Vicarious Existence
To blog about what is going on in the MMO genre from a casual MMO player's viewpoint.

There's been, and probably will continue to be, quite a bit of debate about whether or not MMOs should have centralised official forums or should let fansites take the burden of operating forums for community members. On the "we don't need no official forums" side is NCsoft's Tabula Rasa, which uses fansites directly, and Mark Jacobs of Mythic, who doesn't hold official forums in particularly high regard.

On the "we have official forums; come to them" are pretty much every other MMO on the market. Quality of the official forums varies wildly from game to game, with some MMOs having more popular fansite forums than official forums and visa versa. In general though, most players probably start off in the offical forums since that's the logical place to begin.

With due respect, any MMO that thinks they can operate without official forums (or something that is so close to a forum-style communication structure) is deluding itself. Jacobs is technically correct about what official forums contain, but he misses the point - that these are his customers talking to each other and sometimes to him. Most of the time, what these customers say is pretty high on noise, but that's how the internet works - you have to plow though the noise to find the signal, and sometimes the signal comes from surprising places. Having a centralised forum allows a MMO to develop a community - which is, compared to just offering a gaming experience, probably more important to the long-term health of a MMO. Communities can be sticky things. They hold players to the game long after they would have quit if they were only considering how much they were enjoying the game.

Of course, fansites can do the same thing with their forums; fansites can certainly build communities. But, in my opinion, fansites work better at creating common-interest communities (e.g. a guild, or the role-players, or the PvPers), not large sprawling all-in communities you see on arise on official forums. Having 100 splintered fansite communities doesn't make it easier to communicate to them or listen to them; it makes it harder. If there is a fire to fight, the community manager staff have to (or: should - sometimes they think releasing a PR statement on one site is enough, but it doesn't work if different fansites run off on different tangents) deal with it in numerous places at one time, rather than dealing with everything in a central forum.

Also, it might not take much for the operator of an officially-sanctioned (or close enough, if they've been favoured with interviews and exclusive content) fansite to turn against the MMO it follows. It might not be much - a mail-out that they don't get, a rude PM from someone on the MMO staff following some fansite forum comments, a nerf to the operator's favourite class or item - but suddenly you have an uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) rant site that has in the past been given a lot of official credibility. You can look at the EQ2Flames drama for an example of this.

Forum drama does create epic lulz, but like most clowns it isn't really that funny.

So, not only does the MMO team lose face as the operator rants their little heart out (sometimes spilling privileged information they know) but a relationship has to be built up with at least one other fansite so that players will start hearing the 'correct' dev message again.

Having a MMO without an official forum is like having a zoo with no fences - you can't control where things wander and feeding time can turn very messy indeed. An official forum at least keeps the majority in one place and lets communication occur more easily. There will always be some fans who prefer fansites - that's fine. But those fansites tend to closely follow the information on official forums and, if those players want to get heard, they know they need to comment on the main site.

If official forums suck, it is because they have been allowed to suck by the community managers (CMs). CMs have to draw a line in the sand and say, "This is too far," then act when players cross that line. If the WoW official forums suck, it is because Blizzard doesn't care enough for them not to suck.

There have been cases where official forums have been criticism-shy, deleting every negative word that might appear. This is stupid behaviour. Some criticism of the MMO is necessary, even desirable, because it will point out what players feel is important. Who knows, the group consensus of the players might be right? Fansites might not be nearly as well managed and discussions are likely to be between smaller groups of people who already mostly agree with some key issues (e.g. PvPers tend not to care what the RPers think, and visa versa), so their criticism is likely to be slanted heavily and not examined objectively.

If MMO CMs / devs want to stop the majority of negative behaviour that goes on in a forum, all they need to do is remove the anonimity. Make people post under their real names, even if it is just a first name and initial. Well-run official forums actually require CM and dev interaction too - if you leave a zoo as breeding grounds for the bored and restless because you give them little to do, you shouldn't be surprised when it produces only manure.

As more people start playing MMOs - and as the MMO category expands to include more people playing different types of games - I'm sure the debate over whether or not the effort of officially managing communities is worth it will increase. In my opinion, it is, and the cost of running official forums is well worth it for what it returns in information and customer involvement in a MMO title.

