Hell hath no fury
Tesh dug up this guest article from Penny Arcade and I thought it was worth relinking. It’s written by Daniel James (aka Captain Cleaver), CEO and designer for Three Rings Design (Puzzle Pirates).
The paraphrasing quote hits home like a hammer:
“Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the only sustainable way to earn money is by first creating love, and then hoping that some folks want to demonstrate that love with their dollars.”
Free to Play hasn’t grabbed onto my heart as it should. Most of the publishers are so busy seeing dollar signs and trying to leverage the word “free”, that I often sum up the whole business model as a bait-and-switch ploy.
There are some notable exceptions and that’s what this quote above is all about. How to do it right.
In that same article Mr. James slams the “expectations of vast profit” of traditional media and I’d say that has plenty of overlap into the games industry. All of the major publishers (and minor ones, see: gPotato’s faux pas with Allods Online) are salivating over what it means (in dollars) to be the gatekeepers.
When the developer’s love of their game gets superseded by the publisher’s love of money, the gamer’s love dwindles accordingly. On this topic, balance is everything. Love can be a fickle thing. Expose your hand with motivations of pure greed and, well– Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned.
Too many of these games are trying to design themselves around a supposed addiction and not enough around joy.
Windows 7 working well for me
I’ve just migrated from the Windows 7 RC1 to the full retail install of Windows 7. I like it.
For years I’ve treated Windows as a necessary evil for playing PC games. Outside of that scope, I’d much rather run Linux or BSD. Windows XP was the first time I actually enjoyed a Microsoft OS, at least in regards to the user interface (with a lot of tweaking after install, those defaults = ewww).
For the past year of running Beta and RC1, my PC has loved Windows 7. Running in 64bit is probably a big factor on the speed. It’s been downright zippy, even though I don’t have gobs of RAM (2 gigs). That’s really surprised me considering the hideous performance experiences I had with Vista. I’ve even been able to cleanly install some older software that Vista didn’t like at all. It’s also been very stable.
Games have been especially smooth and I don’t think I’ve ever had such few crashes. Not a single blue screen throughout the year, and I’m a serious power user of my PC (it’s never off or sleeping).
The DirectX10 games I’ve run haven’t really impressed me visually, but my DX9 games have run well. Dare I say it: marginally better than on Windows XP. My PC is well past the threshold for speed though, I’d still recommend XP for slower PCs. Just for reference, here’s my current hardware:
Processor: Intel E8400 Dual-Core @ 3Ghz.
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 260 (EVGA with 896Megs of DDR3 videoRAM).
Motherboard: ASUS P5K SE.
RAM: 2 Gigs of DDR2 (weakest point of my PC but honestly not bad).
HD: 1 Terabyte (Seagate @ 7200 RPM).
Sound: SoundBlaster X-Fi “XtremeGamer”.
I’ve still got my big caveats with Windows. I loathe the Registry. I get frustrated at the barriers to clean Backups. I find Network file-sharing messy and problematic. And I dislike the control Microsoft tries to leverage on my own desktop, but I guess that could be worse (Apple). Overall, Windows 7 so far has been the best experience I’ve had with a Microsoft OS.
Of course, if I could run all of my PC games smoothly in Linux, I would switch desktops in a heartbeat.
The Cost of Convenience
I don’t really want to get into another argument with Keen again, but when the nature of Allods Online’s cash shop came up within one of his post threads, I couldn’t help but give my $0.02.
Let me start by saying I think Allods Online is a fine game. It’s very polished and delivers on a lot of features other MMOs have failed on. Although it’s way too much cute-on-cute for me, I can see the appeal. I hope it does well.
One of the reasons I won’t be playing however, is because I’m expecting some serious burns down the road with the cash shop.
It’s cool to sell convenience items on your cash shop. It’s not cool to directly inconvenience your players to send them to the cash shop.
Allods Online has introduced a “Fear of Death” debuff, reducing stats by 25% after leaving Purgatory (already a delay on your death). You can remove the debuff via gold or via a cash shop item (perfume). The perfume can also be obtained in-game via a daily quest. The debuff isn’t much different than the sort you may find in any MMORPG, except for one key difference: It’s really long (scales by level, 45 minutes at lvl 40). Stacking it is exceptionally nasty.
In WoW the death debuff is a decision pivot: “Do I go back to my body, or do I take the debuff and go somewhere else?” If you decide to accept the debuff, it will likely dissipate during your travel time, since it’s only 10 minutes. Players suffer with the death debuff in WoW. In Allods Online, it’s an imperative to remove if you reasonably wish to keep playing (at least at the higher levels).
It’s a clear push of inconvenience to get you into the cash shop and not a good indication for this game down the road. Players can decide if it’s a big deal to them or not. I generally agree with Keen’s summation that a death penalty is a good thing, but clearly this is a case of business model directing the gameplay.
That’s the idea of microtransactions isn’t it? To make the cash choice seem small and then add more later. A little bit here, a little bit there. Already players are calculating that only ~$22 would keep you lush in perfume per month, which makes me do a double-take, because there’s no coincidence that’s just slightly higher than a normal subscription fee.
That’s my $0.02. Or maybe that $0.02 is getting paid to gPotato?
. . .
If you’re curious to try Allods Online for yourself, they’ve opened up closed beta for a few extra days to everyone that signs up. See allods.gPotato.com. Just do me a favour and don’t send me screenshots of your gerbils, okay?
What’s wrong with a WoW clone?
I seem to be in the habit of eating crow lately and here’s another subject where my tune is changing pitch slightly.
I’m not exactly happy that the MMORPG genre is knee-deep in me-too design, but I’m starting to wear down on the alternatives. I don’t know what happened along the way, but somewhere the concept of creating a virtual world became lost on all of the big game houses. Oddly, WoW has been the closest approximation, although it’s been slowly sliding off the virtual world scale since release.
The clones? Most of them don’t measure up, that’s for sure. Some, like LOTRO for instance, are superior in a number of ways, but still stop short of the most important elements (for me at least) that keep me from feeling like I’m adventuring in a living and breathing world. Aside from a tiny few exceptions, they’re all online theme parks. Not enough open world space, too many intentional bottlenecks funnelling players into one locale, not much in the way of exploration and oh my look at all those linear goals.
Bring in the clones. That just might help. Look at Allods Online for instance, which I admit I’ve been completely dismissive of. By most accounts, it’s come the closest to a WoW-like experience and may even *gasp* surpass it (I shouldn’t start this hype machine tho, look how many games have disappointed after such rhetoric). The free-to-play moniker scares me tho.
Maybe even Blizzard can recapture WoW’s original magic and clone the pre-expansions version of the game with Cataclysm. Although I suspect they’re more likely to put it on rails.
I was hoping to move forward, to even better and bigger games, but now I’ve realized you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. I’d just like to have that thrill again, the one I enjoyed when I first explored Duskwood, The Loch, Desolace and all of those times in Blackrock, Stratholme and Scholomance. When WoW was less scripted but somehow felt richer.
If someone can clone that, I’ll happily play it.
Except I’m probably not teaming up with gerbils, especially three boxed-movement gerbils. That’s just creepy.
2009: Year of the Game Downpayment Plan
The best games I played this year were actually released in previous years.
Oh I enjoyed some of the fresh titles. Left 4 Dead 2, Champions Online, Fallen Earth and Borderlands all come to mind, but each have their own caveats. I expect they’ll improve with updates. That’s the trend right? The one we’ve been sold on for years, it’s finally the norm.
Patches and Downloadable Content have hit the mainstream on the consoles and it’s bounced back to PC-land. A key pivot point has been the impact that updates (and easy access to them) have on piracy. The number of PC games with static end-product releases are now very few. Expansions are becoming common again.
I’ve long been a bit of a classic gaming nut, so playing older games has always been normal for me, but this is the first time I’ve celebrated games from just a year or two previously instead of focusing on the new releases.
For me, 2009’s highlights were Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars and Sins of a Solar Empire. I felt the bliss of playing these games after they’d been polished to a good shine, gotten past their major bugs and most thankfully been balanced already (I haaaaaate playing through balancing). Most importantly, these games had already added a significant amount of content.
For MMOs, I may be trading in my old 6 month wait rule for a “after an expansion or big content update” rule.
I hope the actual 2009 releases I purchased come into their own over the coming year. It’s a bit of a bet now, isn’t it? I also skipped over other games, knowing I can get in once the dust settles. I could care less about the bargain bins, in fact I hope digital distribution keeps the dollars rolling in for longer shelf life. For far too long it’s been about the top few releases. Of course, I appreciate Steam’s current floor-dropping sale nonetheless.
Maybe next year my list will include more 2009 games. =)
Metaplace shuts down
Metaplace is shutting down and I know this isn’t supposed to be the appropriate time to disassemble why, but I think that’s part of the point. Everyone has been too polite and reserved toward Raph Koster and his big project. The collective web has been a group of yes men. There’s no grand conspiracy, just a lot of respect. Respect != Honesty. Of course, I’m just as culpable as the next fanboi. It’s too damn easy to critique after the fact, but better late than never.
