Oceanic Soapbox: Highlights and Lowlights

oceanic-soap-box

This week’s topic is one that may generate some debate. It’s been a huge year for MMOs and gaming more broadly, so I’m interested in what has been the highlight and lowlight for you this year gaming-wise.

For me the highlight was my first few hours playing The Secret World and seeing MMOs from a totally different perspective. A lowlight is a little more difficult but I’d have to say it’d be the struggles SWTOR has had this year – like a lot of people who’ve followed the game for years I was relatively confident of huge success. That may still occur though but at the very least here’s hoping we have SWTOR on the playing field for a lot more years to come.

So what about you: what’s taken you to the most highs and lows during 2012?

Comments

  1. Both my high and lowlight points have come from the same mmo, SWTOR. The highlight was just getting into the game and playing for those first couple of months, my guild going strong and stepping into the Operations and working through those with a great bunch of people.

    The lowlight is actually a couple of things. Firstly the split launch between basically the northern and southern hemisphere for SWTOR /facepalm and them being so quiet in regards to what they were doing. That and the lack of attention that we seem to get down this way. The population hasn’t been the best which has made certain aspects of the game difficult to do. However with the addition of f2p there are more people around. Here’s hoping the increased numbers feeds through to level cap and a vibrant population gets going again.

    TSW has my interest, maybe next year. 😀

  2. High: Australia seeing more games with local servers.

    Low: ME3’s ending

    High: The success with kickstarter getting sooooo many cool games funded for the future.

    Low: Hardcore raiders trying and unfortunately succeeding in getting the developers of SWTOR to focus on endgame content and not a single class story release all year.

    High: So many great games breaking the mold like Journy’s word less cinematic experience or Natural selection 2’s mix of FPS and RTS or TERA trying to break fantasy MMO’s out of hotkey gaming and GW2 focusing on changing the way questing is done.

    Low: Generally poor quality of customer support from publishers, SWTOR’s staggered release and general poor customer service, Diablo 3 and error 37 etc.

    Tragic low: Bioware loosing many talented staff including the Doctors and David Karpyshyn, Big Huge games and 38 studios closing down, the batman shooting

    Potential for the future: The Mouse controlling the death star and thousands of indi projects applying to be green lit through steam.