Here’s what I want for my 2009 year in MMOs:

• Mega-quantities of awesome from SOE. Agency, Free Realms, and DC Universe Online are all very near the top of my awesomedar. I am really looking forward to the Free Realms Beta, and my hope is that Agency will go into Beta at some point near the end of the year. I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing much of DCUO publicly, but at least one more chance to play that kickass demo would be much appreciated.
• An ongoing stream of content from BioWare about The Old Republic. Not only am I personally really thrilled that we’re finally getting something, professionally I can’t get enough of that SWTOR.
• The lads at 38 have told us that we should see real news on Copernicus sometime in early summer. I want their kickoff to be a huge splash, their content to be incredibly well-received, and their design to be absolutely inspired. I’ll be straight: I think they’ve got a long haul ahead of them. The fantasy genre is going to be hell and a half to enter as a direct competitor to WoW. But if they want to give it a try, who am I to stand in their way or do anything but cheerlead from the sidelines?
• After one of my favorite interviews of the year with two gents from Red 5, I have been obsessed about getting more details on their game. I would absolutely love to know what the hell they’re doing down there. More than any other ‘dark’ company right now, Red 5 is making the game that I’m desperate to explore. Here’s hoping they give us a bit more insight on their plans thiscoming year.
• I’m greedy, I know, but I really want a look at Guild Wars 2 as well. It’s been more than a year since Arena.net put out Eye of the North, and GW2 was well along in development back in that point. While I completely understand why it’s not out yet, the tomb-like silence that we’ve seen from the company on the topic of their sequel to their groundbreaking title has been a bit unnerving. I really hope Arena will finally be able to throw back the curtain and give us a look at the goods.
• Tons of success to my fellow MMO bloggers and podcasters, be they industry paragons like Scott or enthusiast juggernauts like Tim (Van Hemlock). While I know I don’t contribute a lot from this domain much any more, I’d like to think that the MMOblogosphere is a pretty darn special place to be hanging your hat. Here’s hoping it continues in 2009.
• Continued good gaming vibes and personal connections between myself and my guilds! A year ago I was a boring-as-hell soloer, and now I have a community in all three of my primary MMOs! I hope that 2009 finds me growing even closer to the Podcasters of Bree, Revelry and Honor, and What Would Thrall Do.
• The will, intelligence, writing skill, and patience required to run Massively.com. I’ll be honest, a year ago I never in a million years would have imagined I’d be running an MMO news site. It’s exactly, precisely what I’ve been working towards for the last few years and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. It’s hard, it’s challenging, it’s stressful, and to be honest it doesn’t pay that well. But it’s Massively, and I’ve got lots and lots of love.
• The energy to recommit to doing the MMOG Nation Broadcast … a podcast that should be returning soon!
• And, of course, the dedication to keep the feed alive here at MMOG Nation.

Feel free to drop in what presents you want from the industry next year in the comments.

Reference posts:
Guild Wars 2 – Too Soon?
Guild Wars 2 Confirmed and Explained
Guild Wars 2 – Too Soon!
Face the Nation: Guild Wars 2 with Mike O’Brien and Jeff Strain

Music:
Selections from the Guild Wars: Nightfall, Prophecies, and Eye of the North soundtracks. By Jeremy Soule, used without permission.

In any case, to commemorate the site’s second anniversary I thought I’d drop a headpat on few personal favorites things from the past year. I’m not going to even tongue-in-cheek call them ‘awards’ like I did last year; these are just the things that made me well pleased in the past twelve months.

Playing A Good Game - 

I know I’ve complained and kvetched, but EverQuest 2 was the game I spent the most time playing this year. Despite its (many) flaws, I’m now very used to the refurbished lands of Norrath. I have really enjoyed running around with my gnomish companions, and we’re definitely getting into the strange and fabulous world of high level play. We were kvetching the other night about the really awesome high level mounts, actually, and how our guild-less-ness ensures it’ll be some time before we snag Wargs or Rhinos or anything like that.

I’m incredibly impressed by what I saw of Kunark, and I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to reach high level with a static party. Good times.

I also want to call out Guild Wars, a game that I unexpectedly fell head over heels in love with this year. I’ve been working through the Nightfall and Eye of the North content at a lackadaisical pace – just something fun and Massive to fill time with every once in a while. I’m really : / that Shawn is closing up Guildcast. His show is one of the big reasons I appreciate this game as much as I do. Van Hemlock, of course, is another big reason – and he just finished up his exploration of Arena’s world.

