2008: A MMO Odyssey

Posted by Stropp on January 1, 2008

Happy New Year.

I hope you all enjoyed your New Years Eve. Wether you were celebrating out on the town, with family and friends (as I was), or just quietly ringing in the new year in the virtual world of your choice, I hope you all had a great time.

I have to say, I’m stuffed. I usually throw a NYE Barbeque at my place every year, and this year was no exception to that rule. And as usual there was plenty of food to go round. Sausages of all kinds and lamb chops galore. I’ve got enough left over meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next week. Yoiks!

So today, after eating heaps and getting to bed after 3am, I’m completely knackered. Add to that the heatwave we are currently experiencing (43C 110F today), and it’s been a slumped-in-a-heap new years day.

Even so, since I wanted to post today about where I see the next year of MMO games headed, I’ll be giving you my meat induced hallucinations on that subject.

The Games

Wrath of the Lich King

When WotLK was announced, I predicted that it would be released just before Christmas. I based this on the statements by Blizzard that they were going to release one expansion per year. And I figured they were big enough a developer to have started Wrath of the Lich King some months before The Burning Crusade was released. Unfortunately, the announcement was met with a less than enthusiastic response. A poll I conducted after the announcement resulted in 31 out of 54 respondents voting that they weren’t happy with it.

I believe the lukewarm response that Blizzard received to the announced features has sent them back to the drawing board, which is the reason for the delay. I expect we’ll see one or more of the following features added to the final WotLK expansion. The list is in order of the most likely first.

• New quest lines between level 30 and 70, possibly leading into the WotLK storyline.

• A new set of middle level content and dungeons for characters between level 30 and 50.

• More than one Hero class, possibly one each for Horde and Alliance. Maybe as many as one for each class. I think this makes more sense than having everyone get the previously Horde only Deathknight.

• In addition to the new professions, revamping existing professions to make them more useful.

• Creating a much more accessible end game for the 95 percent of players who don’t raid.

If Blizzard is responding to the criticism about WotLK and adding new content to compensate, I expect we’ll see a release late 2008 probably just before Christmas. I don’t expect Wrath of the Lich King to be released much later than that. At the very least we’ll have a release date by the end of October.

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa launched to some criticism that it was launching too early and without enough content. Even in beta, a few weeks before launch I was quite concerned that there was too much wrong and that NCSoft and Destination Games had not learned the lesson of Vanguard (launched a year too early.) However, in those last couple of weeks, a lot improved in the game. While I think they were still a couple of months early, they launched a good game.

The general consensus I hear around the internet is that TR is a fun game to play. I agree with this verdict having played it myself. TR is a fun game. The problem with the bad press is because a lot of people left the beta before they had fixed the problems, and it’s this group that seems to have the most criticism.

I expect that the developers will release a lot of new content to Tabula Rasa during 2008. There may even be an expansion later in the year. I also expect to see some good press, and the game will not only improve, but the subscriber base will grow as well, possibly to the point where they need to add servers.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

I was considering including Vanguard in the list of games that I expected to see fall into the Deadpool sometime during 2008. But, after some consideration, I think it’s unlikely that Sony Online Entertainment will shut Vanguard down. The reason is that Sony doesn’t actually can their MMOs. They are still running games like Planetside and Matrix Online, even though they are very niche MMOs and have a smaller audience. From what I can tell, there has been very little developer activity on these games for quite some time, while there is a reasonable effort being expended to fix the flaws in Vanguard.

Vanguard will be around for the foreseeable future.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Warhammer Online will be one of the big releases of 2008. The release date has been pushed back a couple of time, most recently to the second quarter. I doubt it will be pushed back again.

I’ve heard some mixed reports on Warhammer. Some folks have nothing but good to say about the game. But there have also been comments such as, ‘It’s like WoW, but without the fun.’ It’s possible that the bad reports are the reason for the push back. However, it’s really too late to make changes to core game mechanics, and it’s usually core game mechanics that determine the fun factor.

