Blog Retrospective: A Look Back to February 2011

 So here's how this concept for posts started: while writing the prior blog on Resident Evil Village I did a link on the search bar to prior posts that spoke about Resident Evil. While perusing those posts I was more than a little surprised and entertained to see that many of them are so old now that they talk about situations and perspective that feel like ancient history to me. There was a time, for example, when you couldn't get the original Resident Evil games from the PS1 era on GOG.com, or to play Resident Evil Revelations you needed access to a Nintendo 3DS. Hell, some of those posts are written before Resident Evil 6 came out and caused Capcom to rethink their approach to the series! Other posts were me writing about the batshit crazy multiple-character scenarios of RE6. 

Bottom line is.....my blog started in February 2011 and spun out of a time when I had more free time and less to worry about (also, less money, meaning more to worry about in a different sense), I was involved a lot in learning how to self-publish online and my then fairly new marriage hadn't yet even spawned our first child. So when I started this blog I was recently married to my third (and final) wife, did not have a child, was using online publishing and POD as a source of income (mainly to get more money for games) along with my then accounting job, I ran RPGs Wednesday and Saturday nights, and my video game time was centered around MMOs on the PC and the Xbox 360, my exclusive console of choice back then. I also note an old air of pragmatism that I think I should try to re-adopt, as I tended to have one thing (say, one console, one e-reader or one MMO I was obsessed with) that I was thoroughly focused on. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment up near the mountains in our local city that was small but very cozy for my wife and I. We had a lot of cats.

To contrast today, my wife and I passed our 16th anniversary last September, my son is 14 years old and asking me for advice about his sundry girlfriends, I am still gaming on Wednesday nights though not Saturdays anymore, I haven't touched an MMO at all except to occasionally pop into Guild Wars 2 just to see what's up only to play an hour then log out for another six months, and I don't have a single console....I have ALL the consoles and I have a real problem with handheld PCs, too (and tablets). In fact I have a problem with collecting and hoarding gadgets and I really, really need to stop doing that. Meanwhile I no longer put any effort into self-publishing online outside of the blog, mainly because the long term reward-to-effort value simply wasn't there; I get more fun doing the blog for fun, and while I still write a lot, its mainly for the home campaigns and the entertainment of my player group. I am no longer an accountant, and am instead a business owner who hires accountants to do that work for me. I am, ironically, still working in the exact same building as I did in 2011, but its by coincidence a completely different company that I have ownership in. Oh, and I own a house which is a 30 minute highway commute away. And we have even more cats than we used to, though only one of the cats from 2011 is still with us (he is 17 years old now).

I only had three blog posts in 2011: an introductory blog post, one which talked about our experiments in Swords & Wizardry, and a third one which talked about The Rising Dark, a book on the lands of Agraphar, a setting I published for Swords & Wizardry and had also adapted to D&D 4E (holy cow, that was the edition of 2011....yikes...). The Lands of Agraphar is still available in print at Lulu, I think....PDF probably at Drivethrurpg. I never used it as written; I ended up modifying and adapting its scenario concepts to other systems and settings, notably D&D and my Lingusia setting. You know....I have this book on my shelf even today, in my S&W section. I should pull it out and run the thing as originally intended at some point, it would be a fun exercise.

Apparently I played and was only mildly impressed with the game Singularity in Feb 2011, commenting on how it was good enough to finish but also not good enough to feel good about finishing. Weird, as over the years I have replayed that game a couple times and liked it more on a new playthrough. I recently tried getting it to work on the handhelds but it is difficult to get Singularity to play nice with modern controller schemes, unfortunately....and then I thought, "I should really play some of the new games I have stacked up, like RE Village." So that went away.

I also talked about being into the early adopters of the free-to-play model of MMOs: Champions Online and D&D Online. I really did love those two games, but eventually the interest petered out. Both games were fairly decent at least early on in their F2P models, with the goal being to sell actual content such as scenario packs and classes and stuff. They would eventually turn this approach into a far too expensive proposition, and as we all know, F2P models have turned into predatory nightmares that are so bad now I simply won't give a F2P game any effort or energy, noting that rare exceptions remain those which sell you actual content even if their base game remains free (so "free to try") like Guild Wars 2 or Destiny 2.

Okay! This might be a fun exercise, periodically digging through the ancient archives and revisiting long lost eras of this blog. Maybe there will be more of this. 

