Archive for category MMO-related
Get ready to Hero Up!
Posted by Rockjaw in Jobsworth, MMO-related, Pimpin' on May 19th, 2010
Erm, so, what have I been doing for the last five or so months…? Well amongst other things, helping this to appear:
What do you think? More soon.
Predicting 2010
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related on January 3rd, 2010
That’s Twenty-Ten to you soldier. (Still finding it hard myself.)
Well, a year to the day since I made some outlandish predictions for Twenty-Zero-Nine, here I am back to make a fool of myself for 2010. I’m a year older, a year wiser (ish) and probably going to be a mite more cautious, especially after what I’ve seen this year.
Let’s dive in though, see what the scrying pool has to tell us.
One caveat: being currently employed as I am, and wanting to stay that way, I won’t be ‘predicting’ anything to do with Trion World Network (my employers until October this year) or Gazillion Entertainment (my current employers). So no predictions for (deep breath) Heroes of Telara or any other Trion game in production, or Jumpgate: Evolution, LEGO Universe or anything else Gazillion has in the works which we haven’t told anyone about yet…! Sorry ’bout that, but I reckon you understand.
Known MMOGs
World of WarCraft‘s latest expansion, Cataclysm, will launch in September, or very close to that (last week of August/first week of October). Backed by a huge global marketing campaign (TV adverts, etc etc) Activision-Blizzard will attempt to convert the last few humans living in a cave on the moon into active players by pushing – hard – the fact that the game is now easier to get into than ever. It’ll be a massive, towering hit at launch, breaking the current (US, NPD-data) records for fastest selling PC game. A month after launch, everyone who’s played for more than a year will find something to complain about.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will launch in Q4 as well, probably about two months after Cataclysm (say, November). EA’s marketing machine will be in full effect from E3 onwards, pulling out all the stops to get as many people into the Beta as possible, which everyone will call the ‘most polished since WoW’. Bloggers will spend endless amounts of words talking about whether SWTOR will topple WoW; of course it won’t, but it’ll launch huge, falling just shy of Cataclysm’s newly-established record for fastest-selling PC game. Naturally, we won’t hear a thing about subscriber numbers until EA’s first financial report in 2011… so I can neatly dodge predicting them. (Although I will say, they’ll be less than WoW’s…!)
Star Trek Online will launch on time in February, and will get plenty of early traction from Trekkers who’ve spent many a long year waiting for a chance to indulge their inner captain. Think 250K box sales in the US alone… but a month after launch, despite Cryptic/Atari keeping very quiet about the actual numbers, the retained subscribers will be less than 100K. We’ll all be guessing about this though. Reviews will be in the fair-to-good range, depending on the level of Trek-love the reviewer has.
APB will launch on time, with a big marketing push from EA. It’ll start strongly but will quickly be derided by ‘hardcore’ MMOGers as just being ‘CounterStrike with better customisation’. Realtime Worlds will promise a lot of exciting stuff post-ship, and will probably get a chance to do it, as their initial numbers (customers? subscribers?) will be decent. Talk of a 360 port will be mostly drowned out by whoops of joy from those of us already playing Crackdown 2 / MAG.
DC Universe Online won’t launch this year, but it’ll spend another summer doing the comic book convention circuit. I have to hope it’ll be in some form of Beta by the end of the year. Surely. Said Beta will be PC-only though, leading many to predict it’s never going to ship on PS3.
City of Heroes will launch Going Rogue, which will be generally well accepted, and give a small shot in the arm to the game’s subscriber base – undermining Champions Online a little in the process.
Guild Wars 2 will be demonstrated to press, behind closed doors, at E3. The previews are strong, mostly based on graphics and a few demonstrable features, but press are unsure if they’ll let it be called a ‘proper’ MMOG. The game will be playable at PAX in Q4, and the first public ‘preview event’ dates will be announced for 2011.
Aion will continue to suffer from bots and gold farming galore, although NCwest will try their best to make their finger-in-the-dam approach to controlling them look tough. The actual reason the bots and gold farming exists – the massive in-game grind – won’t go anywhere. NCsoft will continue to make enough money from Aion in Korea to keep it afloat elsewhere.
Unknown MMOGs
Blizzard will continue to not announce their next MMOG project. They’ll be too busy launching StarCraft 2, Cataclysm and pretending that Diablo III is ‘coming soon’.
I think it’s put-up or shut-up time for 38 Studios, Red 5 and Carbine Studios. All three of them should really be taking the wrappers off something this year. Having said that, if somehow all three have gotten funding for what we (read: marketing people and journos) like to call a ‘triple A’ MMOG, then it’s quite possible they’re on a 3-5 year development schedule. If that’s the case… then assume they’ll stay quiet for a while longer. (Still, it’s got to be getting pretty close to announcement time. Takes time to build a big community to get back that big funding.)
What else; oh yeah, SOE will announce a new game based on the Free Realms ‘engine’ but with a known IP. (Thus helping them earn back some of the big development costs on Free Realms.)
Me, personally?
All I’m going to say about me to finish, is that I hope 2010 is a slightly more quiet year than 2009.
See you in 362 days to find out if I’m right!
Scoring 2009
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related, Personal on December 31st, 2009
I guess one of the advantages of not going out on New Year’s Eve is that you get a chance to write that year-specific blog post… and no, it’s not 2010 yet, at least not by my watch!
