I'm in love with the MMORPG genre, but it's so seldom that my tastes are met. Just taking a glance at some of the upcoming games and my personal reactions to them:

• Aion: Too anime for me. I don't mind anime itself, but the fanbase drives me bonkers. I think I'd poke my eyes out with a stick after the first day.
• BioWare's MMO: It's unnamed, that's mysterious and exciting, but if it turns out to be Star Wars I'll be disappointed, since I'm about as tired of Mr. Lucas' universe as I could possibly be. 2011 is a long time to wait anyway.
• Champion's Online: One superhero MMORPG is enough for me, City of Heroes was great but didn't have a ton of depth.
• Copernicus: 38 Studios' MMO in development, kinda early to tell but the idea of a game produced essentially by a fan of the genre is very intriguing. They've got some significant talent onboard too.
• Chronicles of Spellborn: It's supposed to be story / quest driven, but catchphrases like "What lies hidden must be found" do not grab me.
• Guild Wars 2: I got bored of the first during beta, it's certainly improved since then so maybe by the time the sequel comes out I might feel compelled to play.
• Huxley: It's sounds just like tournament FPS combat to me, "campaign mode" delayed for a 360 version? I suspect as an FPS I'd rather play Left4Dead.
• Stargate Worlds: I liked the movie, the tv show never caught my interest. Hard to get excited about an IP I don't care for.
• Star Trek Online: A theme of interstellar landing parties could work so well as an MMO. If Cryptic does confirm this rumoured revival of Star Trek as an MMORPG, they're the right peeps to do it IMHO.
• Warhammer Online: I've got a few Games Workshop items sitting in my closet, I've always loved the incredible artwork on the Warhammer franchise, but unfortunately that's exactly the part of the game I'm worried Mythic is botching, because they've turned it too cartoony. For gameplay though, WAR has clever quest tweaks and their take on faction-based PvP is being refined from Dark Age of Camelot. The smell of quality and confidence is exuding from Mythic. I'll definitely check it out, but I'm not drooling in anticipation like I was a couple years ago.
• World of Darkness: CCP Games are definitely on the high list of capable MMO developers, EVE Online has grown rather than shrunk over the years. I don't know much about Vampire: Masquerade et al other than it's always sounded hella cool.
• Wrath of the Lich King: Strictly it's an expansion for WoW and that about sums it up, I'm pretty much done with the game and its catering to some of the worst traits in western culture.

Feel free to point out any notable games I've missed that are coming down the pipe sooner or later.

I've just realized my error on my previous post about player patience.

What's changed lately is that I've jumped into a game at launch, that's skewed my perception of the playerbase, I apologize for roasting them. There are likely many patient players that are under the radar right now.

Ever since Ultima Online, I've recommended players wait for stability before playing a new MMORPG.

It's a wait for three important ingredients:

• Stability.
• Fixes for bugs.
• Patching content holes or balancing issues.

It became obvious very early on that these 'massive' online games involve a score of complexities not found in other games. Every ounce of content (and the content tends to be vast) has to deal with latency, security and all of the issues involved when multiple members of the human race approach that content all at once on the same playing field.

I don't think most players realize what it takes to make bullet-proof content. It's astounding to me that these games achieve stability at all over time, but they do.

I know the hardcore among us won't follow this advice and I don't expect them to. I try to myself, but I usually fail and jump into these games sooner than I plan, but rarely on launch day. I've always been witness to the carnage, it's been my job at times to do so, but I've withheld my own deep involvement until further down the road, after the patches of sanity come in.

I don't think these industry problems are going to be solved anytime soon. The next game that has a full range of content (notably Endgame) and is also stable with few bugs-- That will be the first game in this genre to claim that milestone. When it happens, I'll shower accolades, because I will be beyond impressed.

Meanwhile, if you are going to play, then the previous post does apply, it requires patience.

Myself and my guildmates, we'll be exercising this patience.

In most areas of entertainment, the journalistic focus is on new products. In videogames, for some odd reason, it's on future products.

This is IMHO the Number #1 Uno Prime reason Videogame Journalism is so messed up.

Anticipation is not such a bad thing by itself, it's what sells product right? But it's just so accelerated, what's been on the shelf for days is already old news. The window for game sales is so small, if it isn't a blockbuster from the get-go, it's getting tossed into the discount bin pretty quickly.

There's no more room for sleeper hits. I honestly don't think The Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon or Warcraft could have made it in today's game climate. Neither of those games were hyped much before release (The Sims barely got attention in a small corner of EA's '99 E3 booth, seriously).

The games industry has become addicted to anticipation.

• Beta and Alpha product is never fully indicative of the final game. Simple things like removing debuggers, compressing textures and patching visibility leaks are rarely done until last minute and make huge performance differences. Or a game with pretty pre-release screenshots can turn out to have horrible framerates.
• Journalists choose favourites based upon brand, designer and worse: the games they have pre-release access to. A stinker can get a lot of attention and a gem can be neglected.
• Journalists comment on what they think ~may~ be good features based how they expect a game will turn out, applying inaccurate assumptions.
• Gamers begin to predict success or failure (of games and consoles) and the pride of predicting correctly overshadows the actual enjoyment of the game.
• It's ethically unsound, because a game can be hyped by the press without actually reviewing it, creating conflicts of interest between advertisement and news.
• The 'scoop' becomes the 'exclusive first peek', which again, is ethically questionable as these become hand-selected by the publishers looking for pure promotion.

I could think of a whole lot more points, but you get the idea. The fascination with what's in development versus what's playable now is the root of so much evil.