Meeting New People -

The thing I’m probably most proud of from the past 12 months is the number of interesting folks I’ve had the chance to chat with. Writing about Massive games and on this blog has put me in touch with bloggers, designers, producers, podcasters, executives, and journalists … many of whom seem to think I’m not doing an utterly horrible job. That’s mighty satisfying. To the folks who I’ve had the pleasure of befriending this past year – thank you. And the same to those of you who continue to put up with me. Your efforts have been noted in my log.

Admiring The Crusade -

The biggest thing in Massive games this year, and I basically had no part in it. My highest level WoW character is 62. I’ve seen Hellfire, a little bit of Zangermarsh, and Shat. That’s about all of Outlands I’ve seen. That said, I spent all year really admiring how much Blizzard is willing to shake up the status quo in their own little universe. Faster leveling, bigtime changes to PvP, and a general attitude of competence all around. It’s a hell of a show to watch, even though I’m mostly on the sidelines.

The best bit: I’ll likely be participating a bit more directly in Azeroth, thanks to the kind invitation from some Hammy fists.

Drinking the Koolaid –  

I started the year very grumpy about the whole RMT/microtransaction thing. My view was very close to Mr. Jacobs’: subscriptions 4eva. Part of that view was my general focus on AAA games. Bigtime titles generally imply bigtime fees, right?

My exposure over the last twelve months to smaller titles like MapleStory has changed that view a lot. I still don’t love the idea of playing a game where another player’s wallet can hit me for direct damage, don’t get me wrong. Just the same, paying a few pennies for fun stuff in Gaia or a Nexon title holds a lot of appeal. Kid experiences, especially, seem like the perfect fit for that business.

The biggest thing that changed my mind in this area is my ongoing frustration with flat fees. I want tiered options, darnit! I want family plans and publisher packages! Give me options, soulless corporate overlords!

Anticipating the Up and Comers -
I spent quite a bit of the year looking forward to the works of outfits like 38, Carbine, and Red 5. Now I’m bottling up a good deal of anticipation for 2008, for the works of these companies, as well as other unannounced newbs like BioWare. Cryptic and Arena are both working on seekrit games as well. It feels like my days working as a crappy programmer again – lots of time spent pondering what these games are going to be like. In most cases, we don’t even know the genre of these titles. Quite! Fascinating. If even one or two announce this year, it’ll make for even more fun times and theorizing.

Burning Problems – The launch of the expansion to World of Warcraft is going to cause Blizzard bigtime headaches.

Buzz! Bigtime wrong. The launch went almost flawlessly, and despite the huge impact it has had on the life of raiders WoW rolls along unbowed and unbroken. I always thought the expansion was going to be good, but I expected Blizzard to have problems similar to the game’s initial launch. Instead, big blue learned its lessons and scored a customer relations coup.

That Not So Fresh Feeling – At least one of the MMOGs slated to launch this year is going to end up being kind of a stinker.

Ding! This was kind of one of my ’safety’ options, but it came very much true nonetheless. Vanguard was a huge letdown for expectant fans, and the SOE team is still doing overtime work to make the ship sail in a straight line.

Less Is Better Than More – The monthly fee-less games will continue to gain in popularity in 2007. With Dungeon Runners and Guild Wars both proving out NCSoft’s wisdom, other companies will begin to consider changing up the usual box-and-a-monthly-sub costs. At least one major U.S. Massive game will offer a substantially different payment setup than the monthly subscription by the end of the year.

Ding! I’m going to give this whole thing to me. Both DR and GW are doing great, and RMT/microtransactions are on everyone’s lips. I consider SOE’s decision to use microtransactions for Agency and FreeRealms a win for this point.

Raph’s Rabbit – Whatever Raph has planned will prove to be an eyebrow raiser. Even if it’s not the Next Big Thing, Areae’s product announcement will end up sounding like a pretty good deal and will be a constant topic of conversation towards the end of the year. We won’t see whatever it is live in 2007.

Ding! Another ’safety’ one, kinda, but the buzz for Metaplace is high and rising.

Later is Worse Than Sooner – One of the big MMOGs slated for release ’soon’ or in 2007 is not going to make it out this year. Whatever game it is, gamers will increasingly think of it as a lost cause, and you’ll see less public interest in the game going forward.

