West Karana

I have nothing against old MMOs. In fact, I spend most of my time in one of the oldest. But I know that EQ is old, and I play it now not to see new things, but just to reminisce about all the good times I had in it.

People have been going off to World of Warcraft for years, and starting their adventures in Azeroth. I’ve even done it (and my gosh, has it been three years already?). But I’ve been reading the adventures of Cownose, who recently starting in WoW, and Ogrebears, who is just starting, any my first thought for them both was, why would they want to start out with that old game?

And I startled myself thinking that, because it was the first time I had even thought of World of Warcraft as being old. And yet, it is. It’s no longer the young upstart, it’s something they market to older people. When your spokesmen are a 60s scifi television star and a 70s action show star, you have to wonder, who are they targeting with WoW? My PARENTS?

At this time in EverQuest’s history, it was just about to release its fifth expansion “The Legacy of Ykesha”, which was widely seen as a shrewd move to reposition the aging game toward more casual players. WoW’s *second* expansion will likely release around its fourth anniversary. *cough* But this isn’t about the pace of expansions. It’s that by 2004, EQ was the market leader, but it was showing some cracks, cracks that WoW’s release later that year would widen and split entirely apart.

WoW was the better game, but more than that, it was the newer game. People had done everything in EQ — many, many times — and unless you were in one of the top raid guilds, you probably were still angry that Planes of Power had been mostly a raid-guild-only expansion (and though the casual player-focused LDoN was just about to come out, the expansion after that, Gates of Discord, would cement that raid-only mentality). In short, many EQ players were looking for a change, and with the news that many raid guilds would be jumping over to WoW en masse based on the phenomenally popular beta, it was clear the torch had been passed. EQ was now the “old” game, and WoW was the fresh young debutante, flirting with her suitors.

WoW is now where EQ was then. It’s old, people have done everything there is to do in WoW, many zillions of times, and the game itself is being marketed toward an increasingly older population. It’s still as great a game as ever, but will that matter when someone is looking for a new fresh game, and WoW becomes the game their parents play?

WoW may weather WAR and AoC, but it can’t escape time. With AoC and WAR being so similar to WoW and being marketed to the same aging demographic, those games entirely skipped the demographic of upcoming, new MMO players (especially WAR — fans who have played the tabletop game for a half dozen years and people who played the equally aged Dark Age of Camelot form the bulk of the people who aren’t just looking for a WoW-like to play in general).

Unlike fine wine, games do not improve with age. Instead, they narrow themselves to focus on the players they already have in a struggle to keep them from leaving. I find the same freshness and energy in Wizard101 that I remember from the WoW beta, though W101 is in no way attempting to be a huge, expansive game like EQ or WoW. But the energy is there. And that energy, or the lack of it, is what dooms all older games and is what will doom WoW.

I just had a thought, while writing the Mythos article. We all know where Mythos came from. Diablo II game play with a Warcraft art style. Diablo II came from Diablo, and Diablo was heavily influenced by the rogue-likes Moria and Angband, I think? Both those games were inspired by Hack, which was inspired by Rogue, which was heavily influenced by Temple of Apshai (I’m guessing), which took its inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, World of Warcraft was inspired by the Warcraft RTS games, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. EverQuest took its inspiration from Toril MUD, which was based on other MUDs back to Diku, which was itself based on D&D and earlier MUDs which were inspired by Infocom’s Dungeon/Zork, which was inspired by Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure, which was based on real spelunking. Dark Age of Camelot took its inspiration EverQuest, so there’s some inbreeding going on there. Warcraft polished earlier RTS games, which draw heavily from those old Avalon-Hill war games, which likely got their start as variants of the board game Risk (total speculation for purposes of illustration only).

See where this is going? All these games take certain ideas — call them genes — and mix them up to form new games. What if we could, to push the analogy, sequence these genes, and directly diagram the rise and fall of genetic markers over the years. We would have a new handle on how to judge games. Point and click vs WASD? XP grind or quest grind? Group or solo preferred?

