Ten Ton Hammer’s 2011 MMOG Predictions

It’s that special time when we close out the year that was
and look ahead to the glittering promise of what lies ahead. For MMOGs,
it has been a year of delays ( style="font-style: italic;">DCUO,
SW:TOR),
minor releases ( style="font-style: italic;">STO),
the continuing domination of style="font-style: italic;">World
of Warcraft,
pay-to-play to free-to-play game conversions ( style="font-style: italic;">LotRO,
EverQuest
II Extended, style="font-style: italic;">Pirates of the
Burning Sea,
Champions
Online), and outright
failures (APB).
What lies ahead for the MMOG community? Wonder no more, friends, for
the staffers here at Ten Ton Hammer have made some bold predictions for
2011! Our keen gazes peered deeply into the murky depths of our crystal
balls (or Magic 8 Balls) to see what will be. Will these predictions
hold true? Only time will tell.



To begin, href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/editorials/2010-predictions-review">take
a look back at some hits and
misses of the Ten Ton Hammer staff for their 2010
predictions. Feel free to blame any wrong predictions upon the
corrupting influence of Sauron.



size="+2">PREDICTIONS FOR 2011



Now
that we’ve gotten last year’s predictions out
of the way, it is time to see what predictions the staff at Ten Ton
Hammer will make for 2011. Will they predict that Blizzard’s
next MMOG will be a variant of style="font-style: italic;">Hello
Kitty
called Hello
Doggy? Will style="font-style: italic;">WoW
continue to dominate the market? (Well, actually, that one is a given.
We all know that style="font-style: italic;">WoW
will continue as Blizzard’s license to print
money.)  How will the slew of new MMOGS coming out fare?



size="+1">MEM size="+1">


Mem is one of the newer faces on our style="font-style: italic;">World of Warcraft
team and has a “casually hardcore” focus, which
means that he won’t rub your face in it too hard when he pwns
you.

style="font-style: italic;">World of Warcraft
will add no less than three major content patches, introducing new
bosses, new gear, and new in-game mods by the end of 2011. style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
will just miss being released in 2011, instead being released in
January of 2012. Thanks to Blizzard's previous track record in this
department no one will be surprised at having to wait a full year. Even being free-to-play and
browser-based will not be enough to attract attention or enthusiasm to style="font-style: italic;"> Star Trek: Infinite Space,
and it will fail spectacularly in its first month of life. style="font-style: italic;">DC Universe Online
will attract a modest yet loyal fan base that won't wow anyone with
numbers, but will be enough to keep the game trucking along in what
could potentially be a very long life. Ninety percent of new games
released in 2011 will follow the new free-to-play trend in order to
muster a solid fan base. Games that are not free to play will be
crushed by powerhouses like style="font-style: italic;">World of
Warcraft
and be forced to go free-to-play or face being obliterated from
existence.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/91133"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="diablo 3"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/91133">

Will
Diablo III see the light of day in 2011?

size="+1">MESSIAH

A six year Ten Ton Hammer veteran, Messiah is considered one of the grand old
men at the site. He has covered style="font-style: italic;"> WoW
extensively and definitely lets you know what his true opinion is!

style="font-style: italic;">WoW
will continue to rule the
MMOG space throughout 2011, even though by
halfway through the year, players will once again be complaining it is
way too easy. It is, of course, way too easy, but that is part of its
appeal to the masses. It literally has something for everyone, but not
that much for the serious gamer with any amount of intelligence and
skill. This, of course shows up when you try to PUG a group and get
hunters who don’t know what a trap is. By mid 2011, the
serious intelligent players will once again become frustrated and leave
the game between raid releases. Of course since this only represents 5%
of the gamers playing style="font-style: italic;">WoW,
no one will take notice. style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars: The Old
Republic will be released
this year and will fly off the shelves as fans rush in to pick it up.
It will survive in a serious way for less than six months and then fade
away as people realize it isn't fun when everyone can be a Jedi, and
that the little bit for everyone that style="font-style: italic;">WoW
has is better than pretty much everything else out there. Blizzard may release style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
this coming year, which, while technically not an MMORPG, is still is
very close to one. It will outsell every other MMOG released by any
other company this coming year and maintain more market share for
longer than any other game coming out.

size="+1">GUNKY

Being the staff writer for
Lord
of the Rings Online and a
fanatic to the game, Gunky limited his
predictions to his beloved style="font-style: italic;">LotRO.

