It’s media blitz time for MMOs right now. With Champions Online and Aion about to launch, plus Blizzcon going on, every other MMO publisher is piping up to compete with their news too.

Oddly, I’m just not all that hyped about most of them, even the ones that sound cool. So here are my quick thoughts about a variety of games in point form:

• Guild Wars 2 sounds a lot better than the original. More of a complete world and I suspect they may have learned the tricks with instancing that I’ve been hoping to see. I didn’t like Guild Wars much I admit, oddly for the same reasons people complained about in City of Heroes and now Champions, but while it works for me in those games it didn’t in GW.
• The whole cross-world thing CCP is doing with EVE Online and Dust 514 is exactly the sort of thing people expected out of virtual worlds eons ago, so it’s really nice to see. Basically they’re making a ground-forces action game in the same universe as players fly-ships-and-fuck-each-other-over in EVE Online (yes, not so subtle jab at EVE’s cutthroat nature).

  Events (and economy factors) in one game will cross over to the other game. It’s about time a major player did this sort of thing, so kudos to CCP. I hope it works out well.

• WoW’s Cataclysm expansion is basically deleting Kalmdor and replacing it with new stuff. It’s got a lot of people excited. Some are happy pandas and some are sad pandas. I’m a watch-from-the-sidelines panda on this one. I exhausted most of my interest in WoW through playing an absurd amount of hours in a 3 year span. Nice to see Onyxia looking perky with her head sewn back on though.
• I thought I would be mega-hyped by a BioWare MMO, especially with Gordon Walton at the helm, but the more they release info about Star Wars: TOR, the more I feel indifferent about it. Odd. I think maybe I shouldn’t have snuck into the theatres 29 times to see Star Wars as a kid in 1977, because I’m definitely on the Jedi burnout list.
• DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) is relaunching as a free-ish game. I’ll get around to trying it eventually but no rush.
• Copernicus (working title for 38 Studios MMO) is eating up a lot of cash. I’m still holding out hope that it’ll be a great game, but it might get a big crit from the current economy first. It’s a long ways off from being completed regardless.
• Final Fantasy XIV will probably be better than than Final Fantasy XI but probably not as good as Final Fantasy XXXIV. I’m not a Final Fantasy guy, so it’s hard to get worked up about it, but it’s definitely a property with legs.

Overall, despite there being more MMOs getting released than I list here, it feels to me like there’s an MMO dry spell coming on. Not everything will survive to see release and I get the feeling with the changes and shakeups in the games industry right now, huge mega expensive MMO projects just aren’t likely to get off the ground.

I think I’m also just burned out on pre-release hype overall, so while tons of this stuff is as cool as it has ever been, I’m just not as excited along with it personally.