In any case. WHO will at least start off well. There’s a lot of players really hanging out for this game, and they’ll buy it regardless of the initial reports. If WHO is a good game, it will do very well for a long time. Otherwise, it will sell lots of copies initially and then haemorrage players like Vanguard did.

I expect the beta to start up again late March. Hopefully I’ll get an invite this time. WHO will release before the end of the second quarter with excellent sales.

Age of Conan

It will be interesting to watch how Age of Conan does this year. Shortly to be released, it is very likely to be controversial. The Ancient Gaming Noob included it in his list of (tongue in cheek) prognostications as causing all sorts of fuss in the US presidential elections. While Wilhelm was being humourous, I think he is actually on the money with this one. Conan is going to be a pretty violent and sexy game. In a year when politicians are going to be looking for all sorts of scandals to bring voters on side, AoC could find itself in the firing line.

Will this backfire?

Maybe not. As the marketing suits say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Some pretty crappy games have sold very well after some politician tries to ban them. Just look at how well Jack Thompson has marketed Manhunt.

If Age of Conan gets enough bad press, it may do very very well.

The MMO Biz

Mergers and Acquisitions

2007 saw one of the big announcements of the year with the merger announcement of Activision and Blizzard. The new company to be imaginatively called Activision Blizzard… err Blizzard Activision… errr… ah hell, let’s just call them Blizzvision, at least it’s a better name that Actitard. Anyway…

Mergers are a part and parcel of business. Especially when a market matures the bigger guys start buying up or merging with the smaller guys. It happens in every industry, just look at Google lately. And if there is one market segment that is maturing, it’s the MMO segment.

The Blizzvision merger will foreshadow many similar announcements this year, along with announcements of acquisitions.

I expect that SOE will purchase several small companies or their IPs during the year. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Fury or its managing company will be acquired by Sony, provided Fury doesn’t fold altogether. There’s also a more remote possibility NCSoft will look at Fury, but I expect they’d be more interested in a game with a larger playerbase, considering how they dumped Auto Assault last year.

The MMO Deadpool

Apart from Perpetual Entertainment and Auran, I’m not aware of any MMO developers who are headed for the Deadpool. That’s not really surprising since companies guard the detail about their status intently. As we saw with Perpetual and Auran, everything looked good until something happened that couldn’t be hidden, and then all the cracks started to show.

I figure we’ll see two companies, or the games they are working on, go into the Deadpool this year.

New Games

Like the last few years, there will be a spate of announcements of new MMOs. I reckon there will be a good number based on existing intellectual properties.

• Bioware will confirm that their MMO is based on Knights of the Old Republic.

• I’m also going to take a completely random guess here and predict that there will be a MMO announced that is based on the Wheel of Time books by the late Robert Jordan.

There will also be several new games announced that use the RMT business model. MMO publishers are sick of not getting their fair share of the loot that have been going to gold sellers like IGE, so they’ll try to cut out the middleman.

The new philosophy is if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. One or more of these games will end up being extremely popular and will do well from this business model. If this happens, the me too attitude of big companies will prevail and we’ll see a lot more RMT as part of gameplay.

2008: A MMO Odyssey

2008 promises to be an interesting year.

Aside from a bunch of new potentially excellent games being released, the industry will be shaken up as well. Some of the bigger players will start working on new games, possibly without much innovation. Expect a bunch of WoW clones to be announced.

Look to some of the smaller companies, Multiverse with their MMO based on Firefly for example, to provide innovation. Of course some of these won’t see the light of day this year.

Lot’s of people will move around. This happens every year with developers shifting between companies, or leaving to start their own. There will be drama. Possibly even along the lines of Sigil and Brad McQuaid. The Perpetual lawsuit has the potential to air lots of dirty laundry.

I reckon I’ll have a lot to blog about.

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