RJO

*** Originally posted on my gaming blog: Adventures of Taas

It’s that time of year again – time to recap my 2011 predictions!

World of Warcraft: A mind shift that the game’s best days are behind it.

I imagine my man Evan would disagree with me but I feel this has happened. There are a few reasons:

First is SWTOR. It’s hard to judge this factor because SWTOR is so fresh and shiny at the moment and we’ve seen countless games come out swinging and then fall off but I think the IP and staggering initial sales will push SWTOR to terrirtory uncharted by the Rifts and Aions of the world. We all know that every time a new MMO comes out the cries of WoW’s death get kicked in to high gear and I think most people would agree that SWTOR is the biggest threat WoW has faced. One of the things I did in the build up to SWTOR was keep an eye on the MMO-Champion forums every day as the various public betas progressed. I was curious how a fairly WoW centric community would react to the release of a challenger like SWTOR and it was fascinating. Slowly but surely as people got to try the game the sentiment towards SWTOR picked up incredible steam a community that started out as heavily “I doubt I’ll play SWTOR, too much going on WoW” shifted to “I’ll juggle both” to “I’m going to leave WoW for SWTOR”. SWTOR’s voice acting and production values are going to raise the bar in the AAA space and the fact is WoW will for the first time feel a generation behind. Where WoW was an evolution on EQ I think ten years from now we’ll be able to identify SWTOR as the next evolutionary step after WoW. Time will tell, but I think SWTOR is a real threat to WoW.

There are other signs that WoW is past its peak: The response to Cataclysm has been mixed. Some feel that game has lost its nostalgia factor in a changed world, the lore nerds feel that with Arthas down they’ll never quite feel the same about raiding never mind how some of them disagree with the directions Warcraft lore has been taken. Other people just aren’t excited about Mists of Pandaria. Some people hate the idea of Pandas (some love it), I personally worry about what the Monk class is going to do to balance (a hybrid class that sounds amazingly unbalanced from a design perspective – auto healing? really?), while others can’t get excited about an expansion without a central boss to go after. Mists is going to be different, but I’m not sure how the fan base is going to react.

Another thing with Mists is the removal of talents. The talent redesign in Mists is essentially a concession by Blizzard that the talent system as it was designed in vanilla doesn’t work (in their opinion). You basically will not be able to customized your character any longer, the new talent system is the most stripped down iteration you could dream of. I wonder if this is where WoW jumps the shark and goes beyond the common denominator. Will Mists be the expansion where WoW gets too easy? Not just easy, but too simple. What does this new talent and class system offer the min/maxer?

So. For the WoW prediction I will give myself the full point.

Bllizard MMO 2.0: Leaks through 2011 and is announced late 2011.

I was wrong. No points. From what I’m hearing we won’t see a launch of Titan in 2012, but maybe we’ll see an announcement? Is the project even on course after the recent team departures? Has the game taken a Warcraft Adventures -> World of Warcraft type of course correction? We’ll see. But I won’t be predicting much for Titan in 2012.

Blizzard MMO 2.0: Is an MMOFPS

While I still think I’m right (duh), we know nothing on Titan.

Planetside Next is announced. Launch will be delayed to 2012.

Swish! Nailed this one. Game was announced and expected to launch in 2011. Was eventually delayed to 2012.

EQ Next: Slow build up to an announcement. Will be a WoW clone

So. There’s been the slow build up, but no announcement. And the early EARLY indications I’m getting from SOE is they expect to bring in sandbox elements and it might actually be a refreshing departure from WoW Diku. One can hope. But I don’t get the points here.

SOE and F2P. Blunders abound, EQ2′s best years in the rear view mirror

I’ll take full marks here. They didn’t exactly commit out and out blunders but it wasn’t a pretty year for SOE. DCUO going immediately to F2P, partial F2P conversion of EQ2 followed by a late year conversion to full F2P and the release of a different type of EQ2 expansion that the community doesn’t quite know how to take yet. F2P might reenergize EQ2 (I really hope it does, I think it is a brilliant title) but we will have to see. SWTOR’s production values and the issues it causes WoW likely impact EQ2 the same or even more.

SWTOR: Huge commercial success at launch. Game will be found extremely linear with limited replay value. Players will find end game the same old same old. However new players and vets looking for a fresh coat of paint will bring a strong sub base.

I’ll take a half point on this for the commercial success of launch. We’ll see numbers in a week or two and they are going to be unheard of, likely including WoW’s launch. The only hard data I have to take this half point is the preorders and the retail tracking services peg TOR’s North American sales at just south of a million. That’s before Digital Downloads and usually Amazon does not report in to these services. So. 2.5 million sales anyone? Another million out of Europe. Asian plans to likely be announced within 3 months. Oh yeah. Go buy yourself some ERTS quick.

The other aspect we’ll see. I still think replay will SOMEWHAT be limited but now that I’ve actually played the game I think it won’t be as bad as I originally thought. I have a blog post coming up that will explore replayability and pacing in SWTOR soon.

Closures. Vanguard dead, WAR 0 dev resources, lots of closures all around.

I’ll take half point here. It was a year of closures for sure. SWG (close to home, I’ll miss it), Lego, Global Agenda, The Agency cancelled. Lot’s of bad news and lost jobs in the industry. A sad year for the genre.

Rift. A success with MMO vets, game will end the year with around 500k subs. Will be viewed as a WoW clone but will carve a niche.

Full points. I think I nailed this one right down to the final subscription numbers. Rift sold well (~1-1.5M range) and I think Trion will be happy with their investment. I think Rift hit just when WoW sentiment was starting to shift with some vets and they flocked to Rift looking for a slightly more old school Diku-MMO vibe. Sadly patch 1.2 (lowered the difficulty of some content) drove a few of those folks away, but despite that there’s still plenty of pie left for Rift.

They need to announce an expansion very soon to compete in the post SWTOR space I think. 2012 will make or break Rift.

The Design Gods currently wasting their talents on Facebook will wake up and begin work on a AAA product. I’m looking at you Mr Koster, Mr Garriot et all. This one might be more of a “I wish it would come true” but I’m sticking by it

One day… one day. In all honesty it sounds like Richard Garriot might be starting to get the itch. We can only hope.
_

So out of 10 points I landed 5. Not bad, this guessing business isn’t easy.