Up until recently, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, finishing up the last expansion’s final missions to defeat the evil entity known as Revan, who it turns out, wasn’t really Revan, but could have been, and might have been, but (fill in story stuff that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense). Anyway, I finished it, defeated Revan-or someone a lot like him- and then became level 60 (the highest in game), got end an end game experience, and then discovered the game wasn’t over, but I had just finished the new content. So, I was back on the main station then trying to figure out what to do next. I mean, I had saved the galaxy, I had achieved everything, and well, I didn’t know what to do next. So I quit.
Not having anything to do, I picked up where I left off with The Secret World, which is one of those games I’ve learned to love to hate. I mean, it has all sorts of things going for it: HP Lovecrat world, horror, zombies, guns and swords, and all that. But what it doesn’t have is a lot of new fun to it. I’ve felt like I’ve done most of what there is to do in that game. Everything new is just the next level of stuff I’ve done before. There are new lands to go to, but I haven’t felt like they’re all that special. The one event they did have that I truly enjoyed was a nonstop situation where huge golems attacked and you had to join with dozens of people and fight a long battle to kill them. That was a once a year thing, and now it’s over. So, it’s back to the grind. So I finally just stopped playing, looking for something new.
Which brought me back to Defiance. Defiance is one of those games that was a lot like the now defunct game of Tabula Rasa, where you basically grab your machine gun, shotgun or whatever, and fight invasions that are sometimes completely out of control. But you pull the trigger and let loose endless streams of bullets. It’s kind of fun. But it’s limited fun, in that it needs a lot of people on at all times, and these battles are sometimes harder to find than you would imagine. When they happen, they’re a blast, but other times, I find myself just staring at the world map (it’s mostly San Francisco, Marin County and Silicon Valley, or what’s left of them after an alien destruction thing happened) and hoping something pops. And quite often, nothing does. So a lot of this game is just me staring at the map, thinking, man I wish something would happen.
Which leaves me looking for another game. Something fun. Something big. Something enjoyable.
All of this stuff completely makes sense, after 4 years of flight school….
I joined Elite: Dangerous, which is a space shooter kind of game, but I have yet to be able to get into it because the learning curve involves actually learning to fly a space craft with the same intensity I imagine someone going to Air Force flight school might have to undergo. I’ve done a couple of the tutorials, but I’m starting to get really frustrated with the game. Other people who play the game seem to love it, but when you can’t seem to get beyond the tutorial, it starts to feel like one of those games that you’re going to put into a drawer and never look at again.
Which, of course, leaves me with the quandary of not knowing what to play next. I’d love to find a shoot em up kind of game like Defiance that has actual people playing it, events that occur whenever I want them to, and seems worth the effort. Games like World of Warcraft are dead to me now, as I’ve played those to death and have no desire to ever wander the roads of Azeroth again. So, I’m not sure what to play next. But it needs to be something because I love playing games.
I guess I’m waiting for Fallout 4 to come out one of these days. I already played Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim and all of that sort of stuff. That leaves me anxious for something new, but not something boring or stupid.
Most people who know me know that I am probably one of the greatest fans of the Ultima franchise ever. There probably isn’t a title in the series that I don’t remember with great fondness, including some of the more obscure entries in the series. I was probably one of those rare individuals who was devastated when Richard Garriott decided to part ways with Origin (the company that was bought by Electronic Arts and then gutted by that same company). As long as he was part of the franchise, there was always the hope that he would create yet another installment in such a great universe.
Well, he left and he is supposedly working on Shroud of the Avatar, which is kind of a follow up to the series, but time passed on, and people aren’t that into the whole franchise any more, mainly because it spawned Ultima Online, and that game was allowed to whither and die (well, it’s still around, but it’s still spiraling out of control and trying to die).
This week, EA, through its Origin online service, has decided to give away Ultima VIII to anyone who wants it, for free. Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to explore the Ultima universe for the first time, this is somewhat of a strange way to do so as Ultima VIII was never about the Ultima universe but about some alternative location that the avatar ended up going during the adventure. None of the companions are in the game, and to be honest, I’m not even sure the virtues have anything to do with it. Sadly enough, after Ultima VIII, we had Ultima Online as the only entry in the universe and then one last attempt to recapture the magic, a more first person perspective in Ultima IX, which was plagued with so many problems.
It’s probably important to point out that there is still a huge audience that desires anything Ultima that might ever rear its head again. Unfortunately, because of corporate crap and creative licenses, we’re probably going to see very little brilliance in this universe again. So at least with Ultima VIII, there’s the opportunity to live in that mindset again, as it was as close to Ultima as we were probably ever going to get after the wonderful world that was Ultima VII, which I argue is probably the greatest Ultima world that we will ever come to know.
