Case and point? The Wii.

I’m glad you rememered to mention EVE as the sole exception to the EQ template, at least among western examples. I’m not convinced that the Agency will be the next generation, but from what I’m hearing it has a shot, and I’m very curious to see how it pans out.

It’s true that some folks get hung up on ‘New’, but I also think many of us get hung up on ‘Not New Enough’ – especially the old, jaded types that have been doing this for several years. Not everybody finds themselves in that situation, however, and there are those who are still looking for a game to settle down for a couple of years in. I’m not sure if WAR will be that game for me, although I’m having fun so far; if it turns out to be, it may have at least as much to do with Casualties as anything in the game itself.

The measure of a game, old or new, is in how much fun it is to play, not whether it’s revolutionary or not.

The Agency on the other hand, looks to take what’s good about co-op shooters, and what’s good about team based shooters, and turn that into a persistent world MMOG. There’ll still be quests, and levels, and loot… and I’m fairly certain a lot of it will be a DIKU MMOG in a Spy v. Spy setting.

In the meantime, while they may be 10 years and counting, the traditional MMOG does work well, it is still being refined, and I’m glad we’re starting to see more trips into different venues. I just hope a few are successful. The last few to try something different haven’t done well, and that can likely be blamed on poor game design from the getgo.

I’ll be intrigued to see what BioWare does with KotoR. Will it play like everything else, but with a more intense story? Or will it actually do some things different, and try to recapture the old SWG days. With EA behind them, I’m betting the former. Why? Because market trends show that’s where the money is.

I’m looking forward to the next generation; I’m looking forward to “new” and “different” even if it means I don’t like or play the particular games that herald in the new era. But I’m also ok with choosing a current generation game or few and sticking with them.

GW is free, so no real sense in “quitting” it when I can play once a week with you guys. I have a lifetime membership to LOTRO so again, no real reason to “quit” when I can simply take a break should the need arise. WAR? I guess I’ll find out next week or so. I’m curious to see if the CoW guild is fun enough to actually get me to melee PvP even though I’m horrible at it, or if I’ll break down and roll a traditional healer (which I don’t really want to do) or just not be interested enough in the game overall? It would be great if both the game and the guild together are enough for me to have a second game for my off-nights from LOTRO, but with the PvP focus I’m doubting my own skills and concerned about having a predominantly asshattish community that PvP tends to draw like flies.

Certainly not disappointed; if anything, the reverse. The Interweb could use less fanboys in general, I reckon. Personally, I’m looking forward to anything *different*, which probably isn’t the same as Better or Worse, hence my remarks about Jumpgate at the time.

Darkfall, on the other hand, is just about as first-gen as you can get. It’s quite literally Ultima Online (pre-Trammel) 3D. It isn’t using levels and classes (but then neither are Champions and Star Trek Online… a welcome trend?) but that was UO. And personally I’m only expecting the old-school UO fans to give a crap about UO3D Darkfall. I’ll prognosticate that in the months following Darkfall’s release it settles with a total population roughly equal to UO’s current population: 75k.