Question of the Day: Would you play an MMO if you knew it only had a year to live?

Wow, not sure I ever tried a title that long… let’s see what happens.

Anyway, all this idle speculation about the future of Warhammer Online (not to mention Champions, not to mention the early death of Tabula Rasa) has me wondering something.

Would you start playing an MMO if you knew it was only going to be around for 9-12 months?

I’m not going to do a formal poll but I’ll offer my own conflicted answers to the question, just to get you started.

On the one hand, I have an unhealthy level of curiosity about games, so knowing a title won’t be around too long might prompt me to sign up just so I could get a chance to check it out before it ‘dies.’

On the other hand, one of the aspects of MMOs I love is how open-ended and never-ending they are. If I knew one was going to have a limited lifespan, I’m not sure I’d want to bother putting the time into it to ‘establish’ myself.

I do know I quit Tabula Rasa very much intending to come back to it, then when I heard it was shutting down, it didn’t seem worth the effort of going back. Yet I found myself wishing I’d played it more when it launched.

Still I feel conflicted when it comes to answering this question. What about you?

Cross-Post: EA to lay off 1500 employees

I don’t usually do this, but since it is topical I’ll make an exception.

My blog post at ITWorld today is an opinion piece (and I wish that site emphasized posts tagged opinion more) about the EA layoffs:

Game developer Electronic Arts announces 1500 job cuts

A bit more ‘extreme’ thoughts that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing over there; I think this is a really bad sign for the so-called ‘core gamer.’ It sounds to me like EA is shifting it’s emphasis from the PC/Xbox/PS3 triad over to free-to-play web games with micro-scams… I mean micro-transactions.

I never would’ve imagined Facebook would become such a threat to “real” games.

TorchEd release imminent?

RunicGames said on their twitter account today: “TorchED update, we found a bug on the last build, going to try to fix it tonight and get it out tomorrow. Updates in the forums!”

So here’s hoping we get it tomorrow. They’ve posted a few items to get you prepared and/or psyched for the toolset:

First, you’re gonna need .Net installed.

Second, here’s Ten Helpful Tips for Using TorchED

I’m so sucked into Dragon Age I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull myself away to play with TorchED right away, but I have been thinking when I’m finally ready to get my hands dirty, I’ll start with TorchEd and before taking on the rather intimidating Dragon Age toolset.

Rags to riches for me. I haven’t had a neat RPG toolset to play with since NeverWinter Nights, and now I have two at the same time!