When someone says WAR is like WoW, we could say well, it’s 75% like WoW, 10% like DAoC (and since both games draw from EverQuest) can trace half its heritage all the way back to 1999. Now this 25% here, this was never in WoW, and there’s our difference.

And more importantly, we would be able to really focus on truly new and innovative ideas. “Whoa, in this game, your character loses levels if the player doesn’t log in. Is that new? Will it spread to other games?”

Virology and genetics can tell us a lot about gaming evolution, I’m guessing. Evolution? Yeah, I went there. I think we all can see these games are not a product of Intelligent Design… (Sigh. Devs, forgive me. I had to take the shot. You understand, don’t you?)

I admit it. I was wrong about AoC.

I said it would be a blip that would quickly fall to the high system requirements and the World of Warcraft juggernaut. I said that WoW would be entirely unchallenged by AoC, and was only mildly worried about Warhammer Online.

I think I was wrong about every thing I said. Those people who called me clueless were right.

AoC is having the most successful launch I think I have ever seen, maybe even better than WoW back in 2004. Back then, of course, the market was a lot smaller, and WoW’s launch turned then-MMO champ EverQuest into a niche game, something Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot had not been able to do. So I don’t see AoC booting WoW to the curb.

It sure looks like WoW is weaker than I thought. Since all this interest *must* be largely coming from WoW (nobody else has that kind of presence), great crowds of people must have just been waiting for a new game to come out which wasn’t trying to be a WoW competitor but was just trying to be the best game possible. And with the welcome news of a very smooth launch and very playable game, more and more people will decide to take the plunge and join their friends.

I thought WoW had at least another year or two of unchallenged superiority. Maybe when people saw the next expansion would be nothing to really inspire passion, they became more willing to roll the dice and take the chance on something new?

Going to Warhammer Online, I expected. That is a game that I thought would appeal to WoW players (and probably will). AoC I disregarded as a blip, a quick MMO to play before choosing sides in the WoW vs WAR megashowdown at the end of the year — a battle I still expected to be won ultimately by WoW. Now, I am not so sure.

WoW is this giant walking around crushing villages and causing devastation wherever it turns, and all other MMOs are like people attacking the massive toes of the giant with clubs and pitchforks. Maybe the giant has finally met his Jack.

Blizzard acts like a leader in the MMO world, magnanimously hoping for decent competition. You can say that when you’re ahead. But Blizzard has shareholders to appease, and they can’t be liking the thought that another company would steal any of WoW’s thunder before they had a suitable replacement ready.

Is it time for Blizzard to pull back the curtain and show what they have planned for WoW’s second act? We’ve all seen how fast market leaders can become yesterday’s news.

So yeah, I was wrong and I admit I was wrong. Way to go, Funcom. I hope Age of Conan surprises and shocks EVERYONE by its wild success.

Sitting here listening to call in shows on NPR (”On Point”) and thinking about podcasting. For all that it’s a 21st century, Internet-age technology, podcasting is amazingly non-interactive. You and some friends gather in some virtual meeting place, talk about some stuff, and then send it out into the world… but it’s a panel discussion — or just a lone person sending their thoughts into the void — but there isn’t the wide range of discussion. Especially when people know each other well, they may already be anticipating the sorts of things their friends will say — and so the give and take is edited before it’s even spoken.

Now, getting interested and articulate people to call in would be a struggle, and you’d need a producer to screen the people ahead of time and to let them have their time to make their comment or ask a question and then put them back into listen-only… yeah it would be a lot tougher. But wouldn’t you listen to a podcast about, oh I dunno, Age of Conan that included players, beta testers, Conan the Comic fans and such coming up and asking about the game or the lore?

It could work. Getting the word out and everyone online at the same time and screening the callers would take work. But discussion would go into entirely new directions just because of the wide variety of the callers.

Are there any podcasts that work this way already — with random people calling in for comments or questions? If so, I’d like to have a listen and see how well they work out.

