While I’m a huge fan of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) genre and love hopping around from site to site on “teh interwebz”, reading blogs dedicated to them, sometimes I’m left scratching my head. At the moment, I’m sitting here, an eyebrow arched in a way that only villains with twirly moustaches and stovepipe hats ought to do at the notion that an MMOG fails because it didn’t come up with a fancy new take on the user interface.
Am I the only one that thinks that it is asinine to yank out the “Boo! Hiss! Copycat!” card simply because the interface is adopted from another game and doesn’t have go-faster stripes on the handlebars? There’s a reason that the world hasn’t embraced the square steering wheel; version 1.0 (Project Codename: Roundie) was a success! Why? Because innovation is not the point. It serves it’s purpose and that’s that. However, some pundits would make it a sin to adopt a UI based on WoW’s hugely successful model and then constantly praise WoW’s easy to use UI as one (among many others) of the reasons that it has enjoyed so much success and become the cornerstone of the genre.
I know. Your eyebrow is twitching now too, isn’t it?
At the end of the day, a game should be judged on what it does provide, which leads to the only question that matters when it comes to reviewing a game: is it fun? Something that can’t likely be deduced in less time than it takes to make a bag of popcorn in the microwave.
