The Anticipation Builds…

As you all surely know Curt Schilling founded an MMO Studio earlier this year, bringing in some serious star power such as R.A. Salvatore (Drizz’t) and Todd McFarlane(Spawn) to help bring his vision to life.  Something you MAY not know is that they plan on announcing their new game later this week at Comic-Con.  I for one am pretty excited to see what they’ve got in the works.  Between Blizzard’s looming MMO announcement and Areae’s impending announcement as well, it’s going to be exciting to see how they stack up against the current list of upcoming titles. 

~Kanthalos

The Double-Edged Sword of Expectations, Brought to You by Blizzard

So I’m not going to even link Richard Bartle’s post, but I will link to Darren because he’s the one that ultimately spurred this thought. Here goes.

Blizzard Entertainment clearly raised the bar on expectations of MMO’s mainly in terms of polish. Their game was so crisp and clean upon its arrival that MOGers are no longer going to accept a game that doesn’t award xp for a quest or has 7 f/p/s in towns or 30 seconds of rubberbanding with three mobs on you. People just aren’t going to give it a fair chance. One of the main arguments against WoW though is that “It’s a very polished game that did a lot of things right, but it doesn’t offer anything new.” Do you know what this means? Well, this leaves the all those other MMO companies scratching their heads, trying to figure out how they are going to find $50 million in funding for a game as polished as WoW which also incorporates new elements into their game that players find interesting, but still upholds that level of Blizzard polish. It’s simply too much for the vast majority of these companies to live up to. No matter how much “cool stuff” they put in the game, if it doesn’t look nearly perfect, then players call it quits, and we all know how tough it is for a game to recover from a poor launch…

It’s very easy to say “take some risks, push the boundaries, open new doors” but its a whole different story when you have the publisher funding you telling you that they want WoW numbers (most likely without providing anywhere near WoW-type funding numbers) and are willing to pull funding if they don’t like what they see. So then when the game releases, promises from the dev’s are broken, the hype dies within a couple weeks, and it’s deemed another “not-as-good WoW clone.” While I enjoyed two years of WoW and I think its a very well done game, I’m also frustrated that it’s not allowing these companies to spend money on creativity, but rather on what’s been done already and making it look just as good. That said, it’s also not fair to bash Blizzard because of their immense pocketbooks that they created a quality product with. So this begs the question what is it going to take to break out of this train of thought? Is it going to be the next Blizzard MMO, or will one of the new games on the way (WAR, AoC, Spellborn, PotBS, Tabula Rasa, etc.) figure out a way to break out of this funk? I don’t know that we can say for sure until they are all out. I really hope that the term “WoW clone” will be firmly behind us within the next twelve months, though.

~Kanthalos

P.S. One good sign is that other genres are quickly expanding, but will the gameplay (quests/missions, grouping, raiding, skills, UI) be virtually the same even outside of the fantasy genre?

Little Weekend Update

Well, I apologize for the several day break in blogging, you can blame that on J.K. Rowling.  As of 11:30 last night I’m on page 475 (give or take 5 pages) but overall its been what I expected.  On the gaming front, I had a little bit of a scuffle with the SOE customer service (just kidding, they were really helpful) but I did buy the digital download of EoF for the wrong account and they said they would switch it for me, which will probably be switched today.  Honestly though, it won’t get played until I read the last 300 pages of Deathly Hallows.  I am looking forward to getting back into EQ2 again though.  Now I’m going to make a real post that I’ve been minimally brewing over during the weekend.

P.S. PLEASE don’t spoil the book for me…