Content is king. If you’re going to develop a game / platform / whatever that focuses on Community Content Creation, then you better jumpstart it with some seriously good content yourself to begin with. This has been true since Lode Runner and all through Doom, Quake, Half-Life, etc..
When I logged into Metaplace, it seemed cute, but no more compelling than any other Flash-driven avatar system. I know there was more than the usual under the hood, but the exterior never grabbed me. I don’t know if that was everyone’s experience, but that’s my take.
I also feel that trying to trying to compete with Facebook and Myspace is silly. That’s not a market of many successes, it’s a domination of few. The gold rush on mainstream social networking is already over. Although I’m convinced that game communities could wedge into the social networks market, it would require leveraging from a strong game.
I’m curious to hear Raph’s postmortem on Metaplace, which I’m sure is coming. I hope next time he makes a fun game design first, content creation tools second.
Eating Crow with Guild Wars
I’ve been bad-mouthing Guild Wars ever since it released in 2005 and I’m here now to apologize. This is almost a classic example of how an early version of a game can be a turn off. I didn’t enjoy it at all during the 2004 beta and the first general experience of the original game (specifically the early areas of Guild Wars Prophecies) still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Trying it again now, taken as a whole with all of the campaigns, I’m having a lot more fun.
I expect some of the people reading this may be nodding their heads, one direction or another. In re-reviewing a game like this I’m retreading some old territory.
Guild Wars in 2009
Sakkara spotted a one-day sale on Steam for the Guild Wars Trilogy and scooped it up for both of us. Nelg jumped in as well. The single-purchase format was a big attraction and made the purchase an easier choice: No subscription fees and none of that icky F2P bait-and-switch feeling either.
After some initial confusion about how the three games blend together, all three of us realized we like the content. Like it a lot really. This has been a gem I’ve ignored for some of the most pointless reasons.
Between then and now:
Whenever someone asked me what I thought of Guild Wars, I gave the clichéd negative responses:
- Guild Wars is not an MMO: In hindsight, this was an idiotic and pointless jab. In all of the areas that count, Guild Wars is just as qualified as a multiplayer RPG. There are millions of players and you can group up with any of them just like any MMO.
- It’s too Instanced: I used to think an open world was the only way to go, but then I realized a lot of the content I prefer works better when instanced (WoW’s dungeon instances are a great example). It’s about grouping up and questing together and socializing back in town. Again, just like any MMO.
- It’s full of Invisible Walls: Oh geez yeah the first few areas in Prophecies really have a lot of nonsensical invisible barriers. I’m discovering it gets better as it goes along. Factions and Nightfall rarely suffer from this and even later areas in Prophecies are designed better. ArenaNet should have axed or revamped Ascalon and its surrounding areas, that early content is still a turn off for me. The rest is fine, although I still get an urge now and then to jump over large objects or off the sides of stairs (characters in Guild Wars do not jump).
So what’s good or great about Guild Wars now? I’ll elaborate in more articles, but here are the quick bullet points:
- The world is more fluid and complete than most MMOs: There’s a serious amount of content and despite the loading screens, it flows clearly and consistently from zone to zone.
- It feels like a classic RPG, only with better multiplayer options: I can group together with friends or I can control a party of my choosing (with Heroes and / or Henchmen). Or I can do a bit of both at the same time.
- The gameplay is tight and often tactical: Aggro is more about positioning and AI opportunity than DPS and threat calculations. Melee mobs will sometimes try to outflank. It’s a great group experience if you can get into the groove and react dynamically.
- We get to clear mobs: I’d forgotten what a big deal this is to me. I consider respawns a necessary evil for open worlds and I’m guessing the designers for Guild Wars feel the same way. Talk about working with your strengths. It’s satisfying to kill a mob and have it stay dead until you reset the instance.
- Levels max out at 20 quickly (I’m already 20) and gear tops out too. It’s compelling to collect gear sets, but it’s not a gear or DPS ruled game. Teamplay, teamplay, teamplay. If you can coordinate and work well together in groups, that’s far more valuable than your gear. That’s true for both PvE and PvP.
The number one reason I’m enjoying Guild Wars so much is that it knows what kind of game it is. It works well within its own limitations and doesn’t feel like someone just took another game’s model and mashed in a few new features. It’s not different just for the sake of difference, there’s a coherent and cohesive design to every aspect of this game. Most MMORPGs feel like the same bastardization of the Diku / EQ / WoW model. Guild Wars shines on its own set of lights.
That’s probably enough for me to gush about right now. I’ll expand and post as I progress.
