Lord British still likes WoW

Rich Garriott, aka Lord British, aka one of the grandfathers of MMO gaming and even gaming in general through the Ultima series, has fallen on some tough times lately. His latest attempt to re-enter the MMO market, Tabula Rasa, was recently cancelled, and with that, so was his job at NCSoft. Still, according to computerandvideogames.com, he says he's ready to bounce back and get right into the gaming market.

But on a more topical note, he says something in the article about World of Warcraft, praising them for their phenomonal growth and saying that they have "shown us all what good game development is about." Certainly, most of us here, I would think, would strongly agree with that statement. But it is fun to compare and contrast this statement to somewhere around a year ago. Back then, he said that he didn't believe WoW would hurt Tabula Rasa's sales, because MMORPGers generally play a game or two at a time and move on after a year or so.

It's difficult to say whether he was right back then, seeing as WoW's numbers are higher than ever, and as the Holiday season winds down, there's still plenty of long queues on many servers. Anecdotally, I myself have played over 3 years now (I would have been here all 4 years, but my computer broke down just as WoW was being released back in the day and I had to wait til I could replace it), and am in a guild with many people who have been playing as long or longer.

Of course, the other argument has been that WoW's numbers are leveling off, and it's just about to hit that plateau of subscribers. And everyone agrees that the queues will probably evaporate as the holidays end, and many people lets their subscriptions lapse again after having tasted as much of Northrend as they want.

But either way, now he's praising them pretty much unreservedly, which is pretty cool in a sort of "the student has become the master" type of way, if nothing else. If he can get back into the MMO gaming business like he plans, it'll be interesting to see what lessons he takes from Blizzard.