Tuesday Miscellany: Diablo III, DDO, Rift, Torchlight and more...

Diablo III

So my wife is playing Diablo III and enjoying it...."mindless fun for when she doesn't want to have to think too hard." It does look kind of fun, but I learned long ago that my track record with hack'n'slash RPGs is deplorable; I am averse to popping pinata monsters while running around looking for quest givers to wax philosophical on the plight their village. Of the many action-RPGs I have tried to get into the only one with real story/RPG elements* is Dungeon Siege III and that still wasn't very satisfactory. I've gotten reasonably far in Torchlight, though....of all these sorts of games, Torchlight is the best (followed by Titan Quest) but I've never finished any of them or even gotten more than 10-12 hours in, in most cases, before the inevitable "why the hell am I doing this???" effect sets in. Usually cured by loading up a Bioware title, mind you....!

Seeing her play Diablo III did motivate me to get back into Dungeons & Dragons Online, which is (imo) the kind of game all action RPGs should have morphed into by now, with real over-the-shoulder camera angles, more effort at plot (well, sort of....), traps, three dimensional environments and actual jump-around-position-matters combat. Hell, Tera got me back into DDO again, as well. Tera's getting kudos for its action-style combat and mixed views on its stripperific lingerie that they like to call armor, but DDO had both long before Tera showed up (to be fair most of the stripperific armor in DDO is purchase-only in the store, though. DDO's armor suits are otherwise notoriously functional, as Eberronian armor standards go).

Dungeons & Dragons Online

But all that aside, Diablo III is doing what it does best and my wife is enjoying it, along with her guildmates from WoW and SWTOR, so her experience, at least, is following the model track Blizzard wants everyone to be on. Me...I may try her account to see what it's like, but honestly just watching her play has given me a pretty good idea of what to expect. I only ever finished Diablo the First, anyway; I never made it past level 3 in Diablo II; I'm not kidding when I say I have a hard time slogging through isometric action RPGs. They are just not my thing. Torchlight is the rare exception. I also liked Sacred and it's sequel, but only long enough for the snappy one-liners of the various characters to wear thin.

I do plan to get Torchlight II when it comes out, though. For some reason that game is the solitary exception in the realm of action RPGs....the one version of it which makes me want to keep playing. I look forward to being able to hit that one co-op (or solo) at my liesure in a month or so.

Torchlight II

If you are among the rare breed of player like myself who find the endless smashing of pinata monsters (because they rain loot when you pop 'em, ya' see) to be painful without some DIM (deep inner meaning) then I would offer a couple alternatives....

Eschalon

First up, Eschalon (book 1 and 2, although I've only played one so far) is a quasi-turn-based isometric RPG in the old school fashion, available at Gamersgate, Steam and elsewhere. It's graphically old school, but it offers up a real story, real exploration, and a fairly steep difficulty curve. It's a lot more fun and develops a much more interesting story than anything you'll find in an action RPG like Diablo III. I'd love to see a game like this created with a budget closer to Diablo's....or even something akin to Legend of Grimrock.

Speaking of Legend of Grimrock, that's one you might find interesting. I don't personally like it. In fact I spent a bit of time with it and then delightfully deleted it from my hard drive, having been reminded of the fact that the reason I didn't play many PC games from 1989 through 1995 wasn't just because I was in college but because those games really did suck, hard. I was never fond of Eye of the Beholder, which I masochistically played long enough to realize one day that I was wasting precious life energy on an endeavour best substituted with either real tabletop gaming, or maybe something more apropo for the time (going out and getting drunk with my philosophy club buddies and picking up women). Gods I hated that game. And Legend of Grimrock reminded me why.

Legend of Grimrock

But I'm not saying its a bad game: I am saying that if you loved that style of game from the 90's and felt that it was exemplary of a lost style and format that didn't deserve to be cast aside, then you should absolutely check out Grimrock. But if you, like me, found those games as hollow, soulless and painful as a great many other games of that time period, then yeah this one's probably not for you.

There is also Avadon, which is on Steam as well. Avadon is closer to Baldur's Gate and other Black Isle games of old, and it evokes a similar feeling but with its own particular style of old school isometric graphics and an elaborate storyline. I have not found myself motivated to play it for long, but the premise is intriguing.



