With high hope for the future, no prediction is ventured.

Facebook Ads are well known for their knowledge of Ultimate Truth.

You heard it here first, 2009 was the year that MMORPGs died. The advert to the left told me so, and as we all know adverts, like modern day Cassandras, are cursed tell us nothing but the facts about our lives and then be ignored.

The MMORPG genre did have a poor time in 2009 though, and I believe we’ll see the same or worse in 2010. From the few betas that I’ve played recently it seems that the industry is still trying to find its way with regards to pricing structures, and also content and how to structure it.

The Grind is still in evidence; as are Pay Per Pixel games with stores that either charge ludicrous prices or charge for ludicrous items that should be delivered as standard. Any MMO with either of these in evidence is doomed to fail in today’s market.

The advert tells us to get excited, and I find it telling that I can’t really remember the last time I truly got excited about the future of the genre as a whole, a genre that has so readily and consistently failed over the past few years. With each passing year it gets harder and harder to ignore the fact that nothing substantial has happened in the MMO market for some time.

All the evidence I’ve seen so far indicates that basic lessons are not being learned. As things stand I can honestly believe that what the advert tells us is only a year, maybe two, early.

Of course, like PC gaming, the MMO genre will never actually die out, but it will stall and stagnate, and lose any chance at evolving and realising the full potential that many of us have hoped for since we first stepped foot in a virtual world and understood what it might mean for the future.

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and then throw it in the face of the person who gave you the lemons until they give you the oranges you originally asked for.” — Cassandra Clare

Predictions for 2010

These are predictions for 2010 that were definitely written in 2009 before they happened. Look at the datestamp of this entry! You can’t fake that by retrospectively editing fields in a control panel, definitely not. If it’s only just showing up in your feed reader about a year late that’s almost certainly a bug.

1) Star Trek Online will be released on February 2nd (February 5th in the EU). That’s not very far away from the end of 2009 when these predictions are definitely being written, so that date might already be known. I can’t really remember that far back. I mean, I don’t have access to that information just at the moment. It will be reasonably well received, with a metacritic score around 66, and the Extra Super Deluxe Limited Special Platinum Edition will be in particularly high demand due to its inclusion of a life-size anatomically correct action figure of a foxy blue-skinned alien who asks “Can you show me this earth-thing you humans call ‘kiss-ing’, Captain?”

2) About halfway through the year Blizzard will demand players use their real name on forum posts in order to tap into the power of true names through Old Magic (though the official explanation will be something about accountability). Massed protests will force them to backtrack, including every World of Warcraft player in Minnesota officially changing their name to “Damn You, Blizzard, Damn You To Heck”.

3) On August 5th, a cave-in will trap a number of miners somewhere in South America. They will all be successfully brought to the surface 69 days later, and massive international interest in the rescue operation will result in great success for an indie game currently in alpha called Mincraft, which news organisations will use to simulate tunnelling operations in great detail (though question marks will be raised over whether an exploding zombie really caused the initial cave-in).

4) Payment model of the year will be “Free to Play”. Established titles EverQuest II, Champions Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea will all go free-to-play in the second half of the year, and Turbine will build on the success of Dungeons and Dragons Online by removing the subscription requirement of Lord of the Rings Online in September in North America, though they’ll only remember that Codemasters exist and run the game in Europe around November.

5) NetDevil’s Lego Universe will be released towards the end of the year, but nobody will notice as they’re all in Minecraft.

6) APB: All Points Bulletin will finally launch at the end of June or beginning of July, and the extended development time will really pay off for Realtime Worlds. Early access for media representatives will result in a tidal wave of overwhelmingly positive reviews a couple of weeks before launch (certainly no ludicrous post-release embargo or anything) and an unprecedented metacritic score of 136 as magazines invent new scores like “seventeen out of ten” and “125%”. Every human on the planet will buy at least two copies as the game massively outsells the entire Call of Duty series and Rockstar’s whole catalogue combined on day one.

