FFXIV release date announced, concern over early release.

FFXIV is shipping only a year after being announced.

Normally in the world of MMOs they are announced years before their release.
FFXIV however was only announced a year ago and now it's recently confirmed
PC release date of September 30th 2010 and PS3 release date of March 2011 for the
US is raising concerns.

The game was announced last year at E3 2009 and came as a complete shock to
the audience. No game normally gets that far into development and remains a
secret so it was probably the most shocking thing of last years E3.

Although alot of people seem to be concerned recently about the low amount of
development time put into FFXIV what they may not realize is that the MMO has
actually been under development for many years before FFXIV was announced
under the codename "Rapture".

Also the crystal tools engine, Square Enix's own world creation software is likely speeding up development by a incredible amount. Crystal Tools was used to develop FFXIII which was in development forever. Because of this the team working on FFXIV is likely very familiar with the software.

Having said all this however FFXI released in japan a year earlier then the US back in
2003 with very little "endgame content" and what was there was incredibly
disappointing compared to what came a year later. Still if your looking for a
more traditional teamwork based MMO with what is likely to be the best
graphics and music around then FFXIV is what your looking for.

You can learn more about FFXIV and now even preorder from the link below.

FFXIV

Potential threat to MMO’s detected!

The Government may soon control the internet completely.

There has been some talk recently over the “Internet Kill Switch” proposal. The bill would give the government the ability to shut down the internet in a state of emergency caused by some kind of attack on our nation’s network. The bill would also give the government the ability to shut off and censor certain parts of the internet.

On one hand it would really suck if another country or terrorist group developed some sort of sophisticated network attack and we had no kind of failsafe in place to respond. On the other hand we would be handing a lot more power and the ability to censor the internet to our government bringing us a step closer to living like China.

What do you think of the “Internet Kill Switch?”

E3 brings a new round of fail to look foward to PART 3 of 3

E3 is over, so let's finish up with the few remaining MMOs of the future.

- Guild Wars 2
This game wasn't being shown at E3 on purpose since the developers believe their game is for the players and E3 isn't. This game promises to change the way MMOs work. It promises no more questing but a dynamically changing world that responds to every players actions and decisions. Promising to much? probably.

- All Points Bulletin
This game is basically a better version of Grand Theft Auto as an MMO focused on pvp and character customization. It plays more like a first person shooter then a MMO. The lack of long term progression because of the way it plays may have subscribers leaving to play games like call of duty instead of paying for a game that charges by the hour, or month.

- DC universe
Superhero MMOs tend to have a limited audience. This game also doesn't seem to add anything really new to the genre.


The best hope for the future of MMOs likely lies with either Star Wars: The Old Republic or Final Fantasy 14. If neither succeed, there is always WOW:Cataclysm. You can check out some of these more promising titles in the links below.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Final fantasy 14
WoW: Cataclysm

E3 brings a new round of fail to look foward to PART 2 of 3

Let's Continue with the problems of E3's future MMOS...

- Final Fantasy XIV
This game is probably not what most people expect based on how Final Fantasy XI, the first Final Fantasy MMO, turned out. FFXIV will have much slower teamwork based combat which is more about strategy then most newer MMOS. This is likely to be a big disappointment for the newer MMO generation who are expecting fast paced combat that require alot less coordination between players and are often filled with non stop instant gratification.

The recently released benchmark program for the game only seems to be doing well on the best top of the line computers, which is an extremely small market. The game does have a probably toned down version releasing for PS3 as well however and the Benchmark isn't always the best indicator of how the final product will run.

- The secret world
Everything about this game is still, well a secret. What we do know is that it's a MMO with a dark fantasy setting (zombies, vampires etc). There are almost no Dark Fantasy MMOs currently on the market so this may only appeal to a very limited audience.

This game is also created by FUNCOM whose last MMO Age of Conan had a horrible 2 year start and is only recently starting to recover with it's new expansion.

Look for part 3 of the E3 MMOs that will likely fail coming soon...
In the upcoming parts we will look at the MMOS below.

Guild Wars 2
All Points Bulletin
DC Universe

E3 brings a new round of fail to look foward to PART 1 of 3

This last week was the 2010 Entertainment Electronics Expo (aka E3) and with

it came an overflowing amount of new information on future MMOS.

Since the majority of mmos ever released can be considered failures in many
different ways, this new group of mmos is likely to fail as well. Here are
some of the reasons each of these soon to be released MMOS could possibly
fail.

- WOW: Cataclysm
This isn't a new mmo but simply a expansion, however it is going to redo the
entire world of warcraft and replace it with something brand new. How could
this fail? Well alot of people may end up preferring the old world.

- Star Wars, The Old Republic
This game seems to be focusing on single player style content (like Mass
Effect) when it's targeting the Massively multi player market (It remains to
be seen how much of the game is really going to be single player driven.

This game also has the biggest budget ever for a EA game, EA being one of the
biggest game companies ever. This could mean a Massive failure from a
financial standpoint if the game bombs.

This game happens to be extremely hyped up on the Internet as being the only
game that could actually have a chance of taking World of Warcraft's place or
being the first in 6 years to even come anywhere near close. The insane hype
is likely to lead to massive disappointed even if the game is amazing.

This isn't the first attempt at a star wars MMO. The first attempt turned out
to be one of the biggest failures in MMO history. History does tend to repeat
itself, although with Bioware behind this one I'm not sure that will actually be the case.

Look for parts 2 and 3 of the E3 MMOs that will likely fail coming soon...
In the upcoming parts we will look at the MMOS below.

Final Fantasy XIV
The Secret World
Guild Wars 2
All Points Bulletin
DC Universe

Why Warhammer became Failhammer

Warhammer online continues the trend of failure in MMOS despite it's efforts.

It would be hard to argue that Warhammer online hasn't failed when the game launched with around 70 servers and now has dwindled down to a mere 4 servers with only two of them still being somewhat populated. The remaining population is mostly free players limited to the starting zones leaving higher areas as ghost towns.

Here are some of the reasons this MMO failed...

- Population imbalance. This MMO needed a third realm like DAoC so that the two
weaker sides could ally against the strong side.

- No real game economy.

- Developers adding content rather then fixing existing content problems.

- Open world PVP is split up into many zones making it take to long to find where
everyone is.

- The gameplay is the same at level 1 as level 40.

- The in game mail servers are always laggy or down completely.

- Not very involved crafting.

- One of its best features (Public Quests) are always bugged, except in the
free trial area. Although this lead to most new MMOs using this feature
themselves.

- At launch the focus at endgame was about PVE when the entire game was
suppose to be based around RVR or PVP.

- There isn't much of a reason not to just play the free endless trial and not
upgrade.

Warhammer's failure is Sad because it is still one of the best pvp mmos and even if all these problems were fixed it wouldn't be able to recover after acquiring its bad reputation. You can try out Warhammer for yourself for free at http://www.warhammeronline.com/