Before I get into what games I’m looking forward to, I wanted to mention some personal and blog related things. My wife and I are expecting our second little Kae to show up sometime in June. I’m sure that’s going to kill any time I have to play MMOs for a few months. I really dislike logging into an MMO, when I don’t know if I’m going to get pulled away at a second’s notice. When my son was born, I focused mostly on single player games, since I could pause it and go do father things without worrying about ruining anyone else’s game.

Not playing MMOs will either mean that this blog goes silent for a few months, or you’ll see tons of posts as I’ll have lots of time to read, think, and write.

Writing

Last year, I tried an experiment with posting consistently on week days. I wasn’t perfect about it, but I did well enough to consider it a success. I stopped doing that mid-summer though once it started to take the fun out of writing. I don’t regret doing it though as I developed some good habits and even got to the point where I started to feel antsy if I hadn’t written anything by the end of the day. Kind of like those healthy people who talk about missing the gym. I guess anyway, I’ve never felt that.

Anyway, this year I’m trying a new experiment. I write a lot from my phone and from work, basically anytime that I get an urge to put pixels on a screen. Most of the time though, those posts go into the draft folder and never emerge. I always intend to edit and publish them that night, yet rarely ever do. So this year, I’m going to try skipping the editing stage as much as possible. After all, if there are any really stupid grammar or spelling mistakes, I’m going to be much more motivated to fix them if the article is public, and this way I’ll not have any regrets about not getting an opinion or idea out in a timely fashion.

So now you know, if the blog stays empty it’s just because I have no ideas and not because I’m a lazy self-editor. Finally, let’s talk about some games.

PC/Xbox

This is the first year in a while, that I’m not really looking forward to much. Mass Effect 3 is basically my whole list for the year.

I believe this is a good thing though, because my backlog of unfinished, never played, and never installed games is getting embarrassingly massive. I still haven’t gone back to Skyrim and finished my first play through. I have the last DLC for Mass Effect 2 to finish. I’ve barely touched Minecraft since the 1.0 release in November. Then there’s my Steam library, let’s just not even start on that.

So while there’s not much new I’m looking forward to, I’m still excited for single-player and offline gaming this year.

MMOs

Rift

While I do still have an active subscription, I’m not planning on renewing it in April. As I mentioned in my 2001 review, I had a ton of fun with the game, but between feeling so behind with all of the content updates and most of my friends playing other MMOs, I have no interest in going back.

Champions Online

I fully expect to keep playing in Millennium City off and on as Cryptic adds new story missions and new power sets. Honestly, I’ve already started eyeing the launcher as they’ve added some cool new costume options recently as well as the Earth and Wind power sets. The cool thing about this game is I have no expectations for the coming year, so I’ll enjoy whatever comes.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

I’m playing a ton of TOR right now. I have a Jedi Knight Guardian in the mid 40′s (level cap is 50) and am nearing the end of the story missions. This means I’ll hit the mythical end-game soon. Generally when I do that, I start an alt and lose interest in repeating content after a few days. This is followed by moving on to another game. With TOR, I’m hoping that having some fresh class missions will be enough to keep me interested and get a second character to 50. We’ll see if BioWare manages a first in my gaming history.

Interestingly, I’m already feeling like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of TOR, so if I do end up cancelling my subscription, I’m not going to feel bad about it. I suppose that because the game really has felt like playing KotOR 3.

Looking at the rest of the year, I hope to still be playing in June but I kind of doubt it given my history at level cap. Obviously once the baby get’s here, all bets are off.

Lord of the Rings Online

After taking most of the year off and then getting in a solid month, LotRO has been on hold since November. First it was Skyrim and then it was TOR keeping me from playing. Eventually, I’ll return to Middle-Earth and resume my hunter Brynulf’s journey into the Gap of Rohan. It may well be the fall, but it seems like I always go back to LotRO eventually, and that makes me happy.

Star Trek Online

After an extremely rough year, I really hope that STO turns things around. The F2P launch is happening (today actually), and the long awaited Featured Episode Series Four is coming as part of the second anniversary of the game.

Past February, I want to see a permanent Executive Producer hired and I really want to see the monthly Engineering Reports and Ask Cryptics restarted. I know there have been a few new hires since the PWE acquisition, but I’d like to see the team continue to grow, and start seeing that investment payoff in more regular updates of new features and new story missions. If we get to December and have seen Featured Episode Series 4, 5, and 6, I’ll be very happy. If not three FE’s (which D’Angelo doesn’t think is likely), then I want to see more single mission story content added.

