So WoW appears to be getting a new mount… a motorcycle no less… called “The Hog”. You can see some pictures of it here.

Internet commentators, like Steve Danuser, are already up in arms about The Hog appearing in beta testing:

The helicopter flying mount made by engineers was pushing it for me. Once Azeroth has the motocycle, what’s next? When will I be able to get a Hummer to drive around in, or a Maserati?

To me, as a non-WoW person, The Hog actually makes WoW look more appealing. I’ve always had a soft spot for “steampunk” type things, and always enjoyed the gnomes as a race in EQ2. To me, this is the kind of crazy, madcap thing I’d expect if I was a WoW player. To all those who are getting uptight about it, might I suggest (in the nicest possible way), that you’ve probably out-grown the game and might be looking for a more “serious” realm to adventure in, instead?

It seems that the walls of World of Warcraft are impenetrable as yet another hyped MMO is broken against them, I’m of course speaking of Age of Conan.  Age of Conan was probably the most hyped MMO in the last few years and while the hype helped AoC to break sales records, it didn’t last long.  Age of Conan became the fasted selling MMO of all time,  shipping 1 million units by June and Funcom stated it had 700,000 accounts by June 30th.

While off to a good start in terms of sales, the game itself did not start off so well.  Across any MMO gaming site you’ll read about player complaints and gamers leaving AoC due to the many issues.  While Funcom has not released any figures since June 30th, it is rumored that about 1/2 of the player base has left the game.  Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime also recently mentioned that “40% of the World of Warcraft subscribers that left for Age of Conan have since returned“.

Although the walls of WOW still stand strong, like all great world powers they must eventually fall.  In an article at GamePlayer.com.au, they write about the recent “Recruit-a-Friend” campaign as a sign that subscription numbers are falling and Blizzard is looking for ways to bolster them until the release of Wrath of the Lich King.  I myself made a prediction back in May stating that WoW would reach its peak this summer and then start to decline.

It seems that with every new big MMO, WoW is slowly starting to feel the pinch.  With Warhammer Online on the horizon and a few other MMOs (Huxley, The Chronicles of Spellborn) before the years end, can WoW continue it’s growth?  I’m sticking with my earlier statment and say no, it can’t.

Also, this article is not to say that AoC is a failure, I’m merely stating that AoC did not live up to the hype and is little to no threat to the WoW empire.

A little while ago, we had Mike announce that he was done with Age of Conan. I wrote a counterpoint opinion piece saying that I was staying in the game for the time being, although qualified it that unless the game picked up, I’d drop it within another two to three billing cycles. Essentially, I was putting Funcom on notice, with the point of view that I wasn’t going to offer Funcom my coin forever if the game remained in its current state and updates continued to break more than they fixed, among other problems.

Well, scratch that idea as a bad joke. I’ve now cancelled my sub within the next billing cycle. No more chances for Funcom; I’ve had enough of Age of Conan for good.

This game is freaking terrible, and it’s not getting any better. Even having a cool bunch of guildmates to adventure with (well, those who stuck with the game, at least), couldn’t pull this one out of the fire for me. I’ve turned my back on the game for good because, here’s the thing: I’m no one’s fool and, at the end of the day, continuing to pay Funcom for rubbish goes completely against the way I operate. A guy on the AoC forums made a list of things that annoyed him about the game and, looking down that list, I agree with him. I reproduce it here as a simple, shorthand version of things I hate about AoC:

~ No DX10 at launch
~ Meaningless item stats
~ Lag spikes/frequent server kicks
~ Single compulsory starting area
~ Buddy pass delay
~ Exhausting delivery quests/poor travel
~ Poor (non-consequential) death system
~ Various graphical & gameplay glitches
~ Instance heavy/too many load screens
~ On rails/invisible walls
~ Zero player character uniqueness
~ No item degradation/repair system

How do you like them apples, Funcom?

Anyway, for all those feeling royally screwed over by the Funcom experience (“Games for kids, designed by kids” reads one forum poster’s signature file), take heart that the company’s share price has absolutely tanked. Does $54 on May 21 to $16.30 on August 15 sound like a healthy situation to you? Nope, me either.

I had high hopes for Funcom’s upcoming game, The Secret World, but after the Age of Crashing… sorry, Age of Conan, experience, I’m in no rush to sample anything made by Funcom for… hmmm, let’s see… the next 5000 years? A truly excreable experience. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Beam me up Scotty!  Yesterday at PennyArcade they had a comic that illustrated the possible problem that might arise in the upcoming Star Trek MMO with traveling.  As with any MMO, developers must decide how easy traveling will be in the game.  How early should the player get a mount or vehicle.  Will there be teleporters?  Quick travel areas?  However with Star Trek, none of those things are needed if you can just beam from your ship to anywhere you want.

