Unrealistic expectations

Two things happened in the last couple of days: One, I got several mails and comments saying that I should get more interested in Warhammer Online or Age of Conan or Chronicles of Spellborn. And two, I've seen more commentaries about Lord of the Rings Online being "unoriginal" and "not true enough to the Tolkien lore". Abalieno laughed at me for calling LotRO the "next big thing", because he thinks the game needs to be closer to the books.

The thing is, that most major MMORPG are following a typical hype trajectory. As long as you can't play them, as long as there are only a few alpha testers, and lots of features listed on some website, the MMORPG in question is the greatest ever. As soon as the beta phase has grown large enough for many people to actually try the game, people realize two things: Much of the gameplay of the new game is very similar to the gameplay of any other MMORPG, and the hyped "new" features in fact aren't much better than what we had before. In the end it all boils down to how well these well-known characteristics are executed, and whether the few new things and the new world are fun to explore.

I'm especially laughing whenever I read how LotRO is too similar to WoW. Because two-and-a-half years ago the same sort of people were complaining how WoW was the same as Everquest. The basic gameplay of MMORPG, where you kill mobs to gain loot and xp to level up, where you have a tank taunting mobs, a healer patching up the tank, and some others dealing the damage, hasn't changed in ages. And tell you what, that will still remain the same for quite a while, and Warhammer Online will be called an unoriginal copy as soon as people get to play it. You can rename the brilliant EQ-parody Progressquest to Progresscraft, or Progress of the Rings, or Progress : Age of Reckoning, and the joke will still apply.

So here are some answers I'd like to give to comments about upcoming games:

1) "LotRO is a WoW clone": Doh! That's why I want to play it, man! You can rephrase that critique in marketing-speak to "LotRO is a fine example of the state of the art in MMORPG development, exhibiting all the good features that have evolved over the years, and have been proven so popular in World of Warcraft", and it would remain just as true. It just depends on how you look at it. I don't *want* a game that is radically different from WoW, and neither do the majority of the other players out there. Hey, I would have bought "WoW: The Middle-Earth expansion", so why shouldn't I buy LotRO?

2) "LotRO isn't true to the Tolkien lore": No kidding! You mean a game in which 3,000+ would-be heroes per server interact with each other can't exactly reproduce the atmosphere and experience of reading a book by yourself? Who'da thunk that! If you had imagined that you'd get to be the ring-bearer and you'd never get to see other people exhibiting Tolkien-untypical behavior like /ooc chat or "farming mobs", maybe you're in the wrong genre of games. People are people, and a lot of the behavior you'll see in LotRO from them will make Boromir look like a rather upstanding guy in comparison, and Samweis look heroic.

3) "Don't play WoW/LotRO, play WAR instead": I'm not discounting the possibility of Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning turning out to be a great game, in fact I rather hope it will be. But the most optimistic estimate of its release date is Q4 2007. And there is a significant chance that either it will be released at that date but widely be considered as unfinished and not ready for release (call it the "SOE model"), or that the release date will slip into 2008 (the "Blizzard model"). Even if it miraculously turned up in perfect shape for the christmas sales, that is *still* 8 months of waiting time. I need a game to play *now* (WoW) or an alternative very soon (LotRO). I'm still calling LotRO the "next big thing", not because I think it will "kill WoW", or because I'm sure it will be better than WAR. But because I think it will sell several hundred thousand copies, significantly outselling any previous Turbine game and the other recent arrival on the market, Vanguard. And it will do that because it is "good", without necessarily being "better", and because the timing for a WoW-alternative is right. Warhammer Online is probably the "next next big thing", but people aren't going to hold their breath until then. Other upcoming games, like Chronicles of Spellborn or Age of Conan have some interesting features, but probably not the same mass-market appeal. They can be successful in their respective niche, just like Vanguard claims to be successful with over 100,000 subscribers. But they will operate on a completely different tier of the market.

In short, don't get carried away by your expectations, don't believe the hype, and take the upcoming games for what they are: attempts by trial and error to improve an existing genre of games, without destroying the proven popularity and profitability.