MMO communities can often appear to devolve in to 'us vs them' arguments, or the loudest (i.e. those who post the most) people being the ones who appear to be driving popular sentiment. I've thought for a while now this was due to the way forums work - whoever can post the most can control the direction of the conversation, particularly if they can do it over a page or so, since most people don't read all of a multi-page thread before posting their opinion. Sometimes this control can take a perfectly sensible conversation off into realms of idiocy, particularly when a bunch of people jump in with "/agree" or "/signed" posts. It can appear that a large number of people support some very stupid ideas.

However, it turns out that there is a reason for this kind of behaviour hardwired into us - a psychological study has indicated that if only one member of a community repeats their opinion several times, bystanders are likely to take that opinion as representative of the whole group. If three people repeat the same opinion, the results are a bit stronger, but not by much. It's the repetition that makes people think that the opinion is held by the majority and, barring a bystander having a strong contrary opinion, it makes them more likely to hold that opinion too.

As a social animal, humans generally hate sticking out. So, if the first time you've ever heard of the +4 Rogue Dark Sword of Enlightenment being overpowered is in a thread where everyone is saying the same thing (despite it being an echo chamber fueled by the same three people) then you are more likely to think that Dark Sword must be overpowered... and then "why haven't those stupid devs nerfed the Dark Sword already!!!".

So the next time you see something posted that you disagree with, it is in your interest to comment. The more devs / customer managers see a diversity of opinion, the more likely they aren't going to think that the loudest voice has the majority on their side.

City of Heroes / Villains (CoH/V) released the first announcement of I13 this week - titled "Architect" it contains a number of systems to get very excited about, including player mission creation tools and an offline character reward system titled 'Day Jobs'. I'll get to them later, but what interested me a lot is the announcement a bit further down about new Booster Packs coming to CoH/V - purchasable updates that unlock new powers, new costume pieces etc for your account.

In Positron's (aka Matt Miller's, lead developer on CoH/V) words:

"Finally, I want to tell you about two "Booster Packs" that will be available in a month or so. Many players have requested the ability to buy the 30 day temporary jetpack that comes with the new City of Heroes Game Cards. Once the retailer exclusive period ends next month, we are making the same jetpack available for purchase for $4.99 (which is the cost difference between the one month game time and the $20 Game Card price). We are also excited to launch our Super Booster I: Cyborg Pack for $9.99. This pack has an awesome set of costume pieces, emotes, auras and a power. We'll be sharing all of the details shortly."

The first of these items is a bit useless for most existing players - $5 for a 30 day travel power in the jet pack. I'm sure a number of people will buy it once just to try it out, but probably won't repurchase it. However, that's still money into NCSoft NorthCal's coffers, so I'm sure they won't mind.

The second, the Booster Pack I: Cyborg Pack, is also not entirely new to CoH/V, but it's an interesting step down a certain path. In reality it should be called Booster Pack II - Booster Pack I is really The Wedding Pack, which unlocked a number of wedding-related costume pieces and emotes for $10 and was released in February this year. The success of The Wedding Pack meant that more resources could be deployed on developing I12, which in turn saw more content implemented in that issue. So it is a strategy that has worked for CoH/V once and they are trying their hand at doing it more formally.

As much as it pains me to say, CoH/V is unlikely to grow substantially in player numbers from this point forward. CoH/V is four years old and coming up against some younger competition, both of whom have studied this title in great depth. However, what CoH/V does have is a very committed player base and a character creation system that is yet unmatched. As such, the sensible financial strategy for them to take on is to try to increase their current players' share of wallet with CoH/V. This means putting out 'cosmetic' items (such as costume pieces or emotes) that won't actually do much to how your character plays, but is vital for completists or those wanting to build a specific type of character to get.

Some people will grumble about this, or say that if a game charges a sub fee it shouldn't charge any other fees. I disagree, because you don't have to buy these Booster Packs to be competitive, or they won't make the game automatically more fun - they are just added extras. But it is a way to get more money out of a relatively stable player base that means you can then have a development budget that will grow the title, not just keep it propped up.