Back in January I threw out a few predictions for the year. I’m sure if I could open a hole in time, stick my head through and say to my almost-a-year-younger self “By the time you look back at this post, you’ll be living in the US, in a job you don’t even know exists yet – oh and most of your predictions will be wrong…” Well I’d probably be half-surprised.
Let’s score me then – feel free to refresh your memory with the original post, although the important stuff is here anyway.
A million, billion, Gazillion (ahem) possibilities
Posted by Rockjaw in Jobsworth, MMO-related, Personal on October 16th, 2009
Today was my last official day working for Trion World Network. On Monday, I start a new job as Community Director for Gazillion Entertainment.
Yes, that Gazillion Entertainment; the company I called ‘the new 800lb gorilla‘ when they de-cloaked back in March, and who are working on a variety of MMOGs, including two based on Marvel Comics.
Not so surprised now, are ya?
Yes, I’ll admit that when Gazillion’s acquisition of the Marvel licence was announced, my interest was very definitely piqued, if that wasn’t obvious. What really got me intrigued was that they had acquired NetDevil, a development team who I’ve been a fan of since we worked together on Auto Assault. I made some enquiries, heard some pleasing noises, and six months later… here we are.
You might think that I’ve spent the last six months scheming to extract myself from Trion, but that’s absolutely not true. In fact, I’ve had a blast over there, and I’m genuinely sad that I’m leaving. The development teams behind Heroes of Telara and the Syfy-MMO(Action)RPG are packed full of great people who I’m going to miss and in the case of the Syfy crew, now don’t get to work with – boo! Both games are looking great, and unfortunately I now won’t be able to help them across the finish line. Don’t think I’m forgetting the MMORTS in production with Petroglyph Games, either; a trip to Las Vegas earlier this year convinced me that they are going to unleash something that’ll shake up the genre. I still believe everything I said about Trion back when I announced I was working there, however… when opportunity knocks, you don’t just sit back in your easy chair.
Gazillion has got a stellar line-up of games coming, including some I know are going to surprise a lot of people, and my new role allows me to work on all of them, as well as tasking me to direct community strategies for the entire company. Once offered, I couldn’t turn that down, even if it meant leaving behind new friends and some great looking games at Trion.
Weirdly – at least for me – this means that I’m back to full-on secrecy mode. I thought Trion had a lot of secrets, but even after signing on with Gazillion, I still don’t know about everything they’re developing! Roll on Monday….
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks and I’m sure it’ll be a crazy couple of months ahead, but I’m very excited about it; perhaps even ‘stoked’ or ‘psyched’ if we’re being American. Here was me thinking I was done with big, tumultuous changes in my life. I guess all I can do is strap in and enjoy the ride!
Everything old is new again… how very dull
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related on August 22nd, 2009
Have you noticed how much nostalgia we have around us now? I mean, there’s so much, I feel like I’m drowning in it, daily.
Movies: Remakes and reboots aren’t just a trend any more, they’re business as usual. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Red Dawn, Halloween and more have all been or are being remade. Recent reboots included The Incredible Hulk and Punisher: War Zone with rumoured ones including The X-Files and of course, every Marvel property.
And if you’re not rebooting or remaking, you’re digging up a licence to something we are supposed to have liked as kids, like Transformers or G.I. Joe. Little wonder when a vaguely original idea like District 9 comes along, people go crazy for it.
Comics: Same trends, different medium, although it tends to be restricted to characters rather than comics. In the last few years just about every major DC character has been rebooted at least once (Batman, Batgirl, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Blue Beetle), either turning into a new incarnation of the same character or just undergoing an origin revision. Marvel isn’t immune to it either, whether it’s characters (Spider-Man, Captain America) or entire lines (Ultimate becoming Ultimate, er, Comics).
In comics’ defence, given the volume of content that’s output in comparison to movies, they have a more urgent requirement to shake things up on a regular basis; and I remember nodding sagely with (I think) Dan Didio’s assertion that the DC Universe needed to be rebooted every twenty years or so (Crisis on Infinite Earths was in 1986 after all). So perhaps this is just me being an old fart…
Games: However even now in games, we’re getting the same effect. The idea of ‘new IP’ seems to be total anathema to most of the major publishers, with the safe, tried and true method being to remake or reboot somehow. And why is this on my mind? Well it’s because of an MMO announcement, of course.
Those of us (ahem) ‘in the know’ have been aware of WoW’s Cataclysm expansion for a while now, but the full extent of the nostalgia trip it’s going to be wasn’t really clear until recent announcements. While I absolutely see the sense in going back to old content to ensure that players feel the world they’ve inhabited for so long, I can also see that the sticky, sweet, clingy sense of nostalgia that hangs around this stuff had to be a strong motivator in choosing what to do next. I actually read a blog post yesterday where the author was extremely excited for the nostalgia effect, not particularly for the new gameplay.
In other words, apparently as consumers, we’re now just looking to recapture that old feeling, instead of looking for new ones.
I’m as guilty of this as the rest of you. I yearn for those first, life-defining experiences to come again, at least some days. But other days, I really do find myself wondering if there’s a single original thought out there in this world. If anyone is trying to do something new.
If they are, unfortunately, they have their work cut out for them. It’s a rocky road ahead when you’re trying to genuinely do something different and exciting. For me though, it’s the most important path to take. Because everything that’s been remade or rebooted was original once… and it’s those guys, the ones who blazed a trail, who get to say they did it first, who I respect most. Everyone else is just trading on old memories.
You said what?