I’m right with you there. I’m hoping SWTOR takes off like gangbusters as well. If anyone’s got a shot, it’s got to be Bioware with Uncle EA’s money bin behind it. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen I remain confident that they’re going to pull it off, despite what that EA Louse guy was blathering on about last year.

I have high hopes for 2011, but I also have an iron in the fire, having worked for 4 years on one of the projects that will be shipping. Moreover, I want to see Austin survive as a game development hub.

What’s impressive is to see so many things (*gasp*) shipping. Actually SHIPPING. Not canceled. Not lingering in development hell for another two years. Some people are actually finishing their bloody games, and getting them out the door. Some of those games are even marching out in a finished, polished state (if beta is any indication). This kind of lineup would have been considered an embarrassment of riches, in the days before WoW. Even now, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

That said, I totally understand where Brian is coming from. A lot of the funding that is represented by the current barrage of 2011 MMOs was raised years ago. It doesn’t represent a current enthusiasm for investment in that market, and the moderate success of even three or four of those offerings might not be enough to refill the well anytime soon.

That said, I don’t think we’re totally doomed. Things will be built, even if VCs aren’t interested. MMOs seem to pop up out of nowhere, sometimes. Who knows how many things are flying under radar, right now. (No, that’s not a allusion to anything I might be working on. Pixelsea doesn’t have that kind of moolah… yet.)

I liked Jade Empire!

“…WoW’s 2012 expansion (new hero class of healer, to go with a druidic “Emerald Dream” as the next expansion theme)…”

Great article but I think you’re wrong with the above prediction. What the Wrath team learned, in a very harsh backhand smack across the face way, is that balancing prestige classes (AKA Deathknights) inside of a set of established, balanced (questionmark) classes is freaking crushingly hard. They’ve admitted as much in the forums and in interviews, and the sense you get is that no one calling the shots has the stomach to go into it again. It’s too hard and causes too much player agro. It took all of Wrath, up to and including the Cata launch for them to come to terms with DKs…and some DK specs are still broken.

In fact if you look at a LOT of what Blizzard has been doing of late, you’ll see a lot of decisions being made, and stuff being done or not being done because “IT’S TOO HARD”. Class-specific quests, — one of the few things that gave real flavor to the increasingly homogenized classes with increasingly redundant and imitative talents — are gone because re-creating them in the new, post-cataclysm world was too hard.

Similarly, all we’ve heard out of them for a few years now is how HARD itemization is. So for Cataclysm all of the interesting intricacy of the primary and secondary stats were stomped out (e.g., ArPen), and everyone got a Mastery skill that converted Thisums into Thatums (Int, Spirit for example), and itemizaton is so generic and homogenized that gear can probably be algorithmically generated with no human contact.

Even the design of the (“grr, scary, hard!”) Heroics shows an avoidance of doing anything hard from a design perspective. They’re just a a string of thin, thin content powered by a big pile of instant-kill mechanics…all stretched out by miles of repetitive, generic trash. Anything else would be…hard!

“Bioware… has yet to make a really bad game”

But BW *has* made games that did not make back their production cost. Which, in this case, in the real monster under the bed.

I remember having the same thoughts about spore.

This is probably going to fail and then you will not see that level of freedom and money thrown at a bunch of developers for a long time.

Personally I’ll bet on it selling but not selling enough, which is the same as it not selling at all.

So yeah, 2011 is the end of MMO development as we know it

I think you’re right about World of Tanks. Better yet: if anyone (Dice) ever does a Battlefield game (bug-free) with the right persistent features — namely, a true, land/sea/air game that works really well, and has the right kinds of itemization and leveling matrices….. watch out! Sadly, EA would have been better off funding a project like that, better yet leveraging the work they’ve been doing to make BF casual-friendly, than spending all that money on TOR. They’re stuck with seeing through the latter investment, unfortunately.

Regarding VC: I think there was a phase during the worldwide economic bubble when VC was going crazy looking for high-risk, “interesting” speculative development. The money floating around for games development was really just a kind of fluff offshoot of that speculative frenzy. Now? That’s all evaporated like the valley mist at sunrise. There’s barely any funding there even for the most high-profile current speculative opportunities. Facebook got its big recent infusions from…. Russia. Goldman Sachs. Not wild VC. Not much of a pool of funds there for future MMO development. The genre has gone into “safe bet only, aka… WoW” territory, for a good long while.

The only true success story of 2010 was the move to F2P by LOTRO. It has more players than at any other point since launch in 2007 and it is making a lot more money with the switch to micro-transactions.

