A Very Late 2012 Predictions Review

It dawned on my today that I never reviewed my 2012 predictions.  Probably because I decided not to do them for 2013, and promptly hid from myself the fact that I had done them last year.   But what the heck, after yesterday’s deep trip down memory lane, something light is called for.

 

1) FunCom will be FunCom…they will release a conceptually brilliant game long before it is ready, and oblivious to whether or not they have enabled their target audience to consume it

 

Well, The Secret World was clearly made for a certain target audience, and I would certainly consider the genre-bending TSW a conceptually brilliant game.  And they released it before it was ready.  None of this is surprising, and this counts as mostly a hit.  But…I think they did a great job prepping us for what kind of game it was and how it was going to play out.   This is a niche game and that was pretty clear in all counts, from the setting itself to the way characters were built, to the investigation and puzzle quests you encountered early on.  The only real headscratcher is why it wasn’t F2P to begin with –  I guess they needed a cash influx.  And I’m surprised they have not embraced more of the successful F2P options from other games – TSW would be the perfect game to introduce something like STO’s lockboxes or TOR’s cartel packs into.  But maybe scoring the latest pair of hotpants for your virtual Barbie doll is the most lucrative way to go.  How should I know?

 

2) Guild Wars will ship to much acclaim and joy, and find its niche…and then promptly fall off the radar, as people complete is PvE campaign in the course of a week and are left with nothing but hardcore PvP or the next $50 box drop.

 

Yes and no…GW2 apparently anticipated this and has made moves to put some emphasis and elbow grease into their dungeon system.  The end result seems to have pleased some people.  I’m not sure how big of a slice of the PvP pie its taking though.   I can’t imagine its all that much, or games like Darkfall and Camelot Unchained (or Defiance and PlanetSide 2 for that matter) would probably be crying and shaking their fists.  Still, I gotta call this one a miss.  There is plenty of PvE space to explore and the game is reasonably healthy – not to mention it is arguably a bigger success than its predecessor.

 

3) World of Warplanes Beta will come winging our way at some point during the year.  My guess is that it will not be nearly the success that World of Tanks has been.  Primarily because the inclusion of joystick support indicates that the basic keyboard controls are going to be awkward, and lets face it, that’s what most people use.  Again..that whole “know your target audience” mentality.

 

I actually have been in WoW since Alpha – it just took me awhile to find the invitation in my spam box.  :-p  And we are still under NDA, so I can’t tell you anything about this prediction really.

 

In other, completely unrelated news, I am considering downloading War Thunder.

 

ETA:  The NDA was actually dropped a few days ago and I missed it.   So I can be less subtle now – World of Warplanes is a mess.  It can’t decide if it wants to be an arcade shooter or a flight sim, and the parts of the World of Tanks model that were “adopted” in are problematic as well.   End result – people who came for arcade are frustrated, people who came for a flight sim are bored, and people who came from WoT are quickly in over their head.  Sign up and give it a try for yourself, but for my two cents, its a crash and burn.

ETA AGAIN: Turns out, they manage to fix World of Warplanes at the 11th hour, and I freaking love it. Who knew?

 

4) Dawntide may not survive another year.

It didn’t.  The website is still up but the game is all but dead.  Its a shame too, it was a very well designed sandbox.  I would have loved to live in it a while.

5) Sony will find a new flagship.  They have to, right?  I’m shocked that Everquest 3  took so long to get off the ground, even in whispered rumor form.  To be the advance they want it to be will require a full development cycle, which means we are looking at another 4 years probably before it hits.  So part B is this: I fully expect Sony to pick up distribution rights to ArchAge Online.  They have shown no qualms about bringing other people’s developments into their fold (Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea).  Pairing this with a PlanetSide 2 launch would mean fresh blood in the Sci Fi and Fantasy domains.  That’s not to say that ArchAge comes out way in 2012, but I think it will find a home in this time period (call that part C if you will).