One thing I do want to clarify though, I’m not at all disappointed or upset with the Star Trek development team at Cryptic. I think they’ve done as much as possible given some pretty difficult situations over the last six months (if not longer).

Last January, I wan’t looking forward to much on the Xbox. In fact, there were just two games: Mass Effect 3 and Batman: Akham City. Unfortunately Mass Effect 3 was delayed, but Akham City more than made up for that. The game had everything I loved about the first Batman game but added improvements, and even though I’ve finished the game, I still pop it into my console occasionally to beat on some thugs.

Outside of Arkham City, my Xbox didn’t get much playtime, which I guess is why it decided to red-ring on me in December. I had hoped by waiting through the first few manufacturing runs and getting an Elite, that I had dogged all of the overheating problems with Microsoft’s console. I was wrong. The repair process was relatively painless: go online and submit a repair request, print out a label, box and ship it out. I just wish it hadn’t cost me $99.

PC

The PC had a few more titles I was excited about: Minecraft, Portal 2, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2 – Retribution (could the title be any longer?), and Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. Well okay, Minecraft was a bit of a cheat since it was pretty much already released. Portal 2 was as good as I hoped it would be, and I got to have some extra fun by playing through the co-op version with MMOGamerChick. DoW Retribution I’ve barely touched. I really really loved the original Dawn of War games, but the shift in focus from base building to boss battles has soured me a bit on the franchise. Space Marine made up for my disappointment in Retribution though, the game was over the top gory fun. Some people may try to tell you that using a chainsword on an Ork get’s old, but they’re lying to you.

Unlike with Xbox, this last year also had two big surprises for me on the PC platform. First there was the colossal disappointment of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This was a game I was not anticipating in the slightest, but ended up buying because of the wave of good press and excitement from friends. Unfortunately, I only put five hours into it before running headlong into a boss battle geared for the exact opposite type of character that I was playing. I realize I’m in the minority opinion on this game, but I still strongly believe that you don’t build a game around choice and then take it away during the central moments of the game.

The second big surprise happened in exactly the same way, but with opposite results. Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was another game that I wasn’t anticipating at all. Like DXHR, I hadn’t played any of the earlier games in the series, and even though the screenshots looked good and I thought I might like it, I was wary of letting myself get sucked along with the ground again. In the end, I did end up going ahead and getting it, and I’m so glad I did. Skyrim has been a Minecraft-like experience for me (which is ironic given the legal battle between the companies). Just like I got sucked completely into Minecraft last year and played nothing else for months, my gaming time was wholly subsumed by Skyrim. Today, I’ve put 117 hours into just one single-player game. One hundred and seventeen hours. That is incredible, considering a good single-player game usually lasts me no more than 40 (like Red Dead Redemption or Arkham City). But even more incredible is that after more than a hundred hours, I’m not even halfway through the main story line.

PC was much more exciting this year than I thought it would be. I’m not sure that 2012 will be though, but I’ll save that for later.

MMOs

Rift

Trion had the perfect situation this year. From January to November, they had the only new major MMO title. I think they capitalized in it very well too. They’ve been continually releasing new content and making tuning changes. Honestly if anything, I think Trion’s proved it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. They’ve been updating the game so much, that when I came back after a month away, it felt like I’d been gone for six months or more.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

BioWare ended up releasing much later in the year than I expected. This ended up being a good thing both because they had more time to get things right, but also because they managed to get through the hype backlash I was expecting before release (or even beta). There’s not too much more I can say about TOR as far as 2011 goes beyond I got in at launch, had no problems, have seen no queues, and am immensely enjoying the Jedi Knight story line.

Champions Online

Champions has been a fun game to hop into of f and on over the year, especially the few times I’ve gotten to play with Scott. The game had a successful F2P launch and has released some good story content with their first Comic Series and a third Adventure Pack. While I haven’t had that original love of the game rekindle, I’m sure I’ll continue to login anytime I get an urge to play superheroes.

Lord of the Rings Online

Last year, I was feeling pretty down on LotRO. The F2P conversion caused an explosion of gold store buttons in the interface that just got under my skin. My disinterest continued for most of the year, including well into the development cycle for Rise of Isengard. It wasn’t until I saw a developer diary with some video about the making of Orthanc for the game, that I had any interest in returning to Middle-Earth.

Once I got back in the game, I was motivated enough to finish Volume 2 of the Epic Quests, get caught up on Volume 3 in Enedwaith, and charge on towards Isengard. I didn’t make it to level cap before Skyrim started dominating my playtime, but I was really happy with the new work Turbine has done on the game and I’ve finally trained myself to not see the store buttons.