It’s the exception though and I fully expect to see some major MMO closures during 2011.

SWTOR can be a major success based on the Star Wars label but can it attract the mass of MMO players who have no interest in a sci-fi based MMO and who would rather play WoW because it is cute and they can socialize with friends?

I believe TOR will be wildly successful. I believe that while it won’t “kill” WoW, it will cost WoW millions of subscriptions and become the “next big thing.”

Or, it will fail, and it will be another decade before we see another attempt at a true AAA MMO from any one except Blizzard.

“Neverwinter, being under development by Cryptic, seems like it’ll be shit. 4th edition ruleset is believed to be easily portable to video games, but given Jack Emmert’s laissez-faire attitude, I don’t expect anything to adhere to the core material.” — Freakazoid.

You’re absolutely right that Neverwinter looks to be pewpstainz. There hasn’t been a good AD&D ruleset for computer games since…uhm AD&D 2ED…

I don’t think SWOR will launch in 2011. It may be announced to launch, but it is going to miss that initial window.

Why? It’s a new area entirely for BioWare and they are going extra big for it. There is a lot of complexity – all the different story lines, the different mechanics that each class is meant to follow, along with the basic MMO features that even existing MMO devs muck up on new MMOs (see: DCUO and chat system, auction house) – that will need to be ironed out.

BioWare’s strength is in character development, but its key weakness is in gaming mechanics. MMOs live and die (to date) on gaming mechanics (i.e. the subgames are pretty weak and repetitive, the combat systems typically have some quirks). In single player games you don’t mind that your PC is overpowered, but it becomes a much bigger issue in a MMO.

So, although EA will desperately, desperately want SWOR to release in 2011, I think BioWare is going to miss that first launch window because the game just won’t be ready.

It’s another of those moments where I’m forced to agree with Geldon.

In the first category, I tried DDO last year with a few friends, and we found it rather fun for what it was (a pure dungeon crawling game). After a few weeks, we took a break from it, vowing to return to it eventually; we haven’t so far, because it didn’t feel as though there was anything particularly worth returning to (unless you went with a subscription, which also didn’t seem worth it). You’re entirely right, the virtual world was particularly underwhelming, and I’ve heard it said that Eberron was one of the weakest D&D campaign settings. As an online game, it paled in comparison to a single-player RPG played in multiplayer: in the latter case, at least, the story revolves around you and your party. I remember the DDO tutorial, where you heroically save the island from I can’t recall what, but you’re supposed to be an immortal hero as a result — but nothing has changed for others. It’s WoW’s abuse of instancing drawn out to an absurd degree, the point where you’re beyond pretending that player actions have an impact on the world, and are now questioning whether there is a world to impact in the first place.

After writing this, I wonder if the second category is that different from the first. Bigger budgets, more polish, and perhaps more attention to the game world, yes. But with WoW as the standard-bearer of this category, I have to reflect on whether the virtual world matters at all — it’s not just that it’s instanced, but that the developers don’t really take their virtual world seriously, with all those references to pop culture (Haris Pilton, etc). Age of Conan, at least, seemed to respect the canon it was derived from.

Then there’s a third category, which I’m experiencing in Uncharted Waters Online: the good old-fashioned Korean grinder. Where the only goal is to grind harder than the other guys, and where your hardest grinders get advantages for their grinding. In this particular case, it’s sinking under the weight of multiboxers who blatantly cheat and a few hardcore grinders, armed with years of knowledge (from playing the Japanese/Korean version), who flip cities single-handedly and leave everyone else behind. I might actually get riled up about it enough to write a review of it one of these days.

I too am looking for something a little more sandboxy, as it were, but I’ve become quite apprehensive about it.

A Tale in the Desert: I went through the 24-hour trial a year ago, rather liked it, but I did not encounter a single player when I played it past the tutorial phase. It might be thriving for all I know, but it felt empty, even neglected (based on forum activity and news), and I did not get the impression it warranted a subscription.

EVE Online: Played it with friends for two months in the summer of last year (that feels so far away that I thought it was in 2008, until I checked my gaming history). I was the first in and the last out, because I had bought the boxed re-release that came with two months’ subscription. Fun at first, then you realize that it’s just grind, with uninspired missions, with a large part of the game (which, we’re told, is the fun one) being out of our reach — and we didn’t quite feel like joining one of those über-corporations that would treat us as so many untrustworthy foot soldiers. Even though I decided to waive my usual disdain for SF settings, it was a disappointment; and it might have been worse if I had been exposed to the wonderful universe of 0.0 space, inhabited, it would seem, by the rabble of gaming.

