WTS one crystal ball; Doesn't see the future, but makes a cracking paper weight!

Hullo, Hullo, assorted readers! The inspiration for today's article comes largely from a discussion I had the other night with a friend. We were waxing philosophical, ahem, about a certain popular MMO (let your imagination run wild) and talking about the future. It got me thinking about the state of the whole genre now and what might be coming to us SOON (TM). First, a riddle!

Rankin Bass Hobbit, best Hobbit

This thing all things devours:

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down...

Now, of course most of you know that this is a riddle that Gollum gives to Bilbo in The Hobbit. If you remember, the answer to this riddle in particular is quite hard for poor Bilbo to suss out. In fact, he yells out the answer in an inadvertent attempt to get Gollum to not eat him. Time. The reason I bring up this riddle isn't to get poetic or philosophical with you, but instead because I want to first talk about the concept of a "WoW killer." You see, for as long as World of Warcraft has been popular, people have been touting every new game with a small glimmer of promise as a "WoW killer." If you are a follower of MMO games, then you will be quite familiar with the fact that, in truth, none of these games could quite live up to that feat. However, I've met the actual murderer of WoW. Time. Now before we get bogged down into a semantic debate about what constitutes the actual demise of WoW, let me elaborate. Do I think that it will ever really, truly go offline in the near future? Of course not! There will always be people who will play it, just as there are STILL people who play Ultima Online, EverQuest, and even Asheron's Call. Instead, I am just referring to an eventual decline (that I firmly believe we are sailing into currently) that will result in World of Warcraft no longer being the "face" of the massively multiplayer online role playing game genre anymore. Want proof? Look at the subscriber numbers. Plot them on a chart, it's easy to see that with each successive year (and expansion), WoW is going through a cycle of departing and returning players. Only, each year less and less actually make the trip back to Azeroth.

Bowling ball or crystal ball? You decide.

This naturally leads me to wonder; Well, what's in the oven? To be honest, if you do a search for future MMO games it can really make your head spin. It seems that over the past five years it has become hip to slap this tag on your game, even if players are only vaguely connected to each other. So for the sake of keeping myself and all of you sane, I'm only going to be focusing on games in the more traditional vein of massively multiplayer games. You know the drill, many players, together, on some form of a "world" that have the option of interacting with each other. Yeah, it's a fairly murky definition, but I think you know what I mean. Let's take a peek, shall we?

What would an MMO market be without an EverQuest offering? Hmm? Of course there will be another EverQuest attempting to break into the market again soon. EverQuest Next is our first contender, ladies and gentleman, for next biggest thing! What really stands out about this iteration of the series is the raw ambition of the game. Everything will be destructible. I'm not sure how that will work out with towns, but the idea of being able destroy/shape anything I damn-well-please definitely has my chops slavering. It also instill a certain amount of trepidation, as well. Being that their current plans are to have this game back free to play, you can bet that a large contingent of trolls (not the fantasy type) will be around, just to make your life hell. Details about the game are still somewhat sparse, owing to the stage of development that it's in, but it also seems like they are loosing the bonds a bit on class restrictions. The tricky part about this is that they will definitely not want to give players so much freedom that it gives birth to a super complex system of character development. Sure, for an advanced players, that sounds absolutely swell. We have to face the facts though, my friends, for any new game coming out to truly succeed it will have to be accessible. Just look at a game like Darkfall. An amazing concept that seems to truly hearken back to games like Ultima Online, but doomed to fail because the game isn't very new player friendly. (and, apparently, neither are the players, heh)

Moving on with our cavalcade of contenders, next up is a game that player versus player enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting. Camelot Unchained is an upcoming release from City State Entertainment (never heard of them? me neither.) and designer Mark Jacobs. If the name didn't sound vaguely familiar to you, allow me to enlighten you further. This game is being brought to you by the exact same guy who made Dark Age of Camelot, which many people feel was the most balanced PVP game ever. Just like DAoC, Camelot Unchained is promising realm vs realm vs realm combat, or as Mr. Jacobs is calling it, "Tri-Realm" combat. Being that this game is fairly fair along in development (2016 release, first beta phase imminent), there are quite a number of features of the game listed on the website. In a move that reminds me strongly of the word of power from Ultima Online, spell creation will focus on combining runes and reagents to powerful effect. Instead of being presented with the normal progression of "fireball 1, fireball 2, et al.", players will be able to customize their spells for use in specific situations. It sounds extremely interesting to me, but I just wonder how new player friendly it will be. This is only one of the interesting things that I read about when researching for this article, so if you are looking for a game that might skew a little bit more on the deep or challenging side, this might be worth reading up on!

I'm confused on multiple levels, here

And in the "most likely to be cosplayed" category, we have an offering from Korean company NCSOFT, Blade & Soul. For those of you familiar with NCSOFT's offerings, you'll certainly see the common threads that B&S shares with other games. Visually, it seems to be quite stunning. Screenshots and videos that I saw showed a great variety of environments, all rendered beautifully. The character animations seem very well done as well, and for people who really enjoy, uh, "customizing" their avatars, this game will really appeal to them. Stylistically, the game certainly resembles another NCSOFT offering that most of us will be familiar with, Guild Wars 2, The combat Blade & Soul isn't trying to revolutionize the genre, for sure, but are instead focused on improving the existing concept. I'm quite surprised at how amazing the graphics of this game look, being that it saw it's first release in South Korea a few years ago, but GW2 has also held up fairly well, so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. Anyways, if you are looking for more of the same, but fresher, Blade & Soul is set to release later this year in North America.
seems fast paced and action driven, with a great deal of movement and flair accompanying skill usage.

Now, are there a few other games that I could've written about in this article? Certainly. However, I chose these three games as a representative of some of the various options we will have presented to us over the next year-ish. (EverQuest Next, who knows?) In my own opinion, we will continue to see an increasing number of games enter the market with "massively multiplayer" features and at some point we may even see that moniker get completely dropped because it will become the norm. It will be more rare to see a game without some sort of online functionality that connects players to each other. We like to play games with each other, because at best it can lead to a completely different in game experience, and at worst, well, you just turn the game off! I'll be back at you on Friday with another article, folks. Take care!