Because, somehow, I’d managed to miss the announcement of Marvel Universe Online prior to the X06 keynote, I had a pleasant surprise when I saw the trailer. In point of fact, my jaw dropped.

With a day’s worth of thought behind me now, I began to wonder what this would mean for Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Comments from Positron make the whole thing out to be a great opportunity for gamers, no troubles at home at all.

We at Cryptic want to assure our loyal players that we and the good folks at our publisher, NCsoft, are fully committed to City of Heroes and City of Villains. We have a full team of programmers, artists, designers, and producers devoted to creating and maintaining the best experience in the “City of” world of games. This team is, and will remain completely separate from other teams working on other games at Cryptic. Like fantasy, sci-fi, and simulation, comic book heroes is its own genre, capable of supporting multiple titles.

It’s all well and good to say that … but, I dunno.

I’ll say it up front: I love City of Heroes/Villains. My local gaming group really got behind both games when they came out, and it was a trip to be able to save the day with folks I know IRL. That said, I fear that CoH/V will become the aging aunt in the attic when the shiny new Marvel title comes to town. Let’s keep this in perspective, too, there’s actually two Massive games coming to market wearing costumes. SOE’s collusion with DC Comics will be yet another viewpoint on the capes-and-cowls set. Though I agree the genre is ‘capable of supporting multiple titles’, I’m not sure I think that it can support three.

My two-bit, no information hope is that CoH and MUO come out the winners. Outside of the Justice League cartoon, I’ve never been a big fan of DC’s work, and in a coin-toss between Cryptic and SOE I’ll call dibs on Emmert any day of the week.

It is exciting, though. They’re definitely not going to topple WoW, of course, but we finally have what looks like a real battle brewing up in the Massive space again. Is this what all the future buzz regarding MMOGs will be like? Small operations fighting over the niches not occupied by orcs and elves? Interesting stuff, and I’m looking forward to filling out my score card.

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