Where’s the next ‘big’ MMOG?

September 19, 2006 on 6:37 pm | In General Gaming, Reporting, Industry

Today Speck asked,  "is the "WoW Killer" that is on the horizon? Which game is getting the hype now?"

Unlike the old days, when AO, DAoC, SB, AC2 and so on were all going to dethrone the then-dominate Everquest, there's just too many games out now, splintering the playerbase into discrete sub-groups.

It's like other features of bygone days: the magic has been replaced by sheer quantity. And it's not just lots of people playing WoW.

Like there no longer being one community site to rule them all, there is no longer a single game everyone is at, nor just one game to which people look forward. We're finally out of the shell where anyone saying "MMO" meant everyone else knew exactly what they're talking about. Heck, even the relatively light list at MMOGcharts shows the sort of diversity that MMOGs have become over the last five years. And because the majority of games that could be called "massively multiplayer" don't collect a monthly fee, they don't appear on that chart. Yet, they add to the very depth and breadth of the whole.

<>This is because there's so many different types of games to like, played by lots of people. How much does the dedicated Eve Online player care about the Burning Crusade expansion in WoW? Probably no more than the fan of the latter caring about Eve's Kali expansion. 

So there's not one big "next MMO" to which everyone looks.

<>There's a whole bunch of them. <>

For me, as much as I like to keep up with the Maple Story/Virtual Laguna Beach/Kart Racer side of things, I'm still looking for the deeply immersive, where the game is the focus, not a business model wrapped around some sort of  community in which the game is a foregone conclusion (and iterative of everything I'd already been paying a monthly fee for). So I look most forward to Tabula Rasa, Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea.