2010: The Year That Was

Cute list. I think you cut Funcom a little too much slack with STO though. My 2010 predictions are a bit bleaker:

Barring a Beta catastrophe (unlikely since there wont be much of a Beta to screw up in) I think it will be a HUGE release, with well over a million boxes sold, possibly pushing 2 million. And the game won’t be finished, won’t be stable, especially not under that load, and Funcom will be forced to go to lengthy login queues to avoid having STO have a worse release experience than Anarchy Online. Then, just as Funcom gets enough servers set up to handle the initial demand, since the game won’t be nearly as easy/fun/complete/forgiving/polished as WoW, players will abandon it in droves and most of those servers will turn into ghost towns overnight. Funcom wont care though, as all it was after was the box sale revenues and the guilty parties will have already gotten their release-on-time and sell-x-boxes-in-two-weeks bonuses and promotions and will be off working on the next project, leaving the whole mess in the hands of a badly understaffed and woefully inexperienced live team.

Meanwhile, EVE will suffer through but survive yet another PR disaster involving staff helping their friends out in unfair ways.

Age of Conan and Everquest 2 will continue to refine and polish and be/become the best MMO’s nobody plays.

Somebody will come up with a decent multiplayer game for the iPhone and AT&T will be forced to change to a tiered pricing model just to manage the crush of a million people playing it simultaneously. Oh wait, that doesn’t come till 2011, sorry.

I think this is the first you mentioned Star Trek Online, which will launch in February, not March, though I think it could be argued March would be better considering its short dev cycle. I just found it surprising such a big IP wouldn’t get mentioned until so soon before launch.

That said, I think 500k is a reasonable guess. If they can pull it off in time they could do even better. I wouldn’t be surprised if it sold a million boxes all told though how many stay will depend on how well the game holds up at launch.

Who cares about 2010 and 2011? Around Christmas in 2012 it will be the appointed time that Lum leads us to the promised mmo and this will usher in the end of civilization as we know it.

Hmm, wasn’t COH/COV, more like peak of 200,000, not 500,000?
Thats what MMOCharts still says as well.

Argh! Cryptic Funcom. *facepalm* I blame the sinus meds.

Should FFIV or SWOTOR flop, I think Ill just move on from the MMO scene all together. I have played since meridian and dragons gate and hate where the genre is now.

On the other had, I was talking to some buddies who feel the same way and I brung up the fact that pretty much we wouldn’t be seeing another EQ “style”, game ever again. A buddy said, “What if we paid more?” All of us being in our late 30′s agreed. We would be willing to pay 50 to 100 bucks a month for a real game world. One that was more suited to harder and more in depth PVE. This pricing would in my opinion, keep out most of worse elements that plague MMO’s today as far as community. And if the game was good. I mean good enough for people like us to pay this amount. how many others would do so even if they dont at this moment like harder PvE?

Even if the total subscriber count was 300k X 50 bucks a month. At 50 or even 100 bucks a month, Id still be getting my moneys worth compared to other forms of entertainment. Hell to take my wife out to the movies and dinner 1 time a month can run me 150 easily.

Innoe – sounds like what you are looking for is “Vanguard done right”

Actually, that might not be a bad idea. All of the games that have aimed at a niche recently have aimed at the same niche – ‘hardcore’ PvP. Hardcore PvE would probably attract at least as many people, and they would be less prone to drive each other straight out of your game world.

Pretty much altho they world would need to be more fleshed out and populated. I dare say tho at 50 bucks a month, monthly content wouldnt be a problem either. <ake it with as much polish as WoW and youd capture all of the older MMo vets and a good portion of the new even at its higher pricing model. People are spending 20 to 40 monthly on crappy free to play model games. All you have to do is read over some sites like MMORPG and see the current discontent with todays games and a longing for a real fleshed out world.

I hate you cant edit here. But as an example take the movie Avatar. The story is overdone, the characters are typical, but the world….the world makes the movie come alive. Not its actors or the story.

agree. Now we need to find a developer, backing for the project, and a strict almost militaristic manager to make it happen. “sigh”

Nice site altho my talents are in other areas.

Id have to disagree. To me the management part is the most lacking combined with your concept of trying to make an MMO into a single player game.

You’re free to disagree, of course, but take a close look at the end of the beta in any recent MMORPG and you’ll see a whole lot of backtracking and lack of direction that lead to them being out of time – all of that could have been avoided with adequate prototyping.

Geld, I own and manage 2 gyms in Dallas and Waco. I wont try and say that i know anything beyond rudimentary knowledge of the whole MMO process. But I think we can both agree that the current MMO genre is in need of some serious direction. I would like to see that direction go more towards a living world( and i feel that many more people would also) and i am willing to pay to make that happen.

It all sounds reasonable, except the STO getting 500k subs and stabilizing there bit. That is pure cracksmokery, unless you know something we don’t.

Eh, personally I see STO stabilizing if they’re able to capitalize on their license and the fan base. They could carve out a niche market, as long as they don’t try to pull what SWG did and change the game’s entire focus midway.

As for the virtual world topic, I think it is really based on the focus of the game. Lean towards virtual world and you have alot of open ended gameplay but a lack of focus, such as early SWG. There were people who didn’t enjoy that kind of undirected gameplay, but it certinly held a market for itself. Then there is more of a focused game which I think SWTOR is going for. It revolves around the class story and the player’s decisions in that framework rather than building yourself a comfy little house on Tatooine. Not that Tatooine should ever be decribed as comfortable.

In Old Republic’s case I just don’t see there being enough content available at any level IF they stick to the story is all you get mentality. Even under the best of circumstances assuming that all players will enjoy rerolling as a different faction/class is a cheap hack and is NOT the same thing as “enough content”. I really, REALLY don’t want to play a Sith Warrior, Agent, Bounty Hunter and then cancel. I might as well have just replayed KotOR.

The “story” has to end at some point. If we’re lucky it doesn’t coincide at all with max-level and the really juicy/powerful bits are actually the beginnings of the elder game. But I’m not really even sure what their intent is for their elder game at this point.