2017: The Year of RIP for MMO Gaming; But All Hail the MMO Shooter/Survival Games!

Last year I reviewed the state of MMORPGs in 2016. This year I can safely state the 2017 brought about, if not a literal end to MMORPGs, it certainly carved up the tombstone and then riddled it with bullets.

MMOs have suffered greatly in recent years. I feel a compelling argument could be made that the legacy of Barrens Chat in WoW is the state of modern political commentary on Twitter, Reddit and other locations today....why play WoW to spam people with crazy when you can do it in real time, on the "real" world?

But that aside, the problem is that outside of Korea, no new MMORPGs appear to be in development, and certainly no new RPGs of the western variety that we expect....everything on the market is aging, and sustaining themselves on expansions, DLC and various freemium models which can be so ridiculously complex that the only way to enjoy the game is ultimately not to play.

That said, we did see a major new expansion (Morrowind) for The Elder Scrolls Online that was well worth playing, even if I did find myself running out of steam to enjoy TESO around the time it released. Guild Wars 2 also released a new expansion, and many other 2nd tier MMOs (Tera, Aion, Neverwinter Nights and others) all keep pumping out some sort of expansion content to garner renewed interest among fans. There's stuff going on here.....it's just not as exciting as it once was. Even the diehards of World of Warcraft find themselves having difficulty sustaining interest in the venerable king of the dogpile.

All of the excitement and interest in MMORPGs was instead replaced in 2017 by....the shooter. Specifically, shooters like Destiny 2 and Player Unknown Battlelegrounds, which both focus on a theme of large-scale multiplayer. Destiny 2 is a bit more clever trickery and illusion (the feel of an MMO without the actual result of such) but PUBG is a masterpiece of the modern era for those who love it, a battle royal simulator that has garnered impressive interest and effectively created its own genre, with a bunch of me-too games jumping on the bandwagon.

I played PUBG for a few hours, and felt like that was about all I needed to enjoy it....I can certainly see how the game might be compulsively interesting to some people, but honestly? This is not a genre for people who like more story or complexity. It is, however, a fantastic game for social gamers who only enjoy gaming with other players, and love the survival of the fittest thematics. I like the last part.....but after you've won a match, it's kind of like....."me'h, is this it?" for me at least.

Destiny 2 remains as fun to play as the original, but I haven't even tried engaging with it as anything more than a single player experience that happens to muddy the waters. The hardcore social MP gamers all seem to either love or hate it, or love to hate it, or loved it until their manic-obsessive constant effort to drain all life from a game through playing it to death caused them to start hating it after their 2,000 hour play through.

Remember when taking 50 hours to play Final Fantasy VII felt like a lot of time? Yeah me too.

Then there's Ark: Survival Evolved. I hate this game. It is a ruiner of lives, marriages and self respect. It is a beast and some people LOVE it. It may not be the be-all-and-end-all that WoW was, but it many ways it is the black tar heroin to WoW's simpler crack. The fact that the game can and will punish you for logging off is even more bizarre. But there are people who play this game to death. Probably literally.

So....in a world with Ark and PUBG, who the hell needs MMORPGs anymore? And for people like me, really, we should just stick to games that actually give us what we want, like Horizon: Zero Dawn, for example. Or Nier: Automata, or Prey. Good games, focused on one player, with decent stories.

So....yeah RIP MMORPGs in 2017. Maybe 2018 will bring us a new surprise?

State of the MMO in late 2015: Five Things a Lapsed MMOer Can Do This Year

So what's going on in the MMOverse these days? A subject near and dear to me when I have nothing else to write about and no material planned for real (cough) gaming -- tabletop, that is -- is of course video games. I may be too tired on busy work weeks to write much at the end of the day, but an hour of Destiny, Halo or The Elder Scrolls Online is easy enough to fit in...and only one of those is (arguably) a real MMO.

Anyway, 2015 has been for many the year that the MMO bubble burst and pretty much sputtered out of existence....almost. We have an aging population of MMOs that many of us are burned out on, a smattering of titles that command loyalty across the years and pretty much three games I know of that are still brazen enough to demand a subscription fee (EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn). Virtually all other MMOs have moved to some sort of free-to-play or buy-to-play model.

Worse yet, there don't appear to be many --or any!-- new MMOs on the horizon. News revolves around modest expansions (The Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic having notable expansion packs this year) while the Big Daddy World of Warcraft continues to spew out news bits about a new expansion even as it has dwindling subscription numbers that look like a torrential loss to some --and yet still their surviving base is larger than any other MMO could dream of.

Of course, on the side we are now seeing a new breed of stealth MMO....games which are effectively MMOs in function but do so through other styles of play (Destiny) or other mediums (various Android titles) that eschew the traditional MMORPG model made so popular by Everquest, Ultima and later WoW.

So if you're an MMO fan, what do you do in this environment? Here are five suggestions:

5. Revisit old favorites
You can go home again it turns out, although home might smell weird and suffer from some low polygon counts. I did this recently with Dungeons & Dragons Online and enjoyed reminiscing about my grand mess of old characters before being brutally reminded of the many weird hoops one had to go through to play that game on its odd F2P model, with its elaborate henchmen system designed to suck money from you slowly, and its oppressively slow experience system which only serves the truly dedicated. I had more success with Rift, which I have since returned to playing regularly.

4. Go explore the Asian MMO market
You've seen those strange names and listings on MMORPG.com or in random ads on different sites, often using busty armored women as clickbait lures to get you to check out yet another oddball Korean MMO. While the US market is stagnant, the Asian market for MMOs is grinding them out like there's no tomorrow, and some of them are actually really interesting or even playable.

3. Return to WoW
I can't do this. I just can't.....I played too much, though compared to many I played hardly at all. WoW is a game that I will always fondly remember when it was new, and also remember with much pain as it morphed over the years into something that looks very much like the prettiest pig in lipstick on the market. It's still the default "I'm going back to...." game out there, though.

