Only 178 days till Christmas! With 2009 halfway gone now, I thought you’d want to know.

I predicted this year would be one of the best ever for MMOs, with some high-profile releases and expansions, but with many titles delayed and some now not due until next year (like Star Trek Online and EQ2’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion), 2009 just might lose the “best year ever” crown to 2010.

My being bad at predicting was harshly lit when I predicted last year that the expansion that would turn out to be Shadow Odyssey would be Odus, and this year, when I predicted Velious, it really WAS Odus… and what’s worse is that it really is about what you’d expect from a generic expansion.

Ten more levels? 50 more AAs? Are we bored yet? No new races or classes? WoW Achievements? Rao from Gestalt Mind looks at how the new Odus raids will be more highly scripted than ever and about as fun as hitting his toes with a sledgehammer. EQ2 raids look increasingly like you bring your cure potions with you and carefully watch your debuffs to know when to drink what.

Perhaps the best news I heard from Fan Faire was the leaking of the “EQ Next” project. I KNEW it existed!

Loredena of Gnome Depot has a little more info about the lore surrounding the opening of the Shard of Love, and how Erudites came to be the way they are. And more Ratonga lore! How could you not love that, right?

Lazaretto of Complete Heal was on the scene in Las Vegas and had a lot of news about Vanguard, which was ignored at the keynote. Not as dead as that snub would have you believe, Vanguard is introducing a new line of epic weapons. The epics fit into the soul slots of existing weapons and those weapons take on the stats of the epic and change their look to match — so your epic combines with newer weapons to make something more powerful you’ll never outlevel. NICE.

Speaking of Vanguard, recently disinterred Vanguard lead developer Brad McQuaid starts a series of articles on what went wrong with Sigil and Vanguard and why it wasn’t his fault. First excuse: Microsoft reorganized and the new peeps shut off the money and sched-slip faucet. I call “scope creep“.

Suzina of Kill Ten Rats looks at “gear check” requirements for the new Lord of the Rings Online dungeons and wonders, with the recent changes making Radiance gear more difficult to get and groups for it increasingly rare, how casual players will be able to catch up.

Myrix was the first blogger that I read to note that Blizzard will soon allow people to change realm from Alliance to Horde or vice-versa. This was more or less inevitable when BC allowed both sides to have all classes. It seems unlikely you’ll have Taurens hanging out in Darnassus; they’ll probably get a horn-ectomy and become dancing naked night elves.

Thinking about heading over to WoW’s Player Test Realm (PTR) to check out upcoming changes? Ixobelle warns you to think again. Think just being on PTR will exempt you from having your gear checked by potential groupmates? Think they won’t want a look at your achievements? Think that they won’t expect you to know from Day 1, Hour 1, the precise strats for encounters only on PTR? Think again. Ixo does have some of the strats for VOA’s new boss.

Scott Jennings points to WoW sociopath Gevlon the Goblin who wonders why the real world can’t be as brutally Darwinian as WoW? If you could only kill (yes really kill, IRL kill with bullets kill) the 10% of humanity nobody would miss, total IRL win! But, he despairs, now there’s too many useless people for the cops to possibly kill! What to do?

And here I was thinking that people who build their lives around success in WoW would be among the most useless 10%… When Jonathan Swift proposed selling the babies of the Irish poor as food for the English rich, the world was pretty sure he was joking. Now, I’m not so sure.

Wondering what Aion class to try? Seriously, you are? Wow. Okay, then. Atoria at Aion Source has some help for you.

Saylah at Mystic Worlds wrote a little while ago about her cousin who loved Free Realms and wanted to get all hardcore with World of Warcraft. She’s back to FR now, having found WoW to be a little too much to handle.

And lastly, Keen wonders if recent interviews with 38 Studios staff about how their code-name Copernicus game will be a multi-media, multi-pronged marketing blitz with vast amounts of tie-in merc aren’t diluting the idea of just starting with a really good game? And will the Copernicus fantasy novels and the Copernicus action figures and the Copernicus trading card game and the Copernicus “web play” minigames and the Copernicus-branded cereal and the Copernicus “My First Ding” child’s playset be required to play the game? (I’m just making those all up. Maybe.)

Anyway. Clearly you guys don’t need to be reminded to keep gaming. But if you do game, make sure you wear your helmet.

Hey, didja hear the news? Mark Jacobs is leaving Mythic and Mythic is being merged into Bioware! Jacobs was the public face of Mythic for so long, I can’t think of one without the other, and I can’t think of an upside to his leaving for the game I once loved, Dark Age of Camelot.