Star Trek Online

And lastly, we come to the MMO that I’ve had both the most and least fun with during 2011.

The game started out very well. We had an anniversary event, an excellent renovation of Earth Spacedock, and then a third Featured Episode Series, Cloaked Intentions. The Series 3 was the best one so far and featured great missions, fun voice work, and the music from Amok Time.

Unfortunately, that was the high point of the year. We did get the Foundry followed by a good revamp of ground combat in Season Four, but we also got Atari selling Cryptic, Dan Stahl leaving the Executive Producer role, Free-to-Pay announced, and no new story missions.

Whether it was Dan leaving, the change in ownership from Atari to Perfect World, or the announced F2P transition, the high level of communication and transparency that I loved in 2010 has vanished. The last Engineering Report was released in August, with no word about if or when it’s coming back. The last Ask Cryptic was in September. Granted, the temporary Executive Producer Stephen D’Angelo did write a lot of blogs during the F2P development, but I found them pretty thin on details.

Overall, it’s been a disappointing year for me in STO. I guess I have to have at least one MMO to be down on at the end of every year.

I was totally surprised to see  Issue 1 of the first Comic Series announced on Twitter today. The initial series is called Aftershock and issue one is Dead Air. UNTIL’s Camp Lantern in North Africa is not responding to communications and scouts dispatched to investigate have not returned.

The new series is scalable so any heroes level 11 or higher can experience the new content. There are supposed to be five more weekly issues in this series.

Despite how quickly the first issue snuck up on me, I’m very excited to get in and check it out. I started playing through the second Adventure Pack Demonflame this last weekend (more on that when I finish it) and it’s not quite the experience I was hoping for. From everything I’ve read, the Comic Series are intended to be more like the excellent Featured Episodes in STO, if they turn out to be even half as good then I’ll be spending a lot more time in Champions on a regular basis again.

Star Trek

The first Dev Diary about designing the Enterprise-F is up. Most of the controversy that surrounded the winning design has subsided now based on the dev diary forum thread (or I’m just no frequenting the right parts of the forum). The current clay model is interesting. I like how close the saucer and engineering hull are to one another and the dual neck looks much more substantial now that it did in the initial sketches. My only nit to pick is the saucer is a bit too pointy.

Two interesting items on the money-side of the story. Atari bought Cryptic for $28 million (plus sales-incentives) in 2008, and Perfect World is paying $50.3 million. Perfect World is coming off of a good first quarter compared to the prior year, as payoff for investing in long-term projects. If that’s truly representative of PW’s attitude towards business then Cryptic’s in much better hands.

Besides their fiscal history, I didn’t realize that Cryptic isn’t the first development studio that PW has purchased. They bought Runic Games in May last year, but has stayed mostly hands off since then.

There’s still some important details unknown about the deal though. Does Atari still has publishing writes for NWN? I assume they do. If that’s correct, is Cryptic still developing that game? I’m guessing that Atari has passed the risk on to Cryptic and PW and is charging a licensing fee. This gives them a piece of the revenue with little further investment.

Since PW is primarily in the F2P end of the MMO market, what happens to STO? For that matter does Champions stay a hybrid model or does it go full cash shop? I’ll give even odds on STO going F2P but if it does it’ll go hybrid like Champions did. I think that’s a ways out though, I get the impression that Cryptic wants to see how regular weekly content releases affect their subscription numbers. I don’t see either game going full F2P like their eastern-market counterparts. There are very few games, Runes of Magic is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, that do well in the western market as full cash shop. Perfect World seems (in my limited research) to be a bit smarter than that.

One other thing I’m unclear on is what the actual corporate structure is. There’s Perfect World and there’s Perfect World Entertainment. PWE seems to be their western-market facing corporation, and I assume that PWE would be handling management of Cryptic. But the press release announcing the acquisition was on PW’s site.

In the end, it’s much much too early to panic. For the short-term, this is good. It removes uncertainty about the fate of the development teams and their games. For the long-term we’ll have to wait and see, but I’m optimistic based on what I’ve read so far.

Champions Online

I’ve been wondering for weeks now if Poz was still running the Champions Team over at Cryptic. He hadn’t posted on the forums in weeks and the level of communication from the team had really deteriorated. So, I wasn’t surprised by this announcement that Poz hitting the pause button. The thing that’s odd about the news is it’s half written like Poz is on vacation and half like he’s left the company. Rob Overmeyer is taking over, which is also not a surprise since he did the excellent follow-up Ask Cryptic for April.

