Sayeth the Shwayder:

Massively multiplayer online games, as a genre, are still pretty new. But, some players have counted MMO gaming as their primary hobby for about a decade, and others even more still. We, as gamers, are getting wiser to the ways of the online world, and we’re learning to line our expectations up with something at least resembling reality. The point is, I think players are getting smart enough, or at least experienced enough, that they are beginning to react much less impulsively when something unforeseen occurs.

I think there’s a few things here.

Getting Older: A lot of MMOG players, especially vets from EQ1, are that aforementioned decade older. You learn a lot in ten years, like how not to be a little spaz. I am reasonably certain that has as much to do with it as a change in the tenor of the genre.

Managed Expectations: The CMs ten years ago sucked. If there were CMs. Which there weren’t, alot. Or if they were doing CM work without the title … they were bad at it. Today’s post-Sanya crowd of community folks are a lot better at keeping the playerbase down in line informed about what the reality of the situation is.

His specific examine of Warhammer: EA has more money than jesus. For whatever flaws Mark Jacobs and Mythic might have, they have the backing and the talent to get it done right. Waiting on the game to come out is not very hard at all.

In any case, it’s a valid point and one I think is a great sign for things to come. Just imagine what it’ll be like when the WoW noobs are ten years more mature!

Last week’s Big Story was, of course, the shuttering of Gods and Heroes.

I really, really wanted the big story this week to be the World of Warcraft/Toyota Commercial. Massive games go mainstream; World of Warcraft in a commercial during NFL football. Even if you don’t like the commercial, that’s hard not to smile at. Of course, that’s not what we have to talk about today: Gods and Heroes has been canceled.

The Perpetual team is faced with a unique challenge of simultaneously developing both Gods & Heroes and Star Trek Online in addition to growing our Online Game Platform business. After assessing all of Perpetual’s opportunities, we have made the decision to put the development of Gods & Heroes on indefinite hold. I want to express my overwhelming gratitude to the community, engineers, designers, artists, animators, and the game services team for the support and effort that has gone into Gods & Heroes.

Moving forward, we’re shifting our collective focus, resources and development efforts to Perpetual’s Platform Services division and Star Trek Online, thereby ensuring that the game lives up to the high level of expectation set by the dedicated Star Trek fan base.

Finished Portal last night, and it’s a work of beauty. The Jonathan Coulton song “Still Alive” is the reward for finishing it, and you can enjoy the musical awesomeness thanks to the intertubes.

(or: I hate it when I’m right)

Damnit. Damn it all to hell. I’ve just spent the last few hours playing a game for review, and what do I come back to?

Breaking News: Gods and Heroes Canceled

Perpetual Entertainment has indefinitely delayed (essentially canceled) Gods and Heroes. The company will continue work on their development platform and Star Trek Online, and continue its operations in the same San Francisco studio under the same management. Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, though, is no more.

Our source tells us that the majority of the Gods and Heroes development team has been let go as part of the move, which comes only a few weeks after they had downsized and pushed back the release date. The Star Trek Online team, those who worked on the Perpetual Platform (which was recently licensed to BioWare) and a small number of people from the Gods and Heroes team will be remain with the company.

I … I don’t even have the words. This hits my brainpan on so many levels.

First and foremost, my best wishes for the developers and artists, programmers and community folks who have been put out by this. I am well aware of how hard you folks work on these things, and I can’t imagine what it feels like to get news like this.

I also want to convey just how shocking this is to me. When I was down in Austin, hanging around the actual industry, they were talking about Gods and Heroes. Specifically, they were talking about the manual. They were deciding what to put on the outside of the manual, and what the inside would look like. I hope it goes without saying: they don’t tackle that kind of crap until very near the end. I’ve also played the game and, again, it seemed almost done. Despite my frustrations (conveyed earlier this year) about animations and gameplay ‘feel’, I honestly felt they were just a few months away from getting things in gear.

This also makes me sad in a different way. I know I’m not the only person that remembers Mythica. I wrote about the title after it was canceled, mourning its loss, and I realized all in a rush that it’s been some three years since those events. Obviously a lot of things have changed since February of 2004. But this is still an industry in which years of work, thousands and thousands of man-hours, can be flushed with little to no warning. I’m reasonably certain the Gods and Heroes news came as something of a shock; RPG Vault posted a new screenshot today.

