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New Year MMOG News
New developments this week in a few games, with Cryptic Studio's City of Heroes releasing the much anticipated Issue 3 expansion, which adds new archetypes and power sets to the game. Citing increasing costs for running the game Mythic Entertainment has raised the subscription price for Dark Age of Camelot to $14.95 a month, but with a significant discount for long-term subscriptions. Darniaq wrote in to mention that Sony Online Entertainment announced a new Massive title for the PSP at CES, Untold Legends, in what looks to be direct competition to Pocket Kingdoms. Finally, Tobold of Grimwell Online has a nice recap of MMORPGs in 2004, complete with predictions for this year.
Faction(House?) based PVP and no NPC shops? Sounds like Star Wars Galaxies.
Increasing costs for running the game? Or dwindling player base? I expect a large number of their players have recently migrated to World of Warcraft.
Everquest 2 is a worse grind than EQ1, it's on par with Lineage II and old EQ1 with class/race penalties and "hell" levels. All this time, the competition (WoW and CoH) is giving players more fun, caters the solo player too, extremely reduced downtime and did I say fun?
2004 also proved that SOE has no problem in releasing half finished hurried expansions/games all in the name of profit. While the main competition releases a well polished game, SOE hurries out releases, be that for EQ, SWG or EQ2.
2004 also showed that SOE has no problem in releasing medicore expansions. Gates of Discord has yet to be beaten (almost a year old expansion), Omens of War has guilds stalled in Anguish, EQ1 is bleeding. Not to mention, combat revamp in Star Wars Galaxies?
Bold prediction: EQ2 will bleed after the "ooh nice graphics" wears off. The game is a grind fest. Same time, CoH and WoW will pick up the refugees.
SOE still fails to realise that grind != fun, a game should be fun not work.