Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling) - Fires of Heaven ************* (Teclisen)

Things like "episodic content," fancy ways of dropping NPCs in the world, zones that are affected by seasons, or trees that grow over time are all just gimmicks. They ultimately are meaningless in the scope of whether or not a game is fun.

The next step in the genre is to take combat in a completely different direction than it has been going in for what seems like an eternity. Any game that immediately just adopts the EQ model, from WoW to LOTR, or even tries to disguise it as an FPS (Tabula Rasa) in my eyes has missed any chance of being the next big game or taking the genre one step further.

It's like most developers immediately glaze over what it's like to actually PLAY the game, and then try to figure out ways to do exactly the same thing you do in every other game (Auto attack, click x ability, wait for mob to kill you) only in a different setting, universe, theme; against a player, group of players, boar, or Illidan; as a hobbit, dwarf, alien, or car; while trying to quest, instance, grind, or battleground it up.

MMO developers need to be looking at the console genre; find out what's popular and capitalize on it. Console games have had thousands of titles to ship and be evaluated by the gaming public, ironing out what types of game play players enjoy most. Capcom has it down to a science. Console games are almost always on a mass appeal level easily comparable to WoW and dwarfs any other MMO on the market. Console games focus on game play and player enjoyment, are almost never social experiments and demand a level of refinement almost unheard of in the MMO business.

The comparisons between WoW and successful console titles are very apparent and by no means coincidental. Mark my words: the next big MMO that will even come close to challenging WoW will be available on the 360, PS3 and PC, and will be played by both the same people currently addicted to WoW and the 3 million people who are going to purchase Halo 3 in September.

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