End of the Year: ZAM gets Introspective - Part II
With 2012 looming on the horizon, the team at ZAM is thinking about the past, present, and future of MMORPGs. Up today is Staff Writer Patrick Do!
We’re heralding the New Year with a personal examination of the MMORPG industry from the viewpoint of each member of the ZAM Network News and Editorial team. Writing today is ZAM Network Staff Writer Patrick "BakersMan" Do. Happy Holidays!
Be sure to check out the rest of ZAM's End-of-the-Year Introspective Series! Get to know the team at ZAM!
2011 was a transitional year for a lot of games—and for me too. This was my first year at ZAM and, in effect, my first year back into the world of the Massively Multiplayer game. MMOs were always a big part of my childhood: I grew up on a steady diet of Redmoon and Ragnarok. My awkward high school years were spent hunting Hell Bovine in Diablo II and, in college, I experimented with Rappelz and Perfect World (that was a weird phase). Sprinkle a lost weekend with Aion in there somewhere and you have my complete discography.
Since then, the MMO landscape has changed considerably. 2011 will go down in the record books as the year of the Free-to-Play movement. Triple-A IPs like EverQuest II and DC Universe Online have gone Free-to-Play, to great success, and a parade of games is following them into 2012.
A Look Back at 2011
DCUO was the poster-child for the free-to-play movement throughout much of the year. The SOE title went from black sheep to golden boy in a matter of days following the switch. But don’t take my humble word for it, go check out this great article by one of ZAM’s promising young writers here, and find out all you wanted to know.
As much as the developers have tried to keep the transition as smooth as possible, it seems they’ve traded in one set of issues for another. Servers that once resembled spaghetti western ghost towns have struggled to accommodate the influx of new players. Long wait times and server disconnections have become the new norm, frustrating players to no end.
New bugs are springing up left and right and developers are scrambling to plug holes with whatever extremities they can spare. But these game-breaking, hard-drive damaging crashes could prove to be the fatal flaw for many of these otherwise great games that were hanging by a thread to begin with.