Hibernation Time

As snow blankets the country and relatives crowd the sofa, we’re curling up into a ball, reducing core temperatures and slowing our metabolism as well as blogging rate, though there may be an occasional figgy-pudding-fuelled post, possibly under the influence of sherry.   A very merry winter interval solstice celebration to one and all, and we leave you with an exclusive screenshot from The Old Republic…

Tunnelling Jedi rogue class not as stealthy as hoped

MMO Dad.

I was watching Dora the Explorer this morning with mini-Melmoth; she seems to like it. I watch because I’m a parent and it’s my job to know everything about my child’s favourite TV program, teddy, toy, colour, clothes, hairstyle – the list goes on. That’s my excuse, anyway.

This particular episode had Dora and the somewhat confusingly named Boots the monkey looking for the big piñata at the fairground. To get to it they needed to acquire ten yellow tickets by playing various fairground games, the first of which was a very simple stall which required you to shoot a water gun into the mouth of dolphins. It was easily done and over quickly and earned Dora and company two yellow tickets.

The next event was the Ferris wheel, which would (somewhat backwardly) earn them a number of tickets for riding on it. But – oh no! – the Ferris wheel was broken and Dora and Boots had to help the Spanish-speaking toucan repair the wheel first by replacing the long and short parts. This took some time because the toucan had kept his Ferris wheel in considerably poor repair and should probably have been reported to the authorities, but our naive adventurers ignored health and safety regulations and risked all for some more tickets by repairing it themselves. They got their ride, and were rewarded with two more yellow tickets.

“You know,” I said, turning to my daughter “they’d have been much better off grinding out that first dolphin game; they’d have completed it four more times in the time it took to get just two tickets from the Ferris wheel. Admittedly they had fun riding the Ferris wheel, but if they optimised their Reward vs Time Investment they’d already by getting phat loot from the big piñata”.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly, as eighteen month olds are wont to do, and made a couple of loud, possibly derogatory, sucks on her dummy.

“One day you’ll understand”, I said.

“But not too soon, I hope.”

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Previously in Dragon Age: Zoso the Rogue had gathered together an army of Elves, Dwarves and Mages to defeat the Blight, but first there was the small matter of Teryn Loghain to deal with. All was going according to plan as the team headed to Denerhim with Arl Eamon…

(More spoiler-y Dragon Age spoilers follow,)

So as we headed for the capital everything seemed to be proceeding towards the requisite happy ending: overthrow the tyrant, smite some evil, home for tea and scones. Before actually calling the Landsmeet for the tyrant-overthrowing, Arl Eamon thought it would be a good idea to make sure we had the support of more Arls (and possibly Ukes, Aronets and Iscounts, I’m not sure of the exact structure of the Dragon Age nobility), so we sniffed around a bit for more evidence, clearing the Tevinter out of the Alienage and finding evidence linking Loghain with slave-trading.

The first bump in the previously smooth road was Queen Anora. We got word that despite nominally still being in power she was being held prisoner by the rotten bounder who’d done in my parents; a damsel in distress, you say? Sorted! Off to the rescue. I was worried for a moment it might turn out the princess was in another castle, but nope, there she was, and we bundled her back to Eamon’s estate. Only instead of being all “Swoon, I’m so grateful for being rescued, but the excitement has got to me and I must lie down for a while”, she put herself forward in place of Alistair as the prime candidate to be ruler after we deposed Loghain. That set me thinking that I’d just been taking it as read that Loghain was a Bad Man and needed a kicking, but I wasn’t really sure what his motivation was for abandoning the King at Ostegar. Was he in league with the Darkspawn, deliberately allowing them to overrun the kingdom? Did he just spot an opportunity to grab power? Did just think the King was a bit of a dick (he had a point) who was letting the country go to the dogs? Was he really a patriot, determined to protect the Kingdom in the face of a threat he considered to be greater than the Blight? And now his daughter, the Queen, was selling him out, so what was *she* up to? A double agent come to spy on us, who’d cooked up the whole being captured business? A pragmatist who could see the way the wind was blowing and wanted to be on the winning side?

