a) Most of these look like your average Asian f2p mmos that will mainly just replace the current popular ones (Perfect World, etc) at best.
b)Diablo III isn't an MMORPG by any means. Multiplayer option =/= MMO.
c)Guild Wars 2 is in no way coming out this year... the EARLIEST estimates I've seen put it in 2010. There COULD be a beta, but that's all.
Given that except for Diablo, Guild Wars 2, and Aion (and the former 2 are disqualified anyway), I haven't even heard of any of these things (NADA in PCGamer, half of them don't even have Wikipedia pages), I doubt they will garner much attention or particularly large playerbases outside their native countries. I don't have much faith in Aion, either: it looks pretty, and Makani-sensei liked it when she tried it out on the Chinese beta, but I'm not sure if it has sticking power.
Basically, I expect 2009 to be a pretty dry year for MMOs, and unless some good betas get released, I don't see any releases challenging the current big dogs. It'll be a couple years until we get anything particularly impressive (here, at least).
But I could be wrong.
Last edited by Qing Guang; May 27, 2009 at 10:50 PM // 22:50..
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