2. Explore New Horizons
As I mentioned earlier, games like Destiny are pushing the boundary on what you can blend with the MMO genre. It's not 100% like an MMO--yet--but it comes damn close. So does Defiance, and there are other games out there for which the medium is shaping into something entirely different. I am told that there's an entire wave of MMO-like games on Android and iOS which are functionally providing the same "experience" that many people crave in an MMO. For these specific iterations, if the desire is not to play an MMORPG in the traditional sense, then you've got a lot of options to explore.

1. Use this nebulous period for the industry to break free
That's right....while there are no significant new releases on the horizon, and the ex-packs for the current crop are mostly inclined to see if they can lure you back to the cult compound happy customer camp, you can use this lull in the industry to get the hell out of dodge. Go find a forest trail and hike down it. Just remember that in the real world wild pigs are probably gonna kick your ass.

Source

State of the MMO Nation

2013 was a weak year for MMOs in my household. My wife, who plays MMOs almost exclusively, began to migrate to other titles with her online gang such as Borderlands 2, Saint's Row III and IV and even League of Legends. I played a few on and off....here's a recap:

Defiance

For me the highlight of 2013 was Defiance, which despite being a game you'd think I would love (open-world third-person SF themed shooter with MMO design) I didn't play nearly enough of. The fact that Trion Worlds seems to have forgotten about it (only one of the five promised expansion packs was released in 2013, a bad sign if I ever saw one) doesn't help. I will continue to play Defiance at my usual measured pace, but suggest to future developers working on shooter/MMO hybrids that they consider carefully what the audience of both games might expect out of such a merger. Defiance could use something....I'm not sure what, entirely, but something....more diversity in explorable areas, maybe, and a better hub setup for people who just want to jump into the action? I will defer to Warframe as an excellent way of handling a multiplayer shooter experience online. Defiance, with it's MMO trappings, is still a different beast, though. I expect it to hang on until Destiny arrives and squashes the competition like a tiny bug.

Status for 2014: I will continue to play it casually and hope we see some of the promised future content.

Rift

2013 was the year Rift went free to play, and in doing so it changed the core feel of the game from the comfortable subscription model I enjoyed to a typical overpriced freemium model which I have now abandoned. Despite getting an enormous number of in game credits for my lengthy subscription time I was disenchanted with the way they structured the game and how they priced the "subscription equivalent" option to continue to get leveling perks (there was no longer a discount for buying in volume, basically). Moreover, after buying all sorts of cool looking armor with my given points I realized I had once again made a serious error in my play style: I now had blinged out characters who had done nothing in-game to earn the gear. For someone like myself who plays for the story and experience this is an unforgivable tresspass.

Of second note is the Storm Legion expansion content, which suffered greatly for casuals like myself who found the story hard to follow, the quests insanely grindy, and the overall experience just plain tedious. The magic of Storm Legion shortly after launch did not stick, unfortunately.

Status for 2014: Rift is now on hiatus until further notice. I have even deleted it from my computer. I may return if the itch grabs me. This is a real shame as I loved this game a great deal pre-F2P.

Guild Wars 2

I have hardly played this one at all, and I don't know why. For reasons I can't explain at all GW2 did not grab me as consistently as I expected, or as it honestly should; non-MMO open world titles sort of stole the show in 2013 for me, so games like Sleeping Dogs and Saint's Row III dominated my time, and as a side effect structured and ironically "less involved" worlds offered by MMOs like GW2 were simply less intriguing as a result. For a sharply contrasting example on GW2 see here, though.

Status for 2014: I will continue to periodically fire it up and see if I can get motivated. Meanwhile I will continue to be enamored by much more interesting open-exploration titles like GTA V. Saint's Row IV and Skyrim. One approach I am going to take is to follow Zubion's advice on how to hit GW2 for an hour a day and still feel like you're making progress/doing something. Zubion seriously loves GW2, and I'd love to be into this game in the same way.

World of Warcraft

I reloaded it late in November, finally purchased Mists of Pandaria (like two days before it went on sale) and enjoyed it immensely for about a week before experiencing severe WoW fatigue again. I really want to have some characters ready to go at level cap for the forthcoming Warlords of Draenor, which on the surface appears to get WoW back to its roots somewhat while finally offering a graphical overhaul to the geriatric character models of the original races. But....I just can't muster enough interest to devote the time. It is a "been there, done that, can't stomach doing it for hundreds of hours again" problem. Sorry WoW.

Status for 2014: we'll see if Warlords of Draenor motivates me to slog through the game to get ready. I....think this may be the end of my relationship with WoW, however.

Neverwinter Online

Something about the whole Neverwinter experience is just off. It's got some fun gameplay, but the game keeps you on such a tight rail that the freedom of choice in character design it offers is purely illusion, the characters will all suffer from the same narrow pool of gear choices in terms of looks unless you pony up to the store, and Perfect World's method of handling freemium means you'll have to navigate a treacherous web of purchasing confusion on numerous levels. I am very done with Perfect World managed games, and even though I enjoy the gameplay....they're just too greedy for my tastes.

Status for 2014: I may try it again if they magically manage to add several more classes into the game.

Dungeons & Dragons Online

My burnout on DDO know know limits. The ability to reach the high level content where all their new expansion modules can be found is an onerous and soul wrenching task for one such as myself. I have given up on DDO entirely, the grind was just too much.

DC Universe Online

The surprise end-of-year discovery was DC Universe Online. I recall playing this a bit shortly after it went F2P and my wife and I were more into Champions then so we ignored it. When I got the PS4 I noticed DCUO was available on it, so I downloaded it. This game was meant to be played with a controller, for one thing. It's got very smooth, fluid and fun gameplay. My recent resurgence of interest in DC Comics has helped keep me interested in DCUO as well. I bought the expansion packs on sale over the holidays and have been enjoying leveling up my small gang of oddball characters, including Doc Futurity, Doctor Tachyon, Bowman Thirteen, Ladybot Moxietron and the Smouldering Demon.