Avadon

So in the end I'm driven back to resume Dragon Age II. I'm still only a few hours in, but have yet to encounter or "feel" the issues so many people had with the game. Time will tell, I'm sure. There is also Rift, which continues to captivate me as the only MMO that continues to hold my attention. I don't know quite how to explain it: the storyline is just interesting enough, the game's look and feel is interesting, the level/territory design is interesting and encourages exploration, the quests are (while still typically MMOish) still fun to read and pursue, the game's full of options from all sorts of armor and loot to fun crafting, mounts galore and a general sense of "achievability" that looks actually attainable to me (while still managing to have fun in the process). I've even tried the pvp and found it fun. The rogue is an absolute terror to play in pvp, too....I've never been so successful at ganking in MMO-based pvp combat like I have in Rift, it's kind of unnerving, actually. I'm used to being the guy who has no pvp gear getting raked over the coals again and again until I call it quits and move on to more pve focused entertainment....Rift's pvp is actually something I seek out, which is weird.

Rift

*I use RPG here in the tabletop/story sense, not the world-of-computer-gaming "level up and acquire loot" sense.

MMO Monday Update

Just a brief update. Last time I took some time to talk (i.e. complain) about MMOs I was mostly happy to play a little WoW and that the kid seemed to enjoy sitting on my lap while I did so. That lasted about a weekend, as it turned out (playing WoW, that is; kid still loves watching whatever I play....he's also into grabbing the controller whenever its close enough). So I rapidly burned out. I just can't enjoy the game anymore, I have reached the point of no return, total saturation apparently. That, and I have conceded that while I like some of what Cataclysm brought to the table, in the end I really miss the game's feel, flavor, and amazingly enough slightly harder difficulty from the days of 2005. For some reason WoW feels dumbed down to an almost ridiculous level these days. If we were talking cooking, WOW is like an E-Z Bake Oven. (This may not be true for endgame content.....but I'm a ultra-slow leveler who likes the 1-84 process to actually be a fun challenge as well and not just a speedbump on my way to raiding. I hate raiding.)

I don't want my MMOs to be too hard, or too party-focused.....but I do want to feel like there's an effort at plot, pacing and just a smidgeon of system mastery. Blizzard has gradually stripped almost all of that out of WOW. And now I'm hearing ugly rumors from people that the beta for Mists of Pandaria is turning out to be a huge disappointment. As my wife put it, playing MoP only made her want to go play Guild Wars: Factions, instead. Not a ringing endorsement.

Aside from realizing my time with WoW is officially over (I even deleted it), I tried Champions again and found that Perfect World's attempt to merge accounts had made a mess of mine. Once I got it sorted out I found that they had apparently added Champions' version of a random dungeon finder, which was cool, but for some reason I found the game tedious and exhausting this time around. Moreover, I found the game itself continued to run processes in the background even after I'd closed it out. Steam says I played continuously for four days straight. I don't know if this is glitchy programming or something sneaky...and now that Champions is part of the Perfect World fold I'll believe either option (never loaded a PW game that didn't act weird). So I deleted it and moved on.



DDO was up next. I want to get back into DDO, but the tedium and grind is preventing me from caring. I could level up still more of my 20 characters to past level 10, or I could play one of my two existing level 10 or level 12 characters and see how many eons it takes to get to level 20 in time for the forthcoming highly nonsensical "Drow fuck up the prime material plane" plotlines in which only the heroes of Eberron can save the Forgotten Realms or something....I mean, it's the kind of lore blending that induces headaches in anyone who even remotely cares (I don't even care and it causes me a headache in the same way I hate poorly done what-if alternate history fiction). So when a game causes physical pain at the sight of a mere loading screen, time to move on. But I'm not deleting DDO yet. I want to play....I just want to feel like there's a chance I'll see some new content I can actually get to experience some day.



So anyway, I accidentally got into Rift and am now really, really hooked on that game. I also accidentally fired up Star Wars: The Old Republic again with the free game time being extended right now to lapsed players and am being reminded of how amazingly well done it is. I want to resub to SWTOR, just trying to balance my free time issue with it is the only issue.

Rift, however, is exactly what I needed at this time, it turns out, and I love the game's backstory and premise, featuring two philosophically opposed groups facing a common menace, but unable to reconcile their methods of dealing with that threat. I love the rift concept itself and how it works, I love the graphics, I love the amazingly flexible and not at all dumbed down soulshard system for class combinations and the fact that I can run two different fighters who don't even feel like the same class as a result. I also love the rogues, which are much more fun than any other rogues I've seen in fantasy MMOs (barring DDO's amazing rogues, but, well....D&D rogues, of course they'll be fun!)

