Cult of Stafford: 7 upcoming MMOs you need to know about

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Bringing a massively multiplayer game into the world, all gooey and screaming, is a tough experience for any developer. More than any other game, the world of an MMO is designed to be pored over, every inch inspected not by single pairs of eyes at a time, but by thousands, flicking their critical consciousnesses over any flaws in the huge creation and spouting out their findings via in-game chat channels.

Developers expose their strengths and their weaknesses when they create an MMO. A successful launch locks them into a constant cycle of batting down problems as they emerge, while introducing endless improvements. The greatest online worlds are nothing like they were when they launched, but those first iterations had a vital spark that ensnared the brains and mouse-fingers of the early adopters.

The games on the following pages have this spark, some special element that marks them out as the most fascinating of upcoming MMOs. Start reading now to find why you should care about them.

The Secret world

Release: Winter 2011
Website: darkdaysarecoming.com
“There’s such a rich reservoir of myths and legends out there, we’re spoilt for choice.” Ragnar Tornquist’s MMO is firmly in foil-hat territory, plundering nutbar conspiracy theories and urban legends to slot into a combat-heavy core game.

It’s an easy sell – a world of vampires and demons, where giant lizards likely are controlling the government – but there’s got to be a limit on the amount of wacko-ness you can jam into an MMO and still make it feel coherent... right Ragnar? “You’d be surprised what we’ve been able to squeeze in – but some of it pops up in very subtle ways. It’s not all about monsters and locations; these legends and myths tie into everything from mission dialogue to achievements.”

The main break from the MMO pack? There’s no grind. “With no levels and no traditional classes, it’s a lot more open and flexible than other RPG systems. You can always mix things up: reshuffle your deck, try a new approach.” Not that all the cards are available from the beginning: “changing your character’s spec may be free, but getting those abilities in the first place isn’t.”

While Secret World’s backstory is written to be pored over, the central experience will be smacking baddies back to whatever plane of existence they escaped from. “Combat will feel like a natural part of the storyline and the character progression,” says Ragnar. This is an RPG, not a shooter. But combat is definitely more hands-on and fast-paced than in other MMOs.”

A three-pronged faction system lies beneath it all, with the Templars, the Illuminati and the Dragon at odds over the treatment of this veiled existence. Fancy character customisation will mean big visual differences between players: “There’s a ton of ways to customise your in-game character both visually and in terms of what that character can do, what kind of hero he or she is. No two players will be quite the same.”

How will this hidden world be laid out? “The world will be open – and there will also be instances. Sometimes you want to get some friends together and play a more scripted experience. Other times, you just want to head out into the wide open world and battle evil on your own.” The first of the game’s locations, Kingsmouth, was unveiled by way of an elaborate set of clues left all over the web leading to www.kingsmouth.com.

It’s a cheapo tourist site for a sleepy New England coastal community, but it’s clear this Lovecraftian settlement isn’t quite as restful as it appears. A spooky fog has set in, awakening something that should have stayed slumbering. Specifically: zombies. It’s a clear merge of influences: Cthulhu-esque townships, mingled with the classic undead, sprinkled liberally with the mist and fog of, um, The Mist and The Fog. The Secret World looks likely to become a secret best not kept to yourself.

LEGO Universe

Release: December
Website: universe.lego.com

Three things are constant in LEGO Universe: Imagination, Chaos, and the unending shower of little bricks spilling from smashed constructs. Imagination is under threat from the destructive force of Chaos, presumably because Chaos stood on a brick on its way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

The distinct LEGO properties – from spacemen to pirates – are tied together by this all-encompassing threat, by way of instances. A black hole threatens an intricate LEGO starship, adorable zombie pirates are washed up on a bricky beach, and so on.

Playable with chums, these instances are designed for small groups of young and old to combine forces, and build devices in a manner similar to Traveller’s Tales’ other LEGO platforming games. Namely: smash stuff, collect the pieces, build stuff. Imagination is a resource, and stockpiling it lets you turn bricks into something useful to your quest. The puzzles are simple, but will usually have a number of solutions.

Mortal Online

Release: Late April
Website: www.mortalonline.com

Do it yourself. That’s Mortal Online’s ethos. See that tree? Chop it down. See that rock? Smash it up. See that bandit? Run away! Carving your own path in MO’s fantasy world involves a lot of literal carving, cutting wood and mining to get the cash you need to live as a pseudo-elf, pseudo-orc, or full-on human. With the game currently in beta, we dropped into the riverside village of Toxai. Playing as a Kallard – hardy Viking-esque beardy types and just one of the game’s many race subsets – we set about chatting to some horses.

Backgrounds offer a sketched path for your character to follow, and we’d taken ‘horse herder’. In the long run, this meant we could rise to be a master of equine combat; for now, it meant we were a low-rent horse-whisperer, sidling up to them and spamming ‘/tame’ in their ears until they let us ride them. Living by your means in the wilds as a highwayman is just as possible as an armour-crafting career in an established settlement. As sandbox experiences go, they don’t get much sandier or boxier.