Status for 2014: I expect to play a lot of DCUO as a place holder until Elder Scrolls Online arrives.

That's it for the 2013 wrap-up on MMOs and the projection for 2014....see you in the game!

Rift and the F2P Experience....A Veteran's Opening Perspective

Rift officially went free to play on June 12th. I've been playing less and less of Rift in recent months, due largely to limited time, which is always going to favor "games that are fun" over "games that are making me grind." I have a low tolerance for slow progression, and Storm Legion, unfortunately, was laboriously slow. Despite buying into a year long sub at a good discount, I barely made it to level 51 on my warrior before my "I care" quotient was overhwhelmed by my "what the hell is this dragging on so long for?!?!" sense.

Still, I like Rift, and have dropped in periodically to keep up, albeit slowly. Hoping, of course, that sooner or later they would make the XP gain at high levels somewhat quicker, to accomodate more than just those mad, mad players who live and breathe MMOs and disdain the casuals like me.

Well, the new F2P model seems to have done just that: it has provided XP bonuses and potions to "patron accounts," which is a fancy new name for what a monthly subscriber is. It rewarded players by how long they had subscribed, with ongoing "loyalty" rewards for keeping with the game. I netted around 12,000 credits in the game, the currency used to buy stuff in the shop, something around $70-80's worth of currency. Additionally, the loyalty rewards dumped 23 gifts on me, in addition to a couple dozen dimension house items. Some of the gifts were useful (XP gain potions) and others were just plain cool (mounts and pets).

The prices in the game store range from the reasonable (a new character slot is about 600 credits) to absurd (3000+ for high end ten-level suits of armor). I don't have the store up so these aren't exact numbers, but they give you an idea of what to expect. The core of the game experience is entirely free, however; they are aiming to generate revenue entirely from extras, which is an interesting approach and I really think it's the smartest way that Trion could do this.

Given that I got so much loot on my many characters, and even after spending a couple thousand credits on cool mounts, wardrobe slots, and even an armor suit for one of my low level characters, I still have around 10,000 credits to use and I have to admit, it's very nice to feel like I got a proper reward for my 18+ months of dedication to this game. I've seen other conversions to F2P riddled with greed (cough >Age of Conan< cough >SWTOR< cough) and then there's the way Trion did it. Very smart. Sometimes...treating your players with respect will make you more money. I hope this pays off for them.

Whole game's F2P now, so no reason not to check it out. Population has exploded, and I don't mind since I get preferential status in queue as a patron player. Check it out! Jump on the faeblight RP shard, it's got lots of good people on it.

Neverwinter Nights Stick-Em-Up

I just received an email which points me to the splash page for early buy-in on the Neverwinter Nights MMORPG looming close on the horizon. Neverwinter Nights is being developed by Cryptic, which in turn was purchased by Perfect World Entertainment, one of the more successful MMO-focused companies out of Korea. No one has accused Perfect World of being out of touch with how to market a F2P experience that generates income, although I seem to recall that buy-in on some of their games can get quite expensive.

My primary experience with the monetization process of PW games comes from Blacklight: Retribution, a very fun game with a crappy store which sells you overpriced and mostly very temporary items with an eye toward encouraging random equipment packs that are often far less useful than you'd think. Blacklight: Retribution also encourages purchases in a sort of "pay to win" feel although it can take many hours playing it before you begin to realize this is going on.

I also of course have played a fair amount of Champions: Online since it went F2P, though the majority of my purchases in that game were during the opening weeks when they converted to F2P and had massive sales, all of which was before PW's ownership. Since PW took over Champions has had some overall improvements, but a massive increase in the volume of "things you'd really like to buy" in the store as well. I can't fault this approach, however, because I can still more or less enjoy Champions without buying all that stuff; it's all prestige, coolness and looks you're buying into there, with (so far as I can tell) very little or no buy-to-win content. I may be wrong, I don't play it often enough, but for a casual drop-in the game feels pretty robust.

Neverwinter Nights was on the fast track to a rush-job and shoddy finish in true Cryptic style when Perfect World bought them whole cloth and forced the studio to slow down and do a good job of it all (i.e. not like Star Trek Online). This was a good thing. Now, however, we finally get to see some opening pricing on the game. Bear in mind that Neverwinter Nights will be F2P as its core model, but I think looking at the pricing structure for people who opt to buy-in to the game's prepackaged goodies is telling as to just how much money PW and Cryptic is hoping you will spend:

The Founder's Pack "Hero of the North" is $199.99 for the chance to play a drow renegade (which sounds suspiciously to me like the characters in NN will be packaged similarly to the prebuilt options in Champions), a spider mount, panther companion, costume set and 13 other items and features ,including 750,000 astral diamonds which....assuming that's cash shop currency...might be a lot if the pricing structure is similar to Champions: Online's system. All of PW's other games were converted to a "Zen" currency so I don't know if in fact these astral diamonds mean anything.

$200 for all of the above sounds like a lot to me, but according to the web page its actually a discount down from a $549 value. No kidding.

The cheaper package is the "Guardians of Neverwinter" pack is for people who still believe that $60 is a maximum value buy-in point for video games, and comes with a medley of ten more conventional non-drow-themed stuff, along with 125,000 astral diamonds.

FInally, for the cheap end of the pool they've got a $19.99 "let me on the bus" package with three items that don't really seem worth twenty bucks and no astral diamonds.

