Kom, i think it's normal, if people don't get more info about WELL they go looking other things. I'm still watching news from there, but at same time i'm busy finding my new home.
Speaking of well-known next MMO's I'm not waiting for AoC (seems too dark for my tastes) nor for WAR (will be another clone, you can bet), but maybe TCoS. WELL can be a good choice when we get more from the devs.
If you read my sig in mmorpg.com, I've played a lot of MMO, some for a very long time.
I played AO for 2 years before getting tired of the outdated engine; the game is full of content, tho, and a good background (sci-fi), it's too old to play it atm;
I played EQ2 for about 3 months but i never liked it. You'll end up overwhelmed by quests in few time. If I would going to play it now, probably i would not finish any trial, but at the time i was not much used to fantasy MMO's.
I played SWG (post-CU/NGE) for 1 month but I found it almost identical to EQ2 in the game mechanics (obviously the environ is sci-fi);
I played DDO,DAOC,LOTRO for just one month, I didn't liked them, the environment is almost identical in 'style' (with EQ2 too). LOTRO is, tho, polished and stable (tho, the environment is cold and without a style), but if you are an experienced MMO player you'll get bored fast;
I played EVE for about 6 months. It's a good game if you love sci-fi, but need too much time to play well and you start having fun when you are cabable to live in 0.0 so need some months, depending if you get a good corporation to join. When i got to decide from EVE and Ryzom i decided Ryzom;
I tried also several others but most of them are unmentionable as they are very very bad, mostly i cannot play the asian style clones. I only mentioned Last Chaos because I beta tested it and it's more polished than others, but it's still an asian clone (sorry Valda, it's just my opinion). MMO like Archlord, Shadowbane are terrible, just to mention some f2p mmo. I don't know how people can play them. Horizons: how come that there are people paying to play it?
No one, except EVE, is a 'sandbox' game. Only Ryzom is (was?) a true fantasy sandbox game.
You can notice i didn't mentioned WoW. I never played it and never do, not because of the game (I've seen it somewhere, but never on my PC), but because i never trusted Blizzard, much before they released it (if you want to know why, just google a bit). It will be the same for any GF game, now: they will never see my hard disk.
So, at the end:
I entitled Ryzom as 'my virtual home' (started playing in dec 2004, joined LoA in jan 2005, got some stop in meanwhile, just to come back and stay), and I got a lot of fun during the last 3 years and got to know a lot of incredible people (that are all of you
... kami included
).
I'm 3yrs old (almost, i lost some months due to unsubs) in CoH/CoV and I'm still playing it, now just casually; it's not fantasy and no lore, but can be played just for the fun of simple and fast actions (you seems reading a comic book). Tho it's extremely repetitive (expecially at low levels) and alt-ish.
I'm a Myst fan, so I'm in the Cavern too, just because i was there since the very beginning (2003) and I played all the single-user titles of the Cyan's serie. Not a true MMO but something different.
Now, I'm trying Vanguard. Got a 10-days trial key, Can't say much actually, just few notes: the graphic engine is poorly implemented, tho, the world has some 'style' into. has a lot of customizations and features. It's one instance only (except the end-game raid) and seems the quests are not overwhelming you. Some original idea: diplomacy (i found it great) and a crafting system that's better than other MMO (still not as Ryzom). Unfortunately harvesting is as usual (but Ryzom is truly unique in that aspect). In the FFA server need a lot of politics to avoid gankers. Community doesn't seems very good, there.
Not sure I'll go playing it, but if Ryzom doesn't come back from death, and being TCoS far from release, it's in the top of my 'next virtual-home' list.
Anyway: no MMOs around implement any decent AI as in Ryzom. It's scripted, so hard to maintain but that's what makes the difference: we never feel at home in any game till someone decide to implement ecosystems that 'live' as we seen in Atys.
