While the above isn’t a real photo from Titan’s surface, such photos DO EXIST. (You can even hear the actual winds from another world). We can DO stuff like that. When reality is so amazing, how can mere games possibly compete?
That’s the dilemma Blizzard faces as it ramps up the publicity machine for its next MMO, code named Titan. Leaked in a not-so-secret memo last month, Destructoid cornered a Blizzard exec who admitted that Titan would be the long expected follow-up to the world’s most successful MMO ever, World of Warcraft.
Four possible outcomes that I can see. The best case scenario for Blizzard is that Titan does for space-based MMOs, let’s say, what WoW did for fantasy MMOs — utterly dominate the field, and bring in zillions of new players who have never heard of EVE or Jumpgate Evolution or Star Wars Galaxies or Star Trek Online and after playing Titan, wonder why anyone would ever want to play anything else? Additionally, EVE & co would lose most of their players.
Failing that, by the time Titan comes out five or six years from now, it will be well positioned to take up the slack as WoW nears the end of its popularity.
Bad news for Blizzard would be if WoW continued to be insanely popular, and Titan is only a modest success. A million players would be wildly amazingly fantastically super with any other MMO. For Blizzard, only a million players would be seen as an abject, utter failure.
Worst case scenario is that WoW declines in popularity, and since the MMO genre has become synonymous with WoW to most people, nobody really has much interest in Titan. That’s unlikely, to be sure, but it would kill the company.
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world of warcraft
Daily Blogroll 12/14 — Take my game, PLEASE! edition
FFXIV opens with a fantastic character generator, shows you a wonderful cinematic that soon includes you and segues smoothly into the tutorial. You soon are dropped into a crowded inn with quest givers that you will come to know very well. They give out your “guildleves” — kill quests, and your “local leves” — crafting quests, and finally your “field leves” — harvesting quests. Your remaining days in FFXIV will consist of filling up on leves, going to the place they tell you to go, killing trash mobs, making items you won’t be able to keep, and whacking away at harvest nodes.
Once in a very, very long while, you will get to continue the story for a short time — and then it’s back to the leves, hoping for the next bit of the story. Or perhaps to rise high enough in level to see anything but the forest. In a game that almost begs for exploration, it keeps such things as the ferry to other cities, riding chocobos and even travel deep into the forest outside Gridania locked away.
FFXI had its issues — a lot of them — but for the most part, I had fun. Nothing stopped me from exploring (and dodging high level monsters). FFXIV, on the other hand, constantly teases with the fun stuff just over the next horizon. Except over the next horizon are more badgers, bees, animate fungus and so on to slaughter, mindlessly.
If a MMO player had to choose between FFXIV and WoW, I can’t think of anything that would compel them to choose FFXIV. They’d miss questing, an explorable world, any goals, dungeons, etc. They would gain a limited ability to mix and match class abilities to form a custom class of their own choosing, but then, with Rift coming out which goes crazy with customizability (and includes leveling by quests or rift chasing or PvP), it’s not easy by any means to build the case for the game.
Now they’re tossing the game’s director and producer, taking the game back to the workshop for a complete overhaul, and not charging for a subscription until sometime next spring. That puts it just after Rift’s launch, and just before SWTOR’s expected launch in April. I have no idea what they could possibly do to fix the game. It is SO BEAUTIFUL! I guess my only suggestion would be to put some of the fun stuff closer to the start of the game.
On to the blogroll.
Daily Blogroll 12/10 — Bite from your wallet edition
I was thinking about some of the things we know about Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s going to be a subscription game. It cost a hell of a lot to produce — perhaps more than $100 million. And yet they think they’re gonna have no trouble making their money back even if they have less than a million subscribers.
It’s no secret. I can do the math. They’re gonna be bleeding their subscribers absolutely friggin’ dry in the Bioware cash shop. But that’s okay! That would have really bothered me a couple years ago, but now — I’m buying space ships in STO and pets in Wizard101 and heck, EQ2 is even taking the bloodsucking thing to a whole new level by adding a new Vampire race to their cash shop.
So yeah. Totally there. Wave of the future, folks. Onto the blogroll.
Daily Blogroll 12/9 — Time Travel edition
A little later, we’ll be talking about a virtual world to a “Time Travel” theme, which will send customers through differently themed worlds. Like, “Now you’re in Roman World! Through that door is Dinosaur World! Take the trolley to Wild West World!”. I don’t know about you, but this seems more like a theme park than time travel. I think I’d keep waiting for the killer robots to spring out from behind the bushes.
What’s the CENTRAL ELEMENT of any time travel story? It’s the ability or at least desire to change the way things happen. Without that, it’s NOT time travel and it’s NOT a time travel story.
I know, I know — you’re going to point to Fred Hoyle’s 1966 novel “October the First is Too Late”* (of which a totally legal excerpt is here). I maintain that even Sir Fred never considered that book a time travel story, even though it was superficially about an Earth fractured in Time.
On to the games, I guess.
Daily Blogroll 12/8 — Holy NDA, Batman! edition
Superhero comics have to be the most consistently grim form of literature imaginable. Here you have people with cosmic supernatural powers, and those powers bring them no joy. Instead, they are crushed by tragedy after unthinkable tragedy. Their lives are living nightmares, and for most heroes, there is no peace even in death. Satan once bet God that he could shake the faith of his most pious worshiper, a rich man named Job. God said sure, go for it, and Job was robbed of his wealth and his family. Satan went on to wrack Job with terrible illnesses, but Job struggled on, never losing faith. We see that in the Book of Job was written the very first superhero story.
I guess this is a sort of roundabout way of celebrating the lifting of the DC Universe Online NDA. But what of The Agency, the other SOE Action-MMO property? News of both, and more, after the break.