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.

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.

The why is the easy part, of course. I don’t have anyone’s job offer in front of me, but it’s easy to make educated guesses. In high-profile cases like the former EQ community folks, small and well-funded studios probably used the ‘dumptruck full of money’ argument. While I’m sure they were being well compensated by Sony, startups tend to be in that ‘long on cash, short of manpower’ phase that makes for some crazy salary offers. Even without the big bucks, both high-profile and tireless trench-worker alike could easily be swayed by the allure of new blood. Why work for the man when someone is trying something new and different?

The trend of folks leaving is harder to pin down, but I think it’s a case of timing and (of course) World of Warcraft. But not directly; I don’t think WoW is making people leave SOE through any direct application. What WoW is doing is 1.) shaking the money trees to make it possible for startups to happen and 2.) training up rafts and rafts of designers/programmers/artists which will look good staffing up these new companies. SOE folks will get hired into the mix too, of course, because they don’t hire slouches over there. Then on the marketing page you can say stuff like ‘developed by veterans of seven different publishers’, or something like that.

The widespread nature of this trend is something I can’t speak to at all, but the departure of several high-profile folks says a few things clearly. Some less visible folks have also made their way to greener pastures, but how many … that’s why this is an editorial and not an article, you know?

What will this mean for their games? If this is general trend at the company, this could eventually lead to problems. Not because of lack of staffing, or of poor staff … but most likely from a lot of new staff. It takes time to train people in how to make these games, in some cases a loooong time. Every developer, producer, or CM they lose results in an intimidating training period for replacements. Enough of those and you could have some pushed release dates or unhappy players.

I definitely think that these departures are indicative of the industry in general. So far in the MMOG market the SOP has been for large publishers to release portfolios of AAA games, banking on the successful ones to shore up the ones that are less so. But all signs now point to that being a thing of the past. Auto Assault was canned outright, a choice NCsoft may not have made a few years ago. Perpetual’s explosion speaks volumes. SOE itself seems to be unaffected at the moment, but I think their decision to entertain alternative payment options for their upcoming games says a lot about the way the winds are blowing.

In the not-too-distant-future all these startups are going to be hatching their several-million-dollar eggs onto the MMOG scene. While most of us are spending time thinking about games like Warhammer, Conan, and BioWare’s game KOTORO, Carbine Studios, 38 Studios and Red 5 are doing seekrit things in the darkness. The folks that are going to make those games have to come from somewhere. The MMOG industry is finally getting to the point where there are plenty of talented workers with past MMOG releases on their resumes … and a lot of them work for those big publishers that these new kids are hoping to usurp.

That makes NCsoft, Blizzard, and SOE prime candidates for employee poaching. In fact, I actually imagine that SOE’s departures are only ‘notable’ insofar as people have had names to attach to the departures. Folks hired away from the developers of Lineage or Final Fantasy XI aren’t going to be noticed as much as ‘names’ like Blackguard.

So in the end, this isn’t really an ‘SOE Brain Drain’. It’s more of a trend of folks taking the chance to get in on the ground floor of the ‘next phase’ of the MMO industry. While these departures may eventually have an effect on games from the big publishers, I think in the larger picture they’re indicative of industry growth. And that … in the long run … is a good thing for everybody.

• 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.

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.

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’.

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.