WoW loses over a million subs, SR4 seems like Volition has learned...

Over the last three months, WoW has lost over a million subs and is now stable, it seems, at a little over 9 million players worldwide. They're expecting a further decline in their playerbase. I don't think ill of Blizzard, for a company that's given me so many hours of fun over the last 8 years, they deserve some loyalty. They're still not pulling Biowares afterall, it's not like they took a great RPG and turned it into a point&shoot with little player-choice afterall.

Yet, it's without question that they too fell in the trap of trying to cater to everyone... to end up catering to nobody.

At some time in a studio's life, they come to feel like they should try to keep their player-base at all costs and lose sight of who they were. The first two Diabloes were not meant for everybody, RTS' like Starcraft and Warcraft aren't meant for everyone, yet all tree franchises seem to be developed now with an eye to keep everybody on-board by lowering the standard to win.

As in; let's give the inept some game.

I'm the first to admit that I absolutely stink at SC or WC. The computer rapes me on easy, it's that bad. That doesn't mean that I want Blizzard to come up with an expansion to those franchises that makes it possible for SC/WC idiots like myself to win, eiher local or online. I'll just get some soda and popcorn and watch prof-matches and be totally, utterly devastated by discovering how frigging awesome those games are. And how bad they suck when I play them. It's all good.

But please, don't code in an option so that I can play and feel like a pro, because the people that can actually play these games will be cheated.

SR3 was a fiasco and heralded the end of THQ (sadly, I might add). It also made Volition the Obsidian of sandbox-games. SR3 was a bad game, not fun and actually pretty pointless. In my opinion, SR2 is still the absolute high-point in sandboxing and I still can't get enough of that game. Might have to do with Shaundi as a homie, lol. It's a shining example of how teambot-ai should be handled.

As an aside to that, I sense that same awesomeness in Liara's ai in ME3, Liara makes it possible to play ME3 on the hardest level. It's as if Volition and Bioware somehow spent extra time on the ai's for those two iconic characters.

SRIV seems to be looking up. Slated to drop in august (probably kicking off the winter season for triple A's), SRIV seems to build on SR3. The story is now totally forgettable. You're the leader of the Saints and you're the president of the US. And then a lot of shit happens. In SR3 that was it. Nothing to came back to after the initial hour of play and quite probably the first game ever to see zero-day pick-ups returned to the shop the very same day... in bulk.

It was so bad in the Netherlands that major retailers stopped accepting returns a day later. Used-game chains like Game-Mania also rejected SR3 turn ins for a long time. Yes, SR3 was that bad.

In SRIV however, Volition has added more costumization, the player now has super-powers, minigames are tiered and there's an alien-invasion going on... Though Volition stuck with the SR3 engine (why?), they seem to have put that engine on a torture-rack and squeezed every ounce of awesomeness out of it. The developer gameplay vid looks very promising and despite myself, I find myself... tentavely interested.

Once bitten, twice shy though. I'll be following SRIV very closely up to release and then I'll be allover the let's plays on you tube. I'm so not interested in wasting a small fortune on a coaster again.