I feel a little like a relic at this moment. Everyone is talking about Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Liche King, and I realized… I have no interest in any of them. I have a coworker in the AoC closed beta, but going around in gangs randomly ganking people wasn’t that fun in EQ2’s Nagafen from either end — seemed really pointless to me, though I did enjoy the feeling of danger and risk it brought to the game.

Still, they will rise or fall on their merits, and I’ll be watching from the sidelines. I have my EQ1 and EQ2. Mythos is coming out, Champions Online and Chronicles of Spellborn are on the horizon. I can spend my time anticipating those, while enjoying the good games I am already playing.

Flagship Studios is being incredibly responsive to its beta players, retooling Mythos at a fantastic rate to improve the game play and move it away from the “Diablo II”-clone label. It’s turning out to be something new to Western MMOs — a AAA-quality, Free to Play MMO with microtransactions. Dungeon Runners shares a lot of similar elements, and is released while Mythos is in beta, but it does not include microtransactions and has shown a greater reluctance to move in any significant away from the Diablo II model. Plus, I consider it rather dull. Mythos’ over the top, here’s a hundred mobs at once, edge-of-the-seat gameplay gets addicting after awhile.

Anyway, since I won’t be playing any of the current generation of MMOs as I wait for the next, here’s my quick takes on my hopes for them.

Age of Conan: This will be the EverQuest 2 of this generation. Few people will be able to play the game properly, but those who stick with it may find a fantastic game. It will follow the EQ2 arc. A quick burst of initial interest will give way to mass defections. AoC will fix the problems, get back on track, and in a year, the game will be where it should have been at launch and the players who stuck with them will be having fun.

Warhammer Online: The game can’t possibly match people’s expectations. EA Mythic may think that with enough money and marketing might that they can pull people away from WoW. Unfortunately, they are doing nearly nothing to lure non-WoW players to the game. They may think they can get a couple of million players without Blizzard noticing, but a lot of other companies have thought that in the past. It is impossible to drag WoW players away when they release a new expansion.

Wrath of the Liche King: I’ve seen the videos. This expansion is going to blow in the doors. AoC may struggle through because it is a significant departure from WoW, but Warhammer Online is going to be pounded. WoW will keep its crown for another year. By the time people finish the new content, Warhammer Online will seem like a has-been, and people will be more likely to wait for the next new shiny rather than give WAR a try. It’s all about the opening weekend — or free month. It is impossible to entice people to leave WoW unless Blizzard shoved them out the door first.

Why EA Mythic thought releasing against WoW would ever work… I dunno. Blizz was never going to give them an easy, uncontested launch. About the only thing EA Mythic can really do now is delay it a further six months and put in something so cool that the delay would be worth it.

There’s also SOE’s new MMOs, The Agency and Free Realms, coming out at some point, probably around the WAR and WotLK launches. The buzz on both these titles is so incredibly low, as are the expectations, that almost anything they can do will look like a success. If either game compromises the PC gameplay in favor of the PS3 gameplay, you might as well write them off right now. It won’t be these games that convince anyone to buy a PS3.

Anyway, I’m afraid all you’ll be seeing on the pages of this particular blog is more EQ, EQ2 and Mythos adventures for awhile. Mythos won the Mythos vs Dungeon Runners competition on my hard drive by virtue of not being boring. I am HOPING to get into the Spellborn beta (Spellborn devs, HINT HINT). I’m not sure I can talk about another beta I am in, but my high hopes for it were utterly crushed.

AoC, WAR and WotLK players — I’ll be looking forward to reading about your adventures :)

Today, the Age of Conan open beta opens. And people are fibrillating over it, slavering, EAGER to download a game most of them will have forgotten about in six months. But not today. Today, it brings meaning to their lives. Today the sun is shining right on them and the birds are singing because, today, they can play a new video game.