Now, we're migrating into a situation that's compounding it: Bloggers the world around have decided that the established journalists are corrupt (there's plenty of good evidence for that) and are taking it upon themselves to replace the industry, which they're doing very effectively.

Except the Numero Uno problem is now just exasperated, because bloggers write what they damn well please and the fascination with beta and 'next-gen' is so over the top at this point.

I've seen a lot of bloggers comment that what they think is wrong with the established press is the lack of full disclosure over games before they get released. This is soooo messed up backwards to me, it's not thinking with their heads it's thinking with the pre-release hype. Correct the mistakes, don't repeat them.

We need more disclosure of completed products and less of what's in the works.

It's a damn good thing most game designers are passionate about the games they make, otherwise it would be all hype and no game. That's probably the only reason I see this as a journalistic problem, not one with the game developments themselves.

I'm currently working on converting this blog + a whole bunch of other sites to Drupal. I'm also restructuring my entire server and database setup. So far, it's a bigger task than I had imagined. You can read about my efforts if you wish on my work-in-progress blog: News @ Gameslate.

In the meantime I've been posting less here, not so much because I'm so busy, but when I've got something new on the horizon the incentive is low to add to the pile. It's mostly just an in-my-head thing, because logically I know that a couple more articles in a database of ~1000 isn't going to make much difference in the conversion process, but still it doesn't feel as productive.

I'm looking forward to this blog thriving in my new working environment. I have a few world domination plans here and there. ;)

I almost missed this, but Flying Lab Software have announced a release date for Pirates of the Burning Sea: January 22nd.

It's good to see it come so soon. Considering the rumours towards Warhammer's potential delay, perhaps spring 2008 won't be so crowded for MMO releases after all and we'll see more staggered releases than expected.

Congrats to the Pirates of the Burning Sea crew, after 6 years of development I'm sure they're very excited to see their launch on the horizon. Shouting out a hearty Arrrrr!

Gamasutra has posted a paraphrased and quoted version of Gordon Walton's GDC Austin speech. I'm a fan of Mr. Walton, I met him back when he worked at Kesmai on some of their amazing forerunners (namely Air Warrior and Battletech) to the MMO market. He has a pedigree resume and I think he's exactly the right man to produce Bioware's first MMO.

Overall I'd say his speech was hit & miss, some parts read bang-on like an MMO producer & designer's bible, while others demonstrate that he could be dangerously too close to the source, perhaps needing to step back and play like a gamer rather than in designer mode 24/7. Regardless, he's still on my shortlist of good peeps in the MMO industry, so it's well worth a thorough read.

Some highlights (because I couldn't resist):

"Content sucks. Content takes people to build. You can build systems, but systems suck because we pattern match 'em real quick. Content is custom-crafted things for people to do." He described the concept of the "player horizon" -- a player should not perceive all that she can do from the beginning of the game: something tantalizing has to hang out of reach. "If I can visualize everything that will happen to me by the end by level 3, the game's over."

. . .

Simplify the damn GUI!" Walton exhorted. "MMOs have the worst and most complex GUIs because we have so much shit you can do in the game. We want to give players all that stuff!"

. . .

Walton described customization as "a steam release valve" for an audience that can't be satisfied within the bounds of the basic interface. Bringing up another example, Walton cited City of Heroes, another MMO with a strong casual audience. "Conventional wisdom said that their game was missing all these features, but it worked."

. . .

"Don't tune for the hardcore."     . . .    this stems from "forgetting our object is not to keep people as long as humanly possible, but to provide entertainment." When it comes to grinding, "they will do it, but they will hate you."

I'm betting that Bioware's MMO will be a great game, although it's still a few years away.

My friends have heard me rant about features that I've read about for Age of Conan. Sometimes it leads to conjecture, because in various interviews and forum postings it's hard to know what's just an "idea" in the minds of developers and what's an actual "design plan".

Stealth in Age of Conan has been described much like a passive ability, that it wouldn't be an ability to press to vanish and become invisible. Comparisons have been made directly to stealth in WoW, where it is like a magical invsibility power.

Recently though, this video clip from AoC @ Leipzig appears to show a stealth ability very similar to WoW's, with the Assassin disappearing at will. So what gives?

Funcom developer Jayde has replied within a forum posting:

"Just because one is attempting to stealth doesn't mean it's actually useful. Stealth doesn't work the same as WoW, and that's actually the "problem" here--as people are leaping to the conclusion that it does, and basing it off that perspective.

It's quite possible that in most cases, if someone was stealthing in the open areas of the playfield there, other people would still see them. Just because you are in stealth mode doesn't make you automatically a ninja--there are a lot of detection rolls going on in regard to the "light" level of where you are standing, your hiding skills, and the perception skills of the people around you.

You won't get "out of stealth" because people see you, but you do have an indicator (not sure if it was present in the demo version, though) as to if people can see you."

Okay, he's convinced me that it works differently than WoW, but it has lost some of the coolness factor for me.

I was under the impression that stealth would be a passive ability triggered by appropriate locations (IE: stepping into shadows or at least not in the open) and perhaps augmented by complimentary gear and related abilities. Instead, what is described is an ability that is actively clicked on and you MAY or may not *poof* disappear to others, although you'll appear stealthed to yourself regardless and must judge via an indicator how much you're seen.

Addtionally, Athelan chimed in with this:

"Everyone has access to stealth, in addition everyone has access to perception, this has always been this way, this means shockingly enough anyone can detect stealth players if they train the skill, the fact that the classes setup for Leipzig didnt have this does not mean this went away."

What Jayde and Athelan describe sounds like something between WoW's stealth and the stealthing systems of Thief, Hitman and other FPS games.