The MMORPG playing field has suddenly become very competitive.

I've heard from various friends and acquaintances who've just been invited into the Warhammer Online Beta, plus I suspect Mythic is handing out select invites to bloggers and press. Apparently Blizzard isn't the only one that sees Age of Conan's release window as fair game to kick up some interest.

WAR is looking bright.

Mythic deserves the attention mind you, by most accounts WAR (Warhammer Online) looks slated to kick some ass.

I distinctly recall Marc Jacobs saying in an interview they were shooting for second or third position in the market, but that was before the EA buyout. Now, I'd put good money that they're aiming to dethrone WoW as the top MMORPG. It will take them some time to pick up the steam, but I think WAR can actually do it.

It would be fitting really, given the borrowed look-and-feel of the Warcraft universe.

Age of Conan goes over the top.

Age of Conan has gained a lot more traction than expected, it's definitely a success and I think what Funcom fully intended to be a niche game has broken into the mass-market.

As a player, I'm pleased that Funcom will have significant leverage to improve the game. It has more than its fair share of rough edges to round out, although I think the core gameplay is solid.

Reaction within my own guild is good. There are some grumblings about a few shortcomings, or changed expectations, but each of these is tempered with happy cries of surprise at other details and features better than expected. Mind you, I think we're Funcom's target audience, because WoW has bored us and WAR doesn't seem our thing.

The debates still going over Age of Conan's expected performance are revolving around the premise that Funcom will be dead in the water because you can't mass-market an MMO with such high system requirements.

I think that's misleading. I was never under the impression that Funcom was ever aiming to be a WoW-beating mass-market MMO.

There's plenty of room in the MMORPG market to carve out a niche.

• Licensed Conan / Hyborian world = Niche.
• M-Rated, adult content = Niche.
• Active combat system = Niche.
• Guild-centric Endgame (PvP Battlekeeps & PvE Cities) = Niche.

And add:

• High system requirements = Niche.

For me, niche isn't a bad word, in fact I think we need a whole lot more of these games to innovate within the MMORPG genre.

What Funcom is betting on, is that these points target their intended audience. That the same adults that will play an M-rated game are the ones likely to upgrade their PCs to do so. Or maybe they already have a suitable machine: note that the most common graphics chipset on the Steam survey is now the 8800, which by most benchmarks is today's fastest GPU.

The people who are going to be the most shocked or disappointed with Age of Conan are the ones who've become accustomed to playing WoW on laptops or underpowered pre-built PCs from the likes of Dell and eMachines. Granted, there are a lot of those folks and it's a normal expectation to play ever game on a PC you've bought in the past year... but that says more about the sad state of standard PC hardware.

The funny thing is, given the niche, I expected Age of Conan to launch quietly, almost un-noticed. I underestimated how many bored MMO players out there are eager to get their hands on something new.

It's a shame this stuff has overshadowed many of the more interesting features planned for Age of Conan. I expect to talk a lot more about those in coming weeks though. =)

Just like I'd done with WoW a few years back, I've intentionally skipped the Beta opportunities with Age of Conan. These are two games with so much potential that I don't wish to ruin my experience testing a beta that can be wildly different from the full game.

I've played enough betas (especially MMO betas: Ultima Online, Everquest, Guild Wars, etc.) to expect frustrations and disappointments that can all be avoided with a bit of patience for the actual game.

As expected, I'm seeing a variety of first impressions from the current 'Open' Beta of Age of Conan, that's very reminiscent of beta info leaked from World of Warcraft before its initial release. None of those reviews are fair of course, whether glowing praise or doom and gloom. You just cannot rate a game based upon its beta, no matter how close to release it is. At the most, you can get a general impression of gameplay.

The WoW comparison:

If WoW had to survive on the merits of its release (let alone beta), it would have failed miserably. Penny Arcade actually withdrew their 2004 Game of the Year award due to WoW's lack of server stability. The real test that Blizzard passed was in halting the game sales (yeah, they did that), refunding time to players and addressing the stability issue, although it took them months. At the time, WoW had sold just over 600,000 copies of the game, which was a great achievement but a far cry from the millions they have now.