People are not only accepting of marketing, they willingly dive right in. Even though each and every one of them knows that if they really wanted a quality game experience, they’d pick up the game a month or two after it launches, when the rush is off, the game is stable, and it’s clear if the game is really awesome or just meh. Something you can’t really tell when ten thousand people are lagging the beta servers.

We computer fans have a long history of falling prey to hype. Remember the “Midnight Madness” spectacle Microsoft orchestrated around the release of Windows 95? Nothing was going to stop those people from buying an OPERATING SYSTEM at midnight. So they could be first to… what, exactly? Nobody really knew. They got over it pretty fast, waking up, wondering what all the fuss was about.

There was no fuss. Just hype. Software marketers have become masters at building hype. Age of Conan, Warhammer Online… If you can somehow get a player to make an emotional connection that can entirely bypass the rational part of their brains… well, you’ve made a SALE.

Because, you know what you’re going to do in AoC, and Warhammer Online? That’s right. You’re going to make a character, kill stuff, level, loot corpse, repeat. The same grind you see in every other MMO you ever played. It’s the *same game*.

If you were buying a car, you wouldn’t trade in your perfecly serviceable car for another just because it looked shiny and new.

Oh wait. Yeah, people do that all the time. Because Marketing WORKS. Marketing’s entire purpose is to make you WANT something. Build that emotional connection. You see that SUV rampaging through the mountains and fields and say — yeah, I’d like to be able to just drive around in mountains and fields and stuff instead of driving to work every day. And then drive their shiny new SUV into work every day. Dream realized. No change.

You won’t become an axe-swinging barbarian by playing Conan. We’re all just geeks behind keyboards, performing repetitive actions for no rewards, wasting time likely better spent doing something that would make a positive difference in our lives.

But hey, I guess if marketing can bring meaning to our lives and convince us that sitting for hours behind keyboards performing repetitive actions for no reward is actually something pretty fantastic, then who am I to say different?

Rock on, Conan dudes. You have six months to do it all over again for Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King.

Marketers everywhere rejoice.

(Full disclosure: I waited two months after EQ launched in 1999 to buy it, a year after WoW launched to buy it, and I bought EQ2 the first day it was out. And I didn’t wait in line for Win95. That would have been silly.)

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.

Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.

Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.

One player. One game. One year.

If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.

Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.

MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.

Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and Wordpress (West Karana runs on Wordpress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.

The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?

Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.

Mythos, still in closed beta, has completely relaunched. No more beta codes to give out (sorry), but if you have been a beta tester, you will have to uninstall your current client and download the new one. I did this this morning; things look shinier. Expect a new look at Mythos soon.

Bristlebane’s Day (apparently) goes live today. The revelers are in North Qeynos at the Claymore, and West Freeport outside the Executioner’s Pit. I have no idea if there are quests associated with them; I couldn’t get a word out of them on the Test server.

Sins of the Solar Empire, the game, is harder than Sins of the Solar Empire, the demo. I’ve had to restart twice. First time I expanded too slow, the second time, too fast.

I’ve been very, very bad with EQ2 news. I promise to be better! There’s been some lower level stuff I’ve been doing that I really do need to write about.

WAR has been kicked back to the fall. This means that people who were trying to decide between AoC and WAR need worry no longer; they can get AoC and play it until WotLK or WAR come out, then move on. This gives AoC a good four-five month window, which is more than I expected for it. So: WAR moving, good for AoC, bad for WAR, since now it has to compete with Wrath of the Lich King, and I think we all know who will win that battle.

No news on the EQ2 or EQ1 expansion front. SOE did a DevDiary chat with Thomas Sincinch, an EQ2 character artist, and he said the next expansion was still early in production. However, the Shard of Hate will be live soon — it’s on Test now, and I hope to take a look inside it soon.

