Global Chat: October 23-29, 2011

For one moment I thought these screenshots were leaked and showing the second next World of Warcraft playable race (after the Pandaren one). On topic, I choose the right one. He looks thuggish and must have developed his intelligence/fighting abilities to compensate for his tiny... horn. He boasts a Darwinian-adapted ass to meld perfectly in his rosy, cheesy environment. I can see him as a Rogue, puncturing superficially and repeatedly his victims like an army of furious wasps and letting them bleed to death.

The left one is more like a girl on a catwalk; she thinks everyone should bow to her magnificence and revolve around her exceptional gravity. She's just posing and wouldn't take any action endangering her perfect haircut, necklace, and makeup or soiling her snow-white skin. Her glazed eye proves that such folks earn lot of money and can afford drugs, so she musn't be the most effective in raids. On the other hand, her horn is majestic and could be deadly, but if she can't/won't use it, her potential goes sadly to waste.

Bad day indeed. I don't even know what to say, other than the fact that my thoughts go with those who have lost their jobs in this shoddy economy.

I don't know about others, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we might be seeing the beginnings of a sort of "bubble-burst" for the MMO industry in the West (I obviously can't speak for other markets because I'm not very familiar with them). Games that just weren't up to snuff for one reason or another ended up shutting their doors (here I'm mainly talking about Faxion Online and Mythos Europe) and entire teams were let go.

Now, whether this heralds a very tight, wary, conservative development age after years of more freewheeling launches and localizations in that ever-elusive quest to one-up WoW (or kill it... or just pick at the droppings) is anyone's guess, but that's my own estimate of the situation. Publishes and investors are probably thinking that you can't toss just any old thing at a given playerbase and expect success to be a given, even if you're to follow everything that the industry leader(s) do to a T.

This can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it (less development all over the place -- more focus on a few, polished polished ones... or dated, "safe" gameplay and mechanics because in a crunch no one wants to be taking any unnecessary risks).