It seems to me that Perfect World is staking a lot on the expectation that gamers who are willing to buy in to Neverwinter Nights are just exploding with cash and a desperate need to spend it. This is probably true of the "whales" in the F2P monetization process, and while I might have questioned just how many of them actually exist out there, the truth is that F2P seems to be a viable market (ergo why everyone is doing it) and then you have things like the Pathfinder Online Kickstarters, proving people will dump tons of cash into pipe dreams. At least PW is offering genuine virtual goods for a sure thing to come this year.

Right now these packages seem seriously overpriced for a game no one's even played yet, and worse yet you get a paid-beta access as part of this buy in, so the only way to try before you buy is to wait until the game pops out and the special founder prices presumably set to the crazily more expensive defaults.

Another theory I have: this founder approach with a big ticket entry price is actually the F2P model's way of trying to figure out how to get those "Lifetime Subscribers" to keep giving big bucks. I know of a few people who saw a game....say, Champions or DDO, and bought lifetime subs when the games were still subscription based. PW must know those people continue to exist, and is trying to figure out how to snag them.

I suspect that this deal would actually look good if they could do two things first: 1. show us a sample of the cash shop pricing, and 2. confirm that astral diamonds are in fact cash shop zen currency. If I knew that information, I'd be more inclined to take the founder packages seriously.

2012 RoC MMO Year in Review

Green Armadillo at Player vs. Developer did a sort of cost-analysis/overview of his 2012 MMO expenditures and time, and I thought it would be fun to do something similar, with more of a focus on my "year of MMOs" and what they amounted to (if anything). So, here goes...



Star Wars: The Old Republic
TOR may have come out in December 2011, but I didn't get my copy until late January. My wife played this game continually for close to a year, but it seems that her interest (and that of her highly dedicated RP guild) waned dramatically after the game went F2P, at least partially due to the over monetization of the game going forward (paying for content previously announced as free, for example, and the souring of the community due to the flood of F2P gamers who are sight-seers and gawkers, and presumably not very RP-friendly).

For my own purposes, TOR has a great single player experience wrapped in a world of MMO suck. It has padded regions (Coruscant, for example) that drag on and on, and feel very tedious and grindy to someone like me who approaches this game less as a new Star Wars MMO and more as the KOTOR 3 single player experience we really wanted. Still, the free to play option opened it back up to me, and I find that being able to jump in and play occasionally is making the game more accessible and fun, now that I don't have to worry about a monthly fee. If Bioware/EA could just realize that a person like me would prefer to pay for a couple extra character slots and not have to subscribe, then we'd all be a bit happier.

Conclusion: SWTOR moving F2P was a smart move for certain types of players, but the game still has problems. That said, it's a casual friendly MMO if you can avoid falling asleep during the long slog through boring padded areas like Coruscant.

Tera
Tera was billed for its action MMO combat and its unique revision to an otherwise very Korean style setting. The game was pretty compelling, initially....but some odd hiccups left me cold in the end. A major problem was its early billing snafus; I signed up for six months on a deal when it first came out, but after four weeks I realized this wasn't a game I was going to care for in six months, so I tried to cancel the subscription. Surprise....they didn't provide for a way to cancel! I did get my money back, and in a twist of irony that changed my opinion of the matter from "they are sleazy con artists" to "they or their billing service are merely incompetent" I still got my six months of play time. Which I barely used until the tail end, in a bid to revisit and see if my feelings had changed. They did not.

Conclusion: Tera is a weird action MMO that is fun to play but it has some unfortunately disturbing undertones, a bit too much of the Korean Cutesy for my tastes, an excess of BDSM inspired armor and for all it does offer it just doesn't seem to feel as satisfying as other, better games out there (among which I would include Rift, GW2 and TOR). And their crappy billing issues soured me from ever letting En Masse have credit card or paypal info again, period.

Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 was heavily anticipated and I was ready for it on its first week or so of release. It's timing was atrocious, however (for me, at least), as I had gotten sucked into Rift and so found my precious game time seriously divided. GW2 is a fantastic game, but thanks to its Buy-to-Play model I have been able to safely play it just a bit, and othewrwise set it aside for now while I concentrate on the two other games worthy of my attention.

Conclusion: all MMOs should look at GW2 in the future, for both the payment model and for ideas on how to innovate. Not too closely...a future full of GW2 clones would be sad.



World of Warcraft
Blizzard sent me a 10 day "please come back" trial to Mists of Pandaria. I logged on, tried a pandaren monk, then jumped to the original Kalitherios who was still stuck in that god awful fhsibowl undersea region, was reminded why I left WoW during Catalyclysm and deleted the game, again.

Conclusion: WoW is getting very long in the tooth, and the only way to appreciate it these days is to be stuck with a low end PC, or otherwise avoid other games entirely.



Dungeons & Dragons Online
I was a HUGE proponent for DDO when it went F2P, and it was the first F2P game I also decided to invest in. I rationalized that if I spent $15 a month for a year, I'd have spent $180 in that time, and if I spent that (or less) on in-game purchases over time, then I'd be ahead.

In the end, I spent more than that (and in fact bought about $50 of turbine points plus the expansion pack at half off on a Steam sale this year) but I also played it heavily for more than two years, and only in the last year did I lag badly. DDO has a huge disadvantage over other MMOs, that outweighs (for me) it's advantages: it has a major grind component, and it's XP is (except for slayer/explorer missions) tethered to mission completion. You can spend a long time leveling in this game if you play in the way I do, which is slowly, mostly solo, and with a methodical pace in mind. I have friends who can blast through this game from level 1 to 20 in weeks. I envy them, because they have a system. The system necessary to earn XP at the fastest rate in DDO is beyond my time frame or network of friends, unfortunately.

Conclusion: DDO is still great, but my love for it has been replaced by Rift. Still, I like to revisit on occasion, even if I've given up hope of ever getting to max level.

