Massively^™

We can never get enough Warhammer Online coverage, even if a particular preview is talking covering a lot of older information we're still interested. It just so happens that this Next-Gen.biz article is talking about old information in a pretty fresh way, which is always a bonus.

It's always interesting to see someone else's take on a game you've been slowly forming an opinion about. The main focus of the article is on PvP and PvE, with a hint of the "war is everywhere" concept that EA Mythic have been working on. Essentially, both styles of gameplay feed directly into the endgame concept of faction warfare and all-out bloody battle. We do often find ourselves wondering how living guilds and the recent social network purchase by EA may play into the Warhammer Online endgame. Hm, yes, we certainly wonder.

With all the new MMO titles in development, sometimes it's easy to forget that running a profit in this business is actually something of an accomplishment. Starting development on a big-budget subscription-based game, with the barrier of entry purportedly being as high as $1 billion, seems like an extraordinary risk for all parties involved. According to analyst Piers Hardings-Rolls, this cut-throat trend is only deepening.

Their research shows that popular new development strategies, like purchasing lucrative intellectual properties and importing cheaply-developed MMOs from Asia, has done little to shake up the subscription-based business, where most of the profit is still concentrated in a few extremely successful titles. We were a little disappointed that their research didn't touch on the increasingly-prolific free-to-play/microtransaction model, but we suppose that'll have to wait until another day.

Flying Lab CEO Russell Williams has explained the reasoning behind the recent shutdown of 7 of the 11 servers that host Pirates of the Burning Sea. In an e-mail to news publication Next-Gen, Williams gives a number of factors that went into the decision to close down over half of their servers and consolidate the in-game population.

Among the numerous reasons are the fact that they made some faulty assumptions concerning player balance and play style, based on the way their beta testers stressed the game more people showed up for the beta than stuck around after the official launch. Williams goes on to say " ... we have systems that require a minimum number of players to function correctly, such as our economy, and they break other systems if they're not working correctly (such as PvP). If we didn't have these kinds of interdependent systems, we wouldn't even be considering server merges."

For the full list of reasons for the shutdown, read the entire article. What do you think, Learned Audience? Was this the right decision to make, based on the evidence?

Bay Area game developer Stormfront Studios is closing its doors after 20 years of operation.

This is an unfortunate turn of events in the video game industry -- especially the MMO sector -- because in 1991 Stormfront produced the very first graphical online RPG, Neverwinter Nights. The company was helmed by Don Daglow, an esteemed developer who created arguably the first ever computer RPG. That game was called Dungeon, and it operated on the PDP-10 mainframe in the mid-late 1970s.

We're sad to see a studio of such pedigree go. We just waxed nostalgic about Neverwinter Nights on Monday, so we're a bit shocked to see the group behind it bite the dust. NWN was shut down long ago, but its influence -- and therefore, Stormfront's influence -- is undeniable. It was even even honored at the Tech & Engineering Emmy Awards in January. We wish Daglow and the other folks at Stormfront success in whatever lies ahead for each of them.

[Via Joystiq]

Next-gen.biz has compiled their list of the top 10 game innovations of 2007, and there is only one MMO on the list: EVE Online. Next-gen decided to honor EVE for taking on the task of completely revamping their graphical engine, and showing that a well-designed MMO can be updated forever.

If I was honoring EVE, that's probably the least of the innovations I'd step up to honor them for. The realtime skill system, the open-ended gameplay, and the masterpiece of an economic system all rank higher than what the ships look like, but then again, this is a list for 2007. And hey, it's a year-end list, so it's hardly definitive anyway (apparently no one told him about Trinity's whole bootini incident).

So if we put together our list of the best MMO innovations of 2007, what would be on there? The Tier 5 token system from Burning Crusade? The "stored labor" crafting system in Pirates of the Burning Sea (or would that be on the 2008 list)? Tabula Rasa's mix of FPS, RPG, and MMO? What was the best innovation you saw in an MMO this year?

[Via Curse]

Blizzard has been recruiting on its website most of this year for team members to work on a "Next-Gen MMO" project, but it has never publicly confirmed that the mysterious title is in development. Some observers have pessimistically suggested that "Next-Gen MMO" is just a hyped-up way of saying "Wrath of the Lich King."

Thankfully, it turns out they were wrong! Official confirmation (of a sort) has come. A Blizzard employee who goes by the forum name of Drysc responded to forum posts speculating about the project. He (or she, maybe -- it's like a female Night Elf Hunter; you can never know) said, "it's an unannounced Next-Gen MMO. And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either."

So Drysc confirmed what most of us already suspected. Hey, better than nothing. So ... is it World of Starcraft? Do we want it to be World of Starcraft? Hmm.

Blizzard has said time and again that World of Warcraft will probably not be released on consoles. But as we learned this year, World of Warcraft is not the only MMO on Blizzard's plate. They've been occasionally tossing up job adverts for people with various skills to work on "Next-Gen MMO" stuff. The folks at Blizzard have never fully embraced consoles and successful console MMOs are rare, so even though we knew Blizzard had some kind of console title in the works, there was no evidence that the next-gen MMO project(s) would be for anything other than the PC (and maybe Mac).

Well, the latest of the MMO job adverts (this time for a physics programmer) requires would-be applicants to have "programming experience on both console and PC titles." This leads us to believe that Blizzard is either making an MMO that will be released for both the PC and one or more consoles, or that it's producing multiple MMO titles with the same physics engine and that the PC and consoles will get different games ... or both.

Either way, it's a tantalizing hint at what's to come.

Monolithic super-developer Blizzard has put out a casting call on their company website for a Lead 3D Character Artist and a Lead 3D Environment Artist to work on a "next-gen MMO." Is it World of Starcraft? Is it a Diablo MMO? Is it a completely new IP? Is it the mythical Hydra (which could be any one of the above)? We don't know.

Even though details are hidden behind the curtain, these job postings give outside observers a sense of the progress Blizzard has made on the mysterious project. This is probably the same project for which they hired a Lead Engine Programmer back in April or May, and it's safe to assume that they're about to move into the next phase of development -- building the game world (or worlds) and its inhabitants.

Now if only they'd clue us in on whether or not those inhabitants are Terran, Zerg and Protoss.