As a last note, I’m embarrassed to say that I appear to have kinda called this. :(

2007’s Losers: Star Wars Galaxies, Gods and Heroes, Vanguard, Dark Age of Camelot

I can honestly say I wish I’d been wrong about this one.

Update: I’ve seen a lot of people referring to G&H as a ‘piece of shit’,  and I object to that. I had a lot of potential; it just needed a little more time. There was a lot of fun there to be had … just not probably my kind of fun. I like the snark and the mean as much as anybody, but I have a hard time dismissing outright the sweat and hard work of a large group of folks like that as ’shit’.

I had the unadulterated pleasure of sitting in on this past weekend’s Gamers With Jobs Conference Call. Their weekly podcast has been one of my staple listens for quite some time. I know I’ve spoken before about their writing, and I can only say having spoken to them in person now that they’re just as cogent verbally as with writing.

Okay … just as funny, for sure. :)

I sat in on Conference Call Episode 53. Here’s the blurb from their site:

Halo 3, Tabula Rasa, Pirates Of The Burning Sea, Jericho, Special Guest Michael Zenke from Games.Slashdot, The State of MMORPGs, Your Emails and more! This week special guest Michael “Zonk” Zenke from Slashdot Games joins the regular crew to talk about all the latest in gaming. Long show this week, can you tell it’s Fall?

The episode is *really* long; almost two hours. I kept apologizing afterwards, but in retrospect it wasn’t me per se that made us go long. In any case, I tried to keep true to my public speaking philosophy: less is more.

Let me know if I did alright.

Well, it’s happening. Watching WoW has the unofficial patch notes for the upcoming 2.3 patch for World of Warcraft, and the changes are amazing.

There are a few things to these notes (not least of which being that there are apparently even more changes here in the works), but here’s the jist of it:

Levels will require less experience to reach, Quests after 20 till 60 will give out bigger rewards (making them more in-line with BC quests), Epic mobs in old Azeroth are going to generally be made non-epic (Dun Garok in Hillsbrad, Stromgarde in Arathi), and pre-BC dungeons will be retuned to have better loot, better experience, and a tighter level range.

The overall result of this should be: faster leveling, more folks running instanced dungeons along the way, but less of a need to group while outside of dungeons. The better loot from instances, btw, is ‘better’ in that they’re adding BC-style bonuses to items, stuff like +hit, +spell crit, +mana regen. In other words, they’re taking steps to make old Azeroth more like the Burning Crusade experience.

And I have to say, while I’ve been wrestling with this for some time, I really like these changes. As I just talked about this past weekend, I’ve been leveling a character quite a bit recently. And, while WoW may be one of the fastest games to level ever it can still take quite some time to get that next ding.

I’ve been especially cognizant of this since cracking the 30 barrier, as it’s common knowledge that 30-45 is sort of a slog. The addition of the town of Mudsprocket to Dustwallow should make that a lot more palatable. Hey Blizz! I really hope you use the Tranquillien model here, and let us earn faction with the town for (level appropriate) neat stuff. I want a Mudsproket tabard! (Actually, I wanted a Tranquillien tabard too, more’s the pity.)

Hilariously, by the time 2.3 goes live on the servers, I’ll be within striking distance of 60 (I hope). I will at the very least be past 40, which is the high end of the Mudsprocket content.

While this may make the folks who have ground multiple characters to 70 a bit ornery at first blush, don’t think of it as cheating you … look at it as helping you. With more players having alts at the high ends, that means ever more useful classes for dungeons and PvP. I know that sometime after my Rogue hits 70 I’m going to want to get my mid-teens Belf Priest up to the top.

Also think of it this way: it’ll be even easier to convince friends to play through the game with you. The more the merrier, right?

I keep seeing ‘1 comment’ on posts that don’t have anything actually commented to them; I keep getting complaints about the CAPTCHA. I’d rather hear what you have to say than never get spam, so with fear in my throat I’m going to disable the CAPTCHA for now. If it turns out to be 3vil again it may come back, but for the moment feel free to comment without fear.

PS: I’ve put up the October banner on the site. It’s Hallo-tastic.