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I am pretty pumped about this year. We will be seeing a slew of new innovative and evolutionary concepts coming to fruition this year in the MMO market. Truly new games with fresh concepts means a better experience for myself and fellow gamers. Here’s a quick rundown of the top MMO games scheduled to release in 2012 and why you should be excited about them:
Firefall
Team based, real time combat, shooter MMO with strong cooperative and competitive PvP elements. It’s sadly lacking open world PvP so don’t expect PlanetSide. It will offer competitive gameplay between clans and a slew of awesome cooperative content. Teamwork will be involve than healbots and taunts and should offer refreshing action-oriented gameplay. Oh, and the founder of developer was a team lead for the original World of Warcraft.
Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 is bringing a new acronym to PvP: WvWvW. So many letters…WvWvW stands for World vs World vs World. You see, players are essentially divided into their own servers and will fight massive battles against other servers for supremacy and other rewards. Guild Wars 2 will also offer competitive, small team arena PvP. Guild Wars 2 is providing the coolest PvE content imaginable: dynamic events. Dragons will randomly spawn and possibly DESTROY local villages unless enough heroes gather around to stop them. There’s still plenty of things to collect too, but in every aspect Guild Wars 2 raises the stakes quite a bit higher. Without a monthly fee.
TERA
Basically you take World of Warcraft and you add real life reflexes to the mix. This is a fantasy MMORPG where you will level up, find loot, and do so while outmaneuvering your enemies, dodging their attacks, and hitting with precise movements rather than hotkeys. There is no limited faction based combat here. In it’s place is a free for all political system of sorts. Anyone can rise to power but in a game like TERA, quality of followers might matter more than quantity.
Salem
Salem is planning on being the most realistic, immersive MMORPG since….ever. Just to make sure I don’t excite you for no reason; this game has permadeath. As in when you die there is no corpse run. You simply lose your character. If you said ‘No corpse run? Genius!’ then there is still hope. In addition to the ultimate ‘your decision matters’ feature there is also open PvP where players must police themselves, mysterious magic that allows limited players to learn witchcraft, and a top notch crafting system which will rely on players to create items and buildings. MMORPG.com wrote a preview on it recently. If the Salem developers can deliver this is going to be much more than a game, it’s going to be an experience that is Legen- wait for it. Dary!
The Secret World
The Secret World is about three secret societies waging war on each in large realm vs. realm settings. The keyword is ‘three’. Where games like World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and The Old Republic failed in faction based PvP is that with two sides one will always be better. You will never have balanced long term battles unless you queue for instances that don’t affect the overall world. The Secret World fixes that by adding a third faction, something that worked very well for Dark Age of Camelot a decade ago. Secret World also has skill based leveling which is typically reserved for more sandbox games, which this probably won’t be. Further working for it is that Funcom has developed two MMORPGs before. Working against it is that Funcom has had two of the worst MMORPG launches in history. Time will tell if I will find a home within the Illuminati.
Of these five games, I predict three successes for what they are setting out to accomplish. A MMORPG like Salem isn’t out to conquer WoW, but if done well, could easily find a strong and loyal niche like that in Eve Online. I’m happy to see some innovation and strong evolution in 2012. It’s been a while since something set out to change the genre and actually succeeded. We are rarely treated to more than one MMORPG with long term potential, but this year will be different. This is going to be a year full of tough decisions and lack of sleep for many MMO enthusiasts.
Atlus just sent over 1,000 promotional keys for their RvR centric MMORPG, Pandora Saga. We’re passing those on to our visitors for free, and it doesn’t take much to get them. You can either leave a comment and we will email you, email our support box, or post in this forum thread and we will send you a private a message.
So just what do these promotional keys get you? How about these goodies below:
Premium One-Day Ticket
When used, the following bonuses will be granted for 24 hours: experience gain will increase by 30%, your item drop rate will increase by 20%, and your death penalty will become 2%.
Short Sword +5
A weapon used by warriors-in-training.
Club +5
A blunt wooden weapon.
Knife +5
A dagger that even beginners can use.
Wand +5
A wand that increases magical strength. Not intended to be used for physical attacks.
Gamebeson +5
Clothing typically worn underneath armor.
Gyanbose Cuisses +5
Quilted leg armor.
Quilted Gloves +5
Quilted gloves worn to protect your hands.
Quilted Boots +5
Quilted footwear worn to protect your feet.
If you’ve heard about Pandora Saga and want to play this is a pretty cool opportunity. If you haven’t heard of it, you can read our Pandora Saga review.
