Massively's top 5 news stories of 2009

It's that time again! Time when we look backwards and try to identify the top 5 big news stories that we covered here at Massively. 2009 was a pretty turbulent year when it comes to the MMO industry, as we were involved in lawsuits, game closures, multiple major releases, a rising set of indie studios, and more news than you could handle.

So are you excited to look at the year's stories in review? Well, I certainly am! So excited that we're going to do this story in gallery-vision. That's right, for every story you get to have an awesome picture accompanying it. It's brilliant, if you ask us.

So if you're ready to start the tour-de-force, click on the link below or simply start at the first image of the gallery below that. Don't try to skip ahead either, we have poison arrow codes loaded into these pages so if you skip ahead, then your monitor will shoot a poisoned arrow at your neck. Gotta just love HTML 5 -- it does everything!

Massively's top news stories of 2009>>

Massively's top 5 news stories of 2009

Reader Comments (9)

My god, I miss TR.

Maybe you will get lucky and someone will resurrect it.

I really miss TR as well. And it is painful to hear the talk about it being shut down because of problems with the game when that's not true. It was done in because of developer ego, corporate greed and infighting.

They were making basically a different version of Aion before they had Richard Garriott come in and take over. He changed everything, plastered his name on the game and made big promises about the game that the team couldn't and didn't deliver.

NCSoft got tired of dumping money into the game and had them release it well before the game was ready. They knew it, the beta testers knew it, the people who picked it up at release knew it. It was running okay, but the game wasn't finished. And NCSoft never had realistic expectations on the game. They wanted WoW subscriber numbers out of it, but it is a fairly niche game, appealing to those who liked both FPS and MMORPG games, not one or the other.

The final nail was that both sides blamed each other for the supposed 'failure' of the game. It didn't fail, it had a decent number of regular subscribers. Even with the people complaining about it's shortcomings, most of them remained after the first bleeding off of people that happens in every game.

Still, NCSoft said that it was going to be one of their AAA+ titles they were going to support fully, the development team was working frantically to keep both interesting things going on in game and fix and update the content, and was going great guns on it. Then Garriott made his trip to space on his own dime, and making it a big publicity drive for TR bringing in a lot of new blood at a time when some big promised additions to the game (Returning to Earth and battle suits) were about to land.. and suddenly NCSoft reverses their stance from a month before and cancels the game, making up some hokey story about how Garriott decided to move on.

I'm still convinced that the big nail in the coffin was personality conflicts between Garriott and the management of NCSoft. If TR wasn't so tied to Garriott (his name has top billing on the game, for frak's sake.. It's officially 'Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa) I think maybe it might have been kept. But sadly, it wasn't to be.

Ouch, not only was 2009 a terrible year for MMO releases, but I forgot how many games were shut down in 2009 as well.

All of the above are very worthy, But perhaps Matrix online should have been #5 and TR #3.

I felt the same way about that, but going on hits (which influenced how I ranked things) the Matrix story got some insane traction and got passed around much more than the TR story.

Dunno why that one occurred. Perhaps because more outlets covered the death of TR while we were one of the few (us and Giant Bomb) that covered MxO.

Great god i´m so happy that there is no "real" Twilight MMO *sighs in relief*

For me the biggest story of 2009 was the release of Dragon Age: Origins, not simply because it was hands-down the most ambitious and highest quality computer game developed this year - and probably ever - but also because it has raised the bar dramatically so far as SW:TOR is concerned.

Bioware have demonstrated their ability at producing second-to-none offline games, enriched by a wonderful storyline and interraction, but the pressure is now even greater for them to prove that they can achieve the same results in an online game where thousands are playing on the same server at the same time, and where people are playing for 2 or 3 years rather than 2 or 3 weeks.

They also need to demonstrate the same level of post-launch support and ongoing development for a multi-player game that they have demonstrated with their single player games. The undoubted quality and success of Dragon Age: Origins have made that challenge much more difficult for Bioware, I hope they can live up to the hype.

God, am I the only one who found the combat unoriginal, the game unpolished, and the story unshamedly generic?

Massively's top 5 news stories of 2009