When the bloom falls off the
Cataclysm
rose and it begins to seem old (probably around March or April), a
large number of style="font-style: italic;">WoW
players will head over to style="font-style: italic;">LotRO.
They will complain on public chat channels that style="font-style: italic;">LotRO
isn't WoW,
fuelling non-stop arguments that go nowhere, and then probably go back
to WoW. Turbine will reinstate
lifetime subscriptions for about 2 months due to popular demand, but
will drop them again in favor of the microtransactions which earn more
money long-term. The expansion of PvMP and
the inclusion of monster-play in the F2P package will result in even
more heated debate on Turbine forums, with both sides arguing that the
other side is overpowered. In other words, it will be no different than
now, but on a larger scale. Chunks of new content
released in smaller parcels will keep long-time players interested in
the game, but chunks of old content that would benefit greatly from a
revamp will continue to be passed over in favor of flashy new stuff.
Carn Dum, Urugarth, and Barad Gularan will not see any significant
improvements, but new dungeons will be added to North Downs, Evendim,
Mirkwood, and Enedwaith.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/89265"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 421px;"
alt="lord of the rings online"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/89265">

Will
LotRO be plagued by disgruntled WoW players?

size="+1">STOW

Stow is our jack-of-all-trades reviewer and writer. He has a passion
for FPS (and who doesn’t?) and is an addict to RTS games.
Family and friends have been trying to intervene, unsuccessfully, for
years.

style="font-style: italic;">Ragnarok Online 2
will
take
the world by storm, recapturing former players with the music,
graphics, simple gameplay,
and personality of the first game. Gravity
has finally gotten its crap together and is going to retake the
audience that once gave Chaos and Loki 25,000+ active players at any
given time. style="font-style: italic;">DoTA 2
will fail. The same
game with a few social upgrades is not worth the price of admission to
players who have lived their lives on the style="font-style: italic;">Warcraft 3
engine, and also
enjoy all of the other custom maps in-between games. The players who
accepted that moved on to style="font-style: italic;">Heroes of
Newerth,
which is evolving into its
own game somewhat. The style="font-style: italic;">WoW
movie will release
to a blockbuster weekend because tickets come with a free in-game
mount, and then instantly die off... until the Blu-Ray release offers
another one. There will not be a single
non-MMO RTS released in 2011 and I will cry myself to sleep every night
knowing that the genre is dead. Facebook games are a scourge
upon this world, but there comes another important
realization--Facebook is the PC Market now. And as such, so many games
and so many applications will be developed specifically around it. A
recent Square Enix newsletter about upcoming games listed one console
game and three Facebook games. In a way,
Facebook is the new iPhone
market in that it's a rush to see who is the next style="font-style: italic;">Mafia Wars
or Farmville.
I wouldn't doubt if a major developer tried to take over the
market with a AAA MMOG designed around the Facebook experience. The death of the
subscription-based model is around the corner. Microtransactions have
finally won the battle, powered by Turbine's success and the launch of
Blizzard's bullshit cash shop. This is a major defeat for those of us
who want to always be on a level playing field and cannot be influenced
by someone with more cash to throw at his character. F2P with Cash Shop
is the future, and every game is slowly starting to add
to it.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/77040"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 326px;"
alt="left 4 dead"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/77040">

Will
co-op games like L4D rise in prominence?

size="+1">JEFFPRIME

The behind the scenes lackey and occasional writer at Ten Ton
Hammer’s main site, Jeffprime has been gaming since the late
1970s (yes, I’m old) with style="font-style: italic;">Space Invaders
and all other types of games from consoles to pen-and-paper rpgs to
miniature games. Fun fact: he has a degree in medieval history which
explains why he trades his services for a cot next to the Ten Ton
Hammer furnace in the basement.

New games and older games
will increasingly go free-to-play (microtransaction) or a hybrid
F2P/sub model. The primary reason for this is that older games will be
desperate for players and newer games will have nothing original or
innovative to offer to draw people away from their game of choice, be
it WoW,
DDO,
LOTRO,
or EQ2. Facebook will continue to
shake up the online gaming industry. I have personally seen the power
that is da Facebook when watching my two sisters harvest freaking
carrots in Farmville
for hours on end. Zynga, a four year old company
that makes Facebook games, is worth $5.4 Billion, which is more than EA. Co-op games will continue to
rise in prominence. Today's players are more into playing with their
friends or by themselves than with grouping or joining large guilds.
Games like Left
4 Dead and style="font-style: italic;">Borderlands
will continue to gain traction. style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
will not be
released and a great gnashing of teeth will be felt among the Nerd
Force. 2011 will be the year that
the hardcore gamer is truly laid to rest for determining a game's
design and success. The Casual Gamer, also known as 99.8% of the
populace, will be crowned king. Hardcores will become increasingly
strident on internet forums, constantly bitching about the state of
online gaming today, and reminiscing over 8 hour corpse runs and how
awesome it was back in the day. The Silent Majority (Casual Gamers)
will not see the forum posts as they will be busy picking up their kids
from soccer practice and hopefully sneaking in an hour or so of killing
orcs after they put the little hellions to bed.

