Wrath of the Lich King won’t come out in 2008.

So. Not a good start here. Fail. But I will point out that I wasn’t alone in thinking this would be the case. Plus, I’m really glad it did come out. Good stuff, and nice job Blizz.

The concept of RMT and microtransactions will continue to gain acceptance with North American gamers. This will be reflected commercially by further successes for MapleStory and Nexon’s other games in the US.

Big pass. Nexon was big business this year, and MT made big inroads with a bunch of different games already out.

Other companies will begin to consider alternatives to the flat subscription fee, even if outright RMT/microtransactions aren’t yet on the table. At least one newly announced game this year will feature a non-subscription schema.

I’m going to say this is like a double-pass. If that’s possible. SOE’s Station Cash service is a big ‘alternative to the fat subscription fee’, as is NCsoft’s adoption of its own cash system and City of Heroes Boosters. SWTOR’s non-subscription schema definitely counts for that last point.

The Agency is going to go over like gangbusters … FreeRealms, on the other hand, is going to have a rough go of it.

I’m going to call this a fail. Obviously Agency didn’t come out this year, and Free Realms looks better and better every time I see it. Just the same, I think SOE still has its work cut out for it making gamers and non-gamers understand what these titles are ‘about’.

Warhammer is also going to be a big hit, though it perhaps won’t be everything that EA is hoping for … Conan will be a much less resounding success. It’s not going to fail, but Funcom is going to end 2008 more than a little bit frustrated.

I’m going to call this a pass. Obviously my hopes for Warhammer haven’t gone quite as far as I would have liked, but I think I was pretty close there. And my sense that Conan wouldn’t do as well as Warhammer has, I think, borne out.

The CCP/White Wolf game is going to be big news this year.

Aherm. Fail. That said, the more I think about the possibilities of CCP’s experience with a one-world/one-server game applied to a non-space game the more excited I get. I’d really like to see what a game with avatars in a one-server space would look like.

One of the newbie studios (Carbine, Red 5) is going to announce a project that will really excite and surprise Massive fans. 38 Studios will announce what they’re doing, and it won’t surprise anyone … but it will be somewhat interesting.

Fail. But, again, we have big and tantalizing hints about what’s coming down the pipe from these companies. Big things on the horizon.

There’s going to be yet another major AAA title whose release date is pushed back to late in the year. One of the big games that we think is going to come out in 2008, won’t.

WAR was slated for early 08 and got pushed back, so ding there. There were a number of games loosely slated for 08 that have slid to 09, so I’m going to call this a total success.

At some point, Vanguard players are going to get tired of waiting around for ‘the good’ to show up in their game. Expect to see some of Vanguard’s best features showing up in EverQuest 2.

I’m going to give myself a half-point for this. I don’t think there’s been a mass exodus from Vanguard or anything, but I’m told by Karen that my point about features migrating to EQ2 was pretty spot on.

We’re going to see another live game close up shop this year, and an in-development title will slip into the unseen depths as well.

Well. Shit. Right on both. TR is closing up, Hellgate slid beneath the waves, and Mythos (among others) went the way of the dodo. Pass.

Another MMO dev or publisher will join Blizzard and SOE in making an official podcast.

Pass. NCsoft has one now too.

Tabula Rasa is going to maintain a steady playerbase throughout the year as folks enjoy the new and exciting flavour. Turbine will continue to not report LOTRO’s subscription numbers, for a reason.

Epic fail Zenke. I especially want to upbraid myself for that LotRO crack, because I’m now officially a Middle-earth fanboy.

BioWare will announce what they’re making in Austin.

Yayyyy! Pass! And finally! Let’s all sing The Old Republic song now!

Right: 6.5

Wrong: 5.5

Wow, I managed to get the exact same ratio this year as last year. Nice job me. That must mean that tomorrow is my day for calling next year’s shots. I think I’m going to do a bit more going out on a limb . Maybe.