Keen thought EA was past absorbing studios for their properties and then squeezing out the help. Snazfg urges people not to pillory either EA or Jacobs until more is known. Heartless_ said he knew it all along (I guess he did!). Ardwulf wonders if this means Mythic will be getting some Bioware resources (don’t count on it). Tobold suspects the merge came because Warhammer did not meet the goals Jacobs promised. Stropps agrees. Abalieno at Cesspit would have preferred this ended differently, with more learning and caring. Werit detects an air of schadenfreud among some of the commentators. And Scott Jennings reminisces about Mark and happier days at Mythic.

I don’t know anything about Mark or Mythic or EA, but I have been working in IT for thirty years and I know quite a lot about mergers. When a big company buys a smaller company, the executives of that smaller company either embrace change and become big dogs in the new company, or conflict with the new bosses and leave (always to seek out new opportunities). This news says to me that regardless of how Warhammer did or does, Jacobs almost certainly didn’t mesh well with EA, and now the big bosses are gonna do things THEIR way. Bioware is the new golden boy studio, so they get to raid Mythic, and they’ll be top dog until they slip up.

I just wonder what will happen to Dark Age of Camelot when the dust settles?

Speaking of Ages of Things Beginning With the Letter ‘C’, Age of Conan had an update yesterday and things went … pretty well, says Openedge1. So more power to them.

WAR and AoC came out around the same time. Both aimed to be the choice for WoW players who wanted better graphics and more PvP. Both were crushed when Blizzard released the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. While WAR has kept steady on course with being the “WoW PvP alternative”, AoC has scaled back and focused on incremental improvements to their game play and growing their customer base gradually — the EVE Online model. No longer looking at WoW’s millions but just working on making a good game for its players, it might yet win where WAR has not.

In Darkfall news, looks like if you’re playing Darkfall now and want to restart on the new North American server when it opens, you’ll have to buy the game all over again. Keen is flabbergasted, and vows not to play DF at all, where he’d planned to give it a shot on the new server. Beau Turkey says hey, Aventurine is an indie developer and they need the money. What’s the big deal? Tobold lifts his rule against commenting on Darkfall by noting that Aventurine is the one company that takes their hardcore rep right into the “Company vs Player” realm.

So, you know, lots of stuff went down yesterday. At least we have WoW as the steady rock upon which we can stand and watch the turmoil swirl below.

Or can we? Spinks notes that Blizzard is trying to use social engineering to balance WoW’s tank classes. Trying to discourage guilds from using warriors to tank raids? Is that something a company should really be manipulating?

Lastly, Suzina at Kill Ten Rats takes Lord of the Rings Online’s summer festival maze as a metaphor for these sorts of games themselves. Players as the rats, and a grind of pointless accomplishments as the reward. Did I say pointless? Hey, she “… could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!”

The path to uberness, folks, is paved with cheese.

I have added a plugin that makes this blog look better on the iPhone, so if you ARE reading this on the iPhone — it looks better, and that’s why :)

Enjoy your Thursday and keep on gaming!

Yeah, I know it’s not a HUGE stretch to announce that Velious will be EverQuest II’s next expansion when pictures of dragon-turtles pulling ice barges are easy to find, but yeah. Velious.

Velious and Kunark are often grouped together, in the minds of old EverQuest players, as the “core” game, beyond which it got more achievement focused. The first thing you saw when you went to Velious, landing in Iceclad, was the black and spiky Tower of Frozen Shadow — an absolutely wonderful dungeon, built so that each group could find their appropriate level, thick in lore and unique loot. The promise of that first dungeon was kept throughout the expansion — even the raid zones (Sleeper’s Tomb, Dragon Necropolis, Planes of Growth and Mischief, the Temple of Veeshan and the three faction cities, Icewell Keep, Kael and Skyshrine) had plenty of spots for single groups to play, and plenty of wide open spaces for kiting soloers.

Well, there’ll be plenty of time to wonder about EQ2’s new expansion once we find out more about it, but of course, I won’t bother waiting until we know more to make wild guesses — in another post.

On to the Blogroll!

If you don’t really ever get tired of mysteries, or comedies, or SF books or fantasy or whatever, why do so many people get tired of WoW-like MMOs? Talyn at Pumping Irony has had enough of the level grindy kind of game. But I wonder if that’s really because most games these days assure you that things will become extra-special fun, once you grind out those 80 or 90 or 100 levels or whatever first. Personally, I feel that an hour spent grinding pointless achievements is one hour of my life I’ll never get back, and this is why I am not playing LotRO. But that doesn’t mean I’m off WoW-likes. I’m just off games that are not fun to play. Make me a fun WoW-like, and I’ll be there.

Syp seems to agree; he just published his latest “MMOmeter”, and most WoW-likes — including WoW itself — are pretty far down the list. Notable for NOT being kicked to the cold half of the crisper is LotRO, which is still delivering for him.

