I haven't seen any news on Bit-Tech regarding the new MMO Aion. Any chance at a preview before it comes out?
True - they are too big, change too often and too quickly and take far, far too long to actually provide any insight into. Any of the big sites out there which simply drop a 7/10 score out there with two pages of text aren't really doing the game justice (and are likely reviewing based on about ten hours of actual gameplay with a provided mid-high level character). That's something we became wise to, so we decided to stop covering MMOs in that way. That said, MMOs are obviously a big part of the industry and the PC platform - and we don't want to ignore them. I'm currently thinking of a number of ways that we could bring MMO content back in a fair and reasonable way, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. Right now, the fairest way to do it would be to have a writer do an on-going MMO blog - but that requires a huge commitment on behalf of the writer either in or out of work. In work, I presonally don't have the time. Out of work, I have neither the time, interest or luxury to spend hours and hours grinding in multiple MMOs - my girlfriend and I see too little of each other as it is!
No Bindi love Still doesn't account for previews, though. I was just surprised that with the hype the game is getting other places, that when I searched BT for "Aion" I got nothing. I understand how the ratings for any MMO can change with a single patch, but you've got to have some sort of initial impression when you try it out. Certain features you like, dislike, classes, races, customizability of characters, graphics, sounds, etc... all of those things you can talk about. A _/10 score might not apply, but you can give people your impression of the game. With or without MMO info, I still love you guys On a side note, Joe deserves a raise. I've loved reading every one of his reviews/articles.
I do have a suggestion for you on this matter - an evolving blog style living and changing review, perhaps written in a humourous lilt, with one or two contributors. It would be a chance for the writer(s) to essentially blog about something cool they did eg why they enjoy the game and why we, the reader, would want to give it a try. To balance it out, of course, there would need to be the odd one which talks about the negative. It should never give a real score about the game, more a general view of why people enjoy it, so others may understand if its for them too. This could even be contributed to out of the BiT community, if there's any talent available for it, or perhaps a partially syndicated feed composited from the better writers out there who already do this in some fashion. GM Dave (http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com) is sorta my inspiration for this suggestion, albeit more focused on the experiences with the game, than with feeding users to Jormy, than he tends to be You could run the feature for say, a month, getting BiT members and passers-by who play said game to contribute a couple blog style entries, and then tie Bindi to a desk and make him edit it into something useable
Cool The obvious bit left unsaid, is that after a month, or perhaps two, you'd move on to another game. Then for the bigger ones, you'd do a revisit month, to combat the constantly evolving nature of the game. Eve Online does for example a 6 - 9 monthly content patch, and WoW does them every 2 - 3 months, with an expansion roughly every 1.5 - 2.0 years, by the look of it. The best entries could even go into the CPC mag if you wanted, which would increase the reader engagement, and also increase your contributions. Finally, -
This is remarkably similar to the lines I too was thinking along, of handling it in blogs. The problems however are still numerous in that we'd need to actually have writers out there committing to these games (and in MMOs that's a BIG commitment) and to writing about them regularly. It'd also be hard to keep things interesting and relevant without coming down to just "Oh, I hit level 8 today." It would also then require someone to sit down and edit it and to manage it all, plus if we're going from reader submissions then it's harder to get that commitment. It's also tough to get everyone in the same style and doing it for free for a long enough period. Everything they said would need to be verified too. It gets messy and, to be brutally honest, there are more important parts of the site that we're focusing on right now. Things like establishing podcasts as a regular event for both gaming and hardware, getting more gaming features up on the site and doing some internal and design tweaks to the site. Don't worry, we are looking to get back on MMOs, but they are such a time-consuming thing to cover it can be difficult and we see very little reward on it because there are sites out there which cater specifically to MMO coverage. Admittedly, I could get into one and blog about it myself - but then it's a matter of singling one out, finding the time. To be honest I'm just not interested enough in MMOs personally to spend my evenings outside of work playing them just to write a blog post about them and I can't find the time within work to do it.
