Massively's predictions for 2010

Reader Comments (5)

"Brendan Drain:
In 2009, there was an almost industry-wide over-estimation in the future success of new MMOs. Coming up to their release days, every game was hailed as the next big thing and few did as well as predicted. I think people as a whole will have more reserved expectations for the genre this year. This may just be the optimist in me speaking, but hopefully studios will focus less on launches and stop over-estimating their ability to keep subscribers in the long-term.

I think 2010 will bring something fresh to the genre. With several sci-fi MMOs on the way to challenge EVE Online and companies currently experimenting with alternative business models, it looks like studios are up for taking some risks. Hopefully then this year will bring some much needed innovation to the industry."

What I'm sure Brendan (please correct me if I'm assuming wrong) is also predicting is the appearance of Ambulations/Walking In Stations/Incarna (will they decide some time today?) and Dust 514. What I personally predict is we will see Incarna next expansion, I'm guessing around late May, June or even July because I know they are still cleaning up from their last expansion.

Dust 514 will probably come not too long after that. XBox 360 is rumored to be coming out with an upgrade to their current console in fall 2010 to give it a little more umph and I bet Dust 514 will follow shortly. Depending on how well Microsoft likes the game it may even come bundled with a XBox 360.

I didn't really touch on EVE Online much in my predictions because it could go either way at this point. I do expect Incarna to be the summer expansion in June/July but seeing how many delays it's gotten so far, it could come as the winter expansion. Either way they haven't released any information on what the other expansion will be (as we always get two per year), so that'll be interesting to see. It could be another disappointing "Quantum Rise" type expansion or something awesome completely out of the blue.

I'm pretty confident that Dust514 won't be launched in 2010, it hasn't been in development long enough. Remember that the development teams working on EVE Online and Dust are completely separate. They're in different countries, even. They can't just put all the EVE guys onto Dust514 and push it out rapidly.

Regarding the XBox360, rumour has it that the full-body motion capture project codenamed "Natal" is coming out by christmas 2010 ("natal" is portuguese for christmas). Maybe that's why the rumour of an upgrade is going about, it might actually be required for natal.

They pretty much confirmed the next two EVE expansions at the fanfest already.
Summer expansion: Planetary Interactions
Winter expansion: Incarna

Dust514.. hmm, 3 years into development already - it just might pop up ready for 2010 Christmas market - but I guess 2011 is more realistic..

Planetary flight for summer? That'll be awesome, it's been long awaited. The new planetary graphics have probably given CCP some important tools to work with for closer planetary interaction. For example, there must be a system in place now for generating a heightmap or normalmap/bumpmap for planets as they use one in the lightmap layer. That can be used for constructing meshes of surface features for up-close interaction, though they'll need a good system for interpolating between points on the heightmap and adding more detail as the player gets closer. They talked of this being a feature of the new planet graphics, using a fractal algorithm to add progressively finer detail on zooming, but as far as I can tell it never materialised. The current iteration of the planet graphics are procedurally generated textures but they don't appear to respond to zoom or proximity apart from the simple mimapping the GPU does.

I think the summer expansion is rumored to be related to the RTS planetary management/control stuff that will be behind the future DUST conflicts, if I remember the Fanfest 09 stuff correctly.