Rock Band solo project — since I got a mic stand for Rock Band, I’ve been working on a solo-duo — me singing and playing guitar at the same time, guitar on hard, singing on medium. It is VERY DIFFICULT to play songs you have never played on the guitar controller on hard, while singing songs somewhat on time and in key. I’m singing now in Amsterdam for something, I forget which. My last battle was for Dan, Dan the Super Sound Man in Stockholm, where I finished Highway Star with five stars — but I knew the song and the words. Hardest has been when Metallica’s “… And Justice for All” came up in a random song set. I’m sorry. Just wasn’t up to speed. Just a couple of songs from completing Rock Band drums on Hard — Police’s “Next to You” and “Run to the Hills”. I’ve been working on how I sit when I play and can get the double kicks fairly well (they tend to “bounce” when you’re in the groove). I’ve also been dipping back into online dueling, this time on Hard. So I guess, I’ve officially graduated from a skilled Medium player to a fairly confident Hard player. Boston’s album makes me crave more albums from 70s rockers. My pick would be Blue Oyster Cult’s “Imaginos”, but that’s a dream that will never come true. Perhaps “Fire of Unknown Origin”? That contains a lot of their hits. Of course, the obvious pick would be Phish.

Working at Massively really is *work*. It doesn’t leave me as much time for gaming as I would like, but I know I will get faster with the articles as I do them. Right now it is taking me an hour or two for each post. I want to get that down to half an hour per.

It’s not so much that it takes me a long time to write — heck, I can sit down and write pages without pause — it’s making the Massively style my own. It’s incredibly easy to write in my own ‘voice’ — I’ve had so much experience with it, after all — harder to write in someone else’s. And my own particular writing style is long and rambling; Massively wants tight, focused articles that get right to their target, deliver their payload of news and information, then fly quickly off — without sounding forced or boring. It’s a real education. Every article I write has to be trimmed down substantially — especially if it’s about something I’m really interested in, like Spellborn.

Anyway, the weekend is here soon. Hoping for three Massively articles each day, time spent in both Vanguard and EverQuest 1, and I’ll be taking my Bloodletter into some new parts of Mythos to see what’s new.

I might sleep, too, but I’ll have to check my schedule first.

Tobold posted today about a site hoping to be for MMO gaming what Wikileaks is for the real world — a way for players in the betas for upcoming games to alert people to potential problems in the game.

These sorts of leaks can be useful — news that a game is a horribly buggy entirely unfinished travesty a la Dark & Light can warn a publisher to put a game back in the oven for a bit.

A quick reading of Betaleaks’ coverage of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Age of Conan shows mostly that both these games are being actively tuned, and that most of the objections to both are extremely subjective.

Warhammer has two posts of note; one from August 2007, which shows a rough game still very much in development; and one from January 2008 that shows incredible progress and incremental tuning of public quests, PvP, and PvP vs PvE rewards. Most every detail, though, is subjective. They don’t like the art style. Combat is too repetitive. PvP is dominated by griefers and solo PvP is not a viable option. It’s too much like WoW…

(And a note to Warhammer fans: as much as this game strives not to be compared to WoW, the rest of the world will be making that exact comparison. So suck it up and deal with it. This game will be marked a success or a failure almost entirely on how it either competes or complements the WoW experience.)

When you get down to subjective matters — if that’s all you can say about the game — then you’ve lost me, because you and I like different things. Many people don’t like EverQuest 2; but I do. Though I played World of Warcraft for awhile, in the end I found it dull and grindy — and yet millions of people feel exactly the opposite about it. People dismiss Vanguard out of hand, but I think it has a little geeky charm. Some people are slavering over Age of Conan, but I don’t think its twitchy gameplay and pandering to the Xbox Live “blood, guts and boobies” crowd will do it for me.

The very fact that both AoC and Warhammer are still in closed beta should be a sign that things are still changing too much, too fast, to make real judgments. It’s probably best if beta players who, after all, signed NDAs, honored their commitment to them and made sure the developers know about their problems with the game so they can do something about them.

When the NDA drops or open beta begins — that’s the time to come forth and say, hey, I told them about all this in beta, they did nothing, here’s all the dope about it. It’s at that time that the devs have invited the world to see what they’ve done in a nearly finished state, when they’re proud of what they made, and they want you to do your worst.