As a player in 2004, I was thrilled to be playing WoW. I rarely commented on the bugs & problems (first day: fell out of the world, got stuck numerously in flower-picking pose, disconnected from server continuously) since I had expected them. I expect Age of Conan to have its share of issues too, in fact I'd assume more, it's designed to a much higher standard of visuals compared to WoW (which was hardly state of the art in 2004, let alone now).

The real test for any MMORPG if you ask me, is twofold:

• Is the gameplay fun? This is subjective of course. What's fun for me isn't necessarily for you, but there are some commonalities to mass-market fun. WoW certainly meets most player's standards, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. Age of Conan's PvP beta gained some glowing reviews, though personally I'm more interested in PvE fun so I'll just have to wait to see, but what I've seen during development looks good and the RPG world certainly suits me.
• Are they a standup company? If there are problems, will they fix it? Or will they just cave, count their losses and dump the whole thing? I don't think I need to give examples of companies that are not what I'd consider standup in the MMORPG field, some of them are notorious and have either outright mismanaged their game developments or have let good games die on the vine.

  Blizzard is clearly a standup MMORPG company, they pulled their socks up when they needed to. I'd say Funcom's experience with Anarchy Online shows they are legit and worthy of faith too.

Funcom doesn't want a repeat of their nearly disastrous Anarchy Online launch. Proof that they're working to avoid that is in their current beta, which is clearly a stress test complete with heavy-duty debugging software. The downside is the impression they're leaving on the beta-testers while they try to push the client and servers to the breaking point, because as expected, things are breaking. That's the nature of the beast.

I'm pretty stoked with the pending release of Age of Conan, from what I've seen this game will suit me better than any that have come previously. I'm really looking forward to watching the game mature as it goes along.

Hell, I'll just be thrilled to play a fantasy MMORPG with no elves!

Pirates of the Burning Sea is worth a try over the holidays. I recommend going through the long download, install, download updates, patch, play process. I'd say it's worth it for a free peek (Open Beta) at the game.

I'm not going to give a full review, that wouldn't be appropriate with a Beta even though the game is very complete at this point, but I will point out a few notable things.

• Sea battles are a great change of pace from typical MMORPG combat. It's inherently more strategic, especially when groups of players are involved.
• I personally love the look and style of the animation, especially the NPCs who can be seen swaggering, stumbling, walking with limps, etc..
• The economic portion of the game is a good contrast to the usual crafting 'professions'. It's a bit complex, but professions should be intended for the micro-managers among us.
• You can sail past battles in progress and not feel like you've artificially avoided danger / combat. This is a subtle element that other MMORPG designers have struggled with (and failed) since the beginning of the genre. Kill-stealing is avoided by battles being "locked" unless the players cry for help. It looks like it will hold up well for PvE and PvP alike and will probably integrate player-chosen PvP more seamlessly than other games.

That last point could be a full article unto itself, but I've only just brushed the surface with the game so far.

It's a good thing Pirates of the Burning Sea is coming out before the next wave of big MMOs, although a few months sooner would have been even better. The extra lead time could keep them from drowning when Age of Conan and Warhammer Online hit the shelves.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea Open Beta has begun, with the release date on the horizon (Jan 22nd). I'll probably hop into it sometime this week and see how it is, but at the same time while a Pirate setting for an MMORPG seems fascinating, I'm also not certain how long it can hold interest.

From what I've seen though, the sailing and ship-to-ship combat looks excellent and this is probably the home for true sailing fans.

As AFK Gamer and Tobold have both pointed out, EA/Mythic has oddly shut down the current Warhammer Online beta for at least 2 months. And now the rumours get to fly, the most obvious of which is a possible delay for the Warhammer release date.

Before EA scooped up Mythic, Warhammer Online was poised to grab a solid niche of the MMO market, but more and more it seems that EA has big hopes for WAR to challenge WoW for dominance. So far though, the leaks from the beta have been a mixed bag and my guess is that EA/Mythic is going for another round of polishing. Despite Mythic's pre-EA insistence that they would be happy as #2, I think they're shooting for the stars now.

More beta madness.

For many of you I know that this is the one you've been looking for: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is now offering Beta signups. Here's the direct link for North American folks and another for Europeans or just click on the big "Beta is Here" banner on the official Warhammer Online website.