ArcheAge found its home with Trion – a good move and I think AA and Trion both will profit from it (and word is it will hit this year).  Sony let PotBS go, and seems to be relying solely on PS2 as its flagship game these days.  Star Wars – The Clone Wars Adventures (“the other Star Wars MMO”) got a quiet makeover while nobody was looking, and now it really is an MMO instead of just being an ambulated amalgam of minigames.  Much to my son’s chagrin, when he started a new trooper character and had to quickly learn how to shoot his way through droids, follow maps and quest points, and do all this if he wanted to get to some of those minigames that he knows and loves.  Quite honestly, I wonder now if EQ3 will ever see the light of day.   Call me a doubter at this point.  But don’t call that a prediction.  Please?

6)  Titan will lose its codename and we will began to get some information on it.  Quite frankly, my belief is that if you’ve been holding it in your backpocket for over four years, without even giving a hint of what it is, its just as likely rotten eggs as it is a hit.   But I’ll be curious to see what’s been rattling around in the heads of Blizzard and whether or not this is the time to unveil it.

Everything I said about Titan above is what leads me to believe that EQ3 is in the same boat.  The drivel of information is tiny, and both those games have been in development for over a full cycle now.  Entire MMO’s have been conceived, incubated, and birthed in the time that we’ve been waiting for information about these two.  That can’t mean good things, because as I’ve learned over the last few years – if its ready to talk about it, companies will trip over themselves doing so.  And if its not, they will do and say anything to put a sheen over the fact that its ugly as sin or broken as a wagon with square wheels.

Most/Least Anticipated and Biggest Fail.

WildStar still looks terrible – but it didn’t launch in 2012.  And it turned out what became my biggest anticipation became my biggest fail – and its one I haven’t said one peep about.  Mechwarrior Online is terrible.  The game will be good one day, like, a year from now.  But they took money and made promises, and its going to be a long time before they deliver.   And they did a great job getting lots of people to part with their money by promising all sorts of grand things, like launching 8 months ago (the game is still in beta) and giving us tons of mechs (I think they might be up to their original twelve now).   And the game itself?  The UI is so bad  – or rather so nonexistent and uninformative, that you might as well be doing freeform roleplaying  on your neared RPG forums.   You will have no idea what’s wrong, how much armor you have left, why you missed, what your heat level will change by, and where anyone is.   And good luck communicating with your teammates.   Oi.

And Guild Wars 2?   Well, I have no real beef with it.  But I also just can’t seem to get into it.  It bores me.  And I hate that I have to go running back to the capital city every couple of levels for a new storyline quest.   And the races, outside of humans, are fugly and awkward to watch.  Okay, so maybe I have a few things against it, but overall its a good game.  Its just not my cup of tea right now.

Anyway, there is your 1300+ word wall of text for today.   Enjoy.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some screenshots to balance it out!

Catching Up

So I’ve been a busy boy, between stuff at work and a week out of town and the stomach bug.  So lets do a little recap roundup shall we?

 

TOR – I have both my characters in the mid-20’s now.  I grind out about a level a week, which is pretty normal for me.   I just hit Tattoine for the first time last night and it felt…weird.   Landing on Tatooine as an Imperial Agent just felt so *not* Star Wars.  In fact, the whole Empire thing is starting to wear on me a bit.  I may have to let one of those two Imp characters lay idle for a bit so I can scratch the Republic itch.  I will wait until update 1.2 though – the Legacy system means that my Republic alts, all at level 10 on another server are basically useless to me.  And I am not running through Tython for the umpteenth time without Sprint if I can help it.

 

World of Tanks – I’ve spent the last week doing my runs on the Test Server, which has been a breath of fresh air.  The Russian players are actually quite nice, and much more skilled than their American counterparts.  I have wondered lately if I was just bad at WoT or if the teams were so bad it was hard to excel, and its definitely the latter.  In all the matches I’ve played on the test server, I’ve only once seen the team deploy poorly, without watching the map.  As one EU player said after a match, “we didn’t get beat because we made bad choices, we just got beat because they were better than us.”  I don’t get many of those matches on the regular server.   Much as patch 1.2 for TOR will turn it into what it should have been at launch, patch 7.2 will certainly do for WoT.  The new tanks are excellent, and the graphical and game updates are all well done.  The M18 Hellcat is almost all that we wanted it to be (it can’t quite hit 89 kph, and the option of the 105mm howitzer is missing).  Time to learn some Russian and make an account on their server I think.

