This week for MMOG Nation Broadcast episode 14, Michael gets to ’sit’ down with one of his blogging idols, Mr. Tim Dale of the Van Hemlock blog and podcast! Michael and Tim find themselves in most unusual circumstances: the depths of a fetid and swampy graveyard in the middle of the night! They’re there to go graverobbing, pulling out the bits they want and leaving the rest to rot. The subjects of their graverobbing attentions?

Asheron’s Call 2
Mythica
Auto Assault
Gods and Heroes

Join us for some retrospectives on gameworlds that have gone to a better place …

Music:
“Re: Your Brains”, Jonathan Coulton. Thing a Week, Week Four. Used without permission, but I’d like to think he wouldn’t mind.

Almost exactly a year ago I put down some predictions for the year in Massive games. It’d be cheating if I didn’t grade myself, so that’s what I’m going to do here, looking back at my 2006 MMOGnostications. This will be a pass/fail test, class … pens at the ready!

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.

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Feelings in the blogosphere (and indeed in online gaming generally) towards Sony Online Entertainment are decidedly mixed. While they’ve made some amazing strides with EverQuest 2 and other titles under their umbrella, some folks are still left with a sour taste in their mouth over past stumbles. Whether griping over the Star Wars Galaxies NGE or complaints going all the way back to the Verant days, people love to grind their axes on Sony’s mega-subsidiary.

So I’ve been kind of surprised that more of a big deal hasn’t been made of the talent drain the company has been undergoing for the past year or so. From high profile folks like Moorgard, Blackguard, and now Scott Hartsman to lower-level community folks, programmers, designers, and artists, there seems to be a general current of talented people flowing away from the monolith.

So why are people leaving the company? What’s prompting this trend? Is it very widespread and (more importantly for the players) what does it mean for their games? And, of course, you can’t help but wonder what this means for the industry in general. Or, at least, I can’t.
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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.

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.

(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’.

Nothing’s anything until it’s official, but Warcry has some details on a possible release date for Gods and Heroes.

And the winner is …. [drumroll] … February 2008! YES! That should be plenty of time to fix the current issues with the game, and might even let the developers have a couple of days off for Christmas. :)

Perpetual folks: I really hope this is the current plan. Good luck! I’m rooting for you. Here’s the pre-order extra -

Purchase Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising and receive:

* LIONHEAD HELMET: Known as the helmet of the great heroes of Rome, aligning the bravery of heroic feats with the symbolic prowess of the lion. Choose one of three class-specific versions: Gladiator/Soldier: Nomad/Scout: or Priest/Mystic. NEMEAN LION MINION: Command the King of Beasts in battle 16-SLOT INVENTORY BAG: The largest bag available in-game for all your loot and rewards. RESERVE YOUR CHARACTER NAME* (FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE): Stake your claim on a unique persona. RESERVE YOUR GUILD NAME* (FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE): Establish an exclusive identity for your group. EARLY ACCESS TO THE LIVE GAME: Enter and begin playing the game up to 5 days prior to release.

Update: Le sigh.