In a word, simplicity. There’s something to be said about a game where the characters have only five abilities, one being passive, yet still provide layers of complexity and strategy.

The reason League of Legends is able to accomplish this is through their skill trees, rune system and item store, which allow players to completely customize each character without adding additional abilities. While players can spend hours tweaking their stats, when they get into the actual game it becomes very simple.

When comparing it to my character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have two hot bars filled with 24 abilities, then an additional two side bars with another 18 or so abilities, buffs, items and skills. I can’t remember the last time I played a MMORPG  where I had so many abilities as SWTOR. Full disclosure the only other two MMORPGs I played to the level cap were LoTRO and Warhammer Online, neither of which, from what I remember, came anywhere near SWTOR.

However I have played dozens of other MMO games to mid level and I can’t recall  filling up my hotbars by mid game in any of them. In comparison I had filled my two bottom bars and nearly another full side bar before I hit level 25. Then let’s not forget a fifth hotbar for companions.

However there’s a certain complexity that is expected when playing a MMORPG, much more than a MOBA game like League of Legends, but when is enough enough? Do we really need 40 abilities and items to select from while in combat?  Seems like overkill to me and while I don’t expect or even want a MMORPG with only 5 abilities, it wouldn’t hurt for MMO developers to take a look at what RiotGames is doing with League of Legends and perhaps simplify some things.

What do you think? Are MMO games going to far with the amount of skills and abilities players have access to or do you enjoy the complexity of it?

In the real world we all use a single currency system, ok, maybe two for some of the EU countries that still accept their old currency, but for most of us there’s only one. If you travel to another country you’ll have to exchange your money for whatever currency that country uses, but you remain in a one currency system.

When MMORPGs first started showing up in the gaming world, they followed basically the same logic, one basic currency that players can use to buy and sell their items to other players or vendors. However over the last decade, this system has ballooned into a complicated multi-currency system where it seems everything you do provides you with another type of currency. Call it what you like, tokens, commendations, points, it’s all basically the same.

Today MMORPGs are more about collecting tokens than they are about role-playing or even just playing. They have become a sort of achievement list for players to brag that they played 1000 PvP matches and now have enough tokens to get that awesome weapon everyone wants. To me that’s not a reason to play a MMO.

An overload in currency systems was the reason I quit LotRO some years ago and I have no doubt they’ve crammed even more collecting systems into the game since. However it’s not just a few games that are at fault, nearly every game today follows the same multi-currency system, including RIFT and SWTOR.

The issue has become so bad today that the simple removal of a token makes entire portions of a game pointless and irrelevant. Developers use these token systems to etice players to participate in activities they normally wouldn’t want to. For instance if you want more people playing mini-game X, simply create some epic gear and a token system specifically for that activity.  Boom, you’ll have people flocking to that mini-game in order to obtain those items, but the questions is, should they?

As a developer wouldn’t you want players to participate in certain activities because they’re fun and not because they get rewarded every time they do? If players are avoiding some areas of the game maybe those activities should be removed or reworked until players will actually want to participate.

I personally believe all MMORPGs should stick to a single currency system and allow mini-games or game features to fail if they’re not fun. If mini-game X is boring and I can get the same rewards elsewhere, I will.  That should give developers incentive to make mini-game X better, but instead they take the forceful route and create high rated gear and hide it behind a secondary currency.

Today En Masse Entertainment officially announced May 1st, 2012 as the release date for their upcoming MMO game TERA.

TERA will be available both online and in stores with standard and Collector’s Editions available, although no info has yet be revealed about the CE.

Closed beta signup opened up over the weekend on the TERA website and are expected to begin within a few weeks. For those of you who want to signup to the beta, head over to their beta signup page.

Undead Labs posted their first blog update of the new year and it was a big one, showing off for the first time some gameplay of their zombie MMO, which is currently in the early-alpha stage of development.