Until then, Alistair had reluctantly accepted prospective Kingship; he didn’t really want to rule (one of the prime qualifications for a position of power, in my book), and I was pretty sure I could trust him after all our adventures. The “optimal” approach looked to be to get Alistair to marry Anora; continue the royal bloodline, put a thoroughly decent chap on the throne, but with the experienced and steely Anora around to actually run things. Trouble was… I’d got quite fond of Alistair. Usually I’ll play characters as… well, as me, so even if playing a female character it feels strange to engage in a romance with a male NPC, but Alistair was pretty engaging in a Hugh-Grant-in-rom-com sort of way, if Hugh Grant spent less time running bookshops and attending weddings and more time stabbing ogres in the face and acquiring useful abilities for smiting enemy magic users. I think the player character being mute in Dragon Age has a slightly odd effect, it almost makes them seem like an external observer, despite being the centre of everything. It could be very immersion breaking if “you” have a voice that doesn’t seem appropriate or match your idea of the character, but the complete voicing of everyone else throws your muteness into sharper relief compared to previous games where conversations were more textual, and just seemed to put a bit of distance there such that getting together with Alistair didn’t seem weird. Or maybe I’m in denial about something. Anyway… I made a sort of half-hearted suggestion to Alistair about marrying Anora, he got a bit cross, and I dropped the subject. I didn’t trust Anora enough to fully support her, so I made some non-committal about being pleased she was on our side, but I wouldn’t be able to back her bid for leadership, and things were all a bit awkward around Eamon’s mansion like Christmas with a couple of sets of in-laws who don’t really get along.

Volunteering to take the dog for a walk to get away from the tense atmosphere, I wandered off and did a bit more evidence gathering, got revenge on the git who’d offed my parents, was banged up but planned an ingenious prison break (it involved a wooden vaulting horse and bag of soil down the trouser legs, only that took a bit too long so I went with the almost-as-ingenious Plan B of picking the door lock and punching all the guards to death), found the son of a noble who’d been imprisoned after he started asking awkward questions about Ostegar, found a spare Gray Warden who’d been lazing around in a dungeon while I was doing all the hard work (honestly, he hadn’t even constructed a wooden horse to vault over) and rescued another noble that Loghain had chucked into prison. I was pretty sure I’d gathered sufficient backing amongst the nobility to stand against the slave-trading king-abandoning noble-imprisoning Loghain, so off we toddled to the Landsmeet and I presented my case (“Loghain: what a bastard, support Alistair instead, he’s a bastard too, but the good kind”).

The nobles seemed to be going with it until Anora turned up and showed her gratitude for the earlier rescue by siding with her father, which I took as reasonable proof she was only in it for a nice tiara. Either that alone was sufficient to turn the tide back for Loghain, or I’d overlooked some other way of getting more support, as the Landsmeet couldn’t reach a decision on a new ruler and decided to settle things the old fashioned way instead, with a full-on ruck. Several stabbings and a couple of fireballs right in the rebuttals convinced the doubters that they hadn’t actually considered our thoroughly convincing arguments carefully enough, though Loghain himself insisted on a one-on-one duel (which seemed to be mandatory; I didn’t notice a “LOL NO WAI!” option to have him riddled with crossbow bolts). Obviously the Teryn hadn’t come across the old country saying “never propose a duel when your opponent has a massive stack of health poultices”, which didn’t give him much of a chance in the resultant fight, and he surrendered.

