A bunch of truly fantastic news and features have gone across WoW Insider and Massivley in the last few days. I had to share me some love:

• 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!

It’s been an amazing year in MMOGs. I think 2008 is going to be just as big a deal, though … and in some ways maybe even bigger. As I did last year (relatively well, I might add) I’m going to try to call some shots. Again, I’m just a guy and this is all in good fun. But I’ll keep myself honest: we’ll see how I did this time next year.

So then:

1. Is It Cold In Here or Is It Just Me? - Wrath of the Lich King won’t come out in 2008. We’ll have a firm release date (of early 2009) for the expansion by late summer, and there are as-yet-unannounced features slated for the content update. Blizzard has Hydralisks to fry this year.
2. Nickel and Dime - 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. 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.
3. Call Me Agent Smith - The Agency is going to go over like gangbusters. A flat box fee with only microtransactions for further goodies is going to make a big impression … if it can make it out this year. Sometime mid-to-late summer would be perfect. This could even be one of the killer apps for the PS3 this year. Which is good, because it needs it. FreeRealms, on the other hand, is going to have a rough go of it. Without clear player understanding of what exactly this humor/fantasy MMOG thingie is, it’s going to take some time for it to take off.
4. WAAAAUGH For the Win - Warhammer is also going to be a big hit … though it perhaps won’t be everything that EA is hoping for. Long-term MMOG fans are going to fall in love all over again just the same. By the end of the year the house that Jacobs built is going to be very happy for all the extra hard work they put in. 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.
5. Sunglasses At Night - The CCP/White Wolf game is going to be big news this year, as they announce the scope of the world. It’s not going to be everything that World of Darkness fans would have hoped for, but there will still be a lot of happy gothsicles.
6. Out of Left Field - 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.
7. Pushback - 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.
8. The Age Gets Darker - WAR’s release will be a very dark day for the already dimly-lit Ages of Camelot. Their emulation of Mythic’s older game’s defining feature, coupled with a better PvE experience in essentially every way, will see a lot of players heading for the hills.
9. The Legacy of McQuaid - 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.
10. With the Brim Pulled Way Down Low - 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.
11. Way To Cast - Another MMO dev or publisher will join Blizzard and SOE in making an official podcast.
12. Coming of Age - 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.
13. Okay For Serious This Time - BioWare will announce what they’re making in Austin. For reals, guys. C’mon! :)

2008’s Winners: Warhammer Online, The Agency, MapleStory, New Studios

2008’s Losers: Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard, Age of Conan

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.

Semi-related to my post from Monday about Mil’s attempt to get CS satisfaction, Mike from MMO Crunch passed me a link to his frustating experience with Turbine.

I have recently stopped playing LOTRO. So today I went and officially canceled my account, however while doing so I saw no option to remove my CC and billing information from their system. Having been a victim of random charges by unsaid company in the past I wanted to remove my info so that my subscription would not accidentally be restarted. Seeing no way to do this from Turbine’s website, I contacted support, who basically said, You either keep your CC information in our system or the game that you PAID for will no longer work, ever.

I thought we were all in agreement that these things are services now?

Okay. Now that I’ve written about how hunky dory LOTRO is, I have to put down some snark. I even got a very nice note from one of the Edelman folks (hi!) who were nice enough to send me a gratis copy. I was originally planning on buying a copy; now I guess I can lay that out on Guitar Hero II for the 360 instead. ;)

Just the same, I do have a couple of snarks I have to get out of my system.