There’s really never been another world quite like it, and I know I speak for a lot of people when I say how much I wish we could somehow go back to that world with the computer technology we have today. So, at least until then, if ever, we can at least pretend we’ve found something close by revisiting those worlds that brought us closer, even if they didn’t bring us exactly there.
Recently, I’ve been dealing with one of those companies known for horrible customer service. You know, one of those corporate entities that everyone loves to hate, yet they keep doing their thing, somehow convinced that people will just forget about horrible customer service in the past, forgive them completely and even though they haven’t done anything to fix anything, their belief is everything will somehow improve.
The company we’re talking about is Electronic Arts, the monopolistic entity of the computer gaming world. Disclosure: Years ago, I worked for them when Maxis was bought by them (and I worked at Maxis Software). That doesn’t mean I have become their biggest fan (or worst enemy either). When I left them, I was lukewarm about the company. My complaint today is coming strictly from a customer, or at least a former customer if you want to be completely honest.
My problem stems from one of those game properties they have that I hate to love, but tend to return to as most gamers seem to have one or two of those kinds of titles in their back list. My title was Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I’ll be honest: It’s one of those games you can enjoy for great segments of time before you grow bored with it and put it on hold for months (or years) before picking it back up again.
Well, I was on my third or so time of going back to picking it up again when all of this happened. I grew bored with World of Warcraft, was looking for something to scratch my gaming itch, and decided to come back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few times in returning back, the game is a lot different from when I first played it. You see, back in the older days it was one of those $15/month games, like World of Warcraft. But it kind of failed at that type of game and became one of those free to play (or purchase to play free, or whatever acronym you need to use). The monthly fee was now waived, although if you wanted the full experience of the game (all your characters and not feeling like you’re a toddler in an adult game), you basically had to pay the full price ($15 a month). So, I went to update my billing information and was immediately denied. For some reason, it wouldn’t take my credit card information. So I went to the Paypal option, and it denied that as well.
What I discovered, after some time on the phone with their customer support (this is SWTOR customer support at this time) is that EA has disabled my pay options because during the time I was away from the game someone tried to access my account and buy a copy of FIFA (some soccer game, or something like that). The person was denied (only because my credit card information had lapsed; not through any great action on the part of EA). But because of this, my account has been frozen.
So, I had to then call EA (not SWTOR) customer support where I went through a maze of customer support people who all promised they could take care of it, but each needed the information told to them from the ground up and then hung up and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. A few days after EACH call, I got an email from someone who said he or she was the one who could fix this if I provided more information but that person couldn’t ask me the information by email, so I would have to call back to relay the correct information. Each time I called back, I was given yet another clueless customer service person who couldn’t acknowledge the person who left the message, so they had to start the process from the beginning again. I should add that he email address of the person who wrote me each time basically went back to someone who would state that he couldn’t help me unless I contacted customer service directly.
So, this went on for weeks. All I kept asking for was someone to unblock my account so I can put my paypal information onto my account and be able to play the game again. There has been absolutely no resolution to this issue whatsoever. Fun fun.
So, as it is, I will probably never buy another game from any entity involved with EA, including, of course, EA.
Recently, I found myself back in the world of Azeroth, or to those who need more information: World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game off and on for years, and recently I ran out of stuff to play, deciding I’d fire up the game again and see what I’ve missed.
Now, to catch up our story, when we last left our characters in the sword and fantasy world, I was level 85, and the last expansion was Cataclysm. Since then, there have been two expansions: Mist of Panderia and Warriors of Draenor. Well, Draenor is brand new (weeks old) and Panderia has been out for a while. But to get from 85 to 90, I had to go through Panderia, at least until I could go to Draenor, where the game lets me level up to 100.
What I wanted to talk about was Mists of Panderia, which from what I’ve been reading didn’t get the most stellar of reviews. And I can understand why. As I played it, it felt very much like an attempt to parody the world of China, and to do that it introduced a new race of Kung Fu Pandas. Yeah, I’m not kidding about this.
But after all of that, I found a couple of really interesting tidbits to keep me going. And those tidbits were specifically story related. To give you an example, I was playing through the story and at one point you have to relive the incidents that a Dwarf engineer went through. Now, the voice over is a Scottish dwarf who has probably one of the funniest voices in the game, and just listening to him narrate made the game fun alone. But then there comes a time where he’s spotting for a sniper and then befriends a raccoon, which the sniper then kills. Now, this may sound kind of harsh or violent, but it was probably one of the funniest scenes in the game by far, because this poor dwarf took the whole cartoon violence very seriously and for the continuation of those missions NEVER forgave his partner for killing his pet raccoon. The whole banter was quite inspired and well worth the play through.