So anyway, my Tuesday news isn't really much more than: guess I'll be taking a bit of a break from the single player games to focus on Rift and possibly SWTOR for a while. This ought hold me over until Guild Wars 2 arrives in June, at least!

The Free To Play Conundrum

I just received an ad email letting me know that Star Trek Online had gone free to play and that it would very much like to see me come on back. In recent months I have received the same ads for many other games including Age of Conan, Fallen Earth, Everquest I and II, DC Universe Online, the Aion announcement that it will soon go F2P and many more. I kicked off last year with Chapions Online going F2P and pretty much spent most of February 2011 playing the hell out of that game (which I'd love to get back to some day but all these single player experiences kept clogging the pipes last year in my mad and futile dash to play All The Games before Marcus was born).

Anyway, when I received the notice about STO's F2P announcement (gotta love the truncated terminology of the MMO experience) I realized that in the long term, F2P has got to have a saturation point, one at which the value of a F2P game, no matter how cool and AAA a title it might be, is going to bump into the problem that it's only likely source of meaningful income is the dedicated and foolish consumer with money to burn on highly transient ephemera.

Now, one could argue that all gamers by definition are consumers of highly transient ephemera (at least in the realm of computer games) and that spending cash on a F2P game is no different than chucking $15/month on a pay to play experience like WoW, Rift or Star Wars: The Old Republic (are there any other P2P games left other than those three, anyway?) However, the truth is that in the end, ownership is a powerful tool, and I am really interested in seeing how the concept of ownership plays out in the F2P market.

To compare my own experiences: I played WoW from around February 2005 and subscribed for about 16 months straight before taking my first prolongued WoW break, after which my subscription pattern boiled down to, "subscribe for a few months after each new expansion arrives, or until the sight of Stormwind or Orgrimmar causes physical pain." Although I subscribed to and played many other MMOs after this point (noting that my acquisition of WoW was preceded immediately by my defection from Mac to a real PC that could actually play games), few held me for more than three months before I felt sated for the content offered. Ultimately I lacked the OCD or addictive personality necessary to stay with an MMO for the prolonged period it demanded. I have also found online social networks, another massively compelling feature of MMOs, to be lacking, so finding a big friendly guild was still not an incentive for me.



Okay, digressions aside, the first F2P game I dedicated myself to was Dungeons & Dragons Online (alias Eberron Unlimited). I was part of it when the game first released as a P2P model back in 2006, with a dearth of content, a grind singularly painful and an experience that was at once promising of a vastly more involved and complicated experience for an MMO type game while still being almost impenetrable to a single-player-hardcore, multiplayer-casual type gamer like me who enjoyed multiplayer elements mostly for the ambience and never for the actual pleasure of it all. Or in other words, I played DDO on and off with a great deal of frustration until early 2010 when I decided to give it another shot as a F2P experience, with a thought of "nothing ventured, nothing gained," about the matter.

Ultimately DDO grabbed me and held me thanks to some key improvements and changes in the gameplay experience that made it a fun package for the F2P player, and also made it more fun for the "single, with occasional rare group" style of gamer I was. It's still not perfect, and there are dungeons in DDO I can't hit without a group, which I always resent in this sort of game because, you know, if they want me and my "hardcore single player, casual multiplayer" ass to play the game then they might as well offer me some way to tackle that raid content that demands whole groups of live players (a "buy this dungeon in single player + bots" feature would earn my cash, for example). So DDO hasn't fixed that part entirely, but luckily a large chunk of the game is manageable for me.

Um....so anyway, with DDO free to play I realized that I could, if I wanted to, buy into the game, purchase its various scenario packs and expansions, character slots and so forth, and effectively "own" the whole of the game. I calculated out how much it would cost to buy everything I wanted, determined that if I played the game for ten months I would spend $150 in subscription costs anyway, so if I capped my spending at that amount, bought everything (timed for their sale events with 20% off discounts) and then got at least ten months' worth of game time out of it that I would basically come out ahead of the subscription model, all while effectively coming as close to ownership on a F2P online game as I could, at least until they turn the servers off one day far down the road.