Buzz! Surprisingly, folks are still as fascinated as ever for all the delayed titles. I had kind of expected Conan to lose some steam from a delay, but the anticipation still seems to be there. Warhammer is hotter than ever.

Bio-Shocking – Whatever Bioware has planned is going to make people really excited.

Buzz! No announcement. Dangit!

Beggar’s Canyon – SOE is finally going to get off its ass and do *something* with Star Wars Galaxies.

Ding! I’m actually going to give this one to me. I never would have imagined the something to be ‘actually make the existing game something people would want to play’, but there you go. The housing event, beast mastery, the upcoming space stuff … SWG is looking really great in the here-and-now and the fans are taking note.

Ever Awesome – 2007 will be the year EverQuest 2 finally gets its due. Good fallout from Faydwer and hype for the next expansion, as well as players looking for an alternative from WoW, will swell the ranks of SOE’s flagship. We’ll start hearing boastful subscription numbers out of them, as they start to get back into the range EQ Live inhabited back in the good old days a few years back.

Errr … ding? Sort of? Faydwer had tons of great fallout, the higher players get into Kunark the more they’re liking it, and there are definitely more people playing … but not quite the amount I predicted here. I’m going to call this half a ding? Is that okay?

Newbie – A company that has, as of yet, not published a Massive game will announce their intention to do so. They’ll promise the moon, and will have already failed and announced the end of the project by December.

It was close, but Ding! From publisher signing to dev shop closure, all in one year. Life’s tough.

Fallout Fallout – The Fallout MMOG will be canceled, with little explanation as to what happened.

Buzz! More’s the pity.

In Space … – Eve Online will continue to do crazy-awesome well, with their end-of-year numbers at the end of 2007 simply blowing peoples minds.

Ding! The rest of this prediction didn’t come true, but Trinity has ended a really strong year for the game, so I’m going to give this one to me.

Gutshot – The release of one of the new generation of heavyweights will prove devastating to a member of the old guard. A game we all think of today as stable and healthy will be a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.

Buzz! You have to remember, though, that I was assuming that WAR, PotBS, and Conan were all going to be released this year. Ahh well.

2007’s Winners: Warhammer Online, Eve Online, EverQuest 2, Guild Wars

Not grading on this one, but I think this was mostly right. Even if WAR didn’t release, I think it’s got a ton of mindshare going into next year.

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

SWG doesn’t belong on this one, but the others seem pretty much right on. DAoC ‘lost’ a bit, I think, because now everybody knows Mythic is cribbing the best of its RvR system for WAR … meaning there’s what reason to play the older game again? I got asked a long while ago why Gods and Heroes was on here. In December of last year it still looked mighty promising. The answer then (and up through most of the summer) was that it just looked too generic to work. Despite my rising enthusiasm through the fall it looks like I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.

That means the grand total is-

Right: 6.5
Wrong: 5.5

Hey! I didn’t do to bad, all things considered. Go me.

Did I let myself off too easy here? Let me know about it. And if you want my MMOGnostications for 2008 … that’s tomorrow’s post.

• Something on the Firefly MMOG … anything!
• To find out what some of those new MMOG startups are doing, and (of course) more Metaplace news.
• A late-in-the-year launch of Lich King. I’ve still got lots of stuff to do before then.
• The dedication to keep playing EQ2 until my fellow adventurers tire of Norrath. I’d really like to get to the Kunark content at some point, too.
• A spectacular launch for Warhammer Online and a Beta invite early in the new year. (Please, Mythic? I promise to play nice.)
• Further success for my newest gig: Massively!
• A successful (first annual) Worlds in Motion Summit.
• Even *more* acceptance of MMOGs by mainstream society. I’ve gotten my Toyota commercial and Mr. T’s night elf mohawk already. Top that.
• I’m still waiting for the second episode of Illegal Danish, and now I’m waiting on MMOvie also. I could use some more of Snacky’s Journal, too.
• Announcements for the new games from Square/Enix and Blizzard … and for the love of all that is holy, just cop to KOTORO, BioWare!
• A sense of what Guild Wars 2 will bring us; 2007 made me a huge fan of Arena.net’s original.
• The dedication to keep the RSS feed smoking here on MMOG Nation.