I’ll admit right now, I’m not a Star Trek fan at all, I’ve probably seen about a dozen episodes of the various series throughout my lifetime and 2-3 of the movies, but one thing I do know is that people can beam pretty much anywhere.  So how will this affect gameplay?

In the FAQ on the Star Trek Online website, states the everyone will be the captain of their own ship and as they gain skill will be able to command larger ships.  So perhaps the smaller ships will not have beaming capability until you reach a certain level.  This would delay the issue a bit, but what happens when you do eventually get a ship with the capability of beaming? Can I beam directly to where the quest tells me to go?  Perhaps traveling will be mostly in space?  But I do have warp drives, so perhaps not.

Many gamers including myself despise long traveling and see it as a waste of time and not actual gaming.  AoC was a good example of how not to do traveling.  There were many respawn points on a map and when you die you could pick any point to respawn at, which was a good way to travel around the map, however you had to die to do it.  Why they didn’t make it an option use these points when your alive is beyond me.   Just one of the many reasons that caused me to quit the game.  I did regularly ask other players to kill me so that I could use the respawn points, as being killed by another player did not give you a death penalty.   So with Star Trek Online perhaps having the ability to beam yourself anywhere will drastically speed up the game and bypass the grind of having to walk around everywhere.  However if they decided to restrict beaming, it will be interested to see how the community responds.

At this point I have no interest in Star Trek Online, however that could change if I start to hear good things about it.

Tonight, SOE demoed its new Free Realms game at the FanFaire. You can get a quick sense of the game via its brief Wikipedia entry. Call me a silly old sentimental gamer who should know better, but it looks quite amazing and strikes me that a lot of people, adult gamers included, could make great use of the environment as a place where they can all meet, either to game with each other (in-game soccer and “Mario Kart” style games look like fun), or just engage in social networking, especially if they are friends who are otherwise playing different games to one another.

Why? Because the game client is free and is only a very small download (according to tonight’s demo) to get running, as well as running on just about any old PC, so most gamers out there would, in theory, have very easy access to it. I believe it will be subsidised with “extra content” costing a $4.99/month subscription, as well as micropayments available in-game for certain items, but none of that is essential to accessing a lot of its basic content in the first place.

I’m going to watch this very closely, actually. Although it’s promoted at the 9-14 age group, there is a lot of fun stuff in there; similar to how the Sims can be enjoyed by a wide variety of people. Infact, it’s funny I should actually say that because, from the demo, the game came across as part (original) Star Wars Galaxies, part Sims, and part something else very rare in gaming today… a game where you can just have fun from the start. Amazing. Creativity is still alive today.

I was reflecting on something I said on the BioWare forums, recently, about skills-based character progression, which can create all manner of “hybrid” characters, versus the more common (and, let me be honest, more boring), concept of levelling a particular class of character in MMORPGs.

It occurs to me that there are people out there who can’t conceive of a system where people are given so much choice. “We’d always need to be rebalancing!” they cry. “Someone would find a combination of skills and become way more uber than the rest and then we’d all have to play that exact character build or perish!”

What these people fail to realise, however, is that not everyone plays these games to be the biggest and baddest… the best at PvP… the most powerful in raids. They play these games so they can be the character they want to be. And skills-based levelling takes that concept a step further, allowing people to level up whatever skills are available in the game… in any combination they like. If someone wants to roll some sort of nuker-healer, knowing that they’ll never be the best nuker and never be the best healer… let ‘em go for it. If someone wants to put all their skills into being a swordsman only… let ‘em go for it. And if people want to respec themselves every other week, chasing the elusive “best build”, they can do that, too.

I sincerely believe a lot of people, out there in the community, need to realise that not everyone plays these games to be “the best”. We want to be competitive, sure, but we never lose sight of being what we want to be and actually having fun doing it. As opposed to rolling characters we don’t enjoy playing and which only give us a 1% edge in PvP, or something, anyway. It’s just not worth the worry.

You know, I never thought to write this up when it happened at the time but, the more I think about it, days later, the more it niggles at the part of my brain which is reserved for conversations that aren’t allowed to run their full course and leave me with more questions than answers. You know the kind… you start thinking about them just before you have to go to sleep and the like.

So what’s behind this rather angsty introduction? Well, you see, in a recent thread on the BioWare forums, I pointed to an earlier – and extremely popular if the amount of Diggs was any indication – MMOCrunch editorial I’d written which ran, in part:

MMORPGS have been dumbed down to the max and someone, somewhere, needs to show that this need not be the case for people who want something more from their gaming than being pushed from quest to quest, zone to zone, doing EXACTLY the same thing everyone else is doing, ad infinitum.

