(Sidenote to readers: Bare with me, that's not supposed to be a World of Warcraft praising post and of course is a personal opinion)

Five years ago Blizzard showed the world that MMOs can be a profitable genre. With 11 million advertised users (should be around 2millions EU and NA players) it still remains the most successful mmo ever. Since then a couple triple A mmos tried to conquer the throne and either failed miserably or survived with huge losses. Namely, Aoc, Warhammer Online and Aion. Will see later what this games did wrong.

As I like to say, the mmo genre is saturated. That pretty much means first that initially at release it's more likely for already mmo players to switch to a new mmo than new players or non mmo players, on the other hand, the million of people that are on f2p mmos are less likely to switch to a p2p for several reasons. With that said a new triple A mmo should aim to attract new players and offer new ideas for veteran players and ofcourse as you can't rely on an advertisement campaign to appeal to new players someone would be safer with offering something new.
Of course all this is useless if developers ignore the basics. Enough Content and variety, Questing over Grinding and minimizing lag/bugs, is it internet or graphic/UI lag.

Let's get back to our three candidates and see what went wrong.
Age of Conan did a clever move trying to add a new touch to mmos. A combo system, great graphics, and a mature flavor helped it to nearly reach the one million mark. A month and some days later the game was a shadow of its majestic release. What went wrong, is for one, not enough content, and for another a bugged engine which pushed developers to introduce zones in what should be an open world. While players could oversee the zoned world, they couldn't close another eye for the content issue. The same time AoC dropped to 100k subscribers Blizzard announced that players left for the new mmo had returned.

Warhammer Online on its turn, went another way. Developers tried to advertise with clever videos through their blogs. What they didn't think about was that when you present something as the coolest thing ever, you should at least manage to make it work in games. The game launched with two less carriers and 4 cities taken out. Of course with 800k pre-orders the games was still to be a success. But after a failed closed beta, a failed open beta and several game breaking bugs at release the developers managed to shoot themselves in the foot. A month later and the game was half dead.

Aion was supposed to do everything right and from the sound of it, it seemed to go the right way. Ncsoft is known for games like Lineage, which admittedlywas a great success, but also for the grinding of its mmos. Ncsoft west promised that the game would be westernized, was it the quest or the grinding or the design itself. The games launch was a success. Huge logon queue times were a problem for many players that wanted to get their hands on the game, of course this was also a good sign for the success story of this game. But then a month later and when players managed to reach 30s in the game.. grinding overtook fun and the future of the game was pretty much signed.

You see, all this games followed a different strategy but failed to keep players amused for more than a month and that was because they violated at least one of the basic laws to a good mmo. What gets the player from a game that offers appealing graphics but no content? How will the hype keep players amused, when things that were promised either aren't implemented or if they are, do not work at all? How is it supposed to be fun when you use grinding as a placeholder for what should be a variety of Quests and content?
And of course at least for the later two games, how are players supposed to stay to a mmo and endure all it's failures when it feels exactly as their old one but in a new but dirty dress? Nor to say that they left in the first place because the seek something new.

With that in mind we can go on and throw a glimpse to the near future of mmos.
EA got into clas sic mmos with Warhammer Online. It's probably a publishers dream, after watching Activision/Blizzard milk their "cash" cow, to get their own. Warhammer Online has a near death experience and while the devs.. the remaining devs.. try to save what they can with a number of very good patches the numbers, at least for Europe (personal experience) don't look good at all. The next multi million dollar franchise for EA is Bioware's Star Wars the Old Republic. This game is promising in many ways. First it's developed by Bioware, which means it's not gonna lack neither content wise nor ''Ooooh'' moment wise. Ofcourse Bioware isn't know for bug free games either and while no one denies that an RPG isn't the easiest thing to program then you got to admit that an MMORPG with all the stuff they promised must be hell. And while there are enough Star Wars or Bioware fans that would endure the possible bugs at release, the similarity to its mmo predecessors are undeniable. Some would say that's a good thing as you get easily used to it, ofcourse what's new to offer when you use the same static mechanic as all other mmos do. Fights should be the same, instances would be again the same story as in all other mmos the same goes for pvp. What helps if you call a castle a space ship or Icecrown, Tatooine or whaterver.
Don't get me wrong I'll be the first to pre-order after the beta if I am satisfied, i am myself at least a bit of a star wars fan, but i can't be conviniced by what i saw till now for the reasons above.

The next mmo with a 2010 or early 2011 release date is Tera Online. Now this is a promising a mmo. Tera Online is not a mmorpg in the ****c sense of the word, but is rather an action based mmo. Fighting in tera is still triggered with buttons, but you can't click and attack an enemy, but you have to focus as you would in an fps. This in combination with it's great engine and it can call it a next Gen mmo. This new game mechanin (at least for a mmo), opens new possibilities to game designers, as for instance more realistic boss fights, or even wars as you can see in some official videos. The only reason for the game to fail is if it stands to it's Korean origins and grinding overtakes what should be fun content and variety.

to be continued and revised..

LINKS:

SWTOR:
A Hard look at combat in SWTOR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGB9aoum9a4

SWTOR: Republic Trooper Gameplay at PAX Demonstration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHicEVREAAk

TERA ONLINE:>

TERA online 2nd CBT - PvE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWF_xlD5WSI

Tera Online Gameplay Large Battles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt_GebWeP_s