Age of Conan should be going to open beta in a couple of weeks. Closed beta testers — tell Funcom what you don’t like about the game! Breaking NDAs just encourages devs to be more and more suspicious of the people they let into their beta, limiting its effectiveness.

I’m the kind of player who seems never to get into closed betas, so naturally I read every shred of information about upcoming games I’m interested in. And just like everyone else, I distrust what marketing people say about their game by reflex. I’m sure nearly every player in the world knows enough to be skeptical of pre-release claims. So when I read that EA/Mythic has tuned public quests from too easy to too hard, I just hope that the beta players let EA/Mythic know before they blurted this all out on public forums.

When you sign an NDA, you are making a pact with a company that you KNOW you will be seeing an unfinished game with placeholder assets, broken things, crashes, unbalanced elements, and all that sort of stuff. You agree to find these things and try to help the company make the game better so that everything works well, is playable and fun, by the time they throw open the doors to the public.

If you don’t feel this is the sort of thing you can do — don’t sign the NDA, don’t play the beta, and just wait to play it in its finished form just like the rest of us.

Betaleaks — bad idea.

He is more a creature of sun and plains than a man whose shadow would ever darken a marble palace floor, unless he carried also a sack for the plunder. Bronzed skin and scars run the length of his body; badges they are, of skin and blood, of battles in places far and near. He is Conan, the Cimmerian, though the people of these more civilized lands think his people myth, and yet he stands, clad simply despite his great station, his dark hair held back with a thin band of silver cloth, his well-burnished, phoenix-etched great sword strapped to his back with leather made of some dark-skinned beast that once prowled the eldritch halls of Set’s great obsidian temple.

“Mention my thews,” offered Conan. “Steely. Bob was always obsessed with muscles. He was always obsessed about something.”

His steely thews rippled as he strode from the scant light of the torch. The night was dark, and the spaces between the glittering diamonds of the stars seemed to ebb and slow hungrily, like the dark rivers that flowed from Stygia’s fetid jungles.

“Oh, I like that. I do. The arts of the scribe have never been mine, unless it be the poems and oaths scribed by my blade as it confounds my foes. I have always appreciated the poems of minstrels, sung full-throated in words drenched with ale. Even when they were used against me. Poor, maddened Rinaldo…”

“Pardon me, King Conan,” I said.

“Please,” said Conan. “You are not an Aquilonian; I am not your king. If you must assign a title to me, let it be Conan, the Cimmerian.”

“In this age, Conan, you are often called a barbarian…”

“Pfft. Only southerners call me thus. They have never tasted the cold air that blows from the Asgardian mountains, never been to the temples of my gods, accursed though they may be, never known the deep knowledge shared by my people. I am Cimmerian, and only one who does not know me would bring me that low.”

“Ah,” said I. “I wonder if we could talk about the game set in your age, the Hyborian age; or the Age of Conan, as it is called. You have been long remembered when all else has been forgotten, until Hyboria and you are inextricably linked…” I winced. I was even beginning to speak in that same purple prose I had long mocked. Agh. Still doing it.

“A game, a game like we played after we fought and plundered, then, with the roar of campfires belching flames into the night, as we gambled our prizes and the wealth of kings might change hands a dozen times before the Sun looked in on the carnage…”

“No, no… this is a different sort of game. People pretend to be people who lived in your age, and they pretend to fight, and kill, and level up…” I stopped myself, hoping he hadn’t heard that. The sudden darting of his eyes was proof he had heard, but perhaps not understood.

“Ah. This is a dalliance, a daydream concocted by you scribes,” he motioned toward my laptop. “A game for women, I see, to idle away the time while their men are away.”

I sighed. “No… it is the men who will play this game. If Funcom, the creators of this game, have their way, men everywhere will devote their lives to this game.”