Hektor returns to MMOdus Operandi with an article about a little known MMO, Wurm Online. I confess I know little about this game; news of community-written MMOs like Citadel of Sorcery and PlaneShift comes and goes. Hektor, though, finds something original and almost primal in it, with mechanics that harken back to the days of early EverQuest and Ultima Online, except this game has a difference: everything you do affects the game world permanently. Overhunt an area, and there won’t be any more animals there. Kill all the dragons, and all the dragons are dead and there are no more. And so on. You can make the world a barren wasteland or a verdant forest depending on the actions you take. That’s pretty cool.

Dusty Monk of Of Course I’ll Play It kinda figures that you can tell the moment a game starts to die by the moment it stops adding new stuff for new players. His reasoning — only a portion of the players will see the hardest content, but EVERYONE sees the new stuff. As a person who plays a lot of MMOs as kind of an obsessive hobby, I gotta agree. Unless I really love your game, I never will see the high end stuff, and if you bore me to tears right at the beginning, well, why would I stay?

There’s more, lot’s more, but it’s been a long night killing rats in deadspace and it’s time for bed. See you tomorrow!

I’ve been staying away from talking about Darkfall and Free Realms lately because, what’s more to say about it?

Well, Darkfall is about to launch in the US, and we can only hope that makes more waves than Spellborn’s rather uneventful splash when it did the same a couple months back. Keen thinks Darkfall’s NA launch will give the game a chance to launch in the shape it should have been from the start. It’s kind of odd, really. Is Europe becoming a kind of live beta for US players? Spellborn, Runes of Magic, now Darkfall — the Europeans pay to make the game better for us.

How generous of them!

I’m not going to make a big deal over the amount of time it takes, anymore, before someone can review an MMO, or even give a first impressions. I gave EVE Online about twenty hours; NeoSteam about three, and I expect Mabinogi will take about twenty. Why should I, when Tobold is right there with his own experiences? He spent 40 hours playing for his Luminaire review. Dayum.

Spinks looks at the rather boring goals of MMO heroes (kill more rats, kill bears, deliver this package, talk to that guy) vs those of villains (destroy civilization, defeat the gods, rule the world) and wonders why villains always get the best plots? She suggests using other players as foils for villainous plots, because, well, game designers can’t seem to do the job, I guess.

Funcom advertised an Age of Conan in-game event without telling the players that THEY were supposed to provide the food, contests and entertainment (in their own defense, Funcom did provide a once-a-day sparkler to help get the party going). The community was not amused. Then they advertised a web page scavenger hunt that was not in game and caused language issues with players. The censors clamped down on the forums, and critical threads were deleted. Openedge1 looks at the mess and calls it launch day, all over again. Why is Funcom having so many problems with their community?

Some people want everything! Give them FedEx or Kill Ten Rats quests and they say they should be more creative. Give them a quest with a plot and that’s not right, either. Ysharros writes of a particular quest in EQ2’s Village of Shin that involves pumping monks for information they show no interest in telling. Spinks would suggest a villainous quest that would go something like “Kill the next monk that talks back to me — and then burn the village to the ground!”

Heartless_ looks at Free Realm’s press release bragging of two million players, and wonders why he never sees any of them in the game itself? Well, he sees them — running to the next minigame, but nobody is talking. I dunno, sometimes people talk to me and I just don’t see it because the chat window is always turning invisible. Then I look over the chat and see that at some point in the past, someone said something to me. Seriously. Chat in FR is broken and was broken in beta.

Scopique at Cedar Street (how do you pronounce that, anyway? Not Cedar Street — Scopique.) Anyway, Scopique examines change in MMOs. Not the kind of change where a weapon is adjusted or a monster’s abilities are tuned, but changes that change the very nature of the game. Good? Bad? Inevitable? But all games change. EQ went from social/casual to achiever/raid. WoW went from social/casual to achiever/raid. LotRO went from social/casual to… hey, is this what they call a ‘pattern’?

I don’t often link to commercial blogs, but this post on io9 decrying the Gawker Media editorial decision to masquerade advertising as actual articles is just full of win. Not the advertising, but I love the tips on how to separate their actual content with the secret ads. Very… subversive. If only every commercial site were that up-front about it.

And lastly, because it just wouldn’t be a blogroll without Syp, he notes that the number of blogs devoted to a game is a rough indicator of its popularity (makes sense), and then takes a look at a couple of really cool Lord of the Rings Online blogs.

Hey, imagine my shock when I didn’t find any other blogs devoted to a single zone in EverQuest. I thought I’d have to push my way through all the exciting South Karana stories to get my voice heard at all!

Anyway, see you tomorrow and until then, keep gaming!