zOMG – Gaia Online’s New MMO

The preview for zOMG, Gaia Online’s new MMORPG was released “recently”.

I have some opinions of it. I don’t care if they ever get read, I’d just like to know that it’s on the internet, where someone has the choice to read it.

First off, if you’re a Gaia fanatic, and are willing to be avidly optimistic about anything the Gaia staff decides to do, this article won’t be your cup of tea.

The preview was nice, it got me a bit excited. Still, I couldn’t shake the fact that it didn’t seem like the development staff and the preview’s editors were on the same page. The preview looked like it was composed by a few guys who play GaiaOnline, and happen to have good editing skills. It really didn’t seem like the Gaia staff themselves worked on it.

One, main thing that bothered me was the preview’s use of images. It rather reminded me of a person on Youtube trying to get people excited for a game, by “animating” new clips by just weaving the camera around in a concept design. It made me feel like Gaia didn’t have any material to show us, and was just going to throw concept art in our face.

Then there’s just bad text directing. “Soon, 6 million gaians…will fight a new evil…THIS GUY??”

Well, that’s definitely very…informative to us. Wait, was that a joke? Hmm…a mystery.

Next, there’s the actual gameplay footage. This is where it felt a bit sad. I was kind-of hoping for some good effects, monsters dropping like flies, evidence of teamwork between dozens of people, fun stuff.

I guess I’ll have to accept that this isn’t designed to be an important MMO for anyone. The only thing that makes it special is that it’s a “Gaia” MMO. That’s fine enough. The game will be good enough for me to give it a try.

Someone may read this article and get angry. If you do, that’s fine. I’m here playing games that look much better than this one, so, by comparison it’s hard to feel much for zOMG.

Maybe it’s the “towns clone” look, that makes me feel disappointed.

~ by Captain Wright on August 24, 2008.