Lord of the Rings Online: Attack of the Clones
I’m going to cut straight to it: this footage is a disaster.
I was going to offer an analysis discussing the endless Clone and Conquer games that followed C&C and *Craft (and which flopped), or the strikingly premature stagnation of the MMO genre, or the proper amount to innovate on a commercial title. I was going to wonder if maybe they weren’t treating this like Just Another License Title.
But let’s be honest. It should be clear to anyone in the MMO sector that you can’t expect to sell gamers on 5 minutes of autoattack footage. If I want to watch two guys occasionally smack each other in between bouts of standing around, I’ll go play my Paladin. Is there something deeper going on? Are they setting up Heroic Opportunities? Would someone at Turbine please try to sell us this game?
August 10th, 2006 at 2:26 am
Yeah, it seems like MMOs are at a disadvantage in terms of preview footage. Their mechanic makes it difficult for them to look as sexy as a single-player game.
Non-MMO people look at that and say, “Huh… looks pretty dull.” MMO people look at it and say, “Huh… looks like the MMO I already play but with different textures.”
Now… the pet-based horror MMO design I put together… that puppy’d look plenty different in previews…
August 10th, 2006 at 2:27 am
(sheds a tear for every great game idea that will never be made)