This strategy could backfire. Players could resent paying for things they used to get for free - new costume pieces are a big thing for some players every issue, so if they stop just so they can go into Booster Packs, well, there will be blood. NCsoft NorthCal will have to carefully balance this strategy with the expectations of players.

However, if it works, it could see more resources put into making CoH/V stand out from its two new rivals. I'm interested to see what Booster Pack I actually has in it and will probably buy it. But would I buy 2 booster packs a year? 4 year? Would I buy Booster Pack XVII: Catgirls Gone Wild? I don't know.

But it is an interesting tactic for CoH/V to be going down. I see the future of AAA MMOs relying more on a mixed model of subscription fees and microtransaction revenue, which certainly seems to be where CoH/V is going.

UPDATE: Toned the title down a smidge.

I'm sure some people will take me to task in even considering Urban Dead a MMO. In my view, however, it ticks all the necessary boxes to be a MMO:

• It's massive (over 40 000 players had signed into Monroeville)
• It's multiplayer
• It's online
• It's set in a game world

That it is action point-based, doesn't have fancy graphics or lacks a complex game lore doesn't exclude it from the genre in my opinion; in fact it is arguably part of the leading edge of web-based MMOs that ignore being pretty or being shallow, grind-based time sinks in exchange for being easy to log in to and easy to play.

I played on Monroeville, a 'hard core' server set up to help celebrate the launch of "Day of the Dead" on DVD. What makes this server 'hard core' is that once you become a zombie, you can't turn back into a human thanks to Necrotech science (which you can in other games of Urban Dead). Also, once a survivor gets to level 10 (not that easy in Monroeville), they can get the Headshot skill which will permanently kill a zombie. So, it's the perma-death server, although you get two goes at virtual life - one as alive, the next as undead.

The short of Urban Dead is that you start a character (classes are Military, Civilian, Scientist and Zombie, with sub-classes for the living classes) and proceed to level that character up by doing things that get experience points (xp) - for the non-dead, this is generally trying to survive while taking pot shots at zombies; for the undead, this is generally trying to make survivors uncomfortable and / or into a meal. Every 100 xp you can buy yourself a new skill to help make surviving / zombie-ing easier.

Each action takes up a certain number of action points and given that each character can only get a maxium of 50 action points per day (earned at a rate of about 1 every half a real-life hour) players have to be careful about how they spend their time. Running out of action points when out in the open is a good way to guarantee a survivor's death or a possible beating from other zombies. This is because characters don't log off just because you aren't online - a character has be to be inactive for 5 days before they are hidden.

That's about the depth of the game: try to spend your action points to gain the most xp while also trying to stay upright. My Civilian Firefighter, Union Sub, managed to make it for several days and got to level 2 before being turned into a zombie while I was offline. Although this annoyed me a bit, it underlines the difficulty in providing a survival horror experience in the online environment: if I can log off at any time to protect my character then there is little risk in playing in such a world. Not being able to hide my character, the best I could do was try to stay with other survivors, or hole up in locations I hoped that zombies wouldn't look. This does a lot to add an element of tension to an otherwise simple game.

Currently Union Sub is wandering the city of Monroeville as a zombie, taking bites out of whoever he comes across (and, at this point, it is a lot easier to chomp on zombie than living flesh). No new characters can be created on Monroeville and at some point this server will be coming down and existing accounts rolled into Malton (a non-hardcore server). Importantly, I'm still having fun. It only takes about 10 minutes at most to play through my 50 action points, but it is a short-and-sweet experience. My only major gripe is that the hit percentages in combat are set incredibly low so that whiffing dozens of attacks is unfortunately common; however, I understand the design reasons behind it (higher hit percentages means it would be easier to kill characters without using all your action points, which in turn would reduce the challenge of making combat decisions in Urban Deadi.e. "Do I spend my last 6 action points attacking a target I might be able to kill, or do I use them to run and hide?").

Urban Dead is fun, simple to get the hang of (once you understand what gives xp) and does what it does with a minimum of fuss. It will never unseat WoW, but it wouldn't want to - Urban Dead and WoW are offering entirely different experiences. Any horror MMO currently in development should take a look at what Urban Dead does and learn from it - it already shows how a number of challenging game design decisions (e.g. characters being killed while players are offline, making survival interesting, permadeath) can potentially be solved.