• Quest balance. While the ‘group quests’ have all very much been right on the money (essentially undoable by solo, very pleasant in a group), I’ve found several ostensibly soloable quests that are too challenging for one avatar. I’m specifically thinking of the one where you help the idiot hobbits trying to knock the satchel out of the tree near Tuckborough. It’s slated as a level 7 quest, and the bees (the first critters you have to protect the hobbit from) are doable at that level. However, then you’re faced with a pair of bears; one is level 10 and the other is level 9. The first level I tried the quest at was 9, and I got creamed. Several times. Same at level 10. I waited until I hit 12 to take them on again, and used up a bunch of food and consumables before doing so. I *bearly* (no pun) squeaked past those bastards with a sliver of health left. I know I’m just a Minstrel, and I’m sure that more front-line folks probably have a better time of it, but I haven’t had any other problems like this with a solo-specified outing. Additionally, I’ve come across several other characters trying the quest that needed bacon-saving. I was happy to oblige, but if that quest is tuned for a group it should say so.
• Bugs. I have noticed several pinchers that made it through the Beta process. Nothing too major, but it’s a little annoying to see nonetheless. The “Honey-Bears” quest over near the aforementioned tree is the most consistent one I’ve seen. The bears spawn up near the top of a hill, and you have to protect Bolo Beekeeper-guy from the marauding ursines. The problem is they do this drop-from-the-sky routine, flickering in and out of existence. You have to run to the top of the hill and aggro them in order to get them to stay put. This quest *is* doable solo, but Bolo helps a lot on that front. By aggroing at the top of the hill you get a lot of damage that might otherwise have been spread around. That ‘drop from the sky’ bug is around a lot; while it makes some kind of sense for the spiders over by Overhill, wolves, bears, and slugs make a lot less sense. As a final wtf I spent about half an hour last night helping a guy get unstuck from the corner of a building, which he somehow managed to teleport himself into facing the wrong direction. IE: he saw his interface, but darkness beyond. /stuck wasn’t working, and we eventually resorted to my telling him which way he was facing and walking him into a building instance. When he turned around and left the instance, his sight was restored. For the most part, LOTRO has been such a smooth experience that these things stand out more than they would have otherwise, but they do bear mentioning.
• Quest Design. STOP SENDING ME BACK TO MICHEL DELVING. The Shire is actually a really small place once you step back and get a better view, but the constant run around back and forth gets old after a while. I think things got a lot better once I’d made my way to the eastern portion of the area (past the Frog swamps and into Scary). The quest that bugged me specifically was the spiders in Nob’s Bole one, where you eventually help the walking tree. I went from Tuckborough to Overhill several times; as I said, not a long trip. The repetition, though, was frustrating. I like feeling a sense of progression from my quests. A leads to B leads to C. We can go back to B, but then I should go on to C and D after that. The spider quest was more like A, B, C, B, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C. This may have been part of their familiarization process for the Shire (and the game’s design philosophy, which I’ll get to below), but it started to get irksome during a long play session earlier this week. As a note, I should say that the frustration led to a really nice payoff. Escorting the walking tree was a blast, and the rewards for the quest were pretty good. Oh, additionally: escort missions are actually really cool in this game. I normally hate them, but all the escorts I’ve done so far have been for folks buff enough to either hold their own in a fight or stay alive well after I thought they should have. Low irritation that way, and it leads to my empathizing with the NPCs.

I have a few other snarks, but they’re really minor. (Why a slug-killer Title but no bear killer?) As I looked out across the Photorealistic landscape earlier today, an element of LOTRO’s design came to mind that I wanted to mention in this post that’s otherwise about negative elements. That element: familiarity.

Because The Shire and Bree-land are places we’ve all read about in books and seen in movies, we have expectations hung on them. Turbine has met those expectations by making them interesting places to explore and (unlike almost every other game I can think of) given the places a character of their own. While I complain about backtracking and one of the other mmogbloggers kvetched about the standardness of the quest design, it adds up in a way that I haven’t seen in other games. For example: I don’t give a flying fuck about Elwynn forest. I know the RPers on Argent Dawn just looooved Goldshire, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Ditto with Westfall, Loch Modan, or almost any other zone you could mention. The only zone I’d say I connected with were Dun Morogh (shorties represent!) and Duskwood. I love the quest lines in Duskwood, play em’ every time. With LOTRO, though, the personality of the Shire has been etched into every little nugget of lore you stumble over. The pie-running, mailbag-delivering, goblin-killing, and slug squishing is all secondary to imparting the innocent and carefree nature of the Hobbit lifestyle to the player. Bree and environs similarly seems fairly over-run with character and nuance. I don’t know how much all this junk is going to impact me on a third or fourth play through, but my first two characters (my alt is a human champion) have definitely given me a sense of these areas; they’ve made an impression.

An aside: Every time I come up on Weathertop, I have to stop and just stare. It’s … absolutely perfect. Damn this game is beautiful.

A few comments on my experiences in Lord of the Rings Online. But first, I want to point something out. On January 12th of this year, I was very sure of myself. Like Abeilano, I was sure that LOTRO was nothing more than a cheap knock-off of WoW with a hobbit-skin cover. By the 17th, during an argument with my comrade in the Cesspit, I found myself reconsidering my opinion. At the end of the month I had already apologized for an ill-given ‘award’. Last week, my will caved. Today, though I still have the sneaking suspicion I’m never going to see much of the world Turbine hath wrought, I stand before you apologetic, impressed, and excited. I don’t have a crystal ball, but Turbine finally might have a hit on their hands. Who knows? Maybe one day DDO will be what I want it to be too.

