to make my own MMORPG.

No, I'm not s***ting you, I'm serious. MMO. RPG. You know, the thing where you get on and play an RPG with a bunch of faggots like yourself. The ones that usually cost an exorbitant amount of money to play. Yep.

Now, by this time, most of you are slapping your heads and looking for the "Back" button on your web browser. Yeah, this is a dumb idea. The MMORPG market is so hard to get into nowdays, it's unbelievable. The genre is saturated with about every concievable style of RPG on the market, all doing varying degrees of "Well". So why do I want to do it?

Easy. Because I do. MMORPGs are probably the funnest version of games you can play, if you do them right. The expansiveness of any major MMORPG on the market now guarantees that even if the game sucks, you're almost always guaranteed to be able to play it for a long time. Take, for example, Final Fantasy XI. While I've given up FFXI after realizing I was spending 3+ hours a day for virtually no return, I still recognize it as a great MMORPG. The game is beautiful, huge, and allows for many different types of gamers and gameplay.

So, if I'm making an MMORPG, let me show you my pattern of thought. Let's look at some of the biggest names in MMORPGs as it stands. This is going by sheer popularity and population, not how much YOU PERSONALLY love said specific game. As well, I tried to stick to newer MMOs, so...:

IN ORDER OF "POWER" IN THE MARKET
1. Everquest
2. World of Warcraft
3. Everquest II
4. City of Heroes
5. Guild Wars
6. Final Fantasy XI
7. Runescape
8. Ultima Online
9. Star Wars Galaxies
10. Dark Age of Camelot

Okay, the above list is my estimation, but I may be wrong. A lot of games I wish I could add to my 10 (Like Lineage II or EVE Online), but they just don't fit into the top 10s, so I keep them out. Just about after slot #5, all of those games group into what I consider "Accessory markets". I'll explain that later. In any case, these can be broken down into some pretty generic groupings:

MEDIEVAL FANTASY
Everquest (1)
World of Warcraft (2)
Everquest 2 (3)
Guild Wars (5)
Final Fantasy XI (6)
Runescape (7)
Ultima Online (8)
Dark Age of Camelot (10)

Wow, talk about saturated. Let's face it: the American and European markets suck up Medieval fantasy games like I suck down soda. This is primarily because of the Dungeons and Dragons craze that hit America, which Ultima Online so powerfully translated into the computer realm. For a long time, if you said "RPG", it was synonymous with "Medieval Fantasy", no matter how hard people tried to break from it. Wizards, Warlocks, Knights in Castles- this is the mainstay of most MMORPGs. Keep in mind that while innovative games like WoW, Guild Wars, and FFXI try to break from some of this, they still fall squarely under it, at least in my book.

BE YOUR OWN FANTASY GAMES
City of Heroes (4)
Star Wars Galaxies (9)

Why are these games so popular? What do they do? They take something dear to people's hearts and put them in the shoes of the characters they've always wanted to be. For example, when I was 7, I thought Link from the Legend of Zelda series was some sort of god. I would have paid good money to BE Link. Now, I wouldn't take money to be his cartoon self, but.. whatever. You get the idea. Comic book nerds all over the world got one big hard-on over City of Heroes, and all those Sci-Fi con nerds basically had wet dreams all the time about Star Wars Galaxies. And that's why they're so popular.

So, where does this leave me? Out in the d*** cold. First off, I seriously don't like games that fall under the swords-and-magic-and-kingdoms-and-kings theory. It's freaking boring. Who am I to challenge the greatness that is Everquest II, anyway? It'd be like me fighting the whole US army with a butterknife. I don't have any franchises to rape like a little maniac, so I don't have that, either. So, what's a poor girl to do?

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