Just to round out a previous entry, Fallen Earth's second attempt to get alpha sign-ups out appears to have worked - all the alpha keys on Gamespot were reportedly snapped up in minutes.

This has led to a lot of wondering on the official forums about why the dedicated community who has been following this MMO for a while didn't get first shot at alpha. As is the idea that perhaps launching your alpha to the Gamespot audience might backfire.

I know I'm a bit late on this, but I think the passing of Fury (along with the undeath of Hellgate: London and Flagship Studios) hold a lot of valuable lessons and insights into the MMO industry today. Failure can teach people a lot, but the natural reaction is to try to ignore the failure of others as if it were somehow contagious. It isn't, and just because WoW was successful doesn't mean the MMO industry won't see failure after failure until the Rapture (and even then, those left behind will want a MMO to play).

And, in the case of Fury, the failure was quite spectacular.

From what is publically available, Fury started development at Australian developer Auran in 2005 and made its first major public appearance at E3 in 2006. It was a MMO title with a difference - a pure PvP arena combat game with no PvE, with huge numbers of powers, a highly customisable character power system and even finishing moves (you might need a codec for that video). Fury had some great ideas on display - no endurance bar (your attacks built up mana that could be then used for more powerful abilities - a similar system is being used in Champions Online), a loot system that saw both winners and losers get copies of loot from their opponents, a very easy respec system - that made it stand out as something different.

The fact it was being developed by Auran, a publisher with a small but solid reputation (Dark Reign, Trainz) also added to the idea that there was a studio out there willing to push the envelope. A lot of PvP orientated players were excited by the potential of Fury as being something different on the horizon.

Fury's alpha started early in 2007 and, from memory (I'll check my emails later) I got an early invite. My PC wasn't up to spec at the time, but the beta forums were quite excited, even if the game had flaws (crashing bugs, it was hard to find opponents - stuff like that). Closed beta happened in July 2007 with a lot of the same bugs and issues still causing trouble. Auran had determined that in order to refine the game as much as possible, they needed a large number of players to beta test Fury despite its instability and short comings. Although this sounds like a sensible idea, the reality is that players get into a closed beta to play, not to act as free quality assurance or to deal with an application that crashes their PC every time they try to remap their keys. Should a player get past the bugs and the waiting time for a match to start, they were then greeted by experienced Fury players / teams, who would then squash their newb face into the dirt. Repeatedly. Often the match was over before you had an idea of what was going on (and yes, I speak from experience :-).

The large player churn that Fury experienced saw them invite more and more players to the beta test, which became more like an open alpha - players got deterred in playing Fury for a number of factors, declared it sucked and left... and then told their friends about it.

So, Fury was getting quite a bit of negative PR and launch (October 16 2007) was approaching. Gamecock Media Group, who'd come aboard as publisher in February 2007, Auran and Codemasters (the European publisher) arranged the Fury Challenge, a pre-launch event with a prize pool of over US $1 million (and later US $2 million in prizes), to help attract attention to the MMO. This was despite Fury still having a number of issues affecting its playability and the fact it was still technically in beta status.

Suffice to say having a competitive event with real world prizes on a game that is still not completely finished backfired somewhat. A lot of people were interested in the idea of winning prizes, but ran into bugs with downloading Fury, installing it and then actually playing it. Those who played in the event found themselves up against the uber-PvPer who didn't make the play experience particularly enjoyable. Although this article makes the Fury Challenge seem like fun, the key stat for me is that even the top 20 didn't win more than about half the matches they took part in. I think a lot of people were turned off by losing more than they won, especially in a MMO.

All of which, surprise surprise, led to Fury launching very weakly and never really picking up an audience. Reviews of Fury were very harsh and the lifespan of Fury looked short from the beginning. Despite Auran's best efforts - free content updates, the introduction of a PvE play type, free play being offered, players being called "LLLOOOOSSSSEEEERRRRR!"s (who thought that was a good idea?) and so on - but it was too late. Fury "was a financial disaster, it lost Auran a lot of money" (Fury cost US13.2 million, which is a big amount to a small developer) and staff numbers working on the title continually were reduced. The branch of Auran who worked on Fury was forced into voluntary administration and, on August 5 2008, Fury announced the servers would be permanently shut down on August 7.

