There are several in the works now. Shadowbane I believe is very close.
Lord of the Rings is far from - if it will ever - be released. The company
that holds the long term development (I think it's Sierra owned by EA) has
wasted three years. - laying off the entire development team and trying to
start again.
Horizons showed a lot of promise - but the management of the company was
completely incompetent - and their best developers quit in frustration.
They went bankrupt and were bought by NCSoft that will hopefully have a good
product some time in the future. They have been pretty tight lipped - but
evidently are concentrating on developing the engine.
NCSoft produces the largest MMORPG in the world. In typical American
arrogance - we talk about EQ being the biggest because we only look at our
market But their BloodPledge game has 2.7 million subscribers. That's not a
typo or a mistake. Those are almost all in Asia and they only recently
started marketing in the US market. They hired Richard Garriot who's
heading up the US arm of the company.
The upcoming 200-pound gorilla of the MMORPG market will also be released by
Verant - sometime this year. You may have heard of it - it's called Star
Wars Galaxies
Slyde

>Anyway, have you heard of the TWO persistent world (massive multiplayer)

Lord

>of the Rings games which're supposed to come out soon?

>And is this (leaving for Anarchy Online or others) why EQ users seem to

have

>vanished over the course of the last year or so?