 

Sandbox Vistas – I’ve shelved this for the time being.  The remaining options just don’t appeal to me all that much, and the announcement that Dawntide was shutting down, while somewhat expected, was ultimately very disheartening.  At this point, unless I get the itch to try Ryzom or Wurm, I’ll probably just keep a keen and interested eye on ArchAge instead.

 

Star Trek Online – Yeah, I know.  But a friend has been begging me to run some missions with him since it went F2P, and I was just a few points shy of my Akira and Nebula.  So I logged in last night and did one mission.  And I have a few things to say:  one is – who killed the graphics?  Its like a whole new engine in there, and it looks like crap, even with all the settings dialed up to max – which, by the way, is something I could not do with the original game.  Balancing that out though – praise the Alpha Quadrant, they actually fixed ground combat to make it manageable, and the skill system to make it less of a headache of WTH, and changed the progression to the point I breathed a sigh of relief.   I did one mission to finish up the jump from 19 to 20.  That same amount of skill points would have required me to do 3-4 missions when I was in the game before.   So now its time to claim that long awaited Akira and learn about that whole “duty officer” thing.  Its like the bizarre crossbreeding of TOR’s companions with your Bridge Officers and a far future version of Pokemon.  I feel like I have to catch them all!

 

And decide if I want to shell out some real bucks for that Nebula.

2012 Predictions

I thought this would be easy.  At least it has been in past years, but this year I’m a little stumped.  More specifically, I’m stumped about what to make predictions *about*.   It seems obvious what will and will not happen this year.

 

1) FunCom will be FunCom…they will release a conceptually brilliant game long before it is ready, and oblivious to whether or not they have enabled their target audience to consume it (think system requirements re: AoC at its launch).

 

2) Guild Wars will ship to much acclaim and joy, and find its niche…and then promptly fall off the radar, as people complete is PvE campaign in the course of a week and are left with nothing but hardcore PvP or the next $50 box drop.

 

3) World of Warplanes Beta will come winging our way at some point during the year.  My guess is that it will not be nearly the success that World of Tanks has been.  Primarily because the inclusion of joystick support indicates that the basic keyboard controls are going to be awkward, and lets face it, that’s what most people use.  Again..that whole “know your target audience” mentality.

 

And then there is stuff that is less obvious.  And that is the stuff that I will really judge myself on predicting, because its a little tougher.

 

1) Dawntide may not survive another year.  After previously announcing plans for a launch and unveiling payment plans, Dawntide had to do a quick E-brake 180 when they lost funding.  They reaquired funding almost immidiately, and promised an updated release date within three weeks time.  Two months later, the big news was instead that the whole world was coming down for a complete redesign/regraphic-ing (is that a word?).  That smacks of desperation or fear, one of the two.  One of the GM’s in the forum is on record as saying he believes a new launch will come late in the year, perhaps around August, but there is simply no  good way to tell at this point.

On the other hand,  I could be wrong.  The redesign of the world could indicate an influx of funding allowing them to modernize and fully realize the game.  And in this case, I truly hope I’m wrong.  The innovations present in the game are wonderful, and I’d like to see it make some inroads.

 

2) Sony will find a new flagship.  They have to, right?  I’m shocked that Everquest 3  took so long to get off the ground, even in whispered rumor form.  To be the advance they want it to be will require a full development cycle, which means we are looking at another 4 years probably before it hits.  So part B is this: I fully expect Sony to pick up distribution rights to ArchAge Online.  They have shown no qualms about bringing other people’s developments into their fold (Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea).  Pairing this with a PlanetSide 2 launch would mean fresh blood in the Sci Fi and Fantasy domains.  That’s not to say that ArchAge comes out way in 2012, but I think it will find a home in this time period (call that part C if you will)

 

3)  Titan will lose its codename and we will began to get some information on it.  Quite frankly, my belief is that if you’ve been holding it in your backpocket for over four years, without even giving a hint of what it is, its just as likely rotten eggs as it is a hit.   But I’ll be curious to see what’s been rattling around in the heads of Blizzard and whether or not this is the time to unveil it.

 

In the most and least categories:

My most anticipated game is…I don’t have one.  Honestly, I don’t.  I’d say Secret World, but I’m pretty sure its gonna flop like a drunk noob off the high dive platform.  I’m honestly not excited about anything that is to come this year.  So, I guess the challenge is to see what does finally get me excited.

