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.LotRO goes F2P. I think, “The game is about to get a huge funding infusion.”
EQ2 goes F2P. I think, “I always meant to try that, but I would hate to jump onto a sinking ship, and it looks like SOE wants to milk the last dollars from a dying game.”
This is even before considering their differing price shop models. I cannot promise that it is a fair pair of reactions, but I do not think I am in the minority in my estimation of whether each game is headed up or down.
: Zubon
Gordon wonders to what extent MMOs are fun versus habit-forming. We have addressed this before, but I find it always a healthy question. For anything you do often, pause and ask yourself how much you are really enjoying it. A favorite book applies that to spending your money: was that worth it?
When I was experimenting with social media games, I found them immediately absorbing. It was an entirely new area to Explore, and it obviously appeals to the Achiever without all that messy “gameplay” getting in the way of watching bars fill up. Quite a few of them are very good at that structure encouraging habitual play. So one day my wife asks, “Are you enjoying that?” Huh. Good point. “That’s all it took?”
The core gameplay of many things is, quite frankly, poor. We cover it with distraction and decoration, but when anything reduces a game to its purest mechanics, you laugh for a bit then ponder how much an entire genre sucks. Progress Quest and Cow Clicker are important thought experiments. It is very easy to be busy with things to do, a digitally refined archetype of the unexamined life. You have your daily quests to do, some things to gather now that the timer is up, maybe a bit of grinding or a few scheduled and structured activities, maybe repeat that on a few alts, and oh goodness it’s past bedtime. Busy busy busy.
There are many games that get the crap out of the way and let you play. They remove the inconveniences and streamline everything. Some of those are some of the best gaming experiences around, minute-for-minute unbeatable. Some of them are just horrible, as you realize just how many fig leaves the genre needs to be presentable. And either way, its purity limits its ability to be habit-forming, so you find yourself back amidst the distractions, “getting your dollar’s worth” from a game where the content is dragged out. And that is where the dollars are, so that is where the industry trends.
: Zubon
Set off once again, the Guild Wars 2 communities are going manic over the PC Gamer article that misinterpreted ArenaNet. PC Gamer thought they heard that microtransaction dungeons were confirmed and ran that “exclusive” pigskin to the freakin’ endzone. Â Except there was clearly a failure to communicate, and it turned out to be the wrong endzone. Still, all manner of speculation arose over how much allegedly game-destroying products would be for sale in the cash-shop. The biggest culprit? The terrible XP potion. (This is going to be a long one.)
Mad King Thorn (as voiced by ArenaNet’s John Stumme), while discussing the various torture implements of his time, revealed that Guild Wars will definitely, concordantly, and absolutely end this Halloween.
I’ll buy it, I’ll play it, but…I’m expecting the ‘gameplay’ to be garbage. =(
— iLkRehp
(The quote refers to SW:TOR, but “the problem” is general.)
For a “review,” this is as good as it gets. I’ll have my caveat first. I don’t really care about Vindictus. I am not vested in the game. If devcat became a sentient monster-machine and in a pyrrhic victory destroyed Nexon, Maple Story, and Vindictus, I’d pour a little off the top and move on. I mean, I named my character “Shingshing” for Eru’s sake. So take my ramblings for what they are worth.
Vindictus starts out as a fantastic game. I step in to this ridiculous dialogue starting out the tutorial with my nameless, faceless soldier, and then I find myself carrying a princess-girl-person while kicking gnolls in the face. I end up fighting a bus-sized tarantula on top of a crumbling bell tower while ballista bolts rain down on the just and unjust a like. Then I feel bad for the dead tarantula in an empathetic Ol’ Yeller kind-of-way.
It is pretty cool, especially the new Haunted Burrow. A Casual Stroll to Mordor has a full guide. And, thanks to F2P, you don’t even need to be a subscriber to see it. The main events are all in lowbie-safe areas.
They keep adding more to the festivals each year. I like that. I also like when MMOs keep adding more little festivals. The long-run goal is for something special to be going on all the time.
: Zubon
Things have been a little up in the air right now. I still have a little time to game after the event, but right now I am finding I have less time to blog. Or rather, time is not the issue so much as the sheer force of will required to transcribe thoughts in to coherent blog posts. Anyway, right now I am actively playing Vindictus, Guild Wars, and Minecraft.
