GotMMOG?

Blizzard showed off Cataclysm‘s trailer and some game play at PAX 2009 as well as Blizzcon. Now, PC Gamer’s latest issue covers it some more with more details on the reasoning behind the changes.

The gist is that Blizzard focused on the end game and expanding that level cap to give advanced players more places to go. Meanwhile, the starting and lower level areas have remained the same. More recently, they’d been improving things on the “back field” so that you can pass through those levels faster to get to the end game sooner.

Now, with Cataclysm, they’re talking about shaking things up to “fix” a lot of the things they didn’t like but had no time to fix. The gaps in game play, the excessive fetch quests, and the disparity between level flow in some areas (like the need to sail out of Auberdeen or make your way through Stonetalon to find content for 30-39), all of this stuff plus the need to just shake things up leads to Cataclysm.

The world will get shaken up to remove some issues and to change the flow of quests and leveling. For instance, splitting up the Barrens and putting more questing hubs in places like Darkshore and Stonetalon so you aren’t running back and forth all the time.

From what we heard at PAX, the “cataclysmic” content will be available to ALL players, expansion or not. The expansion is needed for the new content and professions.

It’s an interesting and very necessary step to take for the five year old (yup, FIVE friggin years, my friends) MMO that took the grind and made it more palatable with quests/goals. And, honestly, it’s actually getting me excited thinking about, as someone was quoted in the PC Gamer article, “rediscovering WoW” again.

Oh, and did I mention the ability to use those flying mounts anywhere? Maybe that’ll kick NCSoft into allowing people to fly anywhere in Aion…

Now if only they’d make the release date January 1, 2010 so we can get our hands on it as soon as possible…

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It’s been a bit of a topic in places that Blizzard might lose it’s 6 million plus subscribers in China over what were originally considered violations of cultural norms and acceptable content and seem to be more about politics and bureaucracy in China.

Now, it seems a bit more obvious what seems to be going on. The Wall Street Journal had a brief article about the struggle between the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). It sounds like the GAPP’s a bit unhappy about losing it’s control over a lucrative market (remember, bribes are the norm in places like China so for those officials in that department, they’re probably losing a lot of money).

Still, it’s not just bad for Blizzard but for any non-Chinese MMO publisher. It seems they’re making life hard for everyone in the end.

But, of course, everyone needs their MMOs and like the article mentions, I’m sure the “bigger” agency will win out in the end. It just goes to show you how much of a pain it is to publish an MMO with a global reach.

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Surprise, surprise. It seems Vogster, the creator of the largely useless CrimeCraft shooter dressed in MMO gear is laying off some people as they “shift” from dev to maintenance of their–as they put it–”Persistent World Next-gen Shooter” or PWNS. LMAO. Right…Maybe it’s time I prepare my own Sustained Tactical Futuristic Urban game, or STFU as I call it, for layoffs now too.

Something tells me they’re seeing lackluster sales (hint: have you considered distributing it better?) and subs. At this stage, there isn’t much you can really do unless you have millions more to invest and revamp the game or something (like, maybe, picking a different name since it’s a blatant copy of Warcraft and also implies something MMOish which you don’t seem to have or want to promote anyway). Better yet, why not host a contest to find and vote for the best name for the game?

I mean, after all, you do need to shift focus once the game is made…technically you don’t need a full staff dedicated to creating all the systems and content and such necessarily. Ideally, you’d have a content creation and maintenance team that’s substantially smaller and you’d move development resources to the next game. Or if you’re onto something and are selling the game like gangbusters, you’d dedicate that dev team to the next expansion…or put some of them back into the maintenance team to update the game more regularly.

Something tells me these guys, who don’t strike me as veteran MMO devs, dreamed of billions in revenue as people, tired of WoW (which they are) flooded their servers to finally play something different and interesting. You’d think a shooter mixed with an MMO would work wonders since I know plenty of shooter gamers who drop out of regular play to join their guild in WoW for a while.

C’mon guys. Why is this so hard? Look at this article about WoW and iteration. Not everyone can afford the time to iterate everything but there’s definitely something to be said about making an interesting feature available and providing a clean and easy mechanism for feedback. It can work well IF you’re committed to it and if you act on it.

All I can say is, when I first heard about CrimeCraft and APB, I thought GTA where everyone (or almost everyone) is a player rather than an NPC. APB looks like it’s much closer to that idea and will likely do a lot better than CrimeCraft is right now. I can’t say that NO one likes CrimeCraft. But, in a market with COD, Halo, and L4D all coming out with sequels in the next few months that everyone wants, why would I care about a “persistent world” shooter? COD is much more entertaining and fun and I already know people I can play with. CrimeCraft? No idea. I know one person who WAS interested in it but with Aion coming out and their love for WAR still out there, guess who’s gonna lose a subscriber?

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It seems GDC Austin had an interesting talk from some people from Blizzard. A summary of it is up on Gamasutra. They talk about the World of Warcraft team and how it’s organized. Kind of interesting…

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (Blizzard)

Nothing new after the announcement of the coming expansion called Cataclysm. Goblins, Worgen, 85 level cap, Archaeology profession, major changes to the map, Path of the Titan, flying mounts in the rest of the world. We’ll probably take a stab playing around with it tomorrow but from seeing what was there, it looks like, well…WoW.