My least anticipated game is…Guild Wars 2.  I’m glad that everyone is nuts over it, but I honestly do not see the draw.  The art direction in the first one and from what I’ve seen in this one, is ugly to my eye.  Guild Wars is honestly the only game I’ve quit playing because I wanted to claw my eyeballs out just looking at the screen.  Does that make me weird?  You bet it does.

The game everyone is excited about that will actually be horrible…that’s gotta be WildStar.  It looks like Champions Online’s graphically impaired World of Warcraft wannabe offspring.  Reminds me a bit of Alganon, which, as we all know, had great success in the MMO world.

Dual of the mini Mecha MMO’s.  Which will win my affection:  Hawken or Mechwarrior Online?  Personally I’m leaning Mechwarrior myself, but the decision to continue a timeline that was already beyond salvage is humorous.  And I could see it being neither.  When I think mecha I think strategic.  I do not think super-action fest.  Which is what both of these games seem like they may be, at first blush.  Which means that the dark horse alternate candidate in this race may actually be the wildly-innacurately name Gratuitous Tank Battles.  Which is actually Gratuitous Mecha Battles…that also happen to have some Tanks in them.   Seriously…are we that desperate to cash in on the World of Tanks fanbase?

A Little Publicity for a Game I’m Sweet On

So here’s a small plug for a game that I hope does very, very well.  I do any number of Beta’s, and while I haven’t been in this one in a while, you could smell the potential from a mile away.  That game is Dawntide, and they recently announced an October 1st launch date.  And the timing couldn’t be better.

If you enjoyed SWG, and are feeling a little sadness over its closing, this may be the replacement for you.  If the words sandbox, open-world PvP, skill-based advancement, or complex crafting systems send a little shiver of excitement down your spine…this may be the game for you.

Open Beta will be lasting right up to launch, so there is still time to jump in and see what its all about, as well as help shape the game.  Yes, Dawntide is another of those games where the Devs have this silly little belief that the players should have some input into the design of the game.  Which is one of the reasons I have some hope for its success.  Another reason is that they are being very generous and offering up a great deal for players at launch:   the client will be free, along with the first 10 days.  After that you can roll with the normal subscription model or jump to the lifetime deal.   Now that sounds cool, but here’s the juicy bit – a lifetime sub will only set you back €84.95, or about $122 for those of us in US land.  That’s a great deal.

If you’re not convinced yet though, spend some time going over the site, and perhaps catch the new trailer or read this interview with the CEO/Producer.  And let me share some of the great highlights with you:

• Crown Market – In order to foster the economy, you can’t sell random junk to vendors.  Yeah, you read that right, a staple feature of MMO’s has been changed, and I think for the better.  Instead you sell things at the market, where the amount you receive is based on the number of those items recently sold on the market.  Those items the market then resells to other players based on that same fluctuating formula.  Items unsold are removed from the market on a regular basis to keep the economy fresh.  A radical idea, and one that gives the Devs an excellent tool for keeping a good handle on the in game economy.  A necessity in the sandbox environment.

• Boats and Buildings – Five and fifty of them (respectively) at release, and yes, players build them.  Warships are planned for a future release so that more “serious piracy” can commence.  Incidentally, wind is part of the dynamic environment.  How cool is that?  If boats and buildings aren’t your intended crafting desire, try one or more of the 16 different professions.  And no, that doesn’t include “gathering skills” – those are all actual crafting skills.

• The World –  Taking a cue from EVE, there are both “anything goes” territories and existing national territories for less hardcore players.  And for kicks, the world is 500 square kilometers (>120 square miles) of wide open spaces.  That’s more than three times the size of Washington DC.

• Active Combat – Similar to AoC, there are three variations on basic strikes, these build things like “speed” or “power,” which are used to pay for more advanced strikes within the combat.   More than 40 such moves are in the game right now.  Magic has a good variety as well, with some nice spells available (150+ combat, 50+ non-combat).

If you aren’t intrigued enough yet to at least give it a try, then this isn’t your cup of tea anyway.   The only downside I can tell you is that this is a small development company we are talking about here.  The graphics are not revolutionary (though the world is pretty), and there will be bugs.  But it should say something that I never had any CTD or freezing issues in my time in beta.