The Secret World
The Secret World is everything I want in an MMORPG with a modern horror theme, short of it being a single player experience. It has immersive, thoughtful storylines (with key stories fully voiced), a mature theme that's not just "adult" (although it delves in that direction occasionally, too) and a smart world that really meshes well with the modern urban horror/fantasy trend in fiction these days. However, it was subscription based for a while, and so like GW2 it was something I didn't feel I had time for with my Rift obsession.

Now, of course, that has all changed and TSW moved to a Buy to Play model just like GW2. This was a very smart move, and it has revitalized my interest in the game....more so even than for GW2, because while GW2 is an innovative drwarf-and-elf free fantasy MMO, TSW is a modern horror MMO that ditches the Tolkienesque fantasy entirely.

Conclusion: I'll be playing a lot of TSW in the future and plan to focus my money on their planned future content.

Age of Conan
I've tried to get back into AoC a couple times. Unfortunately their cash shop was pricey, the play mechanics felt clunky if you stayed away too long, and the game can't survive its main crippling issue (one that TSW fixed) which was that 90% of its primo A game content was front-loaded in the first 20 or so levels, and everything after that right up to level 80 suffered from a "rushed to finish" conclusion. I recently tried it--again--in the wake of some changes that opened up previously gated instances to F2Pers and I was shocked at how empty the game was (okay not really) and how it just doesn't hold up to today's crop of games.

Conclusion: AoC is a game I want to play, badly. Just not the one that actually exists.

Champions Online
When this went F2P two years ago I was in on day one, took advantage of their first two weeks of excellent discounts, and basically absorbed this game (as did my wife). Then we burned out as the game dragged along; the momentum could not be sustained by the title itself, which still needed more...sometuing...to make it better.

Perfect World Entertainment came along and snapped Cryptic up. At first this was bad; a merge of accounts between Cryptic and PW made accessing their games problematic for a while, enough so I gave up on trying. Eventually they got their act together, and by the time I got back in Champions Online was sporting all sorts of impressive new features. It now remains, like DDO, a game I like to keep installed even if i only jump in once every couple of months or so. Unfortunately it's not really that exciting to play (for me) anymore, and I hate the crafting/equipment mechanics of the game with a passion, but the character generator is bar none the best there is (now that CoX is dead).

Conclusion: it's worth vacationing in Champions every now and then, and Perfect World made Cryptic respectable again...a miracle!

Rift
Rift snuck in toward the start of the year and snagged me first with its Lite F2P through level 20 and then with its mixture of interesting story content and compelling mix of traditional and innovative gameplay. It is officially the first game since 2005 when WoW and the original Guild Wars sucked me in to grab and keep me for the long haul. The core game is so good I continue to mainly play it while I occasionally log onto my level 50 guardian warrior and explore the new Storm Legion content at an excessively leisurely pace.

Anyway, I don't need to blab on about how great Rift is, as I've done that a lot already this year. Suffice to say it's my top dog in the kennel right now.

Conclusion: I bought a one year sub along with Storm Legion. That's about as dedicated as it gets for me in the world of MMOs.

Next Year
I'm looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. I think some new titles like Firefall and Wildstar may be dark horses ready to sweep in and change everything up. I suspect more publishers will eyeball the B2P model just as much as the F2P model, and if industry analysts like Michael Pachter are right we may see a decline in the number of MMOs being pumped out as publishers grow wary of entering a saturated market.

Secret World is Suddenly B2P (not F2P)

Got the email today....with no fanfare or announcement I was aware of, The Secret World has opened its doors wide for everyone (announcement here) who buys the game with a one time purchase (correction from earlier, I did not realize this initially!) This is actually a very good game, even if I couldn't justify the expense of an extra sub for a game (with the limited time I have to spread between so many of them). In terms of "Secret World F2P vs. Star Wars: TOR F2P" The Secret World will win hands down.

The release info indicates that merely playing the game as-is is now totally free. You can buy the game before Expansion #5 and get all expansion content for free (so I guess further expansion content will be paywalled) and if you sub monthly you get perks, including $10 of cash shop money, a distint item, a cool-down XP bonus generator and a 10% discount (a membership discount, I guess) in the game store. Unlike SWTOR, this is, I feel, the smart way to run a F2P franchise: give them everything, then make them want to buy the extras.

I'll be reloading The Secret World tonight, I think! Guess I'll queue it up next to Rift, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III and my never-ending obsession with Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

The Secret World's Earnings

MMO Fallout has an interesting bit of news here. Funcom looks poised to sell itself off? The Secret World might reasonably have 50K subscribers, based on reported earnings and cash shop revenues? Interesting stuff. It tempts me to try harder to resub and get some playtime out of the game. My wife played it for several months but as of last month she's not renewing.....I'll have to ask her if its because she's exhausted the content of the game, lost interest in it, or simply can't justify it due to a weak community (she's ultra-social when it comes to MMOs). She's been playing a lot of Rift lately, too....the new expansion smell lured her back; also, I think Rift's got a really healthy community and a pretty decent RP crowd for what she's looking for.

I'd like to try The Secret World again but for the following problems I like to keep complaining about: Funcom ruined my trust a while back with Age of Conan and thus will never be allowed access to my personal credit card info again, but Paypal and Funcom seem to have communications issues, too, as whenever I try to pay that way Funcom seems unable to process the order, and their customer service people can only offer the suggestion that if I wait long enough it might actually process. Yesh... not gonna happen. Paypal has a very precise way it works, and timing is everything; if every other processed order I put through Paypal happens a certain way in a certain amount of time, regardless of whether its a national or international purchase, I expect Funcom to fall within those parameters. Since they don't, it leaves me suspicious that they are doing something different....and different smells funky when it comes to my money.

So yes, this was another thinly disguised Funcom rant, with my ongoing lamentation that I don't understand how two games I should be playing and enjoying a lot, both set in genres or based on fiction I love so much, could be in the hands of a company that has more than earned its euphemistic title of Failcom. Gaaaaaah!