And that’s the point. I think a lot of games are missing the sense of fun that Blizzard tends to invoke in its games. At one point during the beginning of Draenor, you meet a new soldier on the frontier, and his name is something like Newbie Greenguy, or something like that. It reminded me of the one noob character they had running through Cataclysm who the undead npcs were always trying to kill off, just to get him out of the game and out of their hair.
Those kinds of funny moments are truly inspired, and I wish there were more of them in other games.
But for now, I’m happy finding them whenever I can. And sometimes you find them in the strangest of places. One of my favorites for the longest time was when I found a Dwarf Fishing Rod, which was actually a shotgun. It’s one of those jokes that takes you a second to get, but it so cool when you finally do.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on an almost daily basis for the last few months, and only recently I stopped playing, focusing now on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Since playing the latter game, I haven’t signed into SWTOR once. Which brings me to the point of this post, and that’s the realization that I’m probably going to be cancelling my subscription with them soon.
There interesting thing is how much email they send me, trying to convince me that GREAT things are still happening in the game. I still get endless emails from Lord of the Rings Online, even though I dropped that subscription nearly a year ago. They, and Guild Wars 2, are convinced all they have to do to get me back is somehow sound like their game is just as exciting as it was when I decided to start playing it.
What game designers don’t seem to understand is that if a player has left your game, he or she left for a reason, which means that continuous advertisements and announcements of doing the same things you’ve always been doing are probably not going to win back your former members. An example: Star Wars: The Old Republic decided at some point to integrate starship combat into the game. That sounded great. But in doing so, they decided it was only going to be added as player versus player. Now, a lot of people, like me, abhor online player versus player sort of play in our games. If we want that, we’ll sign onto a game that is designed specifically for that. But SWTOR was never about pvp. It was about player versus environment (pve), which means now having to get totally into the wrong kind of play means that the game has moved into a direction that is never going to attract me back. So that means they can stop sending me announcements about all of the great additions they’ve added to the game that are all designed to “enhance” the galactic starfighter part of the game (i.e., pvp). I don’t think they understand that. Oh well.
The other thing they do is keep announcing extra goodies they’ll give me just for staying with the game. The current one is some kind of land speeder that everyone gets as long as they’re activated members on some date in March. I don’t know exactly what date because honest, I don’t care. If I’m not signing into the game to play it, I’m probably not going to sign into it to get my new speeder to run around on a planet where I’m not playing on any way. Just saying.
If you want to win me back into a game that I’ve decided to leave, address some of the reason why I left in the first place. Star Wars Galaxies was notorious for not doing this in the old days. They’d get nonstop complaints about some problem, never fix it, and then beg you to come back because they added elves, or some other stupid shit that you didn’t ask for and really didn’t want in the first place. Everquest was a lot like that.
At least World of Warcraft didn’t promise you anything new. They just figured they were so freaking awesome that you’d come back regardless. And at least three times I did. Not a fourth. They’re currently on yet another expansion I’m going to miss. They haven’t done anything to make the game more interesting. It’s still about running the same big end game dungeons for better gear so you can run those same dungeons at harder difficulty. That got old the second time. The 90th time? Well, that’s why they don’t get money from me any longer.
So, I’ll be dumping SWTOR any day now, kind of like the many women over the years who have dumped me. Like those situations, it wasn’t the game. It was me. Please don’t take it personally.
But please stop calling. The new game is starting to get jealous.
Just recently, I went back to playing Star Wars The Old Republic again. I had played the game back when it first came out, got bored with it and then went onto something else. Recently, I was looking for a game to play, and someone recommended it, so I went back, subscribed for a couple of months of fun, and then a few weeks ago decided it just wasn’t my thing any more. This got me to thinking about all of the MMOs I’ve played over the years, and then it got me thinking as to why I’ve left those particular games. So, I thought I would give a bit of an abridged history of some of those games in my world of playing them.
Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Ultima Online was my first MMO, and I played it back in the day when it was basically the only one people had ever heard of. I started playing it because I was a fan of the Ultima series of computer games put out by Richard Garriott so many years back. For years, I would sign in and have fun there. At one point, I signed up for the Counselor program, and I became one of those players that worked with EA and actually helped other players. Then someone sued EA, claiming we were unpaid employees, and EA gutted the program so that we were now left with only being allowed to play the game and not help other players any more. Around this same time, a Christmas holiday season hit, and the new batch of players who came along were completely different than the ones who had played before. We encountered what has become known as the “grief” player, and they came in droves. Players I knew for years in the game started signing on less and less, and eventually they just left the game. EA tried to respond to this by building a “safer” game within the game, which was to basically clone the entire world and put it into a safer area so that people couldn’t do the sorts of griefer things that were being done before. But this was too little too late as the majority of the people who had made the game famous had already left. I, too, realizing that I was now logging in with so few of my friends playing it any more, left and went to find another game myself.