UO: Before my time. Played it briefly, after Renaissance, but my internet connection was too poor.

Haven & Hearth: As independent as you can get, it’s developed by two guys in Sweden. But even independent sandboxes get infected by pricks who think it’s fun to plow swastikas in the middle of your village. (Gratuitous plug of my half-dead blog with a really awful name: http://puyc.blogspot.com/2010/02/triumph-of-swill.html ) Worse, the developers seemed to endorse all instances of griefing/ganking taking place, so I called it quits.

Wurm Online: I actually liked this one, but it went berserk on the amount of time/involvement required from players. To mine a tunnel, for instance, you needed to mine it 50-odd times, at 35 seconds or so per attempt. Waiting 20 minutes just to break down a wall isn’t my idea of fun, especially on the free server, where quality levels were capped, and decay rates ramped up to the extent that you would return to the game after a month to discover that all your efforts had been undone by the passage of time. Nobody cared about anything they didn’t make themselves, including roads. Adding insult to injury, it was not unheard of for game assistants to go around removing the house deeds of players who quit, so you would return to the game and find someone happily settled over your old spot, while everything in your inventory would have decayed away. I played this game with, most of the time, YouTube on the side, because it was just tedious; and of all the time I’ve wasted playing games, the time I’ve spent playing Wurm (January-March 2009) is the most incomprehensible in retrospect.

Now, for 2011:

I really wonder about SWTOR. I won’t play it, but I wonder, if you drew a Venn diagram, how many Star Wars fans are likely to turn into MMO gamers (in addition to gamers who try anything new), a necessary demographic to tap into if you want to break even. Sure, you could always point to SWG, but is the franchise as prominent as eight years ago? Posterity has not been kind to Episodes I-III, and is it possible to look at any new Star Wars offering as anything but a George Lucas cash grab?

So that’s the prospect for 2011: big names, big franchises, sequels, no originality. But the cycle of hype continues.

On MMORPG.com, they held a poll for the “biggest disappointment of 2010″, and the most popular option was “2010 in general” with 39%. True, it’s a cop-out similar to the year when Time made “you” the person of the year, but I think it points to a jaded player base that is both sinking in its nostalgia of games past (UO, DAOC, EQ and even vanilla WoW) and seeing through the general bullshit that passes as AAA MMORPG’s these days. If SWTOR fails, and fails hard, it might well pull down what’s left of the MMO industry that isn’t 1) based in Korea; 2) dedicated to Facebook social gaming; 3) Blizzard; 4) under-the-radar independent.

Where I said, “Ultima Online, EVE Online, A Tale From The Desert – except better” the “- except better” part was recognizing that each game needs improvement in its own ways.

Ultima Online had great potential. I remember opening up a hint book from back in the day and noticing that each of the creatures in the game had designated prey and hunters. The virtual world focus was paramount. Unfortunately, they weren’t prepared to transition the players to productive behavior when griefing was more fun than the legitimate activities they offered.

EVE Online might have depth of background but the individual interactions are weak, it’s less a game you play and more a game you punch in a few decisions and observe. There’s a niche for that, of course.

Another issue I have with EVE Online is that it seems the balance is a tad off. It’s hard for new players to be anything more than lackeys forever, unless they meet a corp that decides to hand over the reigns. Players are afraid to field the good ships.

A Tale From The Desert is admirable in trying to pick up where Ultima Online left off but, as far as games go, it didn’t do a very good job of creating a truly compelling experience.

Raph Koster’s generally the go-to man when it comes to creating a compelling virtual world, and his efforts in pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies would seem to be a continuation of those features we missed so much about Ultima Online. Yet, even for this pioneer, there seems to be a certain something lacking in the end result which prevents compelling and self-sustaining player interaction.

As Jesse Schnell write in The Art Of Game Design, when it comes to game design, our Mendeleev hasn’t come. There is no periodic table of elements for ascertaining why the elements of game design work or do not. This is part of what makes game design such an interesting field: there’s a great deal of magic about to try and feel out and understand.

sinij:

Expect huge studios to throw everything at Facebook/casual gaming YESTERDAY, in a frenzied, and possibly futile attempt to survive. Expect it to be very difficult to fund new traditional MMO projects, as even the most clueless venture capitalist will remember news stories about EA and the Old Republic and how Blizzard was the exception that proved a rule. Expect free-to-play cash shop gaming to be The New Order for almost every MMO, launched or not. In short, expect the apocalypse in 2012..

Please be wrong.

