MMORPGs

My apologies in advance for any typos and all of my ranting, less then fully sober at the moment as I just got home from seeing a few gamer friends I hadn't caught up with for a while. Cheese sticks, nachos, chili fries and much vodka are mixed in my tummy. One of them had a birthday this last weekend so I got to drop off a very belated xmas gift and pretend that it was wrapped in birthday paper instead.

But to the meat of things... While hanging out, and scaring all the normal people, we got on the topic of MMORPG's. Okay, really, it was them trying to get me to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft and me stumping them with the question of, "Why? What does it have that another MMO doesn't do better?" So the conversation rambled for a bit as they failed to defend WoW, and we talked about a lot of the other MMO's on the market, and now you get to hear the points that I think are valid and hopefully make comments and replies of your own so I know just how one-sided my views are.

World of Warcraft is the current dominant one in the market. Which, really, I just don't understand. What honestly does it have that other MMO's don't have and haven't had for longer and done better?
About all I can think of is that Azeroth is a known world-setting from the previous Warcraft games, but if having a pre-existing known world setting is the key for MMO success then shouldn't Middle Earth Online ( or is it Lord of the Rings Online these days? ) with its much more detailed world setting and pre-existing fantasy fan-base be getting a hell of a lot more press then it is?
It can't be the races, damn near every fantasy MMO in existence has had the exact same damned races. The PvP combat is better balanced and, honestly, more interesting in DAoC, Lineage 2 or Guild Wars. If you want crafting then both EQ and DAoC had crafting systems. Hell, EQ also had more land to explore by the time the last expansions were added. In WoW you still need to sit on your ass and farm the higher level elite gear, hoping you have big guild friends who can help out with getting it. Balance is still whacked out in the game and remains the biggest complaint among the people I know who play it.
About the only allure I see WoW having is naked Alliance elf women in high resolution bump-mapped detail. Which explains why in the upcoming expansion the Horde side is getting their own race designed heavily for sex appeal. Which apparently is a pretty big allure given the number of new servers they've been adding lately. Ultimately, I think WoW is going to dominate the market for some time to come as Blizzard does know how to appeal to an audience and how to maintain that interest with small updates and dangling expansions in the distance.
I do have to admit that the game does look pretty, and it did do some things right, but the idea of grinding for gold and farming elite gear just to be competitive in PvP (or even high-level PvE) just turns me off enough that I don't see getting a copy anytime soon.

City of Heroes and City of Villains is still the only MMORPG I am paying to play. Don't see that changing anytime soon, though I have been finding that the 'new' has worn off and I don't rush to login whenever I have free moments like I used to. Which is shown by the fact that I've barely been on lately. For different reasons between the two games though.
In CoH, I've really ran out of things to do that keep my attention. I still have the Kheldian arcs to finish (mid-way through the 20-25 one) but other then that I only have one task force and I think 4 missions left to do and then I'll have seen it all. With Issue 7 having no listed CoH side content additions, I am kind of depressed about not having anything new and interesting to see in the near future for my hero peoples.
About the only bits of gameplay that have been keeping my attention lately is the PvP. Unfortunately Bloody Bay tends to be full of either whiners (Stop killing me! I don't want to PvP despite being in a PvP zone!) or griefers (How many invisible flying assassins can their be lurking above the helicopter at any one time?) and Warburg I find distasteful as the villains tend to be better mannered and more polite then the heroes (I've had villains offer to duel me and arrange meetings for a fight, and have had heroes lurking just outside of the no-PvP zone by the boat just waiting to jump people newly arriving.) so I end up playing in Siren's Call and that has me set in the 20s and gets dull after a bit, playing without a lot of my powers tends to get rather formulaic but at least the PvP in Siren's Call seems to have a point as you battle for control of the zone. I can only hope that the rumored "Recluse's Folly/Victory" high-level PvP zone shows up with Issue 7 to make PvP more interesting again.
In CoV I actually have a similar, but different problem. There is no where left to explore. I like seeing new parts of the map and the world, but the entire thing is available from the get-go and by the high-teens I had already been everywhere and gotten all the explore and history clicks and all the waypoints from all the zones. Nothing else to see until Grandville in Issue 7. The story-arcs are better written I think, but the balance is getting irritating as the CoV side of the game feels like it is balanced a lot more then CoH was towards trying to force you to team. Or maybe it is the archetypes that seem to do that. Not sure. Just something about solo-play in CoV, while still fun and I still like playing solo a lot, just hasn't clicked the way it did for me in CoH.

Anarchy Online remains a study in how not to launch a MMO. I was a beta-tester for it, and the game in beta- had potential. It was fun. But it was clearly not a finished game. And then they launched it anyways and a lot of people tried it out and quickly got disgusted by how buggy it was. It did have some things that were ground-breaking at the time, like randomly generated on-demand missions/quests. The character creator was one of the most versatile and allowed some of the greatest creativity out there until CoH trumped it. But the game was just incomplete and broken.
Yet it was still fun. I still played for a bit and I still go back and play every so often when they have 14-day free trials or something similar. Until I get into the mid-30s again ( takes me about 45 minutes a level with a Martial Artist or Nanotech ) and run into the same balance problems as before that make the game suddenly slow to a grind while playing solo and have to suddenly find a team to play with. Right now, three expansions later, the game really looks pretty solid and if it had been released with all the features it has now it would have been a much greater success and had a lot more of a market impact then it has had. Still, if you want a sci-fi MMO this would I think be the way to go. There is a free trial offer right now that if I actually had the free time I'd be tempted to download and take a peek at what it looks like again.

