Year in MMORPGs Reviewed

Grimwell.com has an excellent piece on the past year in the MMORPG scene. It highlights the best, worst, and in-between as regards Massively Multiplayer Online Games. From the article: "I have never played so many different MMORPGs in one year before. This is one of the defining features of 2004: an abundance of choice in the MMORPG market like never before. While a few games, like Earth and Beyond and minor independent ones, closed their servers, most games from previous years are still available."

Comments

Casual Gamers Won In 2004

[EngineeringMarvel]

I played FFXI from Oct of 2003 to Feb of 2004. While I enjoyed the game, it is not casual gamer friendly since getting anything done requires time slots of atleast an hour. I then played Star Wars Galaxies from July 2004 to Sept 2004. That game lacked content and bug fixes more than anything else. As soon as the Star Wars part wore off of me, the dullness of the game sunk in.

In comes World of Warcraft. Wow, what a relief. This game is ideal for people like me. You can actually play for 30 minutes and get a lot done. WoW also has in game documentation that gets rid of all the guessing. Another biggie for casual gamers, we don't have the time to try 100 things just to get item we want. In short, casual gamers now have an excellent choice for MMORPGs that fit to our gaming style. Before, I'm not sure there was, so either way, the casual gamer gains a new game type in 2004 (even though it existed for several years before). Besides, I don't think too many veteran MMORPGers will mind seeing SOE losing profits after the type of customer satisfaction they have gotten in the last year.