Let's Talk MMOs

As I get older, my available gaming time has decreased somewhat, and my gaming dollars are not as overflowing as they once were. The result? I've become more or less a big fan of MMORPGs -- online role-playing games, which offer a great combination of dollar-to-value ratio over constantly buying new games. The sense of community, the freedom of exploration, and the pseudo-achievement of character development all appeal to the Inner Justin.

So let's talk MMOs for a bit. 2006 was, to say the least, a really sad year for MMO releases. Guild Wars released Factions, which was pretty, but really more of the same excellent PVP, poor solo PVE play. It's nice that it's free, but Guild Wars never held my attention for long.

Dungeons & Dragons Online released in Feb 2006, which was a relief as I was looking to take a break from World of Warcraft anyway. While DDO had great ideas -- the dozens of instanced , narrated dungeons that required group teamwork on the top of the list -- it immediately suffered from a lack of end game play, the sheer repetativeness of the dungeons, the clunky interface and absolutely horrible shopping options. Turbine lately consolodated DDO servers down to a mere handful, which all but spells doom for this game. Pity.

2007

As high quality MMO titles take years and millions of dollars to develop, there's a long anticipatory period where the potential fan community bites their nails searching for any information about the product, worries crop up about whether it will succeed or fail in its promises, and overall anxiety that the project might be axed in the middle of development (which has happened MANY times).

So while MMOs have taken off into the mainstream and grown into a large chunk of computer gamers' living rooms -- mostly thanks to World of Warcraft -- 2006 was mainly a development year in which we had to wait for the next batch of AAA titles coming down the pipeline.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Released in January 2007, TBC broke first-day computer game sales of ALL TIME. It helped matters that the expansion to the 8 million-plus MMO juggernaut received glowing reviews. I've been playing through this, and vastly enjoyed the new content over the old. The art direction is superb, the new races interesting, and the dungeons a blast. Blizzard's announced that they'll be trying to get an expansion pack out for WoW about once a year, so we might even see another expansion by December.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes - Vanguard's rocky history was no smoother as it released around the same time as TBC. While I followed this "hard core" "old school" MMORPG for a while with interest, somewhere along the line it just lost me. Maybe because it was trying to go back to old game styles that the gaming public really doesn't want any more (harsh death penalties, non-instanced dungeons), maybe the realistic look was honestly too bland. I dunno. Vanguard's gotten some cautiously optimistic reviews, but nothing spectacular -- and the game's incredibly high system requirements are another obstacle to the average gamer in picking it up.

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Agmar - LOTRO will see release in March, but it needs to build up a lot of steam quickly or else it will be buried by TBC and other fantasy-related titles coming later this year. LOTRO's gotten some good pre-release reviews after its NDA was lifted, but if you ask me, it's more or less doomed to a very low sales count. Why? Well, first of all, Turbine is doing it. Turbine's been in a major slump with DDO and the cancellation of Asheron's Call 2, and they can't quite seem to crawl their way out of it. Second, while the LOTR property is a terrific one, they have no connections to the hit movies, and thus won't be picking up a lot of casual LOTR fans who, say, bought Battle for Middle Earth-type games. Third, it just seems... bland. I mean, I love the idea of Virtues (special skills that you get from accomplishing in game tasks, versus just getting them on levels) and Monster Play (a PVP mode where you get to play a monster against the heroes), but the world is a big "eh" and the lack of glitzy magic (however true to the source material) will hurt them.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Okay, I need to get this out of the way: they really, really should have done Warhammer 40,000 as a MMO instead. We have too many fantasy MMOs as it is, and the Warhammer 40k universe would've been a blast to explore. That said, WAR has gotten some of the best advance press out of the developing MMOs right now. While it looks stylistically similar to WOW (not surprising, since WOW borrowed liberally from WAR's looks), Mythic knows how to do PVP (with Dark Age of Camelot) and they're crafting an entire MMO around this. The classes look fun and very unique, and the quests try to be very different from the solo "collect X things and kill Y critters" of past games.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures - October 2007 is when this puppy hits, and I will be there at the door. Conan will launch with a lot of wind to its back: it's a recognized and beloved IP, Microsoft is touting it as one of their DX10 launch titles (although it works just fine on DX9), and it will be also released for XBOX 360. I love the look and feel of this low fantasy world, where grit and blood and grime are all a part of the setting. Plus, drunken brawling! This is the MMO I'm most excited about right now.

And that's not even mentioning smaller titles, and possible future titles under development, such as:

- Bioware's so-far unmentioned MMO title
- Fallout Online
- Firefly MMO
- Another Blizzard MMO (World of Starcraft?)
- Star Trek Online
- Interplay's $75 million MMO