It all sounds hopeless at the moment, but I think we will get what we want eventually. Personally I am just as excited about Guild Wars 2 as anything. I have played the beta quite a lot and I love it. It's not really the EQ type experience a lot of us have wanted for years, but it's different, and it's just as fun in its own way. So I can't wait for that.
And besides being fun, another thing GW2 shows is that if you make one game which is smaller in scale, and it's a big success, you can then afford to make a second game exactly how you want it, and with no interference from publishers. No need to dumb it down etc. There is another promising game which is more sandbox style called ArcheAge which is well worth looking in to.
There is also hope in the future with reduced costs and better availability of 'middle ware'. In other words, there are large chunks of software that you can just buy and use it to make a game. SpeedTree is one example, you buy it, but then it creates all the trees in your entire game. They are great looking too, and don't kill your frame rate, and no artists need to do any work on them. There are other kinds of 'middle ware' too, and eventually as the industry and the MMO genre matures, there will be more of this stuff, and it will come down in price. So independent projects will stand a better chance. Independent games might not be as big and fancy as the big budget ones, but we may still get some great games that are better than the now aging EQ.
|