Zoso pointed out a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article this morning, about the free-to-play, your-soul-in-a-silk-purse-for-upgrades Korean MMO Air Rivals. It looks like a game deserving of a lengthy late night session of manly joystick waggling for sure, but it was Jim Rossignol’s almost throwaway comment about trying the free Robot MMO Exteel that got me to a-thinking, which for me is a rare event indeed.

Where is my BattleTech MMO? Where are our decent stompy robot MMOs? Yes there’s RFOnline and Exteel, but you’ll notice that I pre-qualified my statement by using the word ‘decent’. Surely it’s not just the Koreans who are madly, deeply in love with giant mechanical fighting machines?

EVE Online, now there’s a game where they have character development, and to a certain extent vehicle development in parallel. Vehicles aren’t just expensive mounts in EVE, or a convenient representation of how a player deals damage, they’re so much more. The ships in EVE are tweaked and upgraded and enhanced and even named. ‘Love my badger’ is no longer just a search term that will get you to a website with strangely bearded West Country folk who maintain questionable relations with members of the Mustelidae family.

So if you’re listening CCP, seeing as you are already working on the other MMO that I want to see most of all in the world, how about expanding your EVE universe to have giant mechanised combat on the surfaces of the various planets that the players fly past on a daily basis and pay little heed to, or simply buy the BattleTech rights from Wizkids and give us the decent stompy robot MMO we all desire.