Mindful of International Humanitarian Law and the treatment of surrendered combatants, I was keen to see he was treated humanely and that no outrages were enacted upon his personal dignity. The others took those concerns on board, but instead proposed two alternative plans: either give him a nice cup of Darkspawn blood and turn him into a Gray Warden, or cut his head off. Flipping through the Geneva Convention I couldn’t find any references to Darkspawn blood, and decided that course of action might be OK if we told him it was Ribena. Loghain could’ve been a useful ally too, especially with Sarevok’s precedent as Ultimate Opponent Turned Handy Party Member, but Alistair, in flagrant breach of Article 3, was quite insistent on killing him to death. I tried to talk him out of it, but he rather hoist me by my own King-selecting petard by deciding he would take the crown after all and pointing out that, as King, he could do what he jolly well liked. There didn’t seem to be much of an alternative, so I let him get on with it. One beheading later, it rather put paid to any lingering ideas about an Anora/Alistair ruling combination, patricide being a notoriously bad choice for a first date (even worse than a romantic dinner for two at the local kebab shop), and we had to lock Anora up.

Still, justice had (more or less) prevailed, and with the nation (pretty much) united it was time to give the Archdemon a good kicking. At least that looked nice and straightforward. Until Alisatir popped his head round the door wanting a bit of a chat…

(To be continued. Again.)

Thought for the day.

Did Guild Wars and others get it right? Is it in part why WAR failed? Is the mainstream desire for MMOs actually based around instanced personal content, as opposed to the generic open world content that the genre began with?

World of Warcraft’s LFD tool has many people now levelling their way to the cap pretty much exclusively through instances; Lord of the Rings Online has a large chunk of its population now tucked away in Skirmishes as well as the instanced book, dungeon and raid content. Warhammer Online has many failings, but a major one seems to have been that many players preferred the instanced scenarios over the open world RvR; granted there were many reasons for this outside of the nature of the way the content was partitioned, but it can’t help but be noticed that the instanced game worked, and worked well, where the open one failed.

I wonder if Syncaine’s general lament that real MMOs are a niche market rings true, and that what we are currently experiencing is an evolution of a new branch of gaming which tends towards the instanced solo and small group content that has been available in WoW and other MMOs for some time, but like Guild Wars, is now becoming more prevalent and in many cases the focus of further development of these games at the sacrifice of an open world design.

I have to wonder if Blizzard’s Cataclysm expansion isn’t a massive blunder on their part, because it appears at first glance that a huge percentage of their player base is not interested in open world adventuring as anything other than a way to progress their character to the end game as quickly as possible; when given another viable alternative, as the new LFD tool now does, will there be enough critical mass in the open world zones to make them work for any considerable length of time after release, or will it be a lot of wasted effort on Blizzard’s part to provide new content to the apparently small subset of solo players in their community who are actually still interested in that sort of content?

The Joy of Tech

I’ve been on a bit of a techno-rampage over the last couple of weeks; firstly T-Mobile were doing a big sale on PAYG handsets which brought the price of the Pulse, an Android phone, under £100 so I couldn’t resist that, especially as they actually offer sane data rates for people who don’t bother with any of this “talking” nonsense (£5 for a month, £20 for 6 months of “unlimited” internet access). The Pulse isn’t the fanciest of Android units, but it’s more than up to the job of keeping up with mail and the web while out and about, and with the camera, GPS etc. it can still do nifty tricks like scanning a barcode and finding the cheapest local price for the item.

I’ve also changed the home broadband connection to an ADSL2+ option, which has speeded things up somewhat, though at the cost of a bit of stability so far. Hopefully that’ll settle down, otherwise online gaming is going to be a pain. Good thing I had the Pulse around during the changeover as well, though I could’ve probably survived for an evening or two with no internet. Maybe.

Finally, as a bit of an early Christmas present, I picked up a new gaming PC. Scan’s 3XS systems got good write-ups online, and they’re happy to configure systems to your precise custom spec, so I sorted out a Core i7 build that arrived at the weekend. It’s really rather lovely, and I’ve been having fun with the obligatory “install all games and whack the graphics sliders all the way up”. I also figured it was finally time to move on from Windows XP, so the new system is on the 64 bit version of Windows 7, which so far I’m rather impressed by. No incompatibility issues yet; Dungeons and Dragons Online sulked a bit when I tried to just move the directory over from the old PC, but everything else seems happy. Only difficulty now is finding to the time to set up and play with everything, let alone write about it!