Speaking of Conan, I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea that  Arnold will be reprising his role in a KIng Conan movie. The irony that Arnold himself is older than Conan was in his final tales (from Conan of the Isles) when he sailed off to the west and disappeared is probably, of course, entirely lost on whomever is working on this movie. The good news is that we can continue to treat the Conan film chronology as the funky alternative universe stuff it always has been...

Three hours into Rift: Storm Legion, and FF XIV Bites The Big One

As of Tuesday night, after waiting for servers to recover from the shock of upgrade and transition (or something) I managed to get in a few hours in Rift: Storm Legion. So far I have the following initial observations, based on my one level 50 guardian in the kingdom of Pelladane:

1. I'm getting an eerie deja vu sort of "like Burning Crusade but bigger" feeling. This is good, though; Burning Crusade was a real knock-out expansion for WoW and the only expansion where I was actively subscribed and waiting for content back in the day. The reason, I think, is because the new realms have distinct flavors which separate them from Mathosia and Eth.

2. There's a lot going on, and questing has been revamped a bit. Your character is considered sufficiently worldy to find and start quests on their own, a lot more often. Quests pop up spontaneously, or just by being in a certain area, or grouped...or who knows, but I kept acquiring quests through channels far more unusual than the "find guy with quest marker and talk to him" approach, which was good. Those quests appear to mostly be story quests now, which is pretty interesting.

3. There are a huge number of people playing, and for the first time in ages I had to get into queue. Rift, despite having a better focus on group and shared questing experiences that is effortless, is till prone to the occasional resource/quest object hog situation. You know....you're killing a mob of storm legionnaires, and someone runs up and takes the lighting rod you're trying to liberate while you're fighting? That sort of thing. On the other hand, I think Rift has found a fine balance between the "everybody is happy and shares everything" mode of Guild Wars 2 and the "everybody is in a vicious knife fight for quest resource" mode of WoW and older MMOs.

4. The graphics are impressive as always. The God Engine of Pelladane is incredibly cool, Crucia incredibly evil, and the entire area just begs to be explored....although not, preferably, at the breakneck pace of the current day-one crowd, which was head-spinningly fast as everyone seems determined to blast through the game's content in a week or less. Good luck with that, though. Three hours in and I think I moved my XP bar 15%.

More on Storm Legion later, as I get further along! For now, here's the end of the world video of Finfal Fantasy XIV as Square/Enix shuts it down for a rebirth in the near future. Taking out your game like this as an in-story reason for a major revamp (also known as going out of accidental open beta) is kinda cool, and I really hope the new version is worth checking out:



If only Squeenix could reconcile its status as a game company with its love affair with making CGI movies!

What's your (quest) line?

There are lots of bones people can pick with MMO design, but I have to say that the one I like gnawing on the most is quest text...or quest delivery, if you prefer. It's been common for a long time now to direct players in MMOs by way of quest givers, who usually have windows which pop up full of details about what they want you to do, why they want it done (maybe), and what you get out of agreeing to do it.

It wasn't always like this, of course! I'm a second generation MMORPGer (muh-mor-pee-gee-er, in the parlance of Yahtzee Crosshaw) who started in 2005 with the arrival of two very important elements to the process: a decent PC and a copy of World of Warcraft. WoW hooked me, being my first delve into the world of MMORPGs. I quickly got into Guild Wars, my first "day one" MMO experience and I also tried (and failed) to delve into Everquest 1 and 2. So most of my MMO experience started with games built from a premise of: "Wander landscape, look for guy with marker over his head, click on guy, read text (optional), accept, and go find ten orc spleens. Repeat until braindeath sets in."

And it's been this way for a long time now. The mythical pre-WoW era of which I knew little (having been a iMac user until late 2004, and not a very powerful iMac at that) sounded like a muddy place in which purpose and objectives in MMOs were left up to the players to define more often than not; the joy was in the novelty of playing with other humans online, and the idea that the game might provide meaningful organizational structure (in any form comparable to what we think of it now) was simply outside the scope of most MMOs back then. Or so it often seems. But the survivors of that Generation One era sure do have fond memories of it. My wife has a powerful necromancer in Everquest, which on rare occasion she goes back to visit for nostalgia purposes....but its never quite the same anymore, apparently.

Me? I tried the free-to-play Everquest recently and it was only slightly less traumatizing and annoying than my first effort in 2005 when entire waves of adventurers were killed by simple bats and skeletons for reasons unfathomable to me at the time.

Anyway, as I've been playing Rift I've been having a blast, and noticing that the game, while relying heavily on standardized WoW-like quest text boxes has managed to retain my interest, despite the fact that the incredibly bland, droll quest text info is just as physically painful to wade through as in any other MMO. This is ironic too, because I really like the world setting and story background in Rift....but just not delivered in tiny little quest text boxes devoid of character. Like I was saying yesterday, your character has no agency in quest text outside of "do this or not." You either accept or move on, simple as that. The wise ascended accepts, does the task, gets reward. The busy ascended moves on as his XP potions level him faster than local quests can account for. The smart ascended ignores them and attacks rifts, which are dlicious, juicy XP-filled planar fruit.

So how could quest text...the storyline, basically....be delivered in a coherent fashion that is engaging and not mind-numingly painful? How can this giant pink elephant get trusssed up in a pleasant dress so we at least find it palatable? Many people like myself really do play MMOs for the story, or wish they could. I barely had a clue what was going on in WoW until Northrend, for example...but not because I wasn't trying to figure it out! Here are some of the interesting ways different MMOs have tackled this issue that I felt are or were on the right track:



Age of Conan

Age of Conan had fully voiced cut scenes for the first 20ish levels of the game, and intermittend voiced cutscenes up to level 80 for the core storyline. It failed in that it stopped trying to offer the same (no doubt expensive) level of quality after the opening 20 levels, which was a shock for many people; it was almost like playing this awesomely interesting story driven game, and then suddenly it ends and dumps you into quasi-generic fantasy land, except with a Howard/Conan reskin.