The video is actually a tour of their development studio, but we get a few glimpses of what the game as they walk by a few stations. The video ends with about a 20 seconds scene of two players barricaded in a house as zombies attack it, just enough to get your blood flowing in excitement. Can’t wait to see more.

Check out the full Undead Labs video after the jump.

Continued…

It’s always fun to try to predict what’s going to happen over the next year so here is our list of 2012 predictions for MMO gaming.

Guild Wars 2 will gain more players than Star Wars: The Old Republic – I’m having a great time playing SWTOR, but it’s just not different enough to hold my attention in the long run. I predict players will flock to GW2 and before 2012 ends, Guild Wars 2 will have a larger active player base than SWTOR.

Diablo 3 will be delayed until early July – Blizzard has never released a game or expansion in the first or second quarter past Jan 16th and since no release date has yet been announced, I’m going with an early third quarter release.

Warhammer Online will go Free-to-play –  I still can’t believe they haven’t so I’m guessing 2012 will be the year.

Blizzard will reveal their Titan MMO project – We all know it’s going to be a new IP, but that’s basically all we know right now. I predict that this years Blizzcon, they’ll spill the beans.

Black Prophecy will be shut down or sold – The game is seriously lacking players and while it still has promise, it has no change to turn things around in its current form. I predict Gamigo either shuts it down or sells it off.

End of Nations will be a flop - I love the concept that Trion is doing with End of Nations, but I just don’t see it being a hit and predict it will be a failure in 2012.

Eve Online will rebound from 2011 and continue to grow – I’ve never played the game, but it’s my favorite MMO I to hear about. I predict CCP will get back to basics and subscription numbers will continue to rise in 2012.

Mythos Global will shut down…again – The third attempt to run a successful version of Mythos will fail and the game will close down yet again.

The Secret World will go free-to-play by the end of 2012 – Not that I don’t think it won’t be a good game, but it doesn’t have the pull other titles like D3, SWTOR and GW2 have. I predict it will have a great launch, then peter out like so many other MMO games, changing to free-to-play only months after launch. That or it will launch as a free-to-play title.

There you have it, my nine predictions for 2012 and I’m going to say I’ll get more than half right.

At a recent auction in China for the upcoming MMORPG Age of Wulin, a gamer purchased an in-game virtual sword for $16,000. Other gamers also purchased virtual items, a $1,600 Hook of Departure sheath and a Lordly Spear sheath for $2,500.

Now forget the fact that the two lesser items are only sheaths for cosmetic purposes, why are these people buying items for a game that’s still in beta? What happens if the game is a flop?

Age of Wulin is also a PvP centric game, what happens if it has full corpse-looting? These people are either going to lose their items or never use them for fear of getting ganked. I’d also hate to be this guy once the first expansion gets released and makes his $16,000 sword worthless.

EA announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic has officially become the fastest growing subscription MMO in history, with over one million players registering since the Dec 20th launch.  EA also released some other stats which are listed below.

• Logged 28 million in-game hours – roughly equivalent to watching all sixStar Wars movies, two million times
• Averaged well over five hours a day playing the game
• Created more than 3.8 million characters; 510,000 Jedi Knights and 550,000 Sith Warriors
• Killed more than two billion non-player characters in the eight days since Early Game Access began

The third stat is pretty interesting and reveals something about players class choice . The stat tells us that out of the 3.8 million characters, about 28% are Jedi Knights or Sith Warriors, slightly more than the 25% if we were to divide the classes evenly. I’d be interested to see the numbers for the remains 6 classes especially the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler classes.

In a Tweet yesterday, Emile Gauthier posted that Ubisoft is hiring for a new AAA MMO project, linking to Ubisoft’s Facebook job listings page.

Ubisoft Quebec is working on a NEW AAA MMORPG Game and we need people to fill these very strategic positions

The page shows three new jobs were posted yesterday, which you can see in the screenshot above, two of which are for the Wii U and are AAA titles as well.