Next thing, BioWare employee James Henley (who has identified himself in other posts he has made on the forum as “World Designer, Unnamed MMORPG, BioWare, Austin Studio”) shot back a pithy one-liner at me, just 18 minutes after my post:

I’m almost positive that, one day, people will learn to tell the difference between a fact and their opinion.

To me, that came across as a rather snappy – and kind of unnecessary – comment in general, but also suggested that he disagreed with what I’d said. I mean, people only tend to take what I like to call “the snappy route” on a forum when they disagree with you. Does that seem like a fair assessment to you, dear readers?

I replied, asking for more of his thoughts because I was genuinely intrigued why he would make this comeback. In asking, I pointed out that today’s MMORPGs are a conveyer belt of quests; have levels that are, seemingly, an arbitrary number, rather than meaning something; that people are sick of “the quest grind” in MMORPGs, especially when the quests are variations of “Kill 10 monsters” and “Deliver this letter” and there has been a real void in the market for an intelligent MMORPG, post Ultima Online and the original SWG.

Do they seem like valid complaints from the MMORPG community at large? I thought so. So I naturally wanted James’ thoughts.

No response.

Later, the thread was closed altogether because there is currently a catch-all thread that BioWare uses for its MMORPG discussions (whether they relate to its MMORPG project, or not), so the chance for James to reply directly to the thread disappeared entirely.

Now, why does the exchange still bother me? Primarily because I was talking about a games developer needing to go out there into the marketplace and take a stand by creating a sandbox MMORPG to counteract the plague of MMORPGs that are currently out there, all offering exactly the same thing and all of them, you will note, boring the pants off users, faster and faster with each new release.

(Heck, it’s no lie to say that people were sick of Age of Conan’s end-game within weeks of launch. That’s patently ridiculous, and definitely not what you get when a game has sandbox options…)

Yet here was James, sprinting off the line, with his slap down.

I could be completely wrong… wouldn’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last… but the way James got snappy with the ideas in my post sort of suggested to me that BioWare is making a game that does have levels; does have a quest series that keeps people on rails and doesn’t have the kind of intelligent crafting system that made the original incarnation of Star Wars Galaxies so damn great at first.

Because you’d think that if BioWare WASN’T making such a game, the likes of James could sit back, smugly confident with proceedings and if he DID need to make a reply it would be more along the lines of, “Well, just you wait and see…” instead of being all snappy about it.

It makes me rather sad, actually, that if BioWare’s new MMORPG is Star Wars-based (and all signs certainly point towards that, although it’s not 100% confirmed), that it could be a shadow of the original Star Wars Galaxies when, five years on, it should be SO MUCH MORE.

Steve Danuser has tossed up some interesting thoughts, as always, on his Moorgard blog. This time they relate to how growing up and moving on from a game is really no different to, say, growing up and not watching Sesame Street anymore. Why? Because it’s kind of weird to expect those characters to grow up just because you do.

My take? I tend to agree with Steve. There seems to be an awful lot of MMORPGers out there whom, after maxing out their main character, numerous alts, raiding every dungeon 1000 times and having more PvP kills than God, still tend to get uppity that the game owes them something. “This expansion wasn’t big enough! I finished it in two days!” they cry. Or how about this old classic that you see on some game’s online forums, “The game’s not as good as it used to be! I’m outta here!” and they leave in a total rage at the game they used to love, simply because they’ve run out of new challenges.

It’s really sad to see MMORPGs cop this kind of abuse because, more often than not, the gamer simply has outgrown the game, and it’s time to move on. No more, no less. No hidden agendas. Nothing. Getting them to realise this, however, is an all-new challenge.

The MMORPG industry is a strange beast, isn’t it? I mean, can anyone really make any sense out of it? Everywhere I go on the Internet – forums, blogs, etc – I see discussions about the genre which typically feature the same kinds of comments, over and over again:

* People hate endless quest grinding to an arbitrary level cap which, in truth, could be 20 levels higher, or lower, and it seemingly wouldn’t make any difference.

* People hate the quests themselves, which still revolve around, “Kill 10 of this monster” or “Deliver this letter to someone a really long way away (so you’ll waste the next two hours of your life)”.

* People hate that “the best” content in games is usually reserved for the endgame, which not only takes time to level to, it’s often, weirdly, also the most under-developed in many ways.

So, tell me, besides the obvious question of why any of us bother with MMORPGs if there’s so much to hate in the way they’re designed in the first place, why aren’t these games being designed different? Designed smarter? Designed to be more fun? It’s crazy!