• A wrapup of the pounding that cross-gender ‘research’ took at the hands of Bartle and the Freeman.  I particularly liked the comments on Raph’s blog; almost nothing from him and several really nice retorts from the peanut gallery.
• Will Dobson put together a fantastic look at the Spring Festival going on over in LOTRO. It’s not only interesting and informative but a great chance to show off our new gallery software. Nice!
• The WoW Insider team headed to the Tourney test realm and came away with some amazing stuff. Amanda Miller has a writeup of the events, but you really have to check out the gallery of their experiences. I want to ride a giant Raven Lord!
• A FANTASTIC announcement from NCsoft as they unveil the beginnings of Issue 12 for City of Heroes. I really love the sound of this content – definitely going to have to check it out. In fact, talking it over with the EQ2 group, it sounds like CoH might be our next destination once we hit max level sometime near the end of this year.
• I remember seeing the flying mounts at the end of Vanguard Beta over a year ago now, and only now are they getting put into the game. A little sad, but still great news for the players who have been waiting patiently for this content to drop. Game Update 4 is live!

Raiding, guilds, and chat elements, then, tend to get a lot of attention. And rightly so; the guild is the fundamental unit of any Massive game. Raiding is the ‘thing people do together’ in many titles, and the chat component of the game allows the whole thing to happen in the first place. There’s a missing level of granularity there, that I think is far too often overlooked: the single static group. Static groups are, in my mind, just as important as guilds to the success or failure of a game. Incredibly common, they’re one of the most joyous things about massive games. Tabletop gamers will recognize the static group, that band of comrades, immediately. That’s where my group came from, after all – a player of mine wandering away from the table (and the state).

Static group recognition, in my mind, isn’t just a nice optional feature; it’s an important concept in online gaming that goes regularly overlooked.

Of all the games out there, Vanguard is really the only one that treats static parties with any sense of decorum. It’s actually fairly interesting to me how many specific things Vanguard gets right (diplomacy, mounts, etc.) despite the overall mess of the game. This is what Vanguard’s system looks like:

The Brotherhood System
Brotherhoods are a method for you and your friends to gain experience for each other, even when some of you are offline. All experience you earn is split amongst the members of the fellowship, even members who are offline. When you are in debt or have lost experience, your experience will be devoted to repaying your debt/loss before you resume contributing to the brotherhood. Brotherhoods are completely independent from groups; you can be a member of both at the same time.

So from a mechanical point of view there’s a lot of support, but I’m actually thinking that even more basic support is required. Howabout a shared chat channel? Optional Brotherhood tabards, or some other items? (The Musketeers have hats!) If you’re in a guild and a brotherhood, wouldn’t it be great to choose which tag you hang above your head?

In short, I feel like static groups should be supported as sort of mini-guilds. Brotherhood banks, tabards, tags, housing, chat channels — they’d all be substantive additions to a game.

The underlying reason for all these components – retaining players. If guilds are ’sticky’ to begin with, then how much stickier is a small tight-knit group of people. Having a common banner to wave around would make the group feel that much more connected to the world, and give them even more of a reason to stick with a game. Keeping butts in the seats is what it’s all about, and static groups do it really really well. So why not recognize that?

What can put the brakes on this game’s freefall? In my mind, I think about the only thing left is an influx of new players. A sufficient parachute of players might make this game’s time in the air a little longer – and certainly more interesting.

The key is that folks need to face up to the reality that the game is just not set for the big time anymore. As hard as the skeleton crew on on the game works, regardless of their successes, Vanguard is not going to get these players in its current configuration. Generating a ton of new content is also not in the cards. You’re not going to snag players with expansions and whatnot – the core game isn’t sturdy enough for that. There’s also the incredible hugeness of the title; the game takes up gigs and gigs of space.

That size is a liability for what I have in mind. In short, I think Vanguard would be perfect as the first AAA 3D fantasy free-to-play title. SOE has already shown its interest in utilizing the F2P business strategy with plans for FreeRealms and Agency. I think it would be a small jump to extend that to Vanguard. Show an ad as players log in, and offer a number of options for users via a microtransaction format.

Vanguard is already set up with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at. Most of these currently have to be earned through hard play, and should continue to be available via that method. For a couple of bucks, though, who wouldn’t want a cool camel mount? Or a dragon? Or a unicorn? Housing options are also obvious choices for purchaseable upgrades. With this kind of thinking behind the game’s financial future, I’m certain that all new batches of content could be added to the game.