Everquest was the first “other” game I started playing after the whole UO experience. It was one of those unforgiving types of games that you might log in and do nothing productive for hours, yet you would still log in and try to get something accomplished. It was one of those games that was prior to the Internet explosion, which would kill so many of these types of games because when you needed to find something in the game, you pretty much had to rely on your network of friends and hope someone else knew where something was located, or what some item you received might actually be used for (and quite often they had no idea as well). Nowadays, if you find some obscure item in a game, there are ten web sites dedicated to that item so that you rarely have to do any work to figure out something mysterious in a game.
But I loved the game. I would sign in every day and try to do the things that made your character more powerful, or at least most significant. It was a game that made you very reliant on other characters, as you might have the greatest warrior of all time, but you needed that cleric for heals, that druid for buffs and speed increases, that necro to help you find your corpse after a bad run into very dangerous territory, and practically every other character that existed for some reason or another. The land was dangerous, and you had to be careful because you might be in an area where everything seems level 10 but for no reason some level 50 giant might be walking through the area. There were evil cities where evil characters could go, but good ones would be killed on sight (and the other way around as well). It really was a vibrant world for its time.
Why did I quit? The game just got old. At some point, you’ve done all of the things you’ve wanted to do, and their updates were only designed to do a lot more of the same but at higher levels. Because it was such a big world, the departing players made it that much emptier. And that’s probably what killed it the most.
Dark Age of Camelot came along as the “solution” to Everquest. It played a lot like Everquest, but its focus was on combat, specifically combat between three realms. It was the first of the RvR models (Realm versus Realm), and it did it really well.
The game was focused on player versus player (pvp), specifically working together with everyone in your own realm to fight another realm, which made it truly unique.
The problem for the game was that its content was really lacking. While it did a lot of things right that corrected things Everquest had done wrong (and the list is too vast to get into for this type of post), it didn’t make the game any more interesting over the long run. I’m one of those people who likes to explore a game to find unique things and discover the undiscoverable. DAOC focused on combat, and that was pretty much it. By the time they started releasing expansions, so many of us had already moved onto another game.
There’s really no way to get through an article like this without mentioning the elephant in the room, and that’s World of Warcraft. I played this game for almost as many years as I played each of Ultima Online and Everquest. No other game has actually come along that has replaced those three as the games I’ve played most, although I sure wish one would.
World of Warcraft came along at a time when a new game was needed and people were bored of the games they had been playing. What it did was take all of the models of previous games and did them better. Historically, that’s been the story of WoW. They haven’t done anything all that innovative, but they did what everyone else did, incorporated those ideas into their own, and then made them feel like they were brand new and fresh. That’s a pretty rare talent for a gaming company to do, and this isn’t a criticism against the game or its developers, but a straight out commendation. It also added humor to the mix, which was sorely lacking in previous titles. Sometimes, it even made fun of itself, which was a major part of its expansion Cataclysm, in which you started running across non player characters who were created to be very much like some of the really bad players who inhabit these types of games.
The problem with World of Warcraft is that it just got old. It’s been around for a decade or so now, and as many expansions as they’ve done, the world has never really gotten that much more interesting. The story line still makes little sense and appears to be written by amateur fantasy writers who read a couple of dungeon and dragons books, played a couple of games of Diablo (also by the same company) and then figured that really complicated story lines would totally fazzle the player base and then went with that. Every time the story line hits a point where I find myself having to pay attention, I want to throw my computer through the window, as they’ve had to doctor the story premise so many times to somehow make sense to the theme park they’ve created behind their original ideas.
As to why I left, well, you can only do the exact same thing so many times before you’re just not going to want to do it again. That’s the point I hit with WoW. It was a great game for its time, but instead of focusing on a new expansion to their overdone world, I wish they’d just develop a completely different world. But I get it that accountants run their business, not game developers, so the chances of that happen instead are slim to none.
A couple of other games that came in during this period of time that I played and didn’t give much more time than jump in and out were Earth & Beyond, a space exploration story that once you explored everything left absolutely no game to play beyond that. There was Wahammer Online (which was just an updated version of Dark Age of Camelot and not much more fun). Everquest 2 also came along at this time, and while it was interesting, nothing about it really caused me to want to dedicate much time to it. The grouping dynamic of mobs also really annoyed me, and I started to feel the game was designed for grouping only, cutting up the original world that housed Everquest and dumbed it down.