As it turned out, this was a great idea: I have spent more than the $150 I originally alotted on DDO since then, but it was primarily upkeep (and for a short stint I was hooked on bonus XP potions) and occasional "gold seal" henchmen. I have purchased the additional races, classes and scenarios since released, which they admittedly keep up often enough to continue to get some money from me. Overall though the experience was such that I payed the equivalent of maybe 18 months' worth of subscription fees, but I garnered two+ years worth of play time out of DDO to date, and can continue to log in and and ejoy all of the game content I purchased into perpetuity without spending another dime (or again, the Heat Death of the Universe equivalent in the MMO-verse: server shut down--RIP Tabula Rasa).

I did the same thing (more or less) for Champions Online when it came out as F2P last year, with one caveat: I bought all the content I wanted within the first week it went F2P, and I did so with their super-deluxe one time sale. Champions Online offered a lot of superfluous content, as well; costumes and other cosmetics that frankly didn't interest me much, but nonetheless which I did buy particulars of, along with the remarkably cheap scenario packs and character builds (that are not so cheap if no sale is going on). In fact, it was a great deal then, but I never would have bothered if I hadn't caught the game on sale; since then, the core prices have been fairly fixed (I may have missed some holiday sales, though) and as a result, have been a huge deterrent, especially since unlike DDO I haven't gotten more than a few months' worth of play time out of Champions Online; my staying power hasn't been as great, and it's not as competitive for my time as the many other games I had been playing last year.

So then Age of Conan and many others all flooded through the gates of the F2P circus this year. Age of Conan was especially disappointing, as the prices set for items in the store demonstrated that Funcom didn't actually want you to buy their stuff (or at least, they didn't want people who value their hard earned money and have common sense to buy it), such that it was clear that subscribing was still a better way to play. On top of that they massively overpriced the new expansion content. I love Howard's Conan, but I don't love Age of Conan enough to spend hundreds of dollars on a game that I know has issues after level 22. Maybe if I knew all that money would go to actually finishing the voice overs and later dearth of content in the game (between levels 50-75 or so), I might consider it; but Age of Conan, like DDO, needs a lot more polish. I know Turbine got its act together and turned DDO into a good game, but I really don't trust Funcom to do the same.

So now, today, I see a sea of F2P games, and realize that while I might at some point download all of them on my PC, probably none of them are going to get my money, unless I find something absolutely, unbelievably compelling about the way they handle the F2P experience such that I feel compelled to give them my money (and get a good return). None of the F2P games out there now seem to be in the least bit concerned about the idea that F2P players like me will give them money for unlocked content if they make the return worth my while; they are all seemingly obsessed with the idea that F2P players are a painful aberration, like giant pinatas that when beaten shower down cash, if you can just hit them hard enough. Games like Age of Conan clearly think that they can use F2P as a way of conning you into subbing, and if you don't sub, then they figure maybe they can get money out of you equivalent to a lifetime subscription, if they just truss it up enough in shiny lipstick and make their dollar to funpoint to product relations obscure enough to scare away the "math is terrifying" types. Uuuugh.

There's also a new problem for MMOs on the horizon that I predict will have a major impact: Bioware popped out Star Wars: The Old Republic at last and demonstrated that it is perfectly feasible to do an MMO with an elaborate multi-pathing storyline that is at once filled with emotion, difficult decisions, role playing, voice overs and not a goddamn Kill Ten Rats quest in sight (or at least, showed how you can actually integrate such quests into the general flow of things without ever making it obvious or annoying; never have I seen a game handle "grind quests" so smoothly and efficiently that you don't even realize you're doing them until they're done). SWTOR has set the bar very high for the next generation of MMOs, and I don't think I'll ever be able to stomach paying (or not paying) to play a game that at any point obviously has me collecting ten dead rat bodies.

(I really, really wish that Bioware had gotten ahold of the Conan property and made Age of Conan now.)

Okay, that was a lot of text to basically say, "I will continue to play DDO and Champions Online at my liesure because they beat the rest of you F2Pers to market and made me an offer I couldn't refuse; and I am subscribing to Star Wars: The Old Republic for the next year, so suck it, Funcom." When all MMOs are F2P, no MMO is free....but as a consumer, faced with a nigh infinite number of choices for hooking me with the free h'orderves then hitting me with a major bill for the entree, I choose instead to eat at home.

Basically I guess that is the moral of my raving coluimn for the day!