The end of 2011 is nigh. It’s a natural time to look back through the past year and to look forward to next year. Our average number of visits has grown by 1000% since the first week of January. I don’t expect that sort of growth to continue, but I do hope to see another good year. The question is how do we get there, and the answer, unsurprisingly, is you!
When this site was first created, the only goal was to create a site where MMO gamers could find new games more quickly and easily. We distill MMORPGs down to a few core bullet points and categories. No more lengthy reviews – YAY! Our mission hasn’t changed, but we have run into an inadvertent problem. We have created a site for people to get in and out as easily as possible. It’s not as pretty as some other sites out there (though we will be going through some minor redesigns in 2012), but it is super functional. This means people don’t stick around once they find their new game. Thus, a lot of our unique content falls by the way side and our forums are rarely used.
I set up a contest for the site to run for a month between November and December in order to raise the level of activity on the forum. We were giving away around $500 in prizes to US residents but under 100 people entered the contest. About 6,000 people read the contest page but only around 1% of those actually signed up. The process was pretty simple – requiring only to create an account on our site and then to click a check box. Was this too much for the type of visitors we attract? Perhaps since What MMORPG is still fairly new, there wasn’t a high enough trust level that we would actually give out the prizes? Is it possible people didn’t want to have to make one forum post a day to maximize their entries? I don’t think there were any technical difficulties and if there were, nobody contacted us about them. It’s a shame because the more successful these kinds of contests are, the more we can give back to the community in terms of similar giveaways.
Creating a real community has to be a goal for any website and it certainly is for What MMORPG. We may run some more contests in the future, but we’ll need to rethink how we do this. Certainly we are welcome to any ideas our visitors may want to share. In the mean time, we will continue providing the great, unique content offerings we always have. We hope you have had a great 2011 and will enjoy an even better 2012!
Posted in General, Update
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Months upon months of free World of Warcraft await one lucky winner. Might that winner be you? Oh, you play Rift you say? Have no fear for we are giving gift cards to the game of your choice. It’s pretty simple, really. We launched a contest that will be running until December 14th. As long as you have a user account on our forum you can sign up. If you haven’t used our forum, it’s free just like pretty much every other forum you’ve ever seen. That means the contest is free too! Winners will receive anywhere from 1 month to 1 year of their subscription paid for to their favorite MMORPG. OK, technically it’s 30 days to 360 days thanks to how these gift cards work but it’s damn close to a year. If you are currently playing a free MMO we are also willing to instead give out the equivalent value in gift cards to Aeria Games, Outspark, Perfect World, Runes of Magic, and gPotato games.
So what do we get out of it? We want to see What MMORPG rise in popularity as place for gamers, especially of the MMO variety, to discuss their games. To encourage greater participation, entrants will receive an additional entry for every day they make at least one, measly post on our forum.
If you are interested in signing up, read the overview and rules here. If you don’t have one, register for a forum account(free). Otherwise just head over to the contest entry page and log in to your account. You’ll see a friendly box that you will need to check and after that you are all good to go.
The past month or so has seen the release of, and our review of, several new online, multiplayer strategy games. Certainly some are more innovative than others, some offer better usability, and some are just…well…at least new games to you and me. There are a few other MMORPGs of the non-strategy variety and a hybrid that could also be worth trying. Without further ado, let’s get this game show started.
As are expectedly pretty common additions, fantasy and medieval historical themed worlds dominate the browser based strategy gaming space. Castle Empire is a pretty cool rendition of the sim/strategy series, Settlers. There’s a bit more to the PvE stages of the game which is great for casual players and is a good learning experience for those that really want to get serious about the game. Golden Age has some typical strategy components but adds in some nifty RPG features. It’s a good choice for someone looking for a new hybrid. 1100AD is very similar to games like Tribal Wars and Travian but does a few things better and a few things worse. On the bad side, it’s mainly slow to load and sometimes unintuitive. However, it boasts greater strategic and tactical options than several free online strategy games. So if you can stomach it’s flaws you may find a hidden gem. I’ll also mention Godfather: Five Families. It’s nothing to special, but if you enjoy the Godfather movies and strategy games it could be worth playing.
Keeping up with the trend of new browser game releases comes Crystal Saga. The cute, cartoon style graphics are very impressive for a browser MMORPG. Crystal Saga offers an AFK leveling system which I’m generally not fond of, but is a great addition for a browser MMORPG. Crystal Saga is pretty generic feeling as far as MMORPGs go, but features like AFK leveling, fast travel, and pet evolution could really go a long way for a gamer looking for a easy, browser experience.