So, who was responsible for this failure? As always, a number of factors go into it. Fury had a good concept that might have been foiled by the real world - do people want to pay a regular subscription fee for a PvP when there are quite a few out there with free online play (especially FPSs)? Perhaps not. The former staff of Auran have been particularly chatty about what went on at the studio, with Adam Carpenter, the lead developer on the title, saw both the difficulty in learning how to play Fury as a new player (correct) and that a certain group at Auran only wanted to work 9am - 5.30pm on the game (incorrect) as key reasons for Fury failing. Former Auran staff blame poor management decisions and a lack of an ability to listen to a wide variety of opinions as reasons for why things went so wrong.

Having been through a lot of articles about Fury and based on my experience with this title, a lot of its problems came down to management decisions. New players had no chance to learn how to play before they were thrown to the wolves, which was a major reason for Fury having very high player churn. The range of power options available were also very confusing for players, especially those who had no idea about the differences between the (say) fire and water power of nearly the same function. How equipment worked and what characters should wear was very hard to work out. These problems are design issues and have to lay clearly at the feet of the developers.

Another management blunder was the handling of alpha / beta. Inviting huge numbers of players to an alpha / beta, only for them to be turned off by bugs, is a great way to get your game some free negative word-of-mouth. Holding a huge contest that attracts a lot of hard core players who also experience bugs / crashes while also destroying the fun of other players new to the game is also a bad move. Bad move after bad move helped sink Fury at launch and it was never able to recover.

Fury is a game that was probably ahead of its time and had a lot of really good ideas behind it. Unfortunately, the execution didn't put those good ideas on the best display and left Fury committing the greatest gaming sin of all: not being particularly fun to play.

After about 7 or 8 years since it was first announced, Fallen Earth (FE) has finally announced it is going into public alpha testing. FE has been very public in saying that the game is feature complete and coming up on content complete, so the actual alpha experience should be more of a bug-fixing and technical exercise prior to launch rather than stuff being added on the fly at random.

Of course, god help FE if players find the existing experience isn't fun, or lacks perceived necessary features. MMOs should wait until they are at a 'launch complete' level before they open the game up to the public, but the risk is that systems that don't work well with a large audience will be too far along to fix prior to launch. But anyway...

FE is using Gamespot as the base to sign up to the alpha. Now, why Gamespot? No official reasons have been given, but it probably comes down to 1) it's a great way to get Fallen Earth known, since the game to date has been practically invisible, 2) it means that someone else handles some of the logistics - this is important for a company running an official forums supported by Google Ads, and 3) it gives FE the chance of future attention from Gamespot editors, who will do probably do exclusive hands-on previews, pre-launch reviews and so on. For a small MMO (it's been small to date, anyway), getting this kind of assistance for promotion and recruitment could be invaluable.

The irony kicks in when a number of players complain that they don't understand the sign-up process, followed by the announcement that the Alpha registration process has been suspended due to "technical issues".

Not quite the coming out party FE wanted, I suspect.

Oh, and I find it interesting that Gamespot currently lists Icarus Studios as the developer and publisher of FE - Icarus publically spun Fallen Earth off into a new company (Fallen Earth LLC), but the fact they haven't even got Gamespot to update their information makes me wonder exactly how separate the two companies really are (in my opinion: not very).

With ComicCon having wrapped up, it's time to take a look at the upcoming superhero MMO battle coming our way in 2009 (and perhaps beyond, depending when some of these titles launch): you've got the established veteran in City of Heroes / Villains (CoH/V), the heir to the throne in Champions Online (ChampO) and the surprise newcomer in DC Universe Online (DCUO). It's still early days, but it is worth having a look at what each competitor is bringing to the table, both in a positive and negative sense.

City of Heroes / Villains

CoH/V is four-and-a-half years old by this point. It's launch in April 2004 helped (along with games like Freedom Force) to dispel the dreaded superhero curse and to breath some fresh air into the MMO genre by adding superheroes alongside fantasy and sci-fi settings. Developed by Cryptic Studios, CoH was seen as an incredibly casual friendly game and a MMO that was fun out of the box - sadly, something that was seen as lacking in previous MMO launches.