Then, of course, there was the albatross known as Star Wars Galaxies, which gave players the opportunity to explore the Star Wars universe, set during the time between Episode IV and Episode V. Why? I’m not really sure. Originally, it was hailed as between Episode 1 and 2 (before the prequels were announced), but even then it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
The game was original in that Everquest way, in that it had absolutely no story line whatsoever. Sure, you knew the Empire hated the rebels and all that, but there was absolutely nothing for you to contribute to the story whatsoever. Oh, Princess Leia might asked you to go kill a bunch of Empire dudes, but the reasons would be random, and the purpose behind it somewhat lacking. What was intriguing about it was to build entire towns and such in their universe. What sucked about it was that once you did, it didn’t really make any difference.
Over the years, the developers kept trying to figure out how to stop people from leaving the game. One of their horrible decisions was to completely change the interface of the game so that it was a lot more like a first person shooter. Really dumb idea. Then they decided to revamp the entire idea of the game, making it into a “you, too, can be a jedi” in a world where the jedi were now extinct, which made even less sense. The only thing they didn’t do (and I might be wrong on this) was add elves, which used to be my joke about how you know an MMO is about to close shop. In the end, they did close shop, and the experiment that was Star Wars Galaxies ended for good.
After this, there were all sorts of games that came out that were dedicated to specific intellectual properties, like Lord of the Rings Online, The Matrix Online, The Clone Wars Online, The Sims Online, and more others than I could possibly remember at this particular time. The problem with most of them was that they were very limited in their worlds, which made it very difficult to continue to wanting to play them. The former example, Lord of the Rings Online, actually was one of those universes I invested a lot of time in, before leaving it and then coming back to it again, but the second time around what mainly kept me invested in the game was that I had a lot of friends still in the game, so it seemed worth signing onto it. When they slowly left to other games, the game became less fun to want to sign into.
Which brings me to another Star Wars property, and that’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. Up until very recently, I was playing a lot of this game. I had subscribed to it when it first came out, but got bored with it and then went back to WoW. A few months back, someone recommended it based on all of its updates and changes. It had gone free to play (which means that you can play it for free but if you want some of the stellar features of a game, you end up having to shell out more money than you would have paid if it was never free to play in the first place). I had avoided SWTOR because of that model, having seen how greedy its developers were (and it being EA, I wasn’t all that surprised). But went back I did, and I had fun up until I got bored with it again. There’s only so many variations of “You’re a jedi who is going to save the universe” or “You’re an evil Sith who needs to kill your master and then become the most powerful bad guy in the universe” one can take before finally hanging up the lightsaber.
The current game I’m playing (for now) is Final Fantasy XIV, which is unique for me because to be honest, I’ve never been a fan of the Final Fantasy franchise, which I’ve found to be really corny writing. But that’s the one I’m playing right now and slowly the universe within the game is opening up to me. Who knows where I’ll be at the end of this journey, or even how long it might take me to get there?
Last year or so, EA/Maxis released the latest version of Sim City, the continued offspring of one of the originally wonderful games to come out on PC. Unfortunately, it had some things wrong with it. Okay, I’m being nice. It had a LOT wrong with it. So much that after a week of trying to play it, I deleted it from my hard drive. But that wasn’t enough. I then burned my hard drive, pulled it out of my computer, threw the hard drive out the window, installed a brand new hard drive and even replaced my operating system so that there would be no hint of that game ANYWHERE near my computer. Okay, not exactly the events that happened, although all of the events DID happen. But the rest of that had nothing to do with Sim City. My hard drive crashed for another reason, but I hated Sim City so much that I’m now blaming all of that on Sim City. It’s kind of like how I blame all of my bad relationships that I’ve had with women on Anne. Not because Anne did anything wrong, but she gets blamed and happened to be at the right place at the wrong time when it came time to forever blame every bad relationship on someone.
But I digress….
The problem with Sim City was that it was designed with great mechanics but horrible mathematics. Let me explain. Imagine a town where its population is made up of tens of thousands of people. And then you throw a big party so that lots of other people come to your town. Well, and then after the party was over, instead of leaving town and going back to their own towns, all the people stay and then move into any available house that happens to be located anywhere nearby. If someone already lives there, that’s okay. They’ll just stay there and the person who lived there before can drive around the town all day, making it impossible for fire trucks to get to fires because everyone’s on the road without an actual place where they actually live. Then add more people (cause they called everyone on their cell phones and told them about the grate party), and then you have a cluster**** of people driving around and walking down the streets all day long, and anyone can work in any job because education no longer is important. Just people.
And you get an idea of why the game kind of goes nuts once you start to actually get any decent population.
But the biggest complaint was that the game forced you to play online (on EA’s servers). And quite often, they’d crash. Or just stop working. Or whatever.
People demanded an offline mode (because that’s what every previous version of Sim City was), but EA said that was impossible. And then people abandoned the game. So EA has announced that is NOW going to allow offline play, which by the way I did mention they said was completely impossible, right? All along, I got the idea that EA was trying to sell us stuff in real money, and the only way to do that was to make sure everyone had to play online, kind of like Blizzard is doing with its current crap load of games, like Diablo III, another game I abandoned shortly after a few weeks of realizing it was a shadow of its original versions.
