This has been a crappy, crappy year.

• 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.

It’s been almost exactly six months since I began doing the Massive Update feature for 1up, and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. Digging my arms elbow-deep into MMOG news every week has really kept me ‘in the loop’, and I think helped with writing here at MMOG Nation on more than one occasion. It also made for the occasional interesting discussion, and whatnot.

I hope you understand that it pains me to say that last week I told my 1up overlords that I’d be stepping back from the column, starting this week.

To give you a sense of the amount of time I put into this column, I’d regularly spend two hours a day -for four and sometimes five days of the week – working on it. The early columns were all done in one go, sometimes requiring me to (literally, not hyperbolically) type for six or seven hours straight to get all the news onto the page. Even up until last week the last push to finish the column usually required a three or four hour chunk of my life.

The problem is one of duplication and context. The asset that people seemed to value in Massive Update is that I know where each piece of news fits into the larger whole. I attempted to convey that through short, witty sentences. I tried to focus on the most important elements for every game out there, with extra ‘fun’ stuff, patches, videos, blog entries, and podcasts on top as a nummy candy coating.

In order to track all of this, though, I have many, many, many RSS feeds to cull through. Unlike on Slashdot, where I only pick the very best angle on a very few stories, to get it right Massive Update basically required that I read every site’s coverage of every patch, interview, preview, review, video about a given game over the course of a week. Now multiply that by all the Massive games out there. Yeah, for something like MapleStory there’d only be one or two stories worth posting in a week. For WoW, though, it was a struggle to make sure that it only showed up three or four times over the course of the Update.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved doing it. I want to thank (again) Scott Sharkey, Jeremy Parish, and Patrick Klepek for their support and assistance with the column. Patrick especially, as he had to deal with my awful formatting every week. :)

Over the course of the last few months, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that I *can* work too much. It got to the point, just after I got back from my whirlwind cross-country jamboree late in the summer, where the amount of writing I was doing was affecting my health and peace of mind. I’d also like to think I’ve done a good job with all the articles I’ve done this year, but I know that some pieces were not up to the level of quality I would have liked. So the new goal is to refocus. Do less, do it better, and most of all – don’t kill myself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed Massive Update, and my gratitude (again) to the many people who have complimented me on the column since May.

Gee, what do you think the big story was this week? Mebbe the surprise sale of one of the pillars of modern MMOGdom? Maybe it wasn’t a suprise to you, but I’m not that cool: I was floored.

The Big Story. — Paragon City’s New Mayor
The word from the official NCsoft site makes no bones about it: NCsoft acquires City of Heroes Franchise. The mega-MMOG publisher has purchased the intellectual property from Cryptic Studios, and will be setting up a new studio in the Northern California area to support it. Most of the development crew currently working on the ‘City of’ titles has made the jump to NCsoft NorCal, and players hopefully shouldn’t see much in the way of a hiccup during the changeover. In fact, they’ll be getting new toys.

A couple of other things from today worth noting:

• Wow Comic #0
• EQ2’s Third Birthday
• Animal Crossing MMOG Confirmed
• Guild Wars Art Giveaway (told you it would be cool)
• Rise of Kunark NDA Lifted

And, just as a note, you’re unfortunately unlikely to see anything from me on RoK this weekend/next week, because I’m going to be fall-out-of-my-chair busy. Call of Duty 4, Mario Galaxy, Assassin’s Creed, and Mass Effect are conspiring to make sure I don’t set eyes on a virtual world for quite a while. :)

I hope to return to my regular posting schedule as best I can next week, but we’ll see. Wish me luck.

This is a truly epic week for Massive games … and in a good way , for flipping once! Hellgate, Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Caribbean, EVE Fan Fest, and FFXI Fan Fest are all packed into these seven days. Go MMOGdom.

This week was a great one for MMOGs, as not one but three online games went live. Probably the highest profile is the much-awaited sci-fi experience from Richard Garriott, Tabula Rasa. General British has a thank you to everyone who has played the Beta so far. Last Friday, players got a chance to try to kill him (in-game, of course) and there’s a lengthy write up of the end-of-beta event at IGN. Next Generation has an interview with the man himself on what it took to get TR released.

“Tabula Rasa was very different from how I approached Ultima. In Ultima I came up with a series of virtues and tried to explore those. I wasn’t aiming for a system that was “the truth” or the truth of ultimate reality (though I think they make pretty good guides to live by) but they allowed for exploration and that was the key. So (when making Tabula Rasa) I took a step back and said to myself, ‘what was the point of that system, why did I do it in the first place?’.”

Meanwhile, Producer Starr Long has chat with Gamespot that tackles what the future might hold for the game.

“We plan to do yearly large expansions with other planets and all the creatures, missions, etc., associated with that. Between those times, we will be adding content to existing systems, like player-versus-player and military surplus every few months.”

Lead Designer Paul Sage has a few words about the game’s development from a more technical standpoint.

This week there were no closures, and the drama just made me want to puke so I tried to ignore it in favour of something positive. IE: Nick Yee’s Work. This week’s Massive Update is brought to you by the letter D.

The Daedalus Project is an ongoing research project run by Nick Yee, a Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University and a man widely regarded as one of the foremost researchers into the field of virtual worlds. Every so often, Yee releases a few short papers based on the information he’s gathered.

If you’ve never heard of the Daedalus project, the best place to start is at The Daedalus Gateway, which highlights some of the most interesting topics Yee has followed up on in his work. For example, did you know the average player spends about twenty hours a week playing? The average age of an MMO Gamer is 26, and more than a third of Massive gamers are married?

“Another caricature of video gamers is that they are solitary hermits, but the data on MMORPG players show that 80% of MMORPG players play with someone they know in RL (a romantic partner, family member, or friend) on a regular basis,” says one of Yee’s reports. “Thus, MMORPGs are in fact highly social environments where new relationships are forged and existing relationships are reinforced.”

This newest chapter in the ongoing project deals with a bevy of fascinating topics, including memorable experiences, leadership roles, and the life-cycle of a player.

This week’s Big Story is kind of a loaner from the rest of gaming news but … you know … it’s BioWare.

As you’re probably well aware at this point, well-respected RPG developer BioWare purchased by Electronic Arts for an obscene amount of money. From all points, despite the understandable misgivings of gamers, things look pretty good for the developer. Mass Effect is still on track, analysts give the move a thumbs up, and the purchase was apparently something BioWare wanted.

“Ray Myzuka: Well, I’m really excited about the opportunity to integrate the great development teams we have here, the marketing teams we have here. As you said, EA is the largest, and I think, the best publisher in the world, and I think we can [add] some value to that team, and that organization as a partnership.”

Why is this so important to massively multiplayer games? Well, the business implications aside, perhaps you’re forgetting that unannounced game they’re working on right now (*cough*KOTOR*cough*)? The one Damion Schubert is working on as combat development lead, and helmed by former Knights of the Old Republic Lead Designer James Ohlen?

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.