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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Some of the highest praise I think a writer can give to another writer is “I wish I’d thought to write that”. Despite some minor quibbles with an article or two that he’s written, I feel the need to point out the work of a guy who’s done a ton of great stuff here on these interwebs. Simon pointed to Varney’s work as one of the strengths of The Escapist, and I couldn’t agree more. Nearly every article I’ve seen with his byline recently has had an initial shock of “he wrote what?”, followed by “neat!”.

Here’s what has had my eyebrows up of late:

• This week’s Escapist features his look at murder mystery parties. It’s like LARPing, but socially acceptable!
• The Korean Invasion touches on all those neat Eastern MMOGs making their way to our shores.
• Captain of the Burning Sea is a talk with John Tynes of Flying Lab, emphasizing the four years of development behind PotBS.
• Uwe Boll and the German Tax Code. Hehehehehehehe.
• Cthulhu - Why So Difficult, is like the article I wrote, only good.

Hats off, sir. Keep up the good work. You can see all of Allen’s Escapist stuff over on his page at the Great Games Experiment.

Tobold and Tipa have had lists of desired feature, while Lum laughs at a general one and Angus laughs at Lum. I’m kinda-sorta with Mark on all this finger-pointing: I think we have it pretty good nowadays. Most people want to play WoW, it seems, and that’s cool. There are going to be WoW clones launched in the next five years; many of them will be poorly done. You can launch an orcs n’ elves game without being WoW, though; WAR is definitely not going to be WoW, again.

I’m with a lot of the other bloggers insofar as wanting some different things out there. However, I think I’m in the minority by thinking that things are pretty much going okay. Not only do we have it pretty good right now, we’ve got it pretty good coming down the pipe. Today I want to lay out why now is such a great time for MMOGing, and why folks who want ’something different’ have absolutely no reason to complain about the future.

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I’ll admit it; last week I wasn’t sure if this was worth it any more. I put a lot of work into these things, and I wasn’t sure if people really dug em’. This week, I think things turned out really well. Plus, the Big Story is kickass. Way to go, Flying Lab.

The Big Story
After months and months of radio silence, the folks at Flying Lab Software have come out swinging. Pirates of the Burning Sea finally, finally, finally has a publisher. Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published by Sony Online Entertainment. Though they’re best known for developing games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, they also publish titles via their ‘Platform Publishing’ label. Gods and Heroes is one title taking advantage of this service, and Vanguard used to be a Platform client, as well. Platform allows SOE to keep another developer in the driver’s, while they handle physical distribution and advertising. Indeed, that is the relationship Flying Lab and SOE will have for Pirates of the Burning Sea.

The announcement lays it out like this:

“Flying Lab Software handles the Game Development, Community, Customer Support, Server Operations. Sony Online Entertainment handles the Billing, Launcher, Retail Distribution, Localization, Marketing.”

They’ve updated the PotBS site a bunch recently, and today they’ve got one up that takes the cake:

Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published in partnership with Sony Online Entertainment’s Platform Publishing. This is an important deal for Flying Lab Software and we know how passionate our community is about this issue. So before you start posting your thoughts on our forums, let me share how this particular arrangement differs from publishing deals you may have read about in the past.

Nicely done for both Flying Labs and SOE. In case you were wondering, this right here is this week’s “Big Story”. :)

ps: Last week’s Massive Update did go up, just late. This time it was my fault. It went up here. Go read it if you missed it.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea folks are … not reporting that they are shipping next month. But! They are going to be dramatically increasing the number of folks in the Beta by the end of June. Rusty’s blog entry describes the point they’re at right now; sounds like business negotiations are holding things up at this point and they’re using this as an excuse to keep polishing the game in advance of lots of entrants.

However, we will be expanding the beta dramatically at the end of June. This coincides with us finally having the original version of the game that we expected to ship for R1. It’s a massive improvement over what’s in the beta now, with a lot of moving pieces all finally coming together. We’ll introduce it to our current beta folks, and assuming that goes well, we’ll start the process of inviting people in. Lots of people. 

I never thought I’d say this … but is it possible there are *too many* pirate games coming out in the Massive genre? As with the soon to be crowded superhero MMOG niche, piratical theming is coming to the genre in the form of four distinct online games.

This occured to me today, because I’m subscribed to Alice’s del.icio.us feed. Alice (of Wonderland) is a very on-top-of-things lady, and so her tagging on Pirates! raised an eyebrow:

Pirates Constructible Strategy Game Online The Pirates of the Caribbean MMO seems to have turned into something else, unless I’m on the wrong page
tags: piratesofthecaribbean disney mmo

If a with-it observer of games like Alice can get mixed up by these properties, how is a casual onlooker going to know what’s what?

Here’s a quick guide to MMOG pirates, just in case you need it -

Pirates of the Burning Sea - The ‘real’ Pirate MMOG in the minds of lots of people. This is the one with the elaborate ship-to-ship combat, swordfighting, nation vs. nation PvP, the whole nine yards. While it’s certainly not a ’simulation’-style game, PotBS is definitely the most serious pirate MMOG in the works, and supports this with crafting, avatar customization, and other great buzzwords. In the works with an eye towards release sometime in 2007 (I believe). Stingy with Beta invites. ;P

Pirates of the Carribean Online - Disney’s offering, based on the park ride turned movie franchise. While I had somehow gotten the idea that this was aimed somewhat at kids, the language on the official site makes it seem very much a big boy’s toy. They’re aiming to incorporate some sort of magic system into the game world, something I imagine we’ll see more of in the third movie. They mention ‘curses’, which can be used to heal, harm, and … cheat at card games? There’s actually a surprising amount of discussion about gambling, considering Disney is backing this. No word about when the game’s coming out, but it would be a good bet it’ll be right around the next movie’s release date.

Uncharted Waters Online - The online version of a game that last saw the light on the Super Nintendo, there’s actually a lot to like in the few details they’ve put out. Really all I could find about it was a quickie preview from 2005 and some screenshots at Gamespot. The stale date of the preview (and the fact that there was no followup from E3 2006) worried me a bit, but some of the screens are from May of this year … so I guess it’s still in production? They’ve definitely got a different take on the genre; players will choose from three general classes and then specialize into a more advanced class over the course of gameplay. One has typical combat leanings, but the other two sound very different - one is a crafting/mercantile role, while the other sounds like it will focus on exploration and puzzle-solving. Hard to see how hitting the Bartle types directly could be a bad thing, but who knows if it will ever come out?

Pirates! Constructible Card Game Online - This is SOE’s new hotness, based on the Wizkids game with the little plastic constructible boats. A friend of mine summed this title up as “all the boring gameplay you’ve grown to hate, without any of the fun of playing with the actual little boats”. I’ve only had the chance to play the tabletop game once or twice (though I can’t say I was overly impressed) and I haven’t played the online version at all yet, so I can’t really speak to the piraticalness of Pirates! At least it’s already out. That’s good. Just the same, if they hewwed fairely closely to the original gameplay of the tabletop game, I can’t imagine it’s going to be a ton of fun over the long-term. I should check this out and get back to you.

SOE’s ‘Constructible’ title is obviously different than the other offerings, but once all three are out how is the savvy MMOGer going to choose between what seem to be awfully similar games? I’m personally rooting for PotBS to take the lead in the as-yet-untapped Pirate MMOG niche, but there are too many groups aiming for that spot on the map for it to be anything like a sure thing.

The bottom line is that niche fighting is good for us as gamers, so yay! Here’s hoping they all launch soon; I want to see how this one turns out.