So, will this cause me to go back to Sim City? No. Not a bit. I own the game and haven’t reinstalled it on my computer mainly because they screwed it up enough that I saw no reason to ever do so again.
What I do know is that I will NEVER buy another Sim City game again. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to work at Maxis and used to love everything about Sim City and the Sims. Not any longer.
Recently, I started playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) after a very long hiatus. A friend on a message board recommended getting back into the game (when I was looking for something new to play), and that’s exactly what I did. Thus, it has given me something to write about.
I should point out that I first started playing LOTRO nearly five years ago when it was in early release. I remember enjoying the game back then but around 25th level, my hunter became too difficult to play, so I quit. There were always so many other choices.
Now, the game is free to play with Turbine making its money from microtransactions and players who choose to pay regularly as VIP members. When I came back to LOTRO, I chose the VIP route, and here I am there today.
A couple of thoughts right after the start: The game is still very immersive, and you definitely feel like a part of Middle Earth. The Hobbit lands are very immersive as you feel as if you’re in one of the movies themselves. The game is also very early Everquest-like, meaning that unlike World of Warcraft, the game rarely holds your hand as you try to figure things out. And there’s a lot to the game, so you have to pay attention or you just might miss something important.
As for the story, that’s where I have mixed feelings. It’s definitely Lord of the Rings, which means it is quite epic. But at the same time, you know Frodo and the gang are the ones saving the day, so where does Argolwar (my elf hunter) fit in if the true quest involves only those people? Every now and then, a hero from the story will come along to recruit me for a mission, like Strider does in the beginning to help him fight bandits. But all I kept thinking was: “Strider, or may I call you Aragorn, good sir? Um, you have much more important things to do than recruit this lowly hunter to beat up bandits. Go stop Sauron. I’ll be fine here shooting arrows at nondescript bad guys who have absolutely no significance to the greater scheme of things.”
And then the game allows me to learn trade skills like farming and cooking. So, as I’m farming for either Shire taters or Shire apples, I’m thinking, “man, there must be more to life than just this.”
Which brings me back to my recognition that I’m in a game that les me be an unimportant cog in the wheel of a, well, a wheel of time of Tolkien perspective in a world where I should be contributing so much more than I’ll ever be capable.
But the game does have a certain amount of a catharsis purpose, as the characters in it appreciate you, even if you realize how insignificant you are. In the Shire, I joined the Bounders, which is the civilian problem solvers for Hobbits. The npcs recognize this and thank me every time I walk by them. If only I had that happen to me just once at work or in my regular life.
The one thing I really like about the game is how much there is that I still don’t know. With World of Warcraft, the game spoon feeds you through each and every stimulation. This game doesn’t do that. I’m always convinced that right around the corner is another needy soul who is going to ask for my help. And as the Hobbits discovered, all they have to do is ask, and I’m there with my bow, my sword, or my axe.
One of the new trends in online computer gaming is the free to play model, which shouldn’t be confused with the Buy to Play model. Let me explain the differences in where computer gaming is today.
Buy to Play: The Buy to Play model is where you buy the game, and then you get to play it forever for free. Usually, the game is expensive, like $59.99 for both Diablo III and the same price for Defiance. The upside to it is that you continue to play the MMO forever, but you had to pay the full price for the game beforehand. How the company makes money is both from the initial sale and from any purchases you make in the game after that. Also, if they create an expansion pack, they’ll charge you for that. Almost every Buy to Play MMO I’ve bought has been a waste of money. Diablo III was the first of the lot, and it sucked badly. It was fun in the very beginning, but after a short while you started to realize that the whole game was designed around Blizzard’s desire to get you to spend money in their auction house. There was little value, and the game got stale really, really fast.
Defiance was a bit more fun, in my opinion, but it was mainly an unfinished game that kept promising to be so much more. I paid extra money for the downloaded content that they were going to be providing, but they’ve been really slow at doing that, so basically I stopped playing and lost the money I spent for downloaded content that they never got around to providing. They keep promising it, but promises are nice fantasies that don’t generally pan out.
The third of the buy to play games out there was Sim City, which was the latest version of a very popular franchise. The beginning of the game was a lot of fun, almost like playing Sim City 3000 again for the first time. And then the game sort of collapsed on itself because it was designed badly so that once your city hit a certain size, it basically just imploded on itself and became a nightmare to fix (translation: not fun). They keep putting out fixes for the game, trying to win back the very pissed off customer base, but as I was very pissed off with the game, all I noticed them doing was trying to port the bugged game over to Mac while ignoring addressing any of the issues that were wrong with the game, almost as if not admitting it would make the problems go away. I have no intentions of going back to the game any time soon.
