Trey Walker News Editor, PC Games	Recent Favorites: Civilization III, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos beta, Sid Meier's SimGolf Most Wanted: Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Heroes of Might and Magic IV

No Vacancy at the Online Motel

In case anyone missed the news, Korean online game company NCsoft recently announced that it had picked up City of Heroes, Cryptic Studios' superhero online role-playing game. NCsoft is the company behind Lineage: The Blood Pledge, the medieval online RPG played by everyone in South Korea. Last year, the company launched the game in North America, and to ensure its success, it hired Richard Garriott--Lord British and creator of the Ultima games--to promote and help launch the game. So far, the game hasn't made the splash in the US that it made in South Korea, but evidently that hasn't discouraged NCsoft from launching online games in the North American market. Which is good, because now City of Heroes will get to see the light of day.

The superhero theme helps this game stand out in the sea of upcoming online games.

The online role-playing game market has become pretty crowded in the past couple of years, and it looks like it's only going to get more competitive. While EverQuest creator Brad McQuaid may not think the market is very competitive, I don't see how all the current and upcoming games can live together in harmony. Assuming everything goes as planned, by the end of this year, players will have about 20 different options. Just off the top of my head, here's an incomplete list of games that may or may not be available to play by December 31, 2002: Ultima Online, Lineage: The Blood Pledge, EverQuest, Asheron's Call (unless it goes away when AC2 comes out), World War II Online, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Mimesis Online, Shadowbane, Meridian 59: Resurrection, Black Moon Chronicles, Dragon Empires, City of Heroes, Neocron, Project Entropia, Earth and Beyond Online, Phantasy Star Online, Asheron's Call 2, and Star Wars Galaxies.

When Star Wars Galaxies comes out, it will be competing with at least a dozen online games.

I'm sure I'm missing some here, and probably at least half of these won't make it out by New Year's, but nevertheless, the public should have at least a dozen or so online role-playing games to choose from this holiday season. And this isn't counting other types of online games like Motor City Online, Jumpgate, Shattered Galaxy, DarkSpace, Neverwinter Nights, and The Sims Online. Then there are games coming next year or the year after like Lost Continents, Sovereign, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy XI. And there will probably be at least a few new online games announced at the upcoming E3 in May.

Admittedly, some of the already released games on the above list might die out before the end of the year, but I doubt if it will happen to more than a couple, and even then those games may still be available in some form. So unless the online game community doubles in the next nine months, these games are going to be competing for players.

What makes this competition so fierce is that online games are far more dependent than other games on the player community for success. While a single-player game can be just as fun whether there are thousands of people playing it or not, online games need lots of players just to survive, so the success of one game could potentially have a direct impact on the failure of another. Similarly, someone could play dozens of ordinary games in a period of a few months, but many online role-playing games are set up so that players end up playing hundreds of hours to raise their character's level, and then spend scores more hours adventuring in the high-level areas in order to get valuable items. This leaves little room for work and sleep, let alone other online role-playing games.

			Which of these things do you spend the most time doing each day? Working or studying Sleeping Playing online role-playing games

Which online role-playing games are going to succeed? Only time will tell, but my guess would be the games that either already have a built-in fan base or stand apart from the competition by offering a different kind of game experience. Games like EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and Asheron's Call are going strong now, and there's no immediate reason to think they will crumble anytime soon (except maybe AC, which may be replaced by AC2). Sure, I talked about the fall of EverQuest a few weeks ago, but I don't see that happening in the next nine months. Games that look different will have a better chance at competing with these medieval fantasy veterans, so Star Wars Galaxies, with its built-in Star Wars appeal, should do well, and City of Heroes, with its comic-book superhero edge, should also be successful. Either way, it will be exciting to see how this growing part of the industry evolves over the next year.