The mature rated PVP MMORPG Age of Conan has been delayed until May 20th from it's previous planned launch date in March. This comes as no surprise as the modern MMORPG field is brutally difficult to enter. Perpetual Entertainment recently exhibited this by having to cancell their Gods and Heroes MMO and then stopping production of their Star Trek Online title as well. Currently Perpetual is filing for bankrupcy and liquidating their assets! In a world where the polish of WoW is blinding there is no way to tell if a launch is going to attract players prior to actually jumping into the deep end. Look at Fury, another MMO that attempted to enter into WoWs space and was brutally shut down. Apparently the flaws in Fury were not 100% ironed out at launch, so word spread about it being aggravating and only about 30,000 players gave it a shot. Auran, the developer of Fury was recently dissolved just like Perpetual.

The two huge MMOs that are going to attempt to compete with WoW are Warhammer Online and Age of Conan. AOC promises a mature environment with a strong focus on PVP coupled with absoutely stunning direct x10 graphics. The game is FFA which I believe gives is a huge leg up over WAR and WoW. MMOs are supposed to be driven by politics and a 2 faction system largly removes player interactions from the menu, instead replacing them with a "red = dead" philosophy where you rarely remember the name of your enemy. In a 2 faction system your guild can't lock down an area and claim it's resources as your own. Players from your same faction can always wander in and hunt there or use gathering proffesions on the resources and you have no PvP option to stop them. In contrast a PVP game that is FFA allows guilds to control territory and defend it against all the other players on the server. You can probably imagine how important this is to a realistic PvP based MMO.

I'm eagerly anticipating AOC and this delay only serves to highten my expectations. Taking the time to ensure problems are not present at launch has become a sigh that a game develop has the intelligence it takes to do well in this genre. If the game half lives up to my hopes it will be ten times better than WoW.