Well, I'm finally caught up on my RSS from the few seasonal weeks off I took, and it does seem quite a bleak kind of season, particularly the 'round-up' type posts, with most of us still playing games from 2005 and further back, not impressed with any new titles released in 2006, and not especially looking forward to anything scheduled for 2007. Lean times, and the Year of The Expansion indeed.

The Podnositcator's holiday special, including interviews with a great many other MMO podcasters, seems to sum this mood up quite well, and can be found here:

Virgin Worlds Podcast #45

(Episode #46, the rather...robust...new year's drinking session with MOGArmy, merely cements this general feeling of irritated malaise)

I'm no pod-caster, but know when to steal a good format when I see one:

My Highpoint of 2006:

A difficult call, but for me, this was the PlanetSide: Reserves deal. For a glorious month or so PlanetSide had a whole new lease of life, as the casually interested, and the long-time veteran ex-players alike got a chance to come and and try/retry this most quirky of online projects, in a limited capacity, free of charge, myself included. Playing numbers, while not quite reaching the levels it had at initial release back in 2003 or so, bulked up to something like twice the typical population it had in the months immediately before. It's a total PvP kind of game, so clearly, having more people to shoot at, and a lower level of average skill (brought down by the new people), makes life better for everyone in there, and the resulting really big battles and varied tactical experimentation I'd not seen since the Early Days rejuvenated it for me. Great stuff.

Of course it's not the sort of game that even I could play night in, night out, indefinitely, (even free of charge), and many found it interesting, but perhaps too harsh, perhaps too repetitive, and after the second month in, on the year-long free-play deal, the numbers had dropped back to only a little above where they were before the Reserves deal was made available. A small proportion of the new Reservists became extremely good, and probably even subscribed, but for most, it remains an interesting curiosity, rather than a life-driving obsession. A Sometimes Game.

It'll be interesting to see if they extend the Reserves offer for a further year, in the way Anarchy Online did with their own play-for-a-year-for-free deal, but at a guess, I'd suggest that PlanetSide won't actually go belly up any time soon - those who do stay, play and pay, are very dedicated types indeed, and barring a company-wide Head Office Cost Cutting Exercise at SOE Towers, it'll probably keep going for quite some time, being paid for, quite ironically, by the legions of new people brought to/back-to EverQuest 2, via the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. I don't mind that at all, personally, and I do hope PlanetSide continues to be there for me, for those moments when I do just want to shoot someone in the face.

(According to my records, the current PS: Reserves offer started March 24th, or thereabouts, so will be expiring in about three months. Watch this space.)

My advice for the PS Team would be to make it a console port, available through XBox Live (or whatever the Nintendo or Playstation variants are), as there's nothing in there that wouldn't work well enough on a console controller, and it shares that same kind of 'slumped on the sofa' drop-in kind of gameplay. That would of course depend on there being any major new development for PlanetSide at all, which at this point, is looking increasingly unlikely.

Resolution for 2007:

Easy - EVE Online. Everyone's favourite Game They'd Love To Love has a particular hold and fascination for me, and I'm determined to 'get it' - to find and engage in the game I know to be in there somewhere. Alas, to date I've gone at it trying to play it as many different kinds of game, and never quite finding the one I suspect it is meant to be, but each time I try it and wander away grumbling, I'm further eliminating games that EVE is not. So far, I've crossed off 'Massively Multiplayer Elite', 'EverQuest In Space', 'Freelancer Online' 'Three Dimensional PlanetSide in the Dark' and many other strange misconceptions. Perhaps I try too hard, perhaps it defies categorisation entirely.

Regardless, I do want to like it, this most unusual of MMOs, with it's dark drifting serenity, it's elegantly clean look and feel, it's vast territorial wars and it's sheer difference to anything else currently on the market. I've ranted before about preferring Sci-Fi to High Fantasy, and lamented the comparatively slim choices available if you don't like Generic World of ElfQuest Online IV, so it's particularly annoying to have a perfectly good alternative sitting there, and to not really know how to get the best out of it.

So this year, I'm going to try it again, and hopefully it'll stick this time. A big corp, 0.0 space, wars, the lot. Mostly this will be a struggle with myself - to identify and reconcile those parts of me that don't want to get involved, that don't want to take risks, that take it all entirely too seriously, and do not commit. All a bit heavy and emo - hopefully, I'll have some fun along the way too!


So there you go, my 2006 highpoint was in a game from 2003, and my big plans for 2007 also involve a game from 2003. 2003 was a good year - not like your modern years you get today...