“WHAT?” he said, his dark eyes smoldering as he bellowed. “What trickery is this? Men should be out, tasting the air, letting their blood roar as they do the great deeds only men may accomplish. Fighting the good battles, routing the enemy, taking their women, scattering their slaves, not bent before a flickering window of false light, and by pretending, never become what they desire so much. Scholars,” he continued, “Skins pale, like beaten papyrus. Put them on the battlefield and they are as useless as women.”

“There will be women playing this as well.”

“Will you be playing?”

“… I might try it.”

“Instead of caring for the wounded, or your children, instead of fighting to keep your cities safe so that your men have a home to which to drag the spoils of war, to rest and drink and rut until war comes once more upon them?”

“…hmmm. Well, perhaps not.”

“War is real. Battle is real. A real man would not pretend to be something he is not. He would become it in truth. Robert Howard knew that. It was his passion that pulled me from distant Hyboria to this time, and that passion that inflames all who read of my adventures. To pretend to feel the thrill of battle or the touch of a woman when you could know it true… what a pale life that must be.”

“You started a revolution, Lord Conan,” I said, to cool his hot agitation. “Your tales have inspired seventy years of writers to call forth other heroes from the past. Corum Mac Art. Thongor. Grignr.”

“Grignr? The Accordion?”

“The same.”

He stopped his restless pacing. Looked at me for awhile, and at the keys on which I copied his words, the ones I am using now. “These idylls of scribes do not concern me, but consider this warning: When battle comes to your cities, hide well behind the scarred bodies of your men, and regret the time you spent in these dreams.”

With that, he turned, and slipped back into that place from whence dreams come.

Decapitated naked women (now with NIPPLES!!!), or the sheer awesome goodness of Hello Kitty Online?

The screams of the damned or catchy synth bubblegum music that leaves you smiling and dancing in your seat?

Carving chunks of flesh from your thick-thewed foes on the battlefield, or fun games with your friends in a wonderland of sweetness?

In the twenty four hours since the Hello Kitty closed beta signups have been live, they have been completely crushed by interest. I just got an email apologizing for their delay but they have had WAY more interest than they ever expected. They had to close their forums because of TOO MUCH INTEREST.

If the chat we were having when we recorded Witty Ranter #3 last night is any clue, you guys are gonna get mighty lonesome shagging your skanky hos in AoC.

Come join the cute side.

It’ll be fun :)

(Sign up here!)

Looks free to play, financed with an item store — usual for these types of games from the East. You get your own home, your own farm, wide variety of gameplay including mini-games…

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place — playing EQ2 exclusively.

There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint.

Not to say there aren’t some excellent games in the past year and coming soon. I just hope they can survive their hype machines. If you promise a carnival and bring only a pony ride, well, people are going to be disappointed, even if it’s a really good pony ride. Promise a walk in the park and it’s “Hey! They have a PONY RIDE!” Underpromise, overdeliver.

2008 will be a year of great expectations and diminished realities.

Personally, I expect to have EQ2 as my main game through the entire year. Because everyone needs a steady game to call home. You may wander, but you always come home. For a lot of people, this is WoW. For me, it’s EQ2.

It’s going to be hard for EQ2 to raise expectations, though. Out of all the games I’ll mention, it has the toughest road. The last couple of expansions have ridden on EQ1’s coattails, but I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but EQ1 no longer has such long coattails. Drawing from a subscriber base that has fond memories of EQ1 but doesn’t play that game, but want something both new and familiar to them… well, that doesn’t bring many new players in. EQ2 gets most of its new players from WoW, who appreciate EQ2 for its technical innovations but have nothing invested in EQ1 nostalgia.

Prediction #1: EQ2 will reinvent itself by the end of the year, either through some innovative new setting or a game mechanic that lets players have an impact on the world. I’m fairly confident about this one, because otherwise, the hits it will take when WoW’s next expansion and Warhammer come out will probably kill it. It has to respond strongly, and “Velious, EQ2’s Fourth Expansion!” or whatever won’t bring anyone new into the fold. Chasing EQ1 is a stupid strategy.