Jump to now and CoH/V is still generally well regarded within MMO circles. Cryptic sold out their share of IP rights to NCsoft (the publisher) in 2007 who started a new studio (NC NorthCal) that took on board the entire CoH/V development team. While some point to the repetitiveness of combat or missions, CoH/V has managed to hold on to a reasonably sized player base (approximately 134 000 at last official count) and has released 12 free issues (i.e. content updates) and one stand alone paid expansion (City of VIllains that launched in October 2005). Recently announced was all access to both CoH and CoV sides of the game regardless of which version you purchased, so the barriers in CoH/V between heroes and villains have been reduced even further. CoH/V is also PC-only, unlike its competitors.

Pros:

• CoH/V is the most established superhero MMO - it's had time to iron out its kinks and to add in additional content; often this content has been demanded by players
• Gameplay is still fast and involved
• Character customisation is still the best in the MMO genre, even after 4 years
• CoH/V also has an incredibly community orientated development team - red name posts get made every day by the people who do the development work, not just community managers / moderators
• On the books is a player customised mission system, allowing players to develop their own missions and let other people into them (details to be released)

Cons:

• Although CoH/V has an active community, it is a community that is slowly dwindling... the introduction of two competitors may shake out these numbers further; efforts to date haven't seen the number of active subscriptions increase
• Although it has had first mover advantage, CoH/V also suffers from first mover disadvantage - it's successes and failings will have been extensively scrutinised by its upcoming competition who will probably avoid some of the traps CoH/V fell into
• A number of promised systems - the website-orientated Vault, the Cathedral of Pain trial - have been in limbo for a long, long time
• UPDATE: One thing CoH/V doesn't have that is promised by the other superhero MMOs is full power customisation, which could be huge attractor to a lot of players

Overall

CoH/V has been a fun superhero MMO for over four years, but does it have the stamina to take on two younger faster opponents?

Champions Online

Cryptic had previously announced they were working on Marvel Universe Online, the Marvel Comics MMO, so perhaps it wasn't a surprise when they sold off the CoH/V IP rights to NCsoft. But then came the news that the Marvel MMO had been cancelled. What was Cryptic going to do? Iron out a deal with an established superhero IP in less than a month and get to work apparently.

ChampO has been biding its time since announcement generally releasing lore and development profiles, with two videos existing to show it in action. Reactions to the visual design have been mixed - some see the thick lines as too cartoony - but the design looks better in action than it does in a screenshot for the most part.

The reality of ChampO is that little is known about the in-game mechanics. Apart from aiming to be an action MMO on both the PC and Xbox360 as well as having full power customisation, the details as to how such things are going to function are fairly limited. To date, Cryptic is being, well, cryptic over where it is taking this title. The expected release date is 2009; some sites have claimed as early as Q2 2009.

Pros:

• Based on an established superhero IP, Champions Online has a lot of lore to rely on; it also has been using recognised comics writer John Layman to develop mission content
• Cryptic has the experience in developing a superhero MMO from its time at CoH/V, which should see some of CoH/V's design issues avoided
• ChampO's strength is meant to be in its character customisation - full costume and power customisation is meant to be possible, as well as customising your characters arch-nemesis (or three); also secret identities are possible
• Cryptic also has a somewhat responsive developer relationship with the fan base, but the community managers are the ones doing most of the talking right now

Cons:

• The Champions IP probably isn't going to be bringing in a lot of fans; given that Cryptic isn't going to be using an exact translation of the Champions RPG ruleset anyway, these kind of fans probably aren't going to be interested in ChampO because of that
• The Champions IP is already rather generic and cliched; the best way I can sum it up is in describing how Grond got transformed into a monster (and I wish I could find the link for it), which was by signing up to an experimental test and drinking their solution only to have an adverse reaction that caused him to run into other experiments which covered him in chemicals and set the lab on fire which caused him to run outside only to get hit by lightning and transform into Grond. Either some guy had the WORST. DAY. EVAH. or that is some lazy, lazy writing
• ChampO is meant to be a very black-and-white, good-and-evil kind of world; as someone who likes moral ambiguity in their superheroes, this is a negative
• More information is needed on how players are going to spend their time in-game is needed - what's going to keep me playing past the first month?