Let’s get the comparisons out of the way first. Is it ‘as good’ as WoW? Maybe. Will it hit WoW numbers? Who knows? Is it as polished as WoW? Yes, but I also think it’s less ambitious. It’s certainly smaller. Will it make Tolkien fans happy? I think that’s a definite yes. Will it make LOTR movie fans happy? Not as much, but it’s hard to stand beneath the party tree and not imagine that dragon firework exploding in the sky above you. (Note to Turbine: If you let me attend Bilbo Baggins’ 111th birthday I could die a happy man. I don’t care if it has to be instanced, I’ll show up.) Is 15 level enough to have seen the whole game? Hell no, but it was enough to convince me that you’ll at least have a couple of fun months with this game.

What I Love About LOTRO:

• The Bags. It might seem like a little thing, but having your full inventory just available from the get go is so liberating. I haven’t seen anyone else mention this per se, and it’s surprised the crap out of me. I can’t even imagine how much time I’ve spent getting alts their bigger-slotted bags in WoW.
• The Titles. Again, a little thing, but the fact that they’ve woven the backstory into the game in a way that’s not represented by a reputation grind is fabulous. I know I would have worked harder at those stupid Firbolgs if they’d given me a neat title at the end of the road. Granted, you see some guys walking around with 1024 pixel wide titles, but that’s just part of the fun.
• The Classes. Sorry dr00ds. I just have never gotten behind classes that screw up the four legs of the D&D table. If I can’t look at a class in a fantasy MMOG and know whether it’s a Tank, Nuke, Healer, or Skills-monkey, I probably won’t play it. My primary character in WoW was a Paladin, and look where that got me.
• The Healers. Easily one of the things I’m most looking forward to with Warhammer Online, but true to a lesser extent in LOTRO as well. Healers don’t *have* to be in the back row steering clear of the fight. Thank everything.
• The Graphics. I still like WoW’s look better, but man is it hard not to be impressed. I’ll refer you to Foton’s Flickr Set if you have any questions.

What I Like About LOTRO:

• The Lore. I’m like, a 2nd level Tolkien nerd. I know everything from the movies and have read some of the books outside the core four. That said, I think the lore in the game is ‘good enough’. Some little stuff bugged me, but I think it’s on the whole going to please the nit-pickers.
• The Combat. It’s ehh, better than ‘the same. damn. thing. as. every. other. game.‘, but not by much. Just enough to keep me amused this month.
• The Crafting. I like that they’ve broken the mold a little bit with crafts like farming and scrollmaking and such. Otherwise nothing super out-of-the-box.
• The Quests. While most of them are the ‘whack the foozle’ or FedEx variety, they know how to dress them up. I really like the post quests. Being a mailman is fun, somehow.

What I See Being a Problem For LOTRO:

• The World of Warcraft. “Oh yeah! Those guys are still out there? What’s that, there’s another expansion coming? I better get back to raiding Karazahn! Yoink!”
• The Music Is Wrong. I’m just picking something to pick on, but there are enough differences between the movies and the game world that some mass-market folks are going to be put off. It remains to be seen how much of an issue this is, but I think their (admirable) adherence to the lore and lack of a license with New Line may keep them from the critical mass they want.
• The Management. I have to pick a little bit. AC and DDO have been … middling? I guess is the right word? And, as Mr. Jacobs pointed out last month, the only Massive games which have died did so because their publishers gave up on them. That’s a spot on their permanent record.
• The UI. Oh. Oh god. Oh please make it stop.

It may seem to you like I put most of the core of the game under ‘like’, some fluff under ‘love, and some serious problems at the bottom. You’d be right. I didn’t shell out $199 for a lifetime membership because I don’t think I’m ever going to play the game that much. By biting the bullet when I did I can stick to the $9.99 membership and get my jollies at a lower cost. Maybe someday my regular MMOG group will move to LOTRO; then I might reconsider. For the time being, though, I’ll be enjoying my hobbit-time as a Minstrel on the realm of Meneldor. Send me a ping if you need healing for a group.

While I’d like to once again register my belief that honesty is something to be lauded … I’m going to step back and agree that Brad McQuaid’s commentary hasn’t helped at all.

A press release totally unconnected to Massive games actually convinced me of this. The release that changed my mind was a recent missive from Palladium Books. Palladium is a publisher of table-top roleplaying games, and is helmed by a gent named Kevin Siembada. I dunno if things have changed since I followed tabletop closely, but back in the day he was regarded as a right proper ass. My nose wrinkled like I was smelling something foul as I read his dripping message to Palladium customers:

My goal and the goal shared by every Palladium staff member, as well as our freelance artists and writers, is to create some of the most dynamic, exciting and fun role-playing games and sourcebooks on the market. Not just for our own survival, but for the survival and advancement of the role-playing game hobby. We are disappointed by the low number of RPG products being released by other game companies. All of us at Palladium Books know role-playing games have a bright future, and we aim to prove it. In addition to RPG sourcebooks and games, you will soon see an offering of three, new T-shirts, Rifts Postage Stamps, the John Zeleznik Art Book, and a new product line I think is fun, different and something you and ALL fans of sci-fi and fantasy artwork will enjoy. I’m sure some of our detractors will shake their heads, but we think it’s something people will enjoy and use.