• Blizzard releases an expansion that’s great – and I’ve barely played it.
• Vanguard flops
• Cryptic sells CoH, and now is completely silent.
• WAR and Conan are delayed until 2008.
• Ryzom goes under, again.
• Perpetual explodes, sending shards of two unreleased games flying.
• My EQII experience has gotten kind of crappy.
• Auto Assault closes.
• LOTRO releases to relatively positive reviews – and I’ve barely played it.

Most distressing for me, personally, is that in the last two weeks I’ve killed both of my gaming PCs. I now have no way of playing even World of Warcraft, let alone something like AoC or Pirates. You wouldn’t believe how much you want to play a MMOG when you can’t.

About the only thing I have fully appreciated this year is Eye of the North, which I’m now really enjoying on my wife’s PC.  I’m almost done with the Norn quest line … more about that later.

The thing that prompted this post was Fury’s demise. I said publicly in a few different places that I thought it had potential, and that I was hopeful for the little Aussie game studio. Just embarrassing. Maybe I thought that they’d take a little more time to get it right before releasing?

Whatever. Burning Crusade is obviously an unqualified success for Blizzard and the Massive industry as a whole. In fact, this year could be considered the year that Massive games went mainstream. Truck commercials, South Park appearances, Mr. T and Shatner … the only problem is that one game in the genre has gone mainstream. As a whole, new ventures this year have floundered or been delayed, while several existing titles have sunk beneath the waves. For better or worse, most of my MMOGnostication predictions have come true. That makes me bloody sad.

So: screw you 2007. Hopefully ‘08 will offer bigger, better things.

The time off gave me an opportunity to reconnect with Nightfall, my current chosen path along Guild Wars’ magical trail. I’ve never run a character through it, so I’m at about level 12 – my last major landmark was beating the Jokanur Diggings mission on Master.

It involved me killing a bunch of zombies, and then taking on something that sort of looked like a form-shifting two-ton lawn ornament.

I actually botched the job the first two times through. You have to put this plaques on these stands, and (little did I know) the restless spirits steal the plaques off the stands if you’re not careful. So you have to go get one, drop it near the stands, get the other, and then put them in place quickly. I got so frustrated with their plaque stealing (it was late) that I quit in a huff. The second time I made it to the lawn ornament but died because I’d been screwing around a bunch on the way and *ahem* was at -60%. My heroes did a brave job of trying to complete the mission without me, but it was not to be.

I know, I know, amazing. Or not. Suffice it to say that I’m still very much in the ‘oh what does my hotbar do again’ phase? I’m playing it on my lonesome, hotfooting it across zones with Koss, Dunkoro, and Melonni, and dreaming of the day when I can use cool pets like Zhed Shadowhoof or … pretty much any of the GWEN pets. This character is also going to be my Eye of the North character, I’ve decided.

My bobbin of choice right now is a Dervish/Necro. Necro is probably my favorite subclass for all those lovely lifedraining and poison spells, but I’m enjoying the Dervish style of play so much I haven’t a single skill point invested into that aspect of the character. I’ll quote from my Guild Wars Jedi Master on the subject of Dervishi:

“Necromancers I understand, and can cope with, but the Dervish is an entirely new profession to me, and I’m still having trouble working out what it is they actually do, apart from spin very fast. A bit of post-rampage research shows that they’re some kind of scythe-based close-combat AoE Melee DPS Fighter, which was just as well, as our Dervish seems to be showing early symptoms of Red Mist, and seems to charge into the fray with great gusto.”

There’s a bit more to them than that, but that’s the gist. The other half of the Dervish equation (besides the red mist part) is their air of Mysticism. D’s slap down enchantments on themselves to do their AoE thing while they’re swinging that giant scythe around (completely awesome). The enchantments all have a ‘thing’ they do when they end (like setting enemies on fire), but an enchantment ending on a Dervish also restores a certain amount of health and mana … dictated by the Mysticism Attribute.

In practice this makes me one bad mother in combat, as my crazy whirling blade only pauses long enough to lay the AoE smackdown. I’m told they’re not that great in PvP, and I’d totally believe it, but it’s a ton of fun in the PvE game. At level 12 I’ve barely begun … haven’t even hit the level cap or gotten off newbie island, but Guild Wars leveling goes awfully quick and I expect to be at the top before long.

My goal is to play through the whole of Nightfall before I hit GWEN, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of the campaign I can solo. I don’t recall a lot about Hemlock’s discussion of the endgame, but I seem to recall several tough missions that required multiple tries. And that was with three players. Good thing my blade is sharp.