I’m also going to go ahead and say that I think Vanguard would be a good game to test the waters of more ‘liberal’ RMT. The kind of players who enjoy Vanguard might appreciate the chance to legitimately buy some gold, decent equipment, or a higher-level avatar. At this point its something that’s never been fully explored on a wholesale commercial level, with full support from the developer. That’s one of the inherent beauties of Vanguard: it has so much potential, but almost none of it is realized. Why not go out on a few limbs with it?

In my view the game is basically a failure. At this point, what does SOE have to lose by shaking things up?

These business-side decisions should be supported by some fairly drastic design changes, I think. The bottom line is that the world of Vanguard is too freaking big. Players are far too spread out, there’s too much art, too many classes, too many races. It’s a mess. It’s a legacy of the overly ambitious days of Sigil, and it shows.

So cut the crap. There’s a ton of unfinished junk lying around the game world. There’s miles and miles of unfilled spaces, starting zones that never really started … so why leave it in the game? What I’m going to say now is going to come across as startlingly naive, but I believe there’s a measure of sanity here: cut and paste.

Cull the world down to a small portion of its current size. Choose the best chunk of the game, and concentrate on that to the exclusion of everything else. Take the best elements of the rest of the game world, and relocate them to the new version of Telon. I know, I know – this wrecks up the gameworld’s lore. But the number of people who really care about that lore are a handful at this point.

I think there’s something worth saving here. It’s just spread out, too thin on the ground for people to enjoy. That laughable monthly fee is a barrier that most people won’t get past. Even if they do, it’s so hard to get to the really good parts that they’re highly unlikely to stick with the game.

I feel the same way about PlanetSide, as long as we’re chatting on this wavelength. The monthly fee for PS is a freaking joke. It’s long, long, long overdue to be done away with. Cut the number of planets and caverns, merge all the servers, drop the fee and you get more people fighting across a smaller world. All hallmarks of fast and furious awesomeness.

I’m a big fan of recycling. I’m an even bigger fan of seeing hard work given meaning. The VG site amusingly has a banner that says “Set Yourself Free”. Indeed. Indeed.

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. F13 has the news:

At approximately 4:30PM [April 14th], Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

Actually, we know for sure the McQuaid wasn’t the one to do it. Grouchy Gamer reports that lord-and-master of Vanguard Brad McQuaid hasn’t been in the Sigil offices since last year. You know, since before the game shipped? Just in case you think that’s some crazy guy on a website, I’ll go on record as saying I can verify most of what he’s saying. I too have heard from ’sources’ who say that the hard workers, the guys on the ground at Sigil, were fucked over by a gent who tipped his toe into the ‘running a company’ pool and decided it was a wee bit too nippy for him.

One of these ’sources’ has been suggesting I look into this further, talk to some of these guys and write it up. And I will say: if there’s any ex-Sigil employees looking to talk my email address is right here on the site. Update: F13 has a talk with one of the ex-devs and lays it all out.

But the reality is, I haven’t dug very hard because the whole thing depresses the hell out of me. How can a guy like McQuaid, who was there at the very beginning, care so little about the project he started? This wasn’t some green schlub out of college: he helped to make one of these things when ‘catass’ wasn’t even a term yet. Hell, he helped make the game that spawned the term.

Krones has a few insightful things to say about this over at Plaguelands, but the last words go to Grouchy:

I should tell you that I’m pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit. I’m pissed that the good people (and good developers) that I care about at Sigil are now in the street, and Brad still has millions and Jeff Butler a job … In the end, this game may someday be good. Tomorrow, when this news is announced a lot of the SOE haters will just jump ship, whether SOE had anything to do with this game failing or not. Fact is, it has (failed.) And fact is, it’s not SOE’s fault. The blame for this one falls squarely at the desk where the buck should stop. The CEO’s office. The empty one in the corner.

It’s all ultimately good news, but complicated enough to justify one of my verbose postings :)  I should have my first Sigil/Vanguard update up tomorrow and then look for regular updates as to the future of the game here and on the affiliate sites (probably weekly or so, depending on what’s going on).  I will post here first and then immediately copy the post to a set of the Vanguard affiliate sites.

thanks,

-Brad