MMORPG.com's newest writer, Ernest Ross writes this rundown of 2008 in Flying Lab Software's Pirates of the Burning Sea.

2008 has been a wild year for the MMO industry, seeing three highly-anticipated and competitive MMO releases meet with varying degrees success (Pirates of the Burning Sea, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Age of Conan), huge changes for old mainstays (particularly EQ/EQII) and the fall of one game that released with such high expectations after just one year (NCSoft's Tabula Rasa) citing a "failure to meet performance expectations."

Of the three big 2008 releases, two of them were well received in their first few months and then came under bombardment from what seemed like non-stop bad feedback, negative word-of-mouth advertising reverberating down the Internet tubes in every major online gaming community. Indeed, in some circles it's difficult for people to say the words "Funcom" or "Age of Conan" with a straight face and there are still people who seem not to have even heard of PotBS! The third of them, Mythic's WAR, only released in September but, while it's still too early to tell, there have already been signs of disappointment among those who had hoped for the rise of a "WoW-Killer".

Read the Pirates of the Burning Sea 2008 Recap