So Many Foreign MMORPGs

You’d think that 200+ free to play client based MMORPGs available in North America is a lot, but in reality its nothing compared to the number of free to play games available in China and Korea. This is because “free to play” is the ‘norm’ in these countries. Paying monthly to play an MMORPG is unheard of in the East. Games like Age of Conan from Funcom and World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment are still available in Asia, just with a different business model. Lineage 2 and Age of Conan for example are both free to play with cash shops in South Korea. In terms of variety, North America is lacking compared to Korea. Obviously the mega popular MMOs like MapleStory, Runes of Magic and Vindictus are available in both the East and West. Other smaller MMOs like Prius Online and Koongya adventure from Netmarble aren’t yet available in the U.S or Europe.

In fact, there are so many smaller free to play MMORPGs in South Korea and Japan that MMORPG players over there have much more variety. Even with 200+ free to play MMORPGs in the U.S. Variety Is lacking – especially since most free to play MMORPGs in the West are the same old fantasy MMORPGs rehashed. Anime MMORPGs like Luna Online and Fly For Fun look neat, but there are so many similar games. Heck, if you’ve played Luna Online, you might as well have played every other anime MMORPG from Adsa Story to Zu Online – as they’re all very similar. I’m sure a lot of games are clones of each other in Korea and Japan too, but with more games means more variety.

I know Korea is big in MMO development, but Japan isn’t. There are only a handful of MMOs actually developed in Japan. I think Ran Online and Pandora Saga are some of the only two. I’m talking free to play MMORPGs, not pay to play ones, so I’m excluding games like Final Fantasy 11 & 14. Oh, and there’s Florensia as well as CosmicBreak. Korean MMORPGs seem to be more popular than Japanese MMORPGs, as Nexon is one of the biggest MMO companies in the world, and they specialize in free to play games. Perfect World Entertainment – the company behind Battle of the Immortals, Perfect World, Forsaken World and Jade Dynasty is also very big on free to play MMOs. I think Perfect World Entertainment and Nexon are the two biggest MMORPG companies in the World. There aren’t too many Western MMO developers, yet, so most of the free to play titles in the U.S. Are imported and licensed from Korean developers. Firefall from Red5 Studios is supposed to be free to play and League of Legends is f2p. So aside from these there are very few new western developed f2p MMOs, though big companies here are starting to realize the potential of free to play. I think Electronic Arts has been doing a good job embracing the genre. They should make their upcoming Star Wars MMO “The Old Republic” free to play too. That would be awesome.

Anyway, I’m done with this long random rant =).

Where Are all the Japanese MMORPGs?

Japan has always been big on both video games and anime, but they’ve been very weak in MMORPGs. Japanese game developers like Square Enix and Konami are world renowned for their triple A games, but it seems like Japan is well behind countries like South Korea and China in the MMORPG space. Sure Square Enix has Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14, but it seems like out of the 200+ free to play MMORPGs available in the U.S. Only a handful of them are Japanese developed. Games like Uncharted Waters Online from NetMarble and GetAmped2 from Cyber Step are Japanese developed, but for every Japanese developed MMORPG I can name a dozen Korean ones. The video game industry in Japan is big. And by big, I mean HUGE. Two of the biggest video game companies are based in Japan – Nintendo and Sony. To be fair, Sony Online Entertainment does have several MMORPGs in North America – Like Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Seas, EverQuest 2 and numerous other titles – but none of these games were actually developed in Japan. So it wouldn’t be fair to call them Japanese MMORPGs.

So why isn’t Japan big on MMORPGs? I think it’s because they’re not great at developing these kinds of games. Don’t get me wrong – I love Japanese console games, but I’ve tried playing Uncharted Waters Online and strongly disliked it. Mostly because the interface sucked. Fantasy Earth Zero, which is published by GamePot USA is also one of the few Japanese developed MMOs in the U.S. The game isn’t bad, but it’s really old. The graphics just look ridiculously out dated. CosmicBreak unfortunately suffers from the same problem. The game is decent, but it just looks REALLY old. Pandora Saga looks a bit nicer, but it’s not at all popular in the U.S. – but that’s because it’s being published in Malaysia. U.S. Users can still access it though, because there aren’t any IP blocks in place.

The problem with Japanese MMORPGs is that they’re all incredibly old. Final Fantasy 14 and Dynasty Warriors Online are the newest MMORPGs developed in Japan. The rest of the titles available in North America are just really old games re-launching in North America. I actually had a chance to play the Final Fantasy 14 beta, and I was very disappointed. The game suffers from the same problem Uncharted Waters Online has – a terrible interface. Aside from the clunky interface, there’s a ton of lag while navigating the menus, that it’s just frustrating to play FF14. Hopefully Square Enix fixes these issues before launch. I Can’t say the same thing about Chinese MMORPGs. I mean, sure some Chinese developers like EnjoyMMO and TQ Digital make low quality games, but Perfect World Entertainment and ChangYou are well known for their very high quality titles. Forsaken World for example looks absolutely incredible – and I have no doubt that the game will be successful, as the company’s other games have been a big hit – See Perfect World, Jade Dynasty and Battle of the Immortals.

Anyway. Hopefully we can see some more Japanese MMORPGs here in the West.