Age of Conan failed mostly because it front-loaded the cool stuff. I wonder to this day why Funcom didn't try to spread out their voicing talent more evenly across the length of the game, or recognize that putting it all at the start was a bad idea. More likely they intended full voice acting all the way through, then deadlines and budgets ruined everything. Ah well.

The upside on this was it made for some extremely engaging storylines, and the idea of parallel group/public quest lines and the "night time" Tortage solo experience was a smart idea that they should have carried forward through the rest of the game. But this, of course, was one of many reasons AoC disappointed so many people.



Star Wars: The Old Republic

SWTOR did the fully-voiced cut scene thing, with the usual multiple choice range and even the light/dark side option, and unlike Funcom Bioware carried out through the length of the entire game. So if this was so innovative, then why did it fail? I mean, I've played SWTOR and personally gotten tired of it long before reaching level 20. I'm not entirely sure why, but playing this game actually made me narcoleptic. I tried...I really loved KOTOR 1 and 2, but the spirtual KOTOR 3 failed to grab me, despite having such a fantasic emphasis on storyline. So why?

There are a lot of reasons SWTOR didn't work for many people. My wife and her guild are not one of them (although apparently Bioware's breaking the game in patches as it preps for F2P, and that there might send her and her guildies away), so I really can only speak for myself, but it boils down to this: SWTOR's got the theatrics right, and I even really liked how each of my characters had distinct storylines. I actually really, really want to play SWTOR again to see some of these storylines come to fruitition. But! SWTOR is supposed to be Star Wars, and one thing I don't remember from Star Wars was that episode where Han Solo talks to some guy on some planet about how he needs to collect twenty mynock snouts before he can get to talk to this other guy who will then demand he collects 15 rancor copralites so he can get a part to fix a speeder bike so he can cut down the inerminable amount of time it takes to run everywhere.

Put another way: SWTOR did the quest-delivery right, but failed to make quest lines that delivered the Star Wars experience. That might change when you get high enough level, but tasking me with suffering through 30-60 hours of running around Coruscant wanting to blow myself up and end it all is bad. I remember my years on campus at the University of Arizona, glad that I had a bike to get from one class to the next as each class was all the way the hell across campus from the other, day in an day out. But hey, at least I had a bicycle to get around on back then. By level 18ish my republic trooper didn't even have a bike to traverse the city planet. Yeesh.

Plus, unfortunately, no matter how much makeup you put on a pig its still a pig. And call them mynocks or jawas or whatever: collecting rat tails and orc spleens by any other name is still just a lot of wasted voice acting for the same old retarded MMO quest lines.



Everquest 2

One thing I liked about Everquest 2 was how you had to talk and respond to quest givers and all NPCs in little cartoon bubbles. It was a nice touch, and while only some NPCs had voice acting, it led to a sense of engagement. I imagine if you'd played EQ2 to death then the conversational text got tedious to click through....but it was definitely a step in the right direction (until the quest turns out to be "collect 30 rat spleens," of course).



The Secret World

I haven't played this since launch, but I really liked TSW, which had far and away the most engaging quest-presentation with FMV and full voice acting I'd seen yet, and still provided a very dynamic environment in which all sorts of spontaneous stuff could happen. The fact that many quests felt more like something out of a point-and-click adventure was an added bonus. I need to get back into this game, and resolve Funcom's issue with Paypal (or the other way around). Hopefully it doesn't stop providing such a level of detail after X period of time in the game...I'll have to ask my wife, who is hopelessly addicted to this game as well.



Guild Wars 2

The 800 pound guerrilla for 2012, Guild Wars 2 is the one to trump all the rest, right? It has: highly unorthodox quest hubs, everything is public and shared, quests are more diverse than just fetch quests, fully voiced cutscenes and interactions, and an environment that actively discourages the need for elaborate quest text fetishistically there for its own sake. So does it work?

In part I love how GW2 does everything, because it really did go for a fresh take on things. I am surprised it doesn't have actual cut scenes, instead relying on two talking figures. I like that, as with the original GW your character has a voice. I like the custom storylines and the fact that many quests are much more elaborate than the typical MMO fare. It's really pretty innovative overall, although I think the "sharing" component of the game, built in from the get-go, is probably the actual innovation at work. It's actually kind of weird to play an MMO where you don't have to feel like you're in direct competition with others for resources and targets, and in fact the opposite is true. That said, there's still something to be said for a defined quest log with obvious goals, and so its the reason I've been enjoying Rift.

Rift

Rift doesn't do quest text differently. Like I said earlier, it's quest text, despite being full of the game background I really want, is so painfully bland I wish it really was delivered in a manner similar to one of the above-mentioned games. It does, however, do something unique with its rift events, world invasions and other public quest activities (instant adventures), and that is make the game world feel dynamic instead of static. I can actually log on to Rift and play for an hour, stopping invasions, closing rifts and maybe doing an occasional quest along the way, and feel like I was part of "something happening." It's a way of delivering content that generates spontaneous quests without ever calling it that, and it's why I've decided to focus so heavily on this game (and GW2, which does something similar).



In the end there's no answer to be had, as I am not a MMO developer and I don't play these games enough to qualify as a hardcore elite MMO specialist. I've never raided (and lived). I've never grouped an instance more than a handful of times, nor have I cared to grind for reputation points or gear. For me the entire point of playing an MMO is not the end game but the journey there, so for me how the questing works and how it engages me is what matters the most. If the game manages to make its world feel alive, I think it can call itself a success. Right now I think Rift and GW2 do that. SWTOR didn't do it (for me) but it does provide the necessary playground for my wife and her guild to have fun.