Another version of the Buy to Play model was Guild Wars 2, which was a lot of fun going from Level 1 to about 30, and then the game just became tedious (at least for me). Others are still playing it and having a great time, but it never did much for me after a certain time. The game relies on other people playing with you, and as the game becomes less and less populated, the game becomes that much more difficult.
But Guild Wars 2 falls into the main reason I decided to make this post. You see, now that the game has been bought, the developers rely on the player base to continue making purchases to keep the game afloat. I’ll talk about that in a second. This can work if you offer something of value to the customer playing the game, but what I’m seeing is that game companies are becoming very greedy, wanting to charge you for all sorts of stupid stuff, which makes paying for it that much more tedious. An example: in Neverwinter, the latest of the free to play games, if you want to buy a bag to carry things in, you can’t ever make one but have to actually buy one from the “Zen” store, which basically has translated to $10 for a bag to carry around 24 items. A bit expansive for something that should have some way in the game to create, which it basically doesn’t. You might be able to buy a bag from another player through the auction house, but essentially, that player bought the bag through the Zen store first, so Neverwinter always gets its money. All mounts cost money, as do most companions (your partner in the game) that’s decent enough to rise above Level 15 (a purpose companion can rise to Level 30).
Some of the MMOs that used to be pay to play have become free to play, or buy to play after having failed as a pay to play type of game. These are games like City of Heroes (which closed its doors a short while ago), Star Wars The Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, Rift, Star Trek Online, and several others that used to be regular pay to play games. A few have remained dirhards, refusing to change to a free model, like World of Warcraft and I think Everquest (although I haven’t checked on that game in years, so who knows what happened).
The moral of the story is that these games exist mainly because there are players like me who are willing to pay for incidentals in the game. Now, before I go any further, I just wanted to say that I’m quite willing to pay for items in a game, if that keeps it going. I paid for a lifetime membership to Star Trek Online, mainly because I felt I wanted to support what was a very entertaining project. But when I feel like I’m being targeted for crappy sales tactics, I start to get annoyed. Guild Wars 2 did that to me, and it’s why I finally left the game. I had bought a hundred or so dollars worth of items, and mainly got annoyed at how crappy the items were in lines of cost. Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, both owned by the same company, have one of the most annoying pay items in the game, which are boxes you open with keys you have to buy, and the hope is that you might one day get a great item (a cool ship in Star Trek or a Nightmare mount in Neverwinter). Having opened several dozen boxes in Star Trek Online and about 30 boxes in Neverwinter, I”ve gotten nothing but junk, which means I’ve spent $30 on each game getting absolutely nothing of value. The fact is: You can’t buy a nightmare mount on the Zen Store, so you have to play their rigged lottery in order to actually try to get something decent. It’s the sort of thing that keeps me from wanting to spend money on a game, especially when I’m exactly the kind of player they want: Someone willing to spend money in a game.
That, to me is why the free to play model is not working. As long as you give crappy value to your products that people have to pay to get, your game is going to fail. City of Heroes suffered this way. I spent money in that game, sometimes just wanting to support a game I really enjoyed. But the value for the things I paid for were atrociously one sided (leaning towards them, not me). While the failure of that game had more to do with NCSoft being a shitty company than the game failing, their market could have probably gone a great deal of distance to have done better.
Some of the pay features of these games are really bad. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Star Wars The Old Republic, in which they didn’t add any value by the pay store, but actually took value away from processes already in the game and then charged you for them if you wanted to get them back. That’s a crappy model for a pay store in a game. I used to play the game back when it was pay to play, and the game’s failure, to me, was that it had nothing to do at the higher levels. My understanding from others is that they haven’t done a great job of fixing that, figuring they’ll get a whole bunch of new players to run through the levels before getting bored (ignoring the players who left due to lack of content).
So what’s the solution? Start producing goods in the game that are both interesting and have value. Star Trek Online does get a bit of this right by creating new ships you can buy. Unfortunately, they don’t do enough to distinguish those new ships from the ones that used to be in the game. But it’s the right track. Neverwinter can do better by discontinuing the stupid drop boxes or by making the items that come in those drop boxes be worth a lot more value to the player. Right now, it’s like gambling at a casino where the slot machines are stuck on losing readouts each time you play them. No one wants to pay for that.
Unfortunately, like City of Heroes, I doubt the developers even care, or they may care but aren’t willing to put forth the effort to make the changes needed, convinced people will keep paying long enough to get them what they need as a payout. Defiance is an interesting variable to watch as the game was a lot of fun, but needed so much more. People tell the developers this on the game’s message boards, but you get the immediate thought that the devs just don’t care. Or they care but it’s too much work to implement change. It probably doesn’t help that Trion fired a great deal of the staff to “save money”, but that’s a subject for another post..