Vindictus, I’m finding, has supplanted Dungeons and Dragons Online action-y, quick bite of an MMO in my stable. Not only does it have that fresh feeling, but each dungeon takes 15 minutes or so. It is a little grindy, but it seems that some forward movement can be accomplished somewhere in any small play session. I have been mostly playing alone due to the horrendous lag I get whenever I try and join a pick-up group. Occasionally, I’ll work up the gall to start a party myself, and with my connection it works a little better. I am hoping some Vindictus blog posts make it through the will barrier in the coming months.
Guild Wars is actually slowing down. I am beginning to get that warm feeling of perfect satiation. My Hall of Monuments sits at 36 points, with a hard day’s work to get to 40, where I suppose I will stay. Flameseeker, they will call me. Still, there is plenty of “play” left in the game. The Guild Wars Live Team seems to have a full plate of updates ready to be served. The next course is Halloween with my always loved Costume Brawl and more Mad King goodness. I am really excited to see both the old and the new for my favorite Guild Wars festival.
Finally Minecraft. Many MMO gamers and bloggers have stared in to that abyss. I’ve been kind of taking a break, though, in anticipation for their Halloween update. In the meantime I will have to argue with my so-called real-life friends over whether we should reset our world and use monsters (if damage is fixed for multiplayer). Might be a dark Halloween.
–Ravious
it would be grand
Anything you do in real time will benefit from repetition. If you need to consciously think about what you are doing, you may not have time to do it at all. If you can do it, you are performing suboptimally and probably focusing on your specific actions rather than incorporating them into a larger strategy.
When I started playing StarCraft II, I would refer to a friend who was jockeying to get into a diamond league, saying, “I don’t want to be that good.” Which is to say, I do not want to engage in the planning and repetition required to be that good. I am still thinking about my build order and looking around to see where ramps are on this map, rather than just building automatically and knowing the terrain.
You can think about only so many things at one time. If you think of your build order as a series of five steps, which you are working on while setting up your economy, you have about exhausted your mental resources. If you have played 1000 games and can subsume all of that under one mental unit of “Reaper rush,” you have lots of active attention available for strategizing and scouting. If you need to flip through three buildings and mouse-over some icons to find the research you want, you have lost time that your opponent has spent micromanaging his units. For him, it is practically Pavlovian to respond to the sound of an upgrade finishing and start the next level.
My early multi-player games were a series of constant re-discoveries of what things from the single-player campaign do not exist in multi-player play. I may not have played Zerg or Protoss as much, but at least I do not need to un-learn things to play those races. Except Scouts and Guardians from SC1, I miss those.
: Zubon
Tesh reminds me of Torchlight’s set items. I was excited the first time a purple item dropped, which might just be conditioning from MMOs that make purple the color of awesome, but upon reflection I never found much use for sets. As Tesh says, you out-level items very quickly; in Torchlight, leveling every 15-20 minutes is taking your time.
Ah, but there is shared storage and inter-generational item transfer in Torchlight. You can gradually build up the set and make use of it every run. Well yes, maybe if I enjoyed inventory management more, but that seems like a lot of work for a small bonus. Meanwhile, there are awesome non-set items I would need to give up, and I can risk them at the enchanter all I like without threatening to gimp the set. (Given enough times, you will have items survive 10 enchants, and given enough times, you will have set items disenchanted on the first try. One of the former gives me a permanent “best in slot,” while one of the latter breaks my set.)
But this assumes that I play Torchlight enough for it to matter. How many runs would it take to get a full set of 4-6 items in the same level range? 6-10, if you are lucky? And then that set is the best for maybe an hour or two per run? If you beat Torchlight once a week, that is probably worthwhile, although after 10 runs you will also have some very nice non-set items. I would be surprised to find many people who play through Torchlight once a month.
It seems like an over-designed subsystem. It works very nicely if you play for hundreds of hours, but it is just noise if you beat the game once with each class.
: Zubon
This is the reverse of Magic: the Gathering. The original designers knew the system would have problems if players spent hundreds of dollars on cards, but if lots of players were spending hundreds of dollars on cards, great!
Oh, and read the comment from Darius at Tesh’s. Interesting notion!