I’ve long held the belief that MMORPGs are increasingly heading in the wrong direction. They are trying to be single-player games with lots of people logged in at the same time. This is such an absurd way to design a MMO game world. Why? Because the nature of the world offers itself to being an environment where people can actually exist – Second Life, style – and should be able to do what they please.

This might mean opening a bar and crafting a dozen flavours of beer to sell to people, or it might mean venturing into a nearby forest and seeing what adventure can be found. MMORPGs should be real, breathing, living worlds where you can do what you please… not be placed on a conveyer belt that takes you from one quest to the next, until you are an arbitrary “level” that doesn’t really mean anything, when you stop to think about it, beyond the rather mindless, “I have played the game long enough to be this level”. Yawn-a-rama.

I think Star Wars Galaxies was honestly on the right track in its original incarnation. You could make a character be whatever you wanted to be. And by repeated actions, you “levelled up” your skills, rather than your character. So you could, conceivably, pick up a rifle and go and be a farmer on the frontier of some planet, processing materials and making money. Or you could opt to be some kind of super swordsman; a mercenary for hire. Or you could collect parts for a spaceship and fly up into space. Whatever you wanted to do… whatever you wanted to be… Star Wars Galaxies gave you a good shot at doing it. And doing it in the Star Wars universe, to boot!

Was it perfect? No, because no game can be. Ever. And, especially in the case of something new like Galaxies, it was always going to take refinement. Of course, let the record show that such “refinement”, when it finally came along, actually took the game in the opposite direction to where it was intended to go in the first place and it will go down in history as one of the most botched game revamps in history. But that’s maybe another rant for another time.

The original Star Wars Galaxies – and the passion with which “true” MMORPG gamers still show for it – is proof that an MMORPG game world can be so much more than a map with a conveyer belt of quests stuck on top of it. Game worlds can be alive and real and vital… the perfect recipe for repeat customers wanting to log in month after month to continue their “life” in the game. Right now, however, developers only seem to see “x” number of quests @ “x” length of time to complete = six months guaranteed revenue. The problem with that, however, is that people’s attention spans are rapidly decreasing with this method of MMORPG design.

A developer needs to get out there and take a stand by making a truly sandbox style of MMORPG, to show that it can be done, and that there is a market for it. Now, will such a game confuse the hell out of “the WoW kids” who will be bewildered by the lack of levels? Undoubtedly. Will those same kids be confused with the concept of characters being classless, hence it’s not as easy to plan a fight without the archetypes of tank, healer and DPS? Yep… and it thrills me to think of that, actually. You see, MMORPGS have been dumbed down to the max and someone, somewhere, needs to show that this need not be the case for people who want something more from their gaming than being pushed from quest to quest, zone to zone, doing EXACTLY the same thing everyone else is doing, ad infinitum.

You know, I’m just as guilty of doing this as anyone else (so please don’t think I’m throwing stones and being holier-than-thou), but the last decade, or thereabouts, has seen an increasing rise in gaming communities acting like they “own” a game before it comes out and the developers of that game are somehow obligated to put every last thought from the community into the game, otherwise it will be “teh suxxors”.

I was recently reminded of this phenomenon by the failure of a 50,000-something signature petition, demanding that the forthcoming Diablo III should use a darker palette of colours. Despite the developers having solid gameplay reasons for their colour choices in the new game, the Diablo III community has chosen to see the colours as WoW-esque, therefore the game will suck. Apparantly.

When did this start to happen? I can remember a time when, believe it or not, games were pretty much made in isolation. You might have some idea that ‘x’ company was making ‘x’ kind of game, via news snippets in gaming magazines… but that was pretty much it, until the game was reviewed in the same publication. At which point, people could make a purchase decision based on the finished game.

Now, I don’t neccessarily think that’s the best way to make a game – I think that community feedback is a very useful thing. But when does it become too much? And why do communities suddenly start thinking they’re entitled to more say than they actually are? You see this happening a hell of a lot in MMORPG communities in particular, which is why I’ve decided to throw the topic up here for discussion.

Naturally, the rise of the Internet, and instantaneous communication with just about anyone, has a large hand in why today’s 10 year old feels completely at ease telling a games developer that his new combat system sucks, whereas when I was 10 years old, back in 1985, I wouldn’t have even known the developer’s name, let alone dreamed I could contact him and give him my opinions.

Neither are ideal situations, to my mind. And I get the very distinct feeling that, in the future, smarter developers will find new ways to engage communities, prior to games being released, lest they suffer the “slings and arrows” of a gaming community scorned when they make some mundane, yet vital, change to a game – and spend the next six months being told they suck by a group of people; half of whom probably won’t end up playing the game, anyway.