There are also a couple of newer large, download required releases. The first, Elsword, is a 2D side scrolling anime, action MMORPG. That short description should pretty much sell you on or turn you off from Elsword. Like other side scrolling MMORPGs, it’s heavily instanced based. It does provide harder challenges, and the animations on skills and special moves is impressive. Rise of Immortals will close out this blog post. It’s a MOBA/MMORPG hybrid where the majority of gameplay revolves around matches similar to Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends. Rise takes another step in this direction by leveling up individual champions to create further persistence between games as well as providing a graphical hub world for people to walk within between matches.
Hopefully one of these MMORPGs sounds like it will be worth a try and if not, there are plenty of other MMORPG choices available.
Dark Souls released in North America on October 4th to many strong reviews for both PS3 and Xbox360. I’ve been playing, enjoying, and suffering through Dark Souls a ton over the past 3 weeks. In short, if you enjoy precise combat with difficult and rewarding gameplay this is a game worth checking out.
Dark Souls can be played entirely as a single player action RPG, but it’s multiplayer components are quite innovative. Perhaps innovative enough for us to label it a MMORPG by today’s standards. If nothing else, there is only one game that can offer a similar multiplayer experience and that is the spiritual “prequel” Demon’s Souls.
Ten years ago when Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron’s Call were running strong, the definition of an MMORPG seemed to be a lot more clear. You had thousands of players potentially all able to interact with each other simultaneously in any or almost any part of the game world. The difficulty in determining a MMORPG lies in the first M of the acronym. A game that’s multiplayer and online and a RPG obviously qualifies as a MORPG. Games like Rusty Hearts and Vindictus are considered MMORPGs but other than seeing other characters in town, gameplay is generally limited to only 4 simultaneous players. So what is it that makes a game massive and does Dark Souls have what it takes?
First, for those that don’t know, Dark Souls offers each player their own personal world with the ability for players to interact with others’ worlds. Players take control over an undead character that can temporarily turn into a human. Turning into a human allows players to help one another tackle bosses as well as invade and kill each other, all for the benefit of more humanity as well as souls, the currency of Dark Souls. Players can also join one of nine covenants that allow deeper interaction, but primarily interaction revolves around the aforementioned. At the very most, only 4 players can occupy a single game world simultaneously.
Surely four players doesn’t constitute whatever massive is? But what about the hundreds of thousands who have purchased Dark Souls? You can potentially interact with any of these characters at any time, assuming you are on the same console system. One major difference between Dark Souls and a game like Rusty Hearts is that the game essentially summons strangers to help you, making it sometimes difficult to play with a friend. The other restriction is that players must be within a narrowly defined level set in order to interact. That’s not too terribly different from the majority of MMORPGs where differences in level and content accessibility essentially restrict interactivity. However, they are still able to generally trade and at least converse with another which is a feature lacking from Dark Souls. Some players are also reporting connection issues which the developer is currently working to patch.
The fact that there are restrictions doesn’t negate that there hundreds of thousands of players who you can interact with given the right circumstances. I know the developers aren’t advertising the game as a MMORPG and they shouldn’t. It’s not what exactly what we’re used to and it’s quite the departure from a game like World of Warcraft. But if we’re going to call games with 4 player instanced missions MMORPGs then we damn well better call Dark Souls a MMORPG.
Last week I took a look at school starting patterns by week based on traffic levels at What MMORPG, which has a significant high school and college aged population. Ultimately, I think we pinned down most schools started the fourth week of August. There is also some evidence to suggest that the beginning of school is either more time consuming or more stressful than a few weeks later. However, the change in traffic isn’t as significant as we see from the first week in August versus the fourth week.
Continuing this idea, I created a similar chart for indexed traffic by day during the same time period as the chart from last week. My apologies go out to those who may have trouble reading the dates. The main date I will call attention to is August 30th, which is a Tuesday. As the the lowest point on the chart and as a day during, which I assumed earlier, is the week by which most schools have started I think this is the actual day most schools start.
Obviously weekends always produce higher traffic than weekdays. Weekends are rest days for everyone and there are few better ways to relax than a nice video game. What is intriguing about the after affect of schools being in session is the disparity between weekends and weekdays. It’s fairly intuitive that gamers are going to get their gaming in and that weekends provide full, free days which allow for that. It’s still a stark contrast between the high point of Sunday, September 18 vs Sunday, August 7 when few to no schools had started.
Certainly some conclusions could be wrong, and if so inclined, I could look up further data to support or disprove my analysis. Still, that doesn’t change how interesting it is to look at some type of a pattern like schools starting classes with something as nontraditional as a video game website’s traffic records. Hope this was worth the read and feel free to comment or contact our support for any other interesting things we can analyze with our traffic.