Besides the (possibly temporary) change in management, Cryptic also posted a new Costumes and Concepts page. The Champions team is going to use this page to give players a peak at upcoming costume designs and get feedback. I really like this idea and hope they keep it up to date. Costumes are a major part of the superhero genre, and the more Cryptic can add to the game the better. Plus. it opens more lines of communication between the development team and the players, and I’m all for increased communication.

Star Trek Online

The other half of Cryptic’s been busy too.

The Breen Featured Episode rerun is underway and offers players who missed out the first time a chance to get the Breen Bridge Officer. The team’s also added a new equipment set, so player’s who’ve already been through the FE have some incentive to go back. I really like the idea of reruns while we’re waiting on Season 4 to come out, of course I’d like new FE’s better but this will help pass the time a bit.

Besides the reruns, Cryptic released a massive Ask Cryptic for May. Fifty good questions and nice detailed answers by Executive Producer Dan Stahl. Here’s some of the highlights, although you should still go read it yourself:

• Some big new Borg-related coming, including a revamp similar to what the Romulans got.
• Rare particle traces are getting their own icons. I know this sounds minor, but when I return to Spacedock and I have a row of rare traces in my inventory, it is so slow to hover over each to figure out which one stacks where.
• Season 5 will focus on End Game and Fleets.
• Featured Episode series 4 doesn’t have a release date yet. Stahl is talking like they want to make sure they’re setup for a consistent FE schedule with two weeks between each before series 4 comes out.
• Despite the possible delay in FE4, Dan said, “The next”content release may not be a feature episode, but something bigger.” So maybe we’ll may see some type of expansion similar to the Season 2: Ancient Enemies?

One other thing I wanted to mention. It feels like the team has a big content change coming related to the Borg. Stahl mentioned that they were getting a graphical and mechanic overall like the Romulans got in FE3. He also mentioned that the Undine would be back but not before the Borg “make their move” which he hinted could happen before FE4. Lastly, Stahl answered a question about the Gorn Rebellion by mentioning it depends on whether or not their homeworld get’s assimilated.

I also feel like I should mention that Cryptic announced the winning design for the Enterprise-F. Apparently there was some voting done by the community a while back and the fan-favorite isn’t even on the Runners Up list. This of course has resulted in a fifty (when I wrote this) page thread full of nerd rage, trolling, and pleas for sanity. I don’t recommend reading them, except to check out Stahl’s follow up posts here, here, and here. Personally, I like the winning design more than the one some of the community is upset about.

Rift

Finally, I wanted to highlight a post on the forums by Producer Scott Hartsman regarding character names on RP servers. I generally don’t look at the Rift forums outside of the dev tracker, so I’m not informed at all on the “excitement” Scott’s referring to. I’m inferring from his post though, that there’s been some kind of drama over character names. Which doesn’t surprise me much. Were the server not marked as RP in the launcher, I’d have no idea based on the high number of immersion jarring character names I see running around. I try to keep an open mind about it, but I’m pleased to see Trion talking about clarifying what the naming policy is on RP servers. I’ll be even more pleased (and a little shocked) if they’re enforced.

First, the post is explicit that the questions are being answered by Producer Rob Overmeyer, so that whole vague anonymous feeling from the original post is gone. Second, the answers are informative and detailed without losing the humor from the original post. Not to mention there’s just more of them.

Besides the second Ask Cryptic, there’s also a State of the Game for April. Also done by Rob, it does has some crossover with the Ask Cryptic, enough so that Rob is planning to start doing alternating months for the posts.

I’m feeling lukewarm about the upcoming Resistance Adventure Pack. I had issues with Serpent Lantern and I haven’t even attempted Demon Flame. My hope when Adventure Packs were originally announced was that they were nice multi-mission story arcs, but they ended up being mini-dungeons complete with boss fights. It just occurred to my that STO’s Featured Episodes were actually what I’d had in mind for AP’s.

The two things I’m really looking forward to are the Golden Age and Pulp Comics costume sets. Even though they’re C-store items, I’ve got enough Atari Points from my stipend to get at least one for free.

Besides more costume options, I am curious about the Hideouts coming in July although I can’t imagine getting a lot of use out of it once the initial novelty wears off. I’m also interested in seeing what the team does with their AP replacement, Comic Series. It sounds much more like the FE’s that they were inspired by, and even though a lot of challenge focused players probably won’t like it, I hope they drop the boss fights. I’m just interested in experiencing more stories, not snapping my keyboard in half in frustration.

