How "Friendly To WoW Players" Is Too Friendly For Warhammer 40,000 MMO?

THQ games boss Danny Bilson touted the WoW-friendliness of upcoming MMO Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millenium to UK website CVG in a recent interview. Bilson is unsurprisingly excited about his own game, but it's easy to infer cause for concern among much of Warhammer's fanbase from his remarks.

"As a WoW fanatic, I'm going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It's very friendly to the WoW player," Bilson told CVG. This brief statement is innocuous in itself, but it's fabulous grist for a little overwrought hand-wringing speculation (with some pontificating about the MMORPG space on the side).

We all understand that 99 percent of companies in the industry would kill for a fraction of WoW's audience, but do we need more games in the MMO space that ape it so closely?  As I rhetorically asked on our latest MMO podcast, do we need more people making WoW? Blizzard is pretty good at it these days.

All that we've seen from Dark Millenium so far is the brief E3 trailer (reposted below), and it doesn't come out for another two years, so writing it off is more than a little premature. Still, the few scenes in the trailer that show the HUD have a very traditional MMO look to them, with action bars holding buttons that no doubt fire off cooldown-limited attacks and support abilities. Maybe I'm just hating, but I've been there and done that -- and there is going to be no shortage of new places to do it all over again between now and Dark Millenium's release. Is there that much of an audience for doing the autoattack-plus-hotkeys level grind with a Warhammer 40,000 skin on it?

Maybe I'm too sensitive to the lifecycle of Blizzard's games. We've seen it several times now: Blizzard takes someone else's core idea, refines the heck out of it, releases it to millions of sales and a chorus of fan-sung hosannas, and then everyone else tries and fails to copy Blizzard's game for the next ten years. Why do such large swathes of the industry think it's a good path to iterate (or outright plagiarize) a design that has already been refined down to a molecular level by the company that is acknowledged as the grandmasters of that process by the entire world?

I'd love for THQ and Vigil to come out swinging with Dark Millenium gameplay (due to be shown in the next six months, according to Bilson) and prove me wrong. Perhaps the developers have a compelling new angle on MMO gameplay that shares superficial resemblances to WoW (and EverQuest and a few dozen other games). Bilson touts the title's multi-person vehicles in the linked interview, so maybe there's more where that came from. One extremely brief gameplay shot in the trailer (at 40 seconds in) shows a targeting reticle in the middle of the screen and some shooting going on, so there's hope there as well.

I want to purge the unclean with flame, not ask my battle brothers where the Orks hid Mankrik's wife. Warhammer 40,000 is arguably the richest, most beloved sci-fi setting in modern fiction, and it's seen its own share of imitators. The last thing it needs is to be sifted through a World of Warcraft-like design framework.