Greg Kasavin Executive Editor

Now Playing: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Arcade), Samurai Shodown 2 (Neo), Way of the Samurai 2 (PS2), Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox), Joint Operations: Typoon Rising (PC), The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Xbox), Far Cry (PC)

Silver Lining Somewhere

Pop Quiz: What do the four following games all have in common?

Mythica, True Fantasy Live Online, Warhammer Online, Ultima X: Odyssey

A) They are all massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
B) They all experienced delays in their development schedules.
C) They were all canceled in the midst of production sometime this year.
D) All of the above.

I'm willing to bet that World of Warcraft is directly responsible for the culling that's happening in the massively multiplayer online role-playing genre.

If you answered A, you're right! If you answered B, you're right! If you answered C, you're right! And if you answered D, you're damn right. But now that you're done feeling proud of yourself, you may also know that these weren't the only such games to meet the same fate this year. Ubisoft's Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was intended to ship with a massively multiplayer online component, in addition to its single-player mode, but that didn't happen; the online mode was promised as a forthcoming upgrade, but eventually Ubisoft just pulled the plug on the whole thing. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts' Earth & Beyond will be going dark later this year. I'm sure there will be more grim news along these lines this year.

Remember a year or two back when seemingly every single game publisher and developer was working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game? The circumstances look mighty different now, don't they? The fact that major publishers--we're talking guys like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Ubisoft--are canceling their online RPGs is all the evidence necessary to conclude that the online role-playing market is oversaturated. That's certainly not to say that the genre is dead, mind you. The upcoming releases of EverQuest II and World of Warcraft clearly have a lot of people extremely excited. And City of Heroes, which shipped earlier this year, earned widespread praise and seems to be a great success overall. But in the grand scheme of things, these are just a few games that will reach a very specific (albeit large) audience. Yet they're indicative of a larger trend that seems like it will shake the foundation of the gaming industry.

Sure, Halo 2's looking great. But what will life be like after Halo 2?

I'll admit that the seemingly large number of high-profile cancellations this year has worried me to some extent. One could easily take it as a sign that the entire industry is going into a relapse. Especially when you factor in the news that sales of console games were down nearly 16 percent in May of this year compared with last year. It's been true for a while that console gaming--what with its backing from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo--has superseded PC gaming in terms of overall popularity, at least in North America. So when the outlook doesn't look so hot even on the console side of things, well...

In general, pessimism comes easily to me, but games and the game industry are a few of the things I tend not to be pessimistic about. I like to think that I've known this industry was destined for true greatness and mass-market success all along. Yet events and trends have begun to conspire in such a way that it makes me concerned at the direction in which this industry is heading for the moment. On the one hand, you've got falling revenues and cancellations left and right. On the other hand, you've got this handful of mammoth upcoming releases--games I won't bother linking to, like Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and The Sims 2--but then, what? That's what bothers me.

The game industry is changing lanes right now. Carefully, I hope.

Try this exercise: We're more than halfway through the year, so go ahead and name five games slated for release in 2005 that you're excited about.

I'll bet you that you can't, because all the highest-profile games are slated for release later this year. Granted, one or two of those will likely end up getting delayed, because that's what always ends up happening year after year. Yet, my impression is that we're proceeding into some seriously dangerous, uncharted territory come 2005.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that there's a lot of premature talk about the next generation of gaming platforms. There's lots of concern about details surrounding Sony's PSP and PlayStation 3, and about how these systems may end up being prohibitively expensive. And then there seems to be a lot of pressure on Microsoft to beat Sony out the gate with its next Xbox, which some theorize could result in Microsoft gaining lots of ground on its main video game rival. Meanwhile, Nintendo's also been talking big about its next console, which it promises will be unveiled at next year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. That's great, but I'd rather have some more GameCube games, actually.

That's exactly my problem with all of this: I'm not ready to be thinking about replacing my PS2, my Xbox, and my GameCube. I don't expect I will be at this time next year. A year after that, maybe. And my impression is that I'm not alone in this. Admittedly, though, the decision-makers behind the world's preeminent console manufacturers need to be thinking far ahead; game players like me can be more comfortable living in the present.

Even so, what's the big rush? Arguably, a couple of the current-generation consoles are just starting to come into their own. Look at the quality of some of the games that have shipped in the past year--they're amazing. None of us, as game players, expect to see technological quantum leaps over games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker or Ninja Gaiden anytime soon. Meanwhile, developers are now relatively comfortable with the current technology and are still pushing it to new limits.

It seems they'll have to start relearning the ropes soon enough, though. There will be even greater pressure on higher-budget games with bigger and bigger teams of artists to take advantage of the presumably greater processing power of the next generation of consoles. But everyone knows that better graphics don't mean better games. Meanwhile, the industry is already suffering from these overblown projects, some of which are mercifully getting canceled, but others of which--like the recent Driver 3--are shipping prematurely, to the chagrin of many unsuspecting customers.

I don't recall ever feeling this way about the gaming industry before, but at the moment, I think it just needs to slow down a little and stop getting ahead of itself. The key to being a successful game publisher is to make good games--not necessarily lots of them, but at least some, and to market those games well. It seems perfectly clear that many game players out there are perfectly happy with this generation's technology and the best that it has to offer. Meanwhile, bigger budgets don't make better games, and new consoles are inherently exciting only to an extent. After all, I only have so much room in my living room, and it's going to take a lot for me to decide to retire my current systems in favor of new ones. I won't jump on that bandwagon just because it's there.