The Tweet has started rumors that Ubisoft is working on a MMO game for the Wii U, although they can very well be separate projects. However it does confirm that Ubisoft is working on a new MMO game, their second behind Ghost Recon Online which is expected to be released sometime in 2012.

With the release of The Old Republic rapidly approaching, I’ve seen many examples of old MMO discussions popping up all over various gaming forums. It’s the argument about how you cannot compare a completely new MMO (In this case SWTOR) to a long running and established MMO (In this, and most cases frankly, World of Warcraft).

The latest example I saw was on a big gaming site forum where a user was stating that the “looking for group” (LFG) solution that SWTOR currently has is very bare bones when you compare it to WoW. While WoW streamlines the process of finding groups to an extreme degree (too extreme for the tastes of some players even), the SWTOR tools for finding groups are much more basic, largely consisting of providing you with a chat channel and ticking off a flag that indicates to anyone looking at the zone population list that you want to group.

It did not take long before people started angrily complaining that the thread author was being completely unfair in comparing SWTOR with WoW. Their argument was that obviously WoW has been out for 7 years now and would have a lot more features than anything you could expect from a game that was just about to launch. The SWTOR defenders did not argue that the way that SWTOR handle grouping currently was in any way a better solution than what WoW does, simply that it was okay for BioWare to release SWTOR with a sub-optimal LFG tool set and then eventually patch in a more fully featured version at a later stage.

There are many variations of the above argument, with different features being called out and different new MMO’s being compared to established ones. But the basic premise of them all are that it is unfair for players to compare one MMO product to another, if one of the products has been around for a long time.

It’s an argument that is bizarre to me. When SWTOR comes out it is going to be competing against WoW in its current state, not what WoW was like 3, 5 or 7 years ago. It’s going to be a full price MMO, so to a consumer they will be able to buy and subscribe to either WoW or SWTOR for around the same price. Does it really make any kind of sense to turn a blind eye to the issues of a game simply because it is new, if it’s offering an inferior experience to an existing and comparatively priced product?

If you try to apply that logic to another product it’s clear that it doesn’t make much sense. Let’s say that a new car company just launched its first car. They decided to price the car at around the same level as a large BMW. But their car didn’t have ABS, no power steering, no climate control and the front passenger door would occasionally fall off if you turned too hard into a corner. Obviously no sane customers would pay for this car. No consumers would say “ah, well they don’t have all the decades of experience with building cars that BMW do. I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out how to make sure their doors don’t fall off”.

It seems to me that this kind of argument is all too often used by people that are already so emotionally invested in a new or upcoming game that they feel the need to defend “their” game by any means. Even if its by using logic that is so poorly thought out that even a Scientologist would shake their head and go “now that is just dumb”.

There is one important point that I want to make, though. While I think it is completely fair that players compare MMO’s regardless of their age, I am *not* saying that all MMO’s necessarily need to match each others feature set 1:1.

When WoW came out it could not match the most popular western MMO of the time, Everquest, in every way. Everquest was a big established MMO with several expansion packs under its wings and many years of polish. But WoW managed to offer an experience that was different and compelling enough that it didn’t matter that Everquest had some features that WoW did not. The overall experience of playing WoW was simply more enjoyable than playing Everquest, despite this disparity of content and features.

Likewise it is entirely possible that SWTOR will not need to have as streamlined a LFG tool as WoW does to match or even beat the success of WoW. Perhaps the deep stories will mean more to players. Or perhaps players will be overjoyed by the companion system. The point is that an MMO can still beat out another MMO even if it is missing some features. In the end it is all about the overall experience for the players.

I just wish that people would stop trying to “protect” new MMO’s from criticism by saying it’s “unfair” to compare them to MMO’s that have had years of post launch updates. At the end of the day players will play whatever game that presents the most fun experience to them and no one is going to care if the game came out in 2011, 2009 or 2004.