The state of MMO's in 2013! I always meant to write something about MMO's and haven't before. Probably because they just bore me to tears these days... In the beginning they were fun and new, so many people all together in these new "worlds" to explore and play in together! Then there were seemingly endless same-ol boring cookie-cutter re-hashes of the same early ones. Last couple years been a whole bunch of "lobby shooters" spewed out masquerading as MMO's... pvp-pay-to-"win" junk. People have a strange difficulty understanding what makes a game pay-to-"win", it seems simple to me, if you're buying advantage then it's pay-to-"win", simple. People have gotten all worked up about them as if they were so wonderful, BAH! Thngs like anything made by Wargaming.net, the russian-mobster pay-to-"win" people who have forever claimed (till recently where they finally admitted it) they weren't pay-to-"win". But who now all-of-a-sudden said they will be removing all pay-to-"win" from their game (without giving concrete details). Wonder if the fanbois will now finally admit to the truth of it, or continue their pathetic fawning worship of this juvenile UN-balanced pvp-trash ...?

But there is some hope! The Asian-market has been creating some things that (if we ever see them in the west) may be above the crap we have currently in the west these days. Archeage comes to mind (I can do without the cat-people, but it's a staple of Asian-market MMO's what's to be done?), it looks fun and to have a greater sandbox depth then what we've seen in recent years in the west. I don't and won't mention any of the recent "action" type so-called MMO's (even when they really are MMO's) as I am no fan of turning MMO's into arcade button-mashers. Not that I don't luv a old-school arcade game now and again, I just don't have any stomach for turning MMO's into "action" hyper-kinetic button-mashers. I have yet to see any of those games that I've been impressed with.

I actually am liking what I'm reading about The Elder Scrolls Online, and am hopeful about it. And yes there is EverQuest Next, of which we know almost nothing except that they scraped and re-did a earlier version (I agree with this article, we need a return to actual consequences, bring back the corpse-runs!) that they themselves were not happy with, this says something at least about SoE's determination to get it right (at least I hope so)! As a fan of the original EverQuest back in it's glory days of Kunark I am hopeful. EQ2 was fun before the Shadow Odyssey took it down bad directions (IMHO), and it's now at a point where, it's just not aged well (again IMHO), gotten ridiculous with crazy-armor/mounts/appearance-pets, etc. that tend to come along with "free-to-pay". They are planning on actually showing it in just a few weeks time, and we will finally get a look, get some real details! There is talk that they may well be planning a launch this year, we'll see. Maybe, finally the long awaited and longed for MMO's renaissance is coming!