Weekly MMORPG.com columnist Dan Fortier muses on the subject of MMORPGs for the next-gen consoles.
As online games become more commonplace and popular, we are seeing their growing influence in all sorts of unexpected and interesting places. We have already seen WoW on South Park and an animated Everquest Adventure cartoon (*shudder*), so frankly I'm sure that we can expect a lot more exposure for the genre in the years to come. This week I'm going to focus on another way that MMOs are pushing their way out of their perceived niche. With several MMO titles now being announced for the 'next-gen' consoles, I figured it was time to weigh in on the matter with a typically obtuse offering.
Console systems have generally shied away from any titles that exposed their weakness over their PC counterparts and concentrated on games that were much easier to play with a controller. While every so often a deep and interactive title, like Morrowind, would find its way to the controller geeks, games that required a massive amount of options have been the domain of the PC platform since their inception. Anyone that remembers the tedious button combinations required to give orders to your wing men in either of the Super Nintendo's 'Wing Commander' games will know exactly what I'm talking about. Of course, all this is starting to change slowly as the newest crop of titles are finding it useful to bundle multi-player and internet features to keep up with the online revolution.
Read the whole article here.
