2005 Best Company: Cryptic Studios
On Halloween, Cryptic Studios and NCSoft released City of Villains, the anxiously awaited evil-twin to their 2004-effort City of Heroes. This release waded into murky territory. Some called it an expansion, some called it a sequel. The two games exist together, but neither requires the other to play. However you classify it, the combination of a new game and the updates to their old one over the course of the year earned Cryptic this awards.
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City of Villains, players are able to finally play the other side of the coin as super-villains. The game offers graphical upgrades over the original hero-title, a whole new wardrobe of costumes, a distinctly-evil feel and setting. Players rob banks, battle NPC superheroes who seek to thwart them, and much more. It makes for a villainous good-time.
City of Heroes hit retail shelves in 2004, but over the course of the year, Cryptic Studios continued to tweak and expand content in their debut hit-title. Unlike most companies, Cryptic has never done a retail expansion. Instead they release "Issues", which are smaller, free-expansions. Since launch in April of 2004, they had released six new issues of the game, with issues three, four, five and six coming out in 2005.
Just after new year they released Issue 3: Council of War, which introduced more PvE content. A month later came the PvP update of Issue 4: Colosseum. On September 1st, they upped the PvE-ante again with Issue 5: Forest of Dread. Finally, Issue 6: Along Came a Spider hit at the same time as City of Villains and introduced a wealth of cross-over PvP content, including competitive PvP zones, base building and raiding options and much more.
These are the reasons why we chose Cryptic Studios as the best MMORPG developer of 2005.
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The following eligible company did not win the category, but does deserve a nod for their efforts in 2005.
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 | Blizzard Entertainment The developers of World of WarCraft garnered an honorable mention more on what happened to them, then what they did in 2005. Their game is from late 2004, but it was during 2005 that it grew into a world-wide hit that recently tipped the scales at over five-million subscribers. While they did release Battlegrounds, the lack of a full-fledged expansion prevented them from winning this category. |
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