size="+1">SARDU

Sardu is our hard-working editor of all things style="font-style: italic;">WoW
and whatever else we can slip on his plate when he’s not
looking. He is also our soft-spoken visionary and color commentator,
which doesn’t translate as well as you think when
he’s battling Stow online.

Apart
from a brief teaser
for their next MMOG at BlizzCon 2011, Blizzard Entertainment will
mostly focus on promoting the final raid bosses in style="font-style: italic;">Cataclysm
and StarCraft
II: Heart of the Swarm. A
release window for style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
will also be announced, though it won’t be given a specific
date. The first details for
Blizzard’s next MMOG will, however, be conveniently
“leaked” the same week that ArenaNet announces the
release date for style="font-style: italic;">Guild Wars 2. style="font-style: italic;">Fallen Earth
will continue to build up a critical mass of dedicated fans, closing
out the year with numerous comparisons being made to style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online’s
steady growth over time versus the sparkle and fade launches seen
throughout the industry over the last few years. The first details and
gameplay footage for the Trion Worlds - SyFy joint MMOG project will be
revealed this summer. The game will involve giant
eels/snakes/alligators/doom bees that cause a shift in the
earth’s crust, and players will take on the role of a retired
Army/Navy/Air Force/Marine officer with an estranged husband/wife who
just happens to be the only scientist in the country that can calculate
the exact locations for nuclear warheads to be placed to stop the
devastation caused by earthquakes and the rampaging
eels/snakes/alligators/doom bees at the same time. Doing it any other
way will naturally lead to the end of all life on the plant. There will be more
announcements that triple-A MMOG releases have slipped into 2012 than
there are actual releases before the close of 2011.

size="+1">SAIA

Saia is the newest member of our style="font-style: italic;">WoW
team, which means that he’s responsible for getting the
donuts for staff meetings. He’s also our unofficial European
bureau chief. We don’t know what happened to our last
European bureau chief. According to Saia, “He just went
away.”

Microtransactions in style="font-style: italic;">World
of Warcraft for pets and
other items will become more prevalent in 2011. Blizzard will announce the
next WoW
expansion at BlizzCon 11 in August. style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
will also get a
release date at BlizzCon. Blizzard will finally
announce their new IP (aka - style="font-style: italic;">Titan)
as a futuristic
FPS.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/92814"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="world of warcraft"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/92814">

Everyone
predicts the supremacy of WoW in 2011.

size="+1">MEDAWKY

A man whose playing experience dates back to the dawn of MMOGs, Medawky
has been covering a variety of free-to-play games for Ten Ton Hammer,
but is currently filling in on the style="font-style: italic;">WoW
team. He loves grinding so much that he doesn’t drive his car
to work, he pushes it!

style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars:
The Old
Republic will do better than
most expect, largely due to the single-player feel of the game. Most
new school MMOG players don't give a damn about grouping and they will
flourish here. Turbine will announce a new
MMOG, which will launch as a microtransaction game out of the gate. Blizzard will unveil their
new "subscription-free" MMOG at Blizzcon 11. BlizzCon tickets will be
$175.00 each. With the exception of style="font-style: italic;">DC
Universe Online,
all SOE titles will employ some sort of microtransaction model, either
the entire game or one existing on separate server model such as style="font-style: italic;">EverQuest II Extended.

size="+1">XERIN

Xerin is another of Ten Ton Hammer’s old guard, being a five
year plus veteran. David covers style="font-style: italic;">WoW
in-between spinning off viciously insightful IMs. He has the ability to
type text messages with his mind!