Speaking of sci-fi... Star Wars: Galaxies may not be around much longer. Or at least may not be improving anymore. From what I have heard, Sony may have lost the license to do any further Star Wars themed development. Honestly, I won't miss it much. I played from right around launch until a bit into the first Alderaan story-event thingy. Was fun, had a Master Smuggler with a bit of Pistoleer, but it got a bit repetitive and the story missions in the game were either buggy and didn't work right or just weren't interesting / fun.
The game also suffered a bit of 'early adopter' syndrome. To do crafting you needed resources, a lot of which were mined. One whole skill tree was about surveying to find where your resource extractor thingy should go. Well, very quickly, all of the good resource spots on all of the planets filled up REAL quick and new people had to go to crapper locations to get stuff. Now, to combat this, the resources were supposed to drift and move periodically so new people had a chance to potentially survey and find a good spot right after a drift and compete with earlier players. I played on, I think it was, Chilastra and when I went back after the 'Jump to Lightspeed' expansion came out adding space combat finally (space combat was fun, but not as fun as the old Tie-Fighter and X-Wing games were...) the resources after three years hadn't moved once. Blegh.
They did some re-design of some of the game elements, especially the 'Path of the Jedi' to become a Jedi because, really, that was what everyone wanted to do and why the played the game. I heard they also re-did combat to be more like CoH rather then typically EQ-style combat but haven't been back to find out. Ultimately the game has always suffered from the problem of the fact that if you stripped out all the 'Star Wars' thematic bits out, the underlying gameplay just wasn't that good. It was always a mediocre game made popular by the Star Wars licensed bits. Still, if you are a rabit Star Wars fan-boy you might enjoy it (and in fact already be playing it). Otherwise I'd wait and see if Bioware (who just started a MMO division) really is developing the new Star Wars MMO they are rumored to be working on and maybe that one will be better.

If I do pick up another MMO'ish game anytime soon it'll probably be Guild Wars. The first expansion is just around the cornor (the 24th of this month), it is fantasy-based (I've had this urge to play a fantasy game lately...), and it has no monthly fee (so I don't suffer in the pocketbook). Guild Wars was built by, it appears, the same people who did Diablo 2 (and some of the old Blizzard Battle.net development) and apparently after Blizzard North got axed started ArenaNet up. Basically it is a fantasy-MMO designed to avoid farming, grinding and a lot of the other normal MMO crap with a lean towards guilds and guild / PvP combat.
Here is the thing though, PvP is entirely seperate from the PvE part of the game but the PvE part of the game unlocks more options for you in the PvP. It is really hard to describe, but a lot of the thought in the design really appeals to me. Apparently they have been pretty surprised by the number of non-PvP'ers who got the game just to roleplay and do the PvE part too. They had apparently expected it to be a lot more PvP then it is. With the upcoming Factions expansion and the new asian themed continent, they will have new PvP styles and goals such as the shifting of the national borders on the new continent as the two-factions fight for control of the land.
All in all, pretty interesting to me at the moment. Solid PvE, interesting PvP, fantasy, no monthly cost, active development and expansions and lots to unlock and explore in the game.

The other one I have my eye on right now is Tactica Online which is still in development. Fantasy, squad-based, turn-based, online tactical combat. Set in a sort of fantasy Rennaisance era, it is three competing ideologies (Doctrine, Science, Magic) and a skill-based tactical game. The online-tactical-game bit is what gets my attention. I am a tactical game junky so looking forward to the Open Beta for this and trying it out.

Other then that, lots of other MMO's on the market that I haven't played:
Lineage 2 looks interesting, especially the actual guild-based castle control stuff.
Eve: Online turned out a lot different then I thought it would, a very cool concept and might be an interesting game someday to try but I lack the time to sink into it now.
Horizons: Empire of Istaria ended up being such a disappointing final product after all the promise and ideas they had for it very early on in development, just goes to show what going bankrupt and being desperate for funding will do to a game.
Ryzom is pretty unpopular in the US and not the prettiest game, but the 'Ryzom Ring' bit coming out soon which apparently going to make players into content-creators for the game and allow them to add storylines and areas to the game which is potentially very revolutionary.
Dark Age of Camelot I have played, but not in a long-time. Pretty fun, like the three-realm PvP balance. Imagine that most of the players bailed to go play World of Warcraft though.
Ultima Online I beta-tested for sooo many years ago. God that game was broken from the moment it was released. A lot of the terms you hear these days referring to peoples playing styles and behavior were coined way back in that game. No idea what the game is like these days. Been way too long since I even though about playing it, halfway surprised it is still around.
Everquest is another I beta-tested for. Was a lot of fun in the beta, too crowded after launch. Really the MMORPG most people think about when trying to define the genre. Haven't played it in years (Is the original even still around? Lost patience waiting for the website to load.) and only goofed with a friends beta of EQ2 and wasn't impressed by it.
Warhammer Online is apparently in development by the people who did DAoC. Either still in beta, or close to beta, haven't heard much about it. But solid world background of the Warhammer setting and hopefully solid game mechanics.
Ragnarok Online I think still wins the award for 'cutest MMORPG'. It was really popular for a while, at least among the crowd I used to hang-out with online, but I think lost a huge chunk of its players to WoW. Had the interesting bit where your gender was set in your account, so all of your characters had to be the same as the players gender. Interesting bit of forced honesty there. The 'Ragnarok' manga by Myung-Jin Lee is actually set in the game setting ( though the english release is re-written/translated oddly). Never played it, heard a lot about it, but apparently a very fun and very cute little game.

Ran out of MMO's that I have bookmarked or can remember off the top of my head. If I missed some, or you have differing opinions, please rant in the comments section. Interested to hear other peoples takes on them.