I’ve been skimming through the games list over at mmorpg.com and was rather astonished by the sheer number of MMORPGs currently in developement. What was even more astonishing was the fact that I’ve never heard of most of them. I recognized a few names, mostly of games that were announced many years ago and are still in developement, like Hero’s Journey. I think most of these games are financial disasters in the making, half-assed projects initiated during the heyday of EverQuest. With the recent success of WoW, we’ll probably see another wave of MMORPGs – hopefully better ones than the most of the garbage from the post-EQ era.
A few titles on that list stuck out. These are the games that I believe to have the potential to turn out well:
Age of Conan is Funcom’s next MMORPG. It’s hard to dislike Funcom. They are the developers of The Longest Journey, arguably the best graphic adventure game ever made. Their first MMORPG, Anarchy Online, was highly innovative at the time it was released. Features like instancing have since then become a staple of the MMORPG genre. Sadly, AO suffered from a catastrophic launch. I was a beta tester for AO and the sudden release came as a complete surprise to all testers. Virtually nothing worked. The servers were unstable, the client CTD’d every few minutes and even fundamental game mechanics, like the random mission generator, were completely borked. Yet, aside from some innovative game mechanics, AO had much going for it. I loved the SciFi game setting, the graphics, the lore and the world design. After a number of expansion and much patching, AO turned out to be one of the better MMORPGs out there.
Age of Conan seems to take a rather unusaly approach to MMO gameplay. Your character will first go through a story-driven single-player game before entering the shared online-world. Gameplay will be centered around epic large-scale battles. Real-time combat, castle sieges, the ability to command NPCs into battle… sounds quite intriguing to me. Plus, the screenshots that have been released so far look absolutely gorgeous. The quality of the artwork is nothing short of incredible.
I have high hopes for Age of Conan, mainly because I have trust in Funcom’s ability to innovate and I am confident that they’ve learned from past mistakes.
Initially co-developed by Games Worshop and some n00b game developer, the project was cancelled in June 2004. Mythic Entertainment, the creators of Dark Age of Camelot, acquired the license in 2005. The game is currently in an early developement stage.
The reason why I am looking forward to Warhammer Online is that Mythic has a proven track record and their trademark “Realm vs Realm” (RvR) concept for PvP is, in my opinion, the best PvP implementation to be found in MMORPGs so far. DAoC is a great game, I played it for almost two years. Mythic have also demonstrated that they can work on a budget. DAoC was developed on a shoe-string budget of less than $ 3 million and became a major success. While the release version initially suffered from a lack of content, the foundation was solid and Mythic greatly expanded upon it. The way Mythic handles community relations is exemplary.
Warhammer Online will mark the return of RvR gameplay, something that I’ve been craving for ever since WoW’s PvP gameplay turned out to be a disappointing exercise in pointlessness.
First of all, the name sucks. It doesn’t sound very nice, it describes a concept from Lockean philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis and it’s frigging Latin. Not the kind of name I’d chose for a computer game. It conveys connotations of intellectual snobbery. Change it. Now.
I included Tabula Rasa in this little list of mine because I don’t believe that the creator of Ultima can develope a crappy game. In recent interviews, Richard Garriot has hinted at game design concepts that could truly break the mold of current MMORPG gameplay, though next to no hard facts are known so far.
Having a financially healthy publisher like NCSoft with a proven track record of successful MMOG releases makes me confident that Tabula Rasa will turn out to be a worthy addition to the genre.
Vanguard will most like be the next MMORPG I will waste my time on. Developed by Sigil Games Online, a company founded by EQ-developers Brad McQuaid and Jeff Buttler and funded by Microsoft, Vanguard is supposed to be a “spiritual successor to EverQuest”.
Most post-EQ MMORPGs have tried to ”improve” on the EQ-formula by reducing or getting rid of gameplay elements the developers percieved as “not fun”. The result are games with fast leveling, a great degree of soloability, a shift from dungeon crawling to questing, the virtual elimination of down times and travel times as well as a sharp reduction of the penalty upon death. Many people feel though that those elements are important to challenge, immersion and the community aspects of the game. I tend to agree, at least to a certain degree.
EverQuest was a bit too heavy on the time-sink side but the counter-movement went clearly over the top. Virtually eliminating penalties upon death takes away the sense of danger, reduces the respect for the game enviroment and thus has a negative impact on immersion. Making travel too easy and fast makes the world appear smaller and less immersive. Fast leveling and the ability to solo to max level prevents players from forming meaningful in-game social networks.
While I certainly don’t want the return of 30 minute boat rides, 8-hour catass raids, 10 minute downtimes and week-long item-camping sessions, the current direction into which most new MMORPGs are headed doesn’t work for me either. I hope Sigil will manage to find a viable balance between these two extremes. I think it’s great that there is at least one game that goes against the current trend of immitating WoW’s successful formula.
There are still a couple of open questions and areas of concern. I think some fo the ideas and game mechanics Sigil have announced are questionable, if not batshit insane. I’m still not convinved that having no instancing at all is such a great idea. I understand the reasons for not having instacing but I think the benefits of instancing far outweigh the problems. Vanguard’s crafting system looks like it will be ridiculously complex and highly interdependent – something which, in my opinion, doesn’t really work out well. I’m also concerned about Vanguard having to many character classes that might be too similar to each other. There are a number of other potential issues. Basically, when reading previews and developer postings I’m constantly torn between “yay!” and “wtf?”.
That’s it. Of all the MMORPGs currently in developement there are only four that I find to be promising. Kind of sad, isn’t it?