Overall

Cryptic have the experience with superhero MMOs that will give it an edge in development, but can it overcome a niche IP to take on an established opponent and another MMO with a killer IP?

DC Universe Online

Sony has held the rights to a DC MMO since 2005 when it bought The Matrix Online and (probably its real target) the DC MMO license off Warner Bros. For three years, there was little news - Jim Lee came aboard, it would be playable on the PC and PS3 - but for most players it was considered a vapour title.

Then DCUO showed off its first gameplay video for E3 and then let people play it at ComicCon. Jim Lee, John Blakely and Chris Cao were everywhere. DCUO was everywhere and getting mostly good reviews for its ComicCon display. After three years of nothing, DCUO was back on the map.

Beneath the flash of DCUO's information launch, not much is known about the game. It will be on the PC and PS3, the art design is by Jim Lee (well, him and his studio of artists, anyway) and you can play your own character (hero or villain) in the DC Universe alongside Batman and Superman. Other areas of this MMO haven't been fleshed out with publicly available information yet.

Pros:

• DCUO really seems to have nailed the action side of things - although I think the combat is still a bit too choppy and lacks impact (too much animation, pause, opponent reacts to animation) with some polish it could be a fantastic experience
• That players can play alongside the key characters of the DCUO, even get access to their powers, will be a big thing to those interested in DC's characters
• Superspeed's ability to run up walls and over objects shouldn't be understated - it just looks fantastic
• SOE has just shown the MMO industry how to promote a MMO title - it was vapourware until June and suddenly it is one of the hottest MMOs coming out

Cons:

• Apart from Jim Lee and the DC IP, what else is DCUO really offering? What is going to keep players playing after the first month?
• Some MMO players publicly refuse to buy SOE products; how strong this feeling is could determine how the MMO market reacts to this title (although I think those players offended by SWG actions probably aren't closely linked to the DCUO crowd)

Overall

DCUO has gained a lot of momentum very quickly, but can it keep up against two competitors who have more superhero MMO experience?

So there you go - the weigh-in for the three big superhero MMO titles that will be competing in the not-to-distant future. I plan to keep a watch on this, especially as ChampO and DCUO release more information and actually launch just to see how each one stacks up.

UPDATE: I found that link with Gromm's origin:

"They accidentally shot him with the wrong serum, a variant of a super soldier [formula] that had been in development," explained Emmert. "He broke out of his restraints and, in crazed mania, crashed into a shelf full of chemicals which all spilled on him. So he's burning and in a rage, races outside in the middle of a thunderstorm and gets struck by lightning. Now singed, Sidney then tumbles outside the gate into a drainage ditch filled with toxic chemicals. Hence, Gromn was born."

... hmmm ...

So, there you go: Cryptic is doing the Star Trek Online MMO.

Not a lot info yet and the site appears to currently be hammered by people, but one of MMO-dom's worst kept rumours has been comfirmed. Interestingly enough, it is planned for both PC and console. The features list is:

"Adventure in the Final Frontier: Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations in an expanding vast universe. Make contact with alien races, discover resources and uncover mysteries that will change the future of the Star Trek universe.

You Are the Captain: Command your own starship as a Federation Captain or a Klingon Warrior. Outfit it with the systems that you need to make your mark in the galaxy. Customize your ship as you see fit. Recruit, train and mold your crew into an elite force for exploration and combat.

Surface, Shipboard and Deep Space Adventures: Command your vessel in thrilling space battles, or beam down to planets with your away team for face-to-face confrontations. Missions will take you and your friends into space, planetside and even inside starships! "

The release platforms will be both PC and console (but no one type of console?). Gameplay footage will be up in two weeks. Let's see what this looks like in action. 

Massively.com has put together a good overview of DCUO's E3 output. The only article that excites me is this one, which talks about in-game events, combat and other in-game systems.

I've got an article I want to write about DCUO, but I'm going to wait until after ComicCon - they will have live demos and a MySpace invite party there, so I want to see what new information comes out before I start casting some judgements around.