I read this, I recalled Siembada’s asinine plea to fans to keep the company afloat (which obviously worked, unfortunately), and I can’t help but think of Brad’s comments to the Vanguard fanbase. Yech. They’re honest, yes, but as with Siembada’s drooling exhortation to buy more of their crap to ‘advance the role-playing game hobby’, they’re essentially penitent excuses laid at the feet of the gamers who are subsidizing Sigil’s existence. “We really really tried. We tried so hard. I know it’s not as good as it could have been. Also: please keep giving us money!”

Moreover, and this is what has been weighing on me, they’re far too little too late. Yes, money was tight. Developing a game on your own often is. Yes, SOE forced them to launch sooner than they were ready. That happens when you let an older boy play with your toys - they might get broken. The bottom line here is that McQuaid and Co. had FIVE FUCKING YEARS to make this game. The official press release wasn’t until 2004, but Sigil has been around since January of 2002. They’ve had that long to get with the times, make changes, realize they were making a horrible mistake, or at least … you know … fix the bugs. The stink is rising from the shambling carcass that is Saga of Heroes, and already the vultures are beginning to take strips of flesh:

Kageru: Meanwhile I have no idea what happened with the game coding. The code seems to already have reached an unmaintainable state where bugs just can’t be fixed. I can’t imagine how else the act of forming a group, or not falling through the world, can still be so flawed. Meanwhile the rate of introduction for new bugs is scarily high.

I honestly can’t see the game holding enough subscriptions to fund the development it needs to be decent.

That, of course, is now the question: Will SOE buy Vanguard from Sigil? There has been lots of discussion on the subject of just what went wrong, and folks are on both sides of the fence. Is it worth saving? Is there any player interest? What does Brad think? (You’ll note he’s been fairly quiet on this particular front.)

My two cents: No, it’s not worth saving. But yes, if SOE can swing it they almost certainly will.

The reason it’s not worth saving? When I talked about throwing a MMOG and no one coming back in Summer of last year, I was talking about Auto Assault. From everything I’ve heard, even though there’s no one (really) interested in playing it … the people who *are* playing it are having a blast. It’s very different, it’s a little hard to understand, but they went out there and they tried something really different. And they fell on their faces. Which happens sometimes. Just like Pauly Shore - at least they tried. Vanguard, on the other hand, is a five-years-in-the-making retread of a game released in 1999 that isn’t even as good as the original game. Yeah, you can make ships and fly cool mounts etc. etc, but the metric shit-ton of content SOE has crammed into EQ over the years makes those extra features look like chump change. The diplomacy game is really neat. I’ll totally give them that. But em … what else is there to get excited about? LOTRO’s got Hobbitses and fancy titles … and you’re offering me a glorified card game?

Now, all that said, SOE is definitely going to buy it if they can. The reason: Because they can. They’ve already got their foot in the door by publishing the thing, and I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Vanguard would probably be pretty cheap to pick up right now. Poor dealings with Microsoft in the past and awful subscriptions rates in the here-and-now have to be making it hard for those guys to be making payroll let alone focusing on future development. So SOE slips some cash in a few pockets and bingo-bango: a 95% complete Massive game that just needs a few months of work to get the kinks ironed out.

Yes, it’s a lot like their two flagship products. Yes, it’s leaving a really bad taste in the mouths of gamers right now. Yes, people are going to yell at them and call them mean and nasty names for ‘butting in’ to ‘Brad’s sacred realm’. All those are good reasons not to. But, as I’ve tried to point out in the past, at the end of the day the Massive industry is a business. From a business standpoint, there’s a wounded competitor lying at their feet. You pick him up, dust him off, and soon enough he’s working for you. Why let the guy die when you can turn misfortune into an opportunity for profit?

(I’m mentally picturing Ferengi rubbing their lobes right now, so consider that as you mentally say the word ::profit::)

All this is just conjecture of course, but why not? Hell, it’s SOE’s money to throw away, not mine. At this point I wouldn’t invest in Vanguard with um … a twelve foot pole.

You tell me, though: What’s a real and honestly good reason for Sony Online Entertainment not to purchase Vanguard?