With World of Warcraft as a trophy, it wouldn't have been long before recognitions soon followed Vivendi's online multiplayer division, Blizzard Entertainment. And now that the MMORPG is the hottest game over PC, kudos goes to the man who pioneered it: Blizzard's head honcho, Mike Morhaime. In that respect, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) hopes to honor this achievement with a special treat.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft (WoW) is generally considered as one of the most, if not the most, successful MMO video game these days. So, it is quite understandable if some development companies are wary of going head-to-head with WoW and its 8.5 million strong user base.

But that is not entirely the case for Tabula Rasa's Richard Garriott. The game developer is credited for Ultima Online - the decade old MMO title that revolutionized the genre. According to Garriott, Tabula Rasa should be thankful to World of Warcraft more than anything. He explained,

The people that World of Warcraft brought into online gaming have been churning out, and are now looking for other forms of online entertainment. So we're very excited - truly, honestly - to see any successful massively multiplayer online game. World of Warcraft has done us a great service.

The renowned game developer added that it is rarely that one player plays the same MMO title for more than one year or so. Garriott then discussed that while it is true that Ultima Online still has a couple of hundreds of thousands of players, almost no one playing today has overlapped with the ones who played it a year ago or the year before that.

Lastly, maintaining the idea that the MMO genre will be too crowded, Garriott said that the real danger is when fans get a taste of a bad MMO game. He commented,

What's interesting is the MMO space is still growing so rapidly. The only enemy we have are bad games. If people try MMOs and get a bad taste because of a bad game, they won't continue to play MMOs. They'll go back to playing offline.

Yes, I know that you hardcore console folks (I'm looking at you, PSPeeps!) hate seeing this sort of stuff on your blogs, but I'm giving you warning - there's a shameless plug ahead! But we gotta get the word out on two of our newest blogs - and not just any blogs, our first game specific blogs! We all know that MMORPG's are big, and it's the nature of an online beast to have lots of news, updates, patches, mods and upgrades to talk about. These new blogs have been lurking around the QJ network all this week, but it's time to give them the proper introduction they deserve.

Okay, so that one doesn't need much of an introduction. Everyone's heard of a little game called World of Warcraft, right? Yeah, I thought so. It is the MMORPG of our times with millions upon millions of players wandering through the world of Azeroth every single minute of every single day. And that's just the beginning. With the upcoming release of the Burning Crusade expansion, things are about to get even bigger. So it's a perfect time to launch our own WoW blog to keep everyone on top of every single bit of info out there! There's no stopping World of Warcraft from dominating the globe...

...or is there? You see, there's this little gem of a game that's been in the works for over 4 years from the fine folks at NCSoft and Destination Games. At the helm is Ultima Online">Richard Garriott aka Lord British, the mastermind behind the grand-daddy of modern MMORPG's - Ultima Online. With experience and an award winning art team on their side, Tabula Rasa hopes to wipe the slate clean and knock WoW off its high horse. With a unique crossbreeding of 3rd person RPG action with alien-blasting FPS controls and tactics, it might do just that.

TR will soon be hitting the beta stage, and we here at QJ want to be in on the ground floor of what will most likely be the next big thing in the MMORPG universe. This is the place to be if you want to keep up on all the latest news, art renders, screenshots, and developments.

So there you have it - two new blogs to check out, with some pretty snazzy sneak peaks and exclusive content on the way. And a third new blog isn't far behind, and hopefully it will fill the obvious hole in the QJ Network when it comes to gaming news!

Blizzard's World of Warcraft, released in 2004, is now played by over half of all MMO gamers.

Blizzard has done well, creating something that appeals to a large demographic. Although it's difficult to attribute the success of WoW to any one element, it does boast unique features that the competition can't match. One innovation is "rest time," in which more casual players can gain experience faster after being away from the game for a few days. Blizzard is also meticulous about small details: the game have  attractive "mini-icons," and armor sets are beautifully detailed. The art styles of this game is considered more imaginative than that of competing MMO's like Everquest II.

Can Blizzard be hold on to this market dominance? One problem common to all MMO's is the fact that casual players eventually run out of content (no doubt, this has happened to you at one time or another).  Is their a way to deal with this problem? Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima, Ultima Online, and the upcoming Tabula Rasa believes he has an answer. 

"Lineage did something that turned out to be much smarter," Garriott says. "They released episodes. The episodes are really the same live team development, but just packaged as an episode. What they'll do is that they'll hold it back. Instead of saying, today there are new trashcans, tomorrow there’s tables, and after that new swords, which everybody thinks is cool, but by the time they see the new sword pretty much everybody else has already seen it too. Statistically, half the people will see every new thing before you.

"But if you save it all up as an episode and you release the whole three months worth of work all at once, everybody knows it's coming, everyone gets a chance to get in there, everybody gets excited about it and not only get in themselves, but they also bring new friends who have never played. At that point, we can see that the usage and the sales of the game go up in a big spike, every one of these episodes."

As Blizzard develops the next expansion for WoW, Garriott hopes that games like Tabula Rasa and others will move MMO's  in new directions. Whether or not the next generation of MMO games will be able to challenge Blizzard's supremacy, however, remains to be seen.