The MMO Royal Rumble

It’s been a while since brought up this subject but I find myself inspired to talk about it for a moment, I wanna see your feedback maybe even get some insight. There are 4 major MMO franchises in the field right now that all bring something to the table that I believe has the potential (if not squandered) to make a big splash in the market and the genre.

I’ve never been much of an MMO player truth be told until FFXI and then WoW, so I find it somewhat interesting that I’ve not only met my wife through an MMO, found a job through an MMO, and have made lifelong friends I work with pseudo-professionally through an MMO. So here’s the scoop:

• Aion (with the induction of Patch 1.9 and 2.0)
• Warhammer 40k MMO
• WoW: Cataclysm
• Star Wars: The Old Republic

Four completely different developer studios and companies with 4 very different games across the board. Bioware is about as strong as humanly possible in gaming especially with Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age doing so well it’s downright titillating; now they’re going to push out a Star Wars MMO next year and the universe itself is big enough to at least get a few million subscribers without a doubt. I wonder though just how successful the game will be at being fun since it follows the Bioware standard of feeling more like a choose-your-own-adventure game but now with a bunch of different people involved.

Blizzard is an old hand at the MMO game by now with a game franchise that pretty much changed the entire genre and revolutionized the gaming industry. All other MMOs regardless of setting are and will always be compared to WoW. Period. Cataclysm makes my mouth water; a revamping of the old world, countless other changes to the game systems and tons more content for us to sink into. At the same time however, we can all safely say that WoW has lost some steam over the years and even if it feels great to play – we’re all starting to play other games and have different needs. That’s the thing about WoW. It makes you not want to play anything else unless you take a few days off.

Warhammer 40k as an MMO is downright made of pure win. THQ is running the show with that and the franchise alone is reason enough to know it’s going to look gorgeous, it’s going to be gritty and mature, it’s going to have some tongue in cheek comedy but mostly it’s going to be bloody and cool as shit. The Warhammer name though carries a really bad taste among many MMO gamers with the utter ass that was Age of Reckoning especially with such terrible support and other glaring issues. As well, I don’t know if I’m down to trade up a colorful living breathing universe for the dirt and blood and washed out ugly that are the Warhammer worlds.

Finally we have Aion. My opinion on the game hasn’t changed, neither has my opinion of NC soft. The promise and ultimate disappointment of the game really hit hard for me. I was so beyond enraptured by the game only to have it completely let me down in every single facet that even thinking about reinstalling makes me feel sick. They’re promising changes based entirely on player feedback; I respect that a lot and am pretty much amazed. There were some purely idiotic mechanics in the game that made no sense and had no place in a Western market and until they’re all pretty much gone, I’m not falling into it again.

A part of me wants to accept the olive branch and say “ok, you’ve gone 75% I’ll match the missing 25″. But even after thinking about it for a moment it feels like I’m settling. The game was 90% behind anything else out there when I played. The servers were horrible, the mechanics were ridiculous, the economy was completely broken, and it lacked the basic fundamentals of any game let alone an MMO (swimming, dynamic combat, healing, any PvE at all, and so forth). I feel that they need to really truly come out and say “we did a really piss poor job before guys, we’re sorry. Here is how we are fixing everything and giving you the game we promised, the game you want to play.”