Prediction #2: Pirates of the Burning Sea will launch strongly, and settle into a role of being about massive clan-based fleet vs fleet battles. I don’t think people will do much solo PvPing, and the economic game will be used to fund the massive fleet battles. Ladder rankings will be an obsession with the players. I’ll try PotBS. I’m not that excited about it, but I think massive fleet battles will be the killer app for PotBS, and it seems from all signs that Flying Labs is positioning it precisely for that. Soloers and non-combatant types interested in the trading game, I think, will not be its final audience.

Prediction #3: Age of Conan will launch and sink without a trace. Come on. PvP with sex and boobies and lots of blood in an election year? The first politician who sees this game will tear it to shreds. ‘Sinking without a trace’ would be the best outcome. ‘Being used as a reason to crack down on MMOs’ would be the worst. Luckily, the teenage boys who make up its natural audience will balk at the subscription fees. Plus, who the heck even knows who Conan is? If the average player even remembers the old Schwarzenegger flick, that’d be amazing — the people who would want to play this game weren’t even born then.

Prediction #4: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning will sell two million boxes and take its place as the #2 MMO in North America. I think this is a slam dunk, being basically World of Warcraft with even more arena games. Those people who love the battlegrounds and arena battles in WoW will flock to the new shiny. This will be a relief to Blizzard, who can cede the battlegrounds market to EA-Mythic and focus more on their excellent PvE and raid experience.

Prediction #5: If WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Liche King. comes out this year, it will be disappointing. Given the presence of two and probably soon to be more WoW-alikes in 2008 (LotRO and WAR), almost anything Blizzard can come up with can only be thought of as ‘more of the same’.

Prediction #6: NCSoft will announce a Station Pass-like “pay one price, play all our games” payment plan. Because it’s about time they do that.

okay, those were the safe predictions. Now to get a little ‘out there’.

SOE: SOE will be bought out by a well-known games company, who will announce the development of a virtual world where players can take their characters from all SOE games and live and adventure together in a world they create. This brings hundreds of thousands of players back to SOE games as they take their Jedis and Code Jockeys and Rangers and Blood Mages out of cold storage and into an entirely new world that they create — sort of like Second Life for MMOs. This will be heralded as the birth of a new sort of MMO gaming, where your characters adventure in one world, but play in another.

Star Trek Online: After the new Star Trek movie loudly tanks, all development stops on the Star Trek Online license. EA then picks up Perpetual Entertainment (or what’s left of it) as a wholly owned division focusing on MMO middleware, its first internal customer being Bioware. Bioware in 2007 announced they were using PE’s middleware for their game, so this isn’t really all that out there. There’s a chance EA-Mythic may pick up the STO license along with the company.

MMOs and movies: At least one movie will launch day-and-date with a matching MMO. MMOs will be increasingly seen as commodities and part of the exploitation of a movie license. Tie-in figurines, pop-up picture books, props, Halloween costumes, video games… add an MMO to the list as something necessary to the launch of any new genre movie.

Guitar Hero: A MMO based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” that lets musicians and musician wannabes play virtual instruments in player-created bands, quartets, symphonies — what have you — will be announced. Unlike Guitar Hero, players will be able to play both tunes available in the game, and tunes of their own composition. The MMO will usher in a revolution of musical creativity. Well, this is something I *want* to happen. And given the popularity of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, why not? I just threw in KSR because, you know, people should read his books.

Roleplaying & Machinima: An MMO that takes fan fiction and makes movies from it will be announced. Write a story and watch it acted out, or advance the plot in real time with friends. This will do for the craft of writing what the Guitar Hero MMO will do for the craft of composing: bring art to the masses at the cost of authenticity.

I want MMOs that make people SMARTER and INVITE CREATIVITY. And so I dream of a future where MMOs will open doors in your mind instead of seal them shut.

MMOs are still a young industry and there is still time to reinvent itself out of the circling spiral drain of cheap entertainment. Ten years on and they are still writing the same game. 2008 will be the year someone dares to show something truly new.