School is pretty much in full swing now and the reason I know isn’t because I’m stalking starting class schedules across the country. The traffic levels at whatmmorpg.com have continued to rise as a whole, discounting seasonality. However, in August we started to see a decline that has been steadily worsened around the end of August and early September. A drop of 10% isn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly significant enough to indicate a major shift. Being the end of summer and a reasonable portion of What MMORPG visitors being high school and college students, I think we can surmise school starting is the culprit. With two full weeks in September behind us, I thought it would be interesting to take note of our traffic levels to see just what is going on around schools in the country.
All of these charts on done on an index basis so anything at 1.00 on the chart is the highest volume day or week. Everything else is a relative percentage compared to that max value. With that said, let’s get started. The first chart below is weekly for the past six weeks. You will see a small dip starting with week #2 (Aug 8-14) that dips again slightly at week #3 (Aug 15-21). I’m not aware of any schools that started as early as August 8 so I believe that’s more representative of getting ready for the school year to start, last minute family trips, and a general decrease in summer fun.
The second, and much more significant, drop is at week #4 (Aug 22-28). While some schools did start as early as the week of August 15, this data suggests that most schools started class sometime during the week of August 22. There’s probably some mix of college students arriving on campus starting as early as week #2. I assume that college students arrive roughly the same length of time before school actually starts so the weekly graph should still be telling of what week classes actually begin. With a final drop in week #5 (Aug 29 – Sep 4), I believe most schools have started classes. However, we see a rise in traffic in two consecutive weeks (Sep 5 – 11, Sep 12 – 18) immediately following week #5. As school has finally kicked into gear at this point it’s very possible gamers are looking to squeeze in some more gaming time to counter the drudgery of their educational woes. As such it is possible there were a few schools that started during weeks #6 and #7. I do feel that it’s safe to say the majority of schools in the US (where we receive 80%+ of our traffic) start class the fourth week of August.
Within the next week I will follow up to this post with a look at our daily chart during the same time frame. That should give us a few more areas of interest to poke around. Kids, enjoy your classes!
World of Warcraft is at last joining the free to play crowd. Well…sort of. The game is still pay to play but the World of Warcraft Starter Edition does away with the limited time trial that Blizzard used to offer and replaces it with a new 100% free experience. How does it hold up versus other free to play games?
Overall, it’s an OK experience but unless you are using this as a quick and easy WoW fix it’s going to provide a lot of long term enjoyment. All race and class combinations are available which is a leg up on games like Lord of the Rings Online. So starting out you really won’t notice a difference from pay to play World of Warcraft. There’s no limit to questing and your character is just as powerful as any other noob.
It starts to go downhill when you want to experience the main crux of an MMO: socialization. You can’t mail other players (probably for spam reasons) but worse is that you can’t even form a party! I know World of Warcraft is solo friendly but really that’s pretty lame. You’ll need to find a party leader under level 20 who is willing to invite you if you want to experience WoW’s grouping. Oh and you don’t get access to public chat. You might as well pretend all the other players are NPCs with as much human interaction as you’ll be getting.
In fact it becomes pretty clear just how limited this free to play World of Warcraft really is. Below are some of the most major limitations:
・ A player can only have a maximum of 10 gold.
・ A player cannot trade through the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player.
・ A player can’t speak on the public chat channels. The chat is limited to whispers, /say and party chat. (If the player can find a person he can party with.)
・ A player can’t create or join a guild.
・ A player cannot ‘whisper’ other players unless that player is on the friends list.
・ A player can’t form a party but can be invited in to parties from a full WoW player.
・ Voice chat is disabled.
・ Starter edition players will be pushed back in any log-in queues.
Clearly a lot of the above is to prevent spammers from ruining the experience for other players. Yet there are plenty of free to play games that have solved this problem without such harsh measures against it’s free players. While the World of Warcraft starter edition is an improvement over the week long free trial, it’s a barely.
If your goal is to find a good free to play game, look elsewhere. If your goal is to play World of Warcraft just buy the game. The Starter Edition is not going to drive repeated logins.
This is more of an FYI than anything else. Over the next couple weeks we are going to test some new site designs and layouts. Some changes will be bigger than others. Feel free to give us any feedback you would like but we’ll be monitoring how the new layouts get used.
With that said, we currently have the first new layout/theme up and running. Hope it’s well received but if not it will only take a few minutes to revert back to the old site so no worries!
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