It’ll be interesting to see how it feels to roam the lands with everything all different-like. In some respects, this might be one of the smartest moves they’ve made to bring people back (and to get those people to renew their subscriptions).

Thing is, each of these expansions and changes they make to improve lower-level progression and help people get through the content to the higher level PVP end game might help but it’s going to have less and less of an effect each time. People are tired of WoW. But they still like it. What can you do? I think this coming expansion might do enough to bring people back for longer (thus why I think it’s one of their smartest moves of late). No more boring level progression through the same places over and over again with each new character.

The next thing they should do after the expansion (or with?) would be to litter the lower level areas (20-60) with new quests with nice loot for higher levels to accomplish and bring them back. They do mention “hundreds of new quests” in their trailer so…we’ll have to see, maybe we’ll see tomorrow.

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Gamasutra’s reporting a couple of updates on the NCSoft front.

First, Jeff Strain’s decided he’s done with Guild Wars and Arenanet and is moving on. While I seriously doubt this will have a serious affect on Guild Wars or Aion, it is interesting to note not that there was another departure (David Reid) but that NCSoft referred to this as an “inevitable” set of events. Sounds more like someone’s trying to stir things up so NCSoft can compete with WoW.

Not sure where that’s going though…they’ve had some decent (though niche) MMOs like CoH/CoV and GuildWars isn’t necessarily niche. And, of course, TR didn’t do so well in the end. Sure, Lineage is more a game for Asia than America and Aion will likely NOT grab that much of the market from WoW. I think it’ll be more like WAR, taking a chunk but relegated pretty quick once a lot of the guys out there playing decide they’d prefer more…uh…manly characters to play.

Now, on to the jinx…

When you’re being successful, you DON’T go around calling the ball on your MMO before it launches over here. It seems with 225 servers and $32.7 million in revenue in the first quarter that Aion’s run in Asia, NCSoft thinks they’re on to a winner. One thing, big guy, the West isn’t ASIAN. Maybe if the general style of the game wasn’t anime, and you were still seeing success in the Asian market (meaning it had some sort of univeral appeal despite the art/cultural style), I’d agree with you. Or better yet, if you’d launched in the US first and saw success, then I’d say sure.

But, 225 servers across several countries means what to me? And how many subscribers are spread over those servers? If you assume 10k limits on servers but also that they aren’t full all the time and that some people play across multiple servers, you’ve got a ballpark of anywhere between 500k and 2.2M subscribers. I seriously doubt you got 2.2M subscribers. More likely closer to a 1M at best.

Thing is, we also know, people will drain off after a few months and it won’t be long before you need to start looking at content updates to keep things interesting 3-6 months after launch.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Aion will have a decent showing (again, anime does not equal success in the US across the board) here and in Europe. The key question is going to be WHO will they lock in? Lock in enough people in a guild and that guild will start playing in your game more often, driving more people in on a consistent basis. However, the average MMO gamer is fickle and despite a “smooth” transition from WoW to Aion in terms of features and the like, there is also the differences in game play and a lack of add-on support at this stage.

I think they’ll do a lot better than WAR and LOTRO did if only because there is a better crafting system more akin to WoW’s. People seem to have drop kicked crafting in recent MMOs thinking it’s like the RTS genre and resource gathering. Sure people don’t want to always hunt down daisies but they DO want to do it at some point, especially if they can craft some bitchin’ potion or armor piece that they can sell. Also, the guy buying that armor piece will be more engaged because now he doesn’t have to run through some raid or dungeon with a group 10 times to get a good drop that works for his class.

Anyhow, stay off the “we’re number 2″ soapbox for now. It didn’t work in Funcon’s favor that everyone thought AoC was going to be a WoW killer…AoC? What’s that?

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Almost missed this sucker (then again, I haven’t played WoW in months) but pretty cool…something I’d actually been wanting and that all MMOGs should be doing.

All that’s missing is the ability to chat into servers as your character so you can comm with your guild or friends.

Anyone else want to say it’s the end of Blizzard’s golden goose??

Gamasutra’s reporting NetEase was granted the ability to set up a closed beta starting July 30th as they update WoW to meet the Chinese Government’s standards.

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Funny, I’d have thought that a company that makes billions on their game could afford to maintain their Web site…I guess I was wrong.

Not that I use the site much but…uh…wow?

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It seems WoW isn’t immune to the Web 2.5 era of technology. Now, people can know where you are and you can give them the blow-by-blow as you’re raiding.

While I’m not so sure about the idea of location-based services the Twitter client was overdue. After all, there’s already IM integration so why not drop notes into Twitter or Facebook (FaceWoW? WoWBook?)?

The thing is…how relevant useful is this all going to be? Sure, the Twitpic integration is probably the best feature (though you’d think they’d have hidden the Tweetcraft window BEFORE generating the screenshot) but anything else? Outside of staying in contact with people instead of diving into WoW and disappearing for hours, is there a purpose to it? After all, if you’re raiding, you’re more than likely going to be with the main group of people you hang out with while in WoW…in other words, the people who care about the crazy purple item that just dropped.

Still, I guess the game industry and especially the MMOG sub-industry has to keep up with the social side of Web 2.x. I’m still waiting for the NeuroSky thing to go somewhere so I can play without a keyboard…

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