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.

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.

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.

Hey, guess what? World of Warcraft is more popular than most of the other Massive games put together; certainly more popular than all the other big-budget subscription titles put together. That’s okay. Know why? Because it deserves it.

As I wrote crankily last month, I have a heard time understanding all the kvetching. All these features that make WoW ‘too easy’ are also what make it ‘popular’. Most people are not us, the hardcore mentality is a blinding one, etc. We’ve been over this before.

The bigger issue, though, is the one in the Massive genre as a whole: some folks see World of Warcraft as dominating the genre as a whole. With the long tail on MMOGs, even if Blizzard stopped development on it right now, and never sunk a single dime into it, it would take years for the game to get depopulated enough to pull the plug. And, of course, Blizzard will be supporting this game with patches and expansions for years to come; I might be playing World of Warcraft with grandkids for all I know.

Probably the most visible of these statements comes to us from Richard Bartle in his recent Guardian interview; I’m sure you’ve already read it, but just in case you haven’t, here’s the last question in the piece:

If you could take over control of one major MMORPG – which would you choose and what would you do with it?
I’d take over World of Warcraft and I’d close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries.

Now, Richard explains what he meant by that, and it’s all in good fun, theoretical exercise and all that. For a full exploration of this topic, the ongoing discussion at Broken Toys is your best bet.

I knew what he meant the first time he said it, but it still gave me pause. Is World of Warcraft bad for the industry? Is it bad for all the other Massives out there that could be something wonderful but end up squashed in their crib because WoW scootched too far to the left on a given day?

If it’s truly bad for the industry, then all we would see are WoW-alikes coming down the pipe. The future of MMOGdom would be nothing but derivative schlock. And guess what? It’s not!

Just this year alone we’ve got Perpetual’s Gods and Heroes, Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Destination Games’ Tabula Rasa.

• GnH tweaks the fantasy with the greek, makes some fairly interesting changes to gameplay with minions, and adds kickass animations into the mix. It has more in common with Guild Wars than WoW.
• PotBS is a wholly unique experience. Right now there are absolutely no games on the market at all like this. Gameplay is a mix of console-ish swordplay and a stately game of predator and prey at sea. It has a grander, more noble aesthetic, and there’s not a cyclops, elf, orc, or centaur to be found.
• TR mixes the elements of Guild Wars with components of Quake 4, and is (again) a wholly unique experience. The first MMOFPS that will likely be taken seriously by genre fans, it’s even doing some innovative things with world persistence and the ‘meaning’ that a player can impart into the world. You know, exactly what every single MMOG player (myself included) has been asking for all these years? No, it’s not going to be just what you want, but it’s a first step.

Even if none of these games interest you personally, you have to admit that not one of them is a WoW clone. So the question becomes, are these titles going to benefit or suffer from WoW’s shadow across the landscape? Given their nature and the time these games are due out, I am of the opinion they’ll benefit, greatly.

Burning Crusade’s content petered out months ago. We don’t even know what the next expansion is yet, though it’s like to be announced at Blizzcon next month. Any possible release date for whatever it is, *cough*Northrend*cough*, has to be sometime early next year. This gives games released in August a full five months, or longer, to attract the attention of World of Warcraft players extremely tired of running Karazahn and fighting with their guildmates.

Assuming that the next expansion for WoW launches in February again, developers are going to have to expect there to be a drop in subscriptions early in the year. That’s just going to be a given; everyone heads back to Azeroth for their yearly fix of new content and the new raiding season. In the meantime, though, you’ve got millions of bored players who now know they like Massively Multiplayer games … but don’t want to play WoW anymore.

Do I think GnH, TR, and PotBS are going to be huge successes as a result of this timing? Not really. I hope they’ll do well, but I don’t really see any of them cracking a million players. The question isn’t if they’ll do better than WoW, the question is: Will they do better because of WoW?

I think the answer to that question is an unmitigated yes. World of Warcraft has introduced so many people to the Massive genre that I firmly believe more people will be playing new releases than otherwise would have. Again, it’s hard to underestimate the impact of 7-8-9 million people worldwide.

As for the genre beyond this year, I think we’re pretty good. WAR looks to Blizzard’s most serious contender; by being ‘kinda’ like WoW but completely different in almost every way, they’re going to attract a bunch of players looking for their old flame in a new dress. Down the pipe we have two more superhero games, Star Trek, whatever the hell BioWare and Raph are doing … I don’t even think a single one of those is going to be in the fantasy genre, like alone a WoW-alike.

The developers say it all the time, WoW has been good for the industry. The reason people are confused and upset, I think, is because these things take so damn long to make that there have only been a handful released since 2004.

At the end of the year I’ll try to revisit this topic and look back at how things went. We’ve got three MMOG launches coming before we crack 2008. By then we’ll know for sure whether Bartle’s quip was just that, or a prescient forecast of doom.

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.”

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.

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. 

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.