I predict, with a lot of
certainty,
that no MMOG will overtake style="font-style: italic;">World
of Warcraft
in 2011, much
less get anywhere near close. style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars: The Old
Republic
will either be delayed another year or, if it launches, do extremely
well at launch and fade quickly into obscurity unless it has a
free-to-play component built in, which is now a requirement for any
MMOG to launch successfully. Any MMOG without a
free-to-play subscription will now fail at a much faster rate than
before. Deathwing will arrive to style="font-style: italic;">Cataclysm
sometime later in 2011 and be a difficult enough boss, but
cause a series of Onyxia like jokes throughout the community
culminating with some kind of viral video involving more dots and
someone freaking out when Deathwing's tailsmack sends them back in time
spawning Chuck Norris like jokes.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/93150"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 326px;"
alt="star wars the old republic"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/93150">

Can
SW:TOR actually challenge WoW?

size="+1">MARTUK

Ten Ton Hammer’s resident news jockey, Martuk has not
officially been offline in more than two years. Currently, the staff
has a betting pool going that he’s either hardwired into his
computer or is a disembodied energy being existing in the Matrix.
Frankly, we’re not sure and are kind of afraid to find out.

I predict that despite not
being entirely original, style="font-style: italic;">Rift
will have moderate success after its
launch. It won't do superhuman style="font-style: italic;">WoW-type
numbers, but it will solidify
at a decent populace that should sustain the game for some time to come. Trion Worlds will then
reveal more details about their SyFy Channel MMOG, which is set to run
alongside a television show. There will be a lot of hype and we'll
begin to get the first clues of why it won't work. style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars: The Old
Republic
will launch sometime before Christmas (likely November). style="font-style: italic;">SWTOR
will
break one million boxes sold and thrive well until the 30 free days are
up and barring a free-to-play hybrid option at launch, that reception
will soon give way to the harsh reality that few games can sustain
millions of subscribers and it will suffer the inevitable population
dip. style="font-style: italic;">The Secret World
will be
postponed until sometime in 2012 to take advantage of the "we're all
going to die" (again) fade with the Mayan calendar. style="font-style: italic;">TERA
will launch and despite
its fun group play and some creative ideas it will be shadowed by the
fact that it's an Eastern-inspired MMOG. This will hinder it a bit in
the Western market, but it will still do okay. It just won't be
shattering any sales records. style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek Online
will
announce a free-to-play option sometime after April. The hybrid model will
further solidify itself in MMOGs becoming the dominant form over basic
subscriptions and the better alternative
to the simple free-to-play
options.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/92421"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 326px;"
alt="dc universe online"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/92421">

Will
DCUO breathe new life into the superhero MMOG?

size="+1">SHAYALYN

Shayalyn is our Premium Member program manager, forum peacemaker, and
resident den mother. She is the beating heart behind Ten Ton
Hammer’s stony countenance. She is also a 12th degree black
belt in Grammar and Writing and has been known to make seasoned writers
quake in terror.

style="font-style: italic;">Rift
will launch early in Q2 2011 and gamers and reviewers alike will
unanimously declare it polished and fun—all in all, a
fantastic title. But its linear gameplay, relatively small world and
lack of group content will lead to a fall-off in subscriptions
bolstered only by the game’s first major update a few months
after launch. By the end of 2011, style="font-style: italic;">Rift
will have converted to some sort of subscription-free payment model
that will finally bring the success the game deserves. style="font-style: italic;">TERA
will, unfortunately, be another style="font-style: italic;">Aion—stunningly
beautiful, with fun gameplay initially, but too grindy in the long run
to sustain a sizeable Western audience. Asian gold sellers will plague
the title, as well. Subscription-based MMOGs
will continue to lose steam as free-to-plays overtake them. Those MMOGs
daring to launch as pay-to-plays in 2011 will face a difficult struggle
to retain subscribers. This is a stretch, but EA
will announce a new link in the massive style="font-style: italic;">Sims
franchise that is online, free-to-play, and heavily
microtransaction-based. The game will also allow players to create and
sell custom content via an online store system. It will be nothing at
all like the failed style="font-style: italic;">The Sims Online
and similar to style="font-style: italic;">The Sims 3
with a quest and achievement system. The game won’t even
approach the light of day until 2012, or possibly even 2013, but EA
will rev up the hype machine nonetheless. You heard it here first!

There you have it, fellow gamers; some bold and not-so-bold predictions
for the upcoming year. Has the staff at Ten Ton Hammer successfully
pulled back the mysterious veil of the future or are we totally insane?
The only thing that can be said with certainty, except for the
continuing dominance of style="font-style: italic;">WoW,
is that time will tell!