Yesterday, a msg was forwarded from a friend that felt like they'd "died inside a bit". At first I was boggled, I didn't think they were interested in Gods and Heroes or anything else I'd heard recently. Then I checked the news--

EA has officially begun an acquisition of BioWare and Pandemic Studios. BioWare has the full press release available in PDF format.

It appears that EA's primary interest is increasing their RPG holdings, especially with the unnamed MMORPG from BioWare. A very wise choice for EA for the future. My take on this though is that BioWare is the pinnacle of independent game design, while EA has the notorious reputation of stifling exactly that sort of thing.

As F13 and others are reporting, the MMORPG that nobody was anticipating (at least few that I know) has been cancelled. Gods and Heroes has been put on hold "indefinitely".

This doesn't come as much of a surprise, the game's previews haven't been well received. I was kinda curious why SOE was willing to publish it, but then they seem to be scooping up any potential MMOs to add to their repertoire.

According to F13, what little remains of the team that was working on Gods and Heroes has been merged into the Star Trek Online development.

Apparently rezzing in Earthland Realms requires pressing ALT-F5 repeatedly.

"I thought all the swords and severed heads were kind of gory, so I redecorated using the Hello Kitty expansion pack"

It is fucking Pac-Man!

June has started off as a good month for game statistics. MMOGChart hasn't been updated in a year, so someone else has decided to pick up the torch and run with it: MMOGData has entered the scene and is bound to become a much linked reference for blogs such as this.

The main difference with the new pie charts are the inclusion of F2P (Free to Play) and B2P (Buy to Play: Buy once, play for free) alongside the usual subscription model MMOs. Personally, I think that's comparing apples to oranges and I would really like to see individual graphs continued for each of those markets.

Valve has released their latest version of their Steam survey, with revealing results. Overall, this is the most real-world and realistic sampling of stats from current gamers. Steam has a potential base of over 13 million players. The survey, restarted for May 30th, already has stats from over 390,000 unique gamer's PCs.

The number that has commanded everyone's attention of course, is the abysmal ~1% showing for DirectX 10 capable systems.

DirectX 10 is tied to Vista, which skews this number. More than three times that amount have the capable videocards, but have not moved to Vista. That will probably change over time, but of course the cynic in me is still unimpressed with Microsoft milking PC gamers for OS sales. They could have done the PC games market a great service by allowing DirectX 10 on Windows XP.

Other notable stats: Most gamers still have less than a gig of RAM, but own a near-current videocard. For me, that means high-end videocards have truly become mass-market: I can't imagine a 'hardcore' gamer that would upgrade one without the other. Developers should adjust their expectations accordingly.

"MMORPGs Are Too Easy?" That's the debate travelling the blogosphere today.

No.

Okay simple answer done, I agree with Ethic @ Kill Ten Rats when he quotes the "easy to learn, difficult to master" cliché. It's true.

The very point of an MMO is to be massive, which logically requires attracting the teeming masses. "Easy" implies that anyone can do it. Exactly. Anyone should be able to login and get started, otherwise the MMO is going to miss out on that first M. If you want a greater challenge, either find another kind of game or dig deeper into the one you're in. If you've already done that, then the real gripe you have is a lack of depth.

So the real question: Do MMORPGs Lack Depth?

A lot of us hardcore types wish MMOs were a bottomless pit, with depth into infinity. I think our scales are unrealistic.

World of Warcraft is the obvious measuring stick and while I can complain endlessly about running out of good content and Blizzard's awful concepts of repeatable content-- I'm also a realist and I'm fully aware of the sheer number of man-hours it has taken them to create the massive world of content that they have. Yes, it's finite and sometimes that means moving onto the next game, even if you've made a solid home in the current.

As long as other games have that to measure against, I think things will work out just fine.