I think the future of MMOs will depend heavily on developers designing more dynamic environments, worlds which feel alive and spontaneous; if they pull that off, we'll never need another static baloon of quest text again.

Musing on the Nature of the Ascended in Rift

Rift employs a plot-specific reason for why it's world is full of powerful adventurers who seem able to defy death and return from the grave: basically you're playing ascended, a form of enheriar who is resurrected by the gods to do their bidding, and who will continue to be resurrected for as long as it takes to get the job done.

The game's quest text lines and story plots are very specific about the many things going on in Telara, but it uses the "neutral participant" approach to presenting them, which is to say your character is never given a voice or opinion on quests; you're only option is "accept or do not." This has the downside of making quest texts less involved. It has the upside of making you realize that it's entirely possible that the ascended aren't quite "alive" or human in thought, anymore. This becomes especially evident when you get quests with some fairly morally or ethically ambiguous rationales from various quest-givers. At some point I started to get the "Would you kindly...?" feel from Bioshock in Rift; the suspicion that a hidden subtext to the storyline is that the ascended are literally resurrection survivors who are compelled to do the bidding of mortals specifically because that's the only reason they've been let off of death's leash by the valkyrie-like servitors of the gods. Viewed from this angle, it gives Rift a kind of weird, creepy undertone.



It also makes the artificially-induced resurrection of the Defiant ascended that much more nebulous; they're manufacturing their ascended and sending them back in time; the defiant engineers know their creations are bound by contract to complete the jobs ahead of them, basically doomed to fight, die, and be reborn time and again. But then, the Defiant managed to damage the world with their dimensional tampering and they get to see what things look like at the very end, so I suppose one could forgive them for taking extreme measures to right wrongs.

Storm Legion is out in a few weeks (Nov. 13th). Looking forward to seeing what sort of new material it adds to the broad lore of Rift. I wish Trion would get its act together and write some novels...even some graphic novels (of which there is only one right now) or visual guides to this game. Anything! It's got a much tighter and more interesting web of lore than many other MMOs out there right now.

Then, maybe someone could explain to me how these guys fit in, along with the mysterious invasion portals of House Fluffington...

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!

This Old Republic

My wife jumped on the bandwagon months ago with a preorder of the $150.00 super crazy collector's edition featuring a Darth Ugly action statue. I resisted. I have spent most of the last year burnt out on MMOs and focused on the decidedly more engaging single player experiences offered in most other games (or the short and frenetic madness of pvp-focused games like Black Ops and GoW 3). I haven't felt very "Star Wars-ish." I didn't want to buy into yet another MMO that was destined to string me to disappointment after a week or two (Rift, Star Trek Online, DCUO, etc.), chiefly with the fact that MMOs seem necessarily limited in their storytelling conventions and just how they can engage a player with that oft-ignored -RPG component that can sometimes be found at the end of the MMO-part.

But yeah, after weeks of ignoring my wife's Star Wars: The Old Republic experiences in beta and then special pre-release early start play, I finally caved and got this game yesterday. I can tell you this much so far:

1. I'm glad I'm playing it now, because I always did want to play KOTOR 3 and this is it.

2. Bioware has managed to wed MMO styled gameplay to their traditional single player RPG storytelling medium. This turned out to work very well. I basically feel like I'm playing KOTOR 3 but with the occasional need to ignore random people running around and a chat window.

3. Whoever made those Bioware movies should be comissioned immediately by Lucas Arts to make a Star Wars trilogy of films using the CGI displayed here. Oh, and maybe give them cart blanche to do whatever the hell sort of storyline they want.

4. The gameplay is really conventional (I haven't even read the tutorial bits, the gameplay is a natural to anyone who's played any MMOs at all since December 2004) but this does not detract from the fun. The shoot-them-up component I've experienced so far as a republic trooper has been fairly engaging as starter zones go.

5. Bioware-style dialogue trees. I am already developing a sense of who my trooper cyborg is and whether he's a maverick, a tow-the-line sort of guy, or an embittered soul. I'm only a few hours in and I'm already being confronted with tough decisions. Hell, I got a classic, "fetch me my necklace" quest and it rapidly blew up into a "she could be a spy for the Sith Empire!" subplot. I really don't know what I'd do with all my free time if it weren't for Bioware and Bethesda knocking out such quality, thoughtful RPGs these days. Read a lot more, I guess.

6. Fully voiced, including your own character. I can't express strongly enough what an impact this has. Age of Conan had this up to about level 20-22, for example, and it was well done (until you left the starter zone and voiced dialogue suddenly got very scarce). Hell, even among single player RPGs I think a voiced protagonist is a smart move; contrast Mass Effect with Dragon Age or Fallout 3, for example.

7. Graphics are good. I cranked it up to max and it is a nice looking game, for an MMO. Not as slick as a dedicated single player experience, but still superior to most MMOs on the market right now.

So I opted for a three months at a time subscription plan. I think it will take me at good long time to finish all of the individual character campaigns in SWTOR, and it's the first MMO I've played since DDO and Champions Online that really grabbed me and now has me keen to play more.

While playing with Marcus in my lap last night he did something I hadn't seen to date: he started staring long and hard at the screen.* Did he recognize shapes and images as the same stuff he sees Mom playing all the time? Or is he just now starting to develop better, far ranging vision? I need to read up a bit on this. He's starting to pay more attention to odd things, like staring intensely at my book shelf (which I imagine looks like a panoply of colors to him) or his stuffed monkeys and ducks hanging from his comfy baby chair.

Okay, enough rambling! I have some preloaded stuff for my S&W Ages articles, and am hoping to get another TME feature done this weekend, but if I don't post much else between now and New Years, have a grand old time for the holidays!

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti! 




*Should he even be looking at a computer screen? Try reading up on early childhood parenting, and you'll discover more wacked out, contradictory information than you can shake a stick at!