Now I get it. The Maya did end their calendar in this year because human kind stopped making games

Borukmmo:

Even if it fails, there is always that unknown where a company comes out with something inventive.
Imagine if a company were to figure our the Eve single server ability while bringing that together like wow on being able to play on older systems easily.
Add innovation like Rifts soul system and bring in Allods ship system. Add pvp for those that love it similar to Warhammer but polished and that starts to make a good game.
It helps to have a game/genre people associate with but it takes the games design team to really make a make it or break it game.

That’s cool, but how are you going to PAY for that? That’s the point about SW:TOR. If you can demonstrate that these major projects can still work, and they can still make a huge amount of money (IF they’re made right, for the right reasons), then there’s still a world to make this all encompassing game.

If SW:TOR fails though, then the conclusion is going to be that it’s impossible to make a mainstream MMO that won’t be snuffed out by WoW, so no one should bother. At that point, you start talking about niche games with niche budgets and the question becomes “how do you carve out your niche?” Facebook and mobile gaming are the obvious answers.

IainC:

Borukmmo:

Even if it fails, there is always that unknown where a company comes out with something inventive.
Imagine if a company were to figure our the Eve single server ability while bringing that together like wow on being able to play on older systems easily.
Add innovation like Rifts soul system and bring in Allods ship system. Add pvp for those that love it similar to Warhammer but polished and that starts to make a good game.
It helps to have a game/genre people associate with but it takes the games design team to really make a make it or break it game.

No serious WoW challenger will feature PvP as anything more than a sideshow. The mass market just wants to whack foozles and get their quest on in any game that has a meaningful progression system. Thus anything that could topple WoW will continue to iterate on Blizzard’s strategy of making an Everquest that doesn’t suck.
That noise you just heard was the sound of Sinij’s heart breaking.

I believe there may be a huge market for a well made, mass market PvP focused MMO. I can’t base this on any scientific market research, but I know how many people have cut their teeth on WoW and have now grown bored waiting for the next big thing, and I know how many people enjoy blowing up other people in RTS and FPS games, not to mention PvP within WoW.

Such a game obviously wouldn’t take away the pure PvE crowd, and it would have to really bring some thing engrossing to the table to justify being an MMO rather than a F2P shooter, but I don’t think it’s ludicrous to think that a PvP centric game could garner millions of subs IF it were done correctly.

Max:

I hope SWTOR would fail precisely for the reasons you stated. Market needs a good shake up with many original (albeit poorly funded) projects spawning up.
Cloning safe ideas and choking any innovation in a diku mud theme park for next 10 years would be consequence of SWTOR success

Well, I think that the popularity of Minecraft has show that there is plenty of room for inexpensive concepts to spring up and take hold IF they truly have a kernel of some thing good in them (and they’re F2P).

The only thing preventing small titles from having small success is that in a lot of cases they’re just not that good.

Vetarnias:

Minecraft isn’t F2P, which proves the point even more.

You’re confusing “free-to-play” (in the MMO sense) with “free”.

For the purposes of this discussion, F2P is understood to mean “no subscription”. Once you’ve spent the initial amount to be allowed to play Minecraft (just as if you had walked into a store and bought it), you never pay another dime for it, whereas you’re still dropping $15 a month to play WoW.

So Iconic’s point stands: Minecraft, while not “free”, is indeed F2P.

F2P has never meant “pay for the box and then free forever.” It’s always meant totally free, coming from the more recent development of F2P MMOs.

People don’t call Modern Warfare 2 F2P, because it most certainly is not. You’re are definitely out $60 or whatever if you’re playing it (legally).

The problem with taking WoW head-on is that it already has too much social momentum behind it. Even an MMO which is “better” than WoW will still find it extremely difficult to compete because:
1) All of my friends play WoW.
2) I’ve already invested a significant amount of time here which I would be “throwing away” if I left.
3) I would need to re-invest all of that time and effort into your game to “get back to where I was” in WoW.

Yes, some day the wave may crest for WoW, but I feel it’s much more likely to happen gradually rather than a one-shot “WoW killer”.

If you’re specifically trying to steal people from WoW you need to be tricky about it:
1) Your game needs to be “free” for me to play for a while: “I’m not canceling my WoW account, I’m just ‘taking a break’.”
2) Your game needs to be immediately and consistently fun and engaging for many hours: “I’m not playing your game because it’s an MMO. That is to say, I’m not playing your game with the intention of investing time in my character (though this is happening without me realizing it), I’m playing it because I have fun.”
3) Your game should probably have mechanics in it to encourage me to bring my friends over: “I am totally hooked on your game now, but I’ll only stay if I have friends here.”

P.S. I actually don’t play WoW.