Stargate Worlds is launching its Beta on October 15th, which I think will be the first serious look into this game beyond a handful of screenshots.

As much as I like the TV series and the license itself is promising (coordinating teams is as natural to their storyline as a Star Trek MMO), this game falls into the category of shooter MMORPG and sadly I think it will suffer in the same ways Tabula Rasa has. This sub-genre overlaps too much with hugely popular FPS games, it's unlikely to hold up well against the likes of Halo, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, etc..

There's also been those pesky rumours of cash-flow problems at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

We'll see though, maybe they'll exceed my expectations, but honestly right now I'm enjoying WAR too much to take a deeper look into Stargate. I hope they do well with their beta and come out of the gate with a good alternative to the myriad Fantasy MMOs.

The full game is set to launch sometime in 2009.

I hadn't really planned to examine the 2004 box art of World of Warcraft so deeply, but take a look at this portion. It's lacking in detail, but I think you'll see the same thing I'm seeing:

When WoW was released, I had a hard time convincing my girlfriend to switch. One of her comments was a lack of classes and in a related note she pointed out that there was a race ("with horns") on the box that wasn't in the game. I looked at this little screenshot on the back and brushed it aside as a helm.

Now hindsight is 20/20, I see a female Draenei casting next to a Tauren. Maybe they were meant to be female Tauren at some point? I don't know, I'm not going to read too much into it other than when the game was released, what was in this image didn't make it into the game.

That's not a critical observation, much the reverse.

Yeah, I'm using this in my leverage against the 'polish' catchphrase. To me, this is what polish actually is, Blizzard cut things from their game as late as the box art going to press. They stuck with what was working and they shelved the rest for a later date.

Is this any different from other games? I don't think so. Blizzard had a smaller audience examining their pre-release, plus their PR team knows how to keep things under wraps. There's this myth that they had no beta NDA, but they segmented concurrent betas for PR: the more public one with no NDA, the closed-beta for real testing and even a friends-and-family server in a state between alpha and beta.

Even WoW's public test servers now are notorious for not so much testing (because invariably, most every mistake on PTR will make it to Live) as advertising upcoming changes.

That's the sort of misdirection that Age of Conan, Warhammer and other upcoming MMORPGs are lacking. Hide what you're working on, trickle out the good info and save the hype for what's actually going into the game.

It's pretty hard to do, because people rarely recognize what it is.

Blizzard wasn't perfect at it either, they had features anticipated that never arrived, but they also didn't have the same massive community of anticipating fans that have followed in WoW's wake.

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.