The WOW Clone Concept

You can barely see an article on a new MMO before someone comments how this new game is just another WOW (World of Warcraft ) clone now a days. Is there any truth to the phrase WOW clone?

It is true that many MMOs follow the same formula as the one WOW used. WOW was not the first game to come up with that formula but it was the first MMO to achieve a massive success by implementing it in such a way as to appeal to a huge number of players. Many people have a love it or hate it attitude towards the game but there is no denying that keeping 12 million players subscribed month after month for years is pretty impressive. Considering all of this it is no surprise that many games that came after it tried to copy this undoubtedly successful formula.

The million dollar question is do the game mechanics make up such a core part of a game that if one game copies these mechanics it is automatically considered a clone? We have to remember that game mechanics are just a small part of a game. In a typical MMO you would have Art Style, Story, Lore, Features, Music, Sound and Theme as well. For people who like to consider other MMOs as being just WoW clones, having anyone of these in common seems to be enough. This is very wrong in my opinion, there is really a lot more then just mechanics to an MMO.

If the WoW clone phenomena where to spread on to other genres we would all be crying clone all the time. Lets take detective stories for example, they all follow the same premiss more or less as well, someone gets killed, a brilliant detective investigates, things seem to go wrong at first but then the final brilliant revelation hits and we all find out that it was obviously the butler who did it. The same plot line is so popular in detective stories that the butler did it phrase is considered a cliché yet you do not hear anyone saying that any book that uses this cliché is a Circular staircase clone! (supposedly according to some quick research I did, the butler did it was first used in the book The Circular Staircase published in 1907). No one would dare yet in the MMO world I have heard the WoW clone argument stretched so thin that it spawned new phrases such as the famous phrase: WoW in Space. recently I managed to come across this comment and I quote “EvE = Wow in space if my guns and equipment is bigger than your guns and equipment and i press my auto attack buttons (high mid low slots) in the right order you loose.” This person effectively reduced the WoW clone criteria to any game in which a better weapon and better equipment wins. Pretty much every single game with customizable equipment is a WoW clone according to this person! But wait.... wasn't that a factor in any multilayer game ever even way before WoW? If EvE that has a completely different formula, Different Setting, Nothing really in common to WoW, even the core (its a Sandbox game while WoW is theme-park) is entirely different yet at least One person still considers it as a copy of this utterly different game. We can safely assume that for this person or at least in his view every single MMO is a WoW clone for I cannot think of any game that's more different then WoW, honestly!

I do not want to stretch this too far or its gonna get boring. Some people need to be a bit more open. Just cause a game copies a few successful mechanics it doesn't make it a clone. We want companies to copy what works! I do not want to live in a world that when I play a really enjoyable game I have to worry that this will be the only time I will enjoy this type of game as no one else is ever going to repeat that formula! Of course the opposite is also true, a winning formula should not be used as an excuse for everyone to stop innovating. But the market takes care of that itself. WoW is successful yet plenty of games tried new things and keep on trying new things. The formula evolves! MMOs are a lot more then just equipping the right equipment, hitting the correct sequence of keys and winning a fight, they have story and lore at their core. They have an art style, music to compliment the game. They have added features such as crafting, mini games and Events. I urge everyone to appreciate these elements and realize that there is a much bigger world out there then just World of Warcraft.