The Champions’ Ask Cryptic is about 15 questions, if you’re lazy like me and count the question marks. The answers provided are all pretty short and generally uninformative, although funny in several cases. Overall, it was a disappointing update. It also bugged me that there’s not mention of who was doing the writeup. Was it Poz? Were the questions handled by different team members? It felt very non-personal to me.

Star Trek’s Ask Cryptic is about 51 questions, calculated the same way. There are actually thirty-two questions listed, but most of them are actually at least two questions. More importantly is that the answers provided are detailed and informative, and the writeup is done by Dan Stahl.

I still enjoy playing both games, though I’ll admit I’ve spent more time in STO lately than CO, so I hope that the level of communication from the Champions team improves. Stahl’s team is definitely a tough act to follow.

First there were thirteen instances of Millennium City when I logged in last night. I’ve not seen more than two or three in a long time. I honestly wasn’t expecting such a large turnout for the launch, but I’m pretty excited to see such a large turnout. I’ll be very curious to see what the population looks like a week from now and then a month from now. How many people were old players just popping in to check things out like me? How many were former subscribers trying out the silver-level version of the game? How many were brand new players? I wasn’t paying much attention to the chat last night so I’m not too sure about any of the answers to those questions. Yet.

The second surprise was the new store icon. It’s the orange circle with the Atari logo on the bottom left of the minimap. Atari and Cryptic are dropping the idea of Cryptic Points in favor of Atari Points, apparently you can now buy Atari points which are good for more than just C-Store purchases. The Atari Points stipend that subscribers get though is locked to the Champions C-Store only. The original C-store button was just a menu item under the Champions C button (top left in the minimap) so the new store button is more visible. But I do like that it’s less conspicuous than the LotRO store button.

While it’s much much too soon to declare Champion’s F2P switch a success, I’m very surprised by the initial level of interest and pleased at how subtle the C-store integration has remained.

I’m a little more excited about this than I thought I would be. Not much changes for me since I have a lifetime subscription, I’ll still have access to everything I did before, but now I’ll also have a stipend of 400 Cryptic Points a month. I’m very curious to see if I can use those points in the STO-side store as well as the Champs-side store.

Besides the points, the F2P launch also includes a substantial revamp of the 1-20 experience as well as a few new powers for each of the existing frameworks. I’m definitely going to roll a new hero to check out the changes.

I know a few people were upset that the free players wouldn’t have access to the fully customizable hero system, but since they are allowing full access to the content (with the exception of adventure packs) they had to do something to incentivise people to subscribe. Like Turbine’s games, Champions is not a true F2P game but a hybrid subscription model.

The more I’ve thought about it though, the more their plan makes sense to me. The open system for building a hero is great for experienced players, but can rapidly get confusing and not-fun for a new player. Things like passive and active defenses, energy forms, etc. are probably more than a new player wants to worry about right away.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A lot of hopes have been pinned on this game. Some people’s expectations for TOR are so high, that I don’t see how the game can match them. So there will be a lot of disappointed people when the game launches. I myself have been trying to stay away from the news and hype for the game as much as I could for most of the year.

It’s Star Wars so I know I’m going to get it and give it a shot for the first month. It’s basically KotOR 3 (only this time finished unlike 2) so I’m sure I’ll play through at least one or two of the storyline (probably light-side Jedi of some flavor and a Smuggler), but I’m also not expecting to still be playing this game in December. This is basically a single-player game with a subscription fee, it’s something I’m not particularly excited about money-wise, but it is Star Wars so what can I say.

Rift

For the longest time I had trouble differentiating between this game and Tera Online, so I’m glad that they’ve changed their name.

Unlike TOR, Rift was not an instant buy for me. I didn’t have any interest until I started see some of the news and videos about their rift system for dynamic PvE content.

I’ve been in a few of the semi-closed beta events and gotten a chance to experience the new system. It is quite a bit of fun, and in several ways rifts could be considered a more dynamic version of Warhammer public quests. The game is an evolutionary mix of WoW’s and Warhammer’s game designs with a touch of Aion’s graphical style. In short, it doesn’t break the DIKU mold common to MMOs, but it is fun.

Like TOR , I don’t foresee this being a long-term subscription for me. LotRO has been my main fantasy game for years now, and I expect that to continue, but who knows. A lot can happen in twelve months.

Guild Wars 2

Here’s the short version: excited for the game, hesitant about NCSoft.

The original Guild Wars has a lot of faithful fans, but I’m not one of them. I bought the game when it released and I’ve played it off an on over the years, but never for very long. Primarily, I think, because of the focus on private over public instancing and the number of invisible walls in the outdoor maps, the game’s just never clicked with me. So it’s been exciting to me to see that ArenaNet is addressing both of those issues in Guild Wars 2.

NCSoft though has me worried. They’ve had some real problems with their security in the last year, and their customer support hasn’t been much better. Hopefully they get their act together before GW2 launches.

MMO Wish-list

If my personal predictions turn out correct I won’t really be playing any of the new 2011 MMOs all year. Come December, I’m expecting that my core games will still be: Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Champions.

Star Trek Online

Of all the MMOs I currently play, this is the one I’m the most happy with. Cryptic’s made a lot of improvements in the eleven months since the game launched, and I like a lot of the plans that I’ve heard Daniel Stahl talk about for the game.

Some of these are things that Cryptic has talked about and some are, but here’s some of the changes (both small and large) that I’d like to see happen this year.

• Ship-wide uniforms. It’s a real pain right now to keep my bridge officer’s uniforms consistent, and there’s no to customize crewman uniforms for when walking around the spacious hallways of my ship.
• Speaking of spacious, there’s got to be someway to bring the scale of the interior maps down at least a little bit.
• Allow bridge officers to have multiple uniform slots just like command officers do.
• Improve the save/load functionality in the tailor so that uniform saves are easier to distinguish from one another.
• Make the pop-up dialog that occurs when crossing zone borders optional. I’d like to be able to leave Sol and set a course for DS9 and not have to keep an eye on the ship to approve warping from one Sector Block to the next.
• Ability to disable ships rather than destroy them. Even if it’s only a cosmetic change where enemies pull some kind of emergency warp. It wouldn’t even have to happen all the time, but incorporating disabling ships in some fashion into the combat system would make the game feel just a bit more Trek-like.
• Change the ground combat system to something cover-based. I would love to see Cryptic borrow some design decisions from Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 and make STO’s ground combat more about moving from cover to cover rather than standing still out in the open and depending on personal shields. Tweaking melee combat so that it’s not a Benny Hill kite-fest would be good too.
• Keep doing the Featured Episodes! Taking a month off here and there is fine, after all TV does too, but I’d love to see a commitment from Cryptic that this is a permanent feature of the game.

Champions Online

Even with my interest trailing off in the second half of 2010, I do enjoy hopping into the game from time to time and heroing about. Of course I’m a bit concerned about how the F2P switch will turn out, but I’m not worried about the same over-commercialization happening that happened with LotRO.

First, Cryptic already has a store interface in the game and it’s not nearly as prominent as Turbine’s is.

Second, there’s no way to earn Cryptic Points in the game (or there wasn’t last time I checked), so there won’t be an annoying pop-up message anytime I finish a Perk or Adventure Pack reminding me about the store.

Third, a little commercialism fits pretty well into the Champions setting. I’m also don’t have emotional ties to the Champions property that go back to my childhood.

So aside from seeing how the F2P change works out, all I want from Cryptic’s Champions team is more. More new zones. More new mission. More new costume pieces.

A few new levels wouldn’t hurt either.

Lord of the Rings Online

Last year with LotRO was a real roller-coaster for me. A one-two punch of little to no content updates and way too much marketing of the store.

My hope is that this year Turbine turns things around, and given recent interviews where they claim to have tripled their revenues, they really have no excuse not to.

• There needs to be a configuration option to turn off the store buttons and TP alerts. I don’t care if I’ve earned another 10 Turbine Points. I may care if I can buy a consumable to speed up crafting sometime, but I usually don’t and I’d rather not be reminded of it every time I open the crafting panel.
• Regular content updates. They don’t have to be large and I actually prefer that Turbine keep them small and frequent rather than dropping a single large one half-way through the year.
• Expanded cosmetic system: more costume slots, the ability to bring one’s cloak hood up or down without switching cloaks, and cosmetic weapons.
• A total revamp of the legendary item system. Drop the lottery aspects and make LI’s work more like a person’s skirmish soldier.
• For the love of Tolkien, find someone to make some decent hats.

I’ve always felt the Turbine did a good job of staying close to the spirit of Tolkien’s lore even if they had to bend the letter of it to fit the MMO genre, but the commercialism that’s invaded the game since it went free-to-play has gotten out of control.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed, Turbine, don’t let me down.