I recently bought the new release of Sim City (from Electronic Arts, using its subsidiary Maxis Software, which is bought some years back). Maxis used to be one of the greatest companies on the planet, creating Sim City, the Sims and then Spore (which was a little after they were bought by EA). However, Sim City has always been the bread and butter of Maxis, and most likely the reason EA bought the company in the first place (The Sims was released under EA’s ownership, even though it was the last project begun under the Maxis only name).
So what are my thoughts on Sim City? It’s a lot of fun, at least until you get really involved with the game. Let me explain. When you first start playing the game, you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do. You build a road from the highway through your patch of land, you then zone residential, then industrial and commercial. Soon after, someone complains they have no power or water, so you build some kind of power plant and a water pump. This goes on for awhile, until someone else complains that there aren’t enough people to work the zones (so you zone more residential), and then you start to realize your city is lacking in fire support (you build a fire house), police (you build a police station), health care (you enact Obamacare…oh wait, I mean you build a clinic), and you continue until your little patch of land starts to become a thriving city. There’s always something to do, so you’re never going to get bored with it.
And then, eventually, you start to build a major city. And unfortunately, that’s where you start to hate it. The reason you hate it isn’t because there’s not a lot of fun things to do, but because the game was designed badly, almost as if they realized they didn’t have the ability to handle AI as they needed to, so they dumbed down the simulation to be less of a simulation and be a compromise instead. Here’s an explanation of that:
Your Sims (the citizens) are disembodied people who don’t really have a specific place in your city. The people who work at the health care clinic are not doctors. They’re just arbitrary Sims, meaning that when people get up in the morning, they might be a doctor, a fireman, a ditch digger, or a protesting hippie who hates government. The way they find their jobs is through a process I like to call “first come, first serve”. A Sim wakes up in the morning, at the same time as every other Sim, and walks out the door of his apartment to find that there’s a business next door selling donuts (so he decides to work there). The next day, he’s not so quick to the donut shop, so he ends up being a neuro surgeon instead, because the clinic or hospital is located next door to the donut shop. He’ll work his entire day in whatever place he’s in, and then he’ll come home–to any home, because he doesn’t live anywhere; he just occupies the first building that’s built for housing. When visitors come to the city because of your tourism stuff you’ve added (like a building that holds mega super concerts), the Sims will fill up the buildings on their way out, or may or may not leave the city. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what different people end up doing when they’re in your city because they’re all interchangeable. Which brings up the problems that destroy your city.
If your traffic was bad before, it becomes a nightmare when everyone is out on the street trying to get to whatever place they need to go. Your firemen, stuck in traffic stops aren’t putting out fires, and your city starts to burn down, even if the buildings are across the street from the firehouse. Your police can’t stop crime, so you have Sims moving out of town because there’s too much crime (caused by cops not being able to maneuver through traffic (or by cops choosing to be donut makers that morning)).. You probably get the picture.
The city’s infrastructure works the same way. If you have water running through your city, it gets bogged down by the fact that the designers of the game didn’t design water (or electricity) any better. Your power gets clogged and randomly just kind of moves around the town so that you can end up with an important set of buildings just not getting power or water because the AI is too stupid to deliver it now that your city has become a lot more complicated. Even if your water pump is across the street from the building that needs water, it waits until the water fills in some cycle that makes no sense to common sense and has as much simulation value as whack a mole does to international diplomacy.
I had a great city that turned into ruins because these problems just blew up at one point where I became too big to fail, but failed miserably. All attempts to fix it were useless because nothing could move through the city. This wasn’t because I was using weak roads; it was because there was so much going on at one time that the Sims pretty much just sat in traffic, water wouldn’t flow, and the city kept complaining that I needed to provide more power, even though I had about 2x the capacity of power that just kept clogging itself up. Even putting a power plant next to the one building lacking power didn’t work because of the previously mentioned random traveling that everything in Sim City does.
This problem is now being noticed by a lot of players, needs to be fixed, or the game is going to be the most successful failure of all time (although it will compete with Diablo 3). EA has the ability to fix this, but I suspect that they’ll do the corporate thing and basically take the money and run, chalking it up to a good experience for the bottom line, even though it may provide the final nail in a coffin that doesn’t need to really happen.
The next move is for EA to do something. The question is: Will they do it or just screw over its player base?
to love to hate. I mean, it has all sorts of things going for it: HP Lovecrat world, horror, zombies, guns and swords, and all that. But what it doesn’t have is a lot of new fun to it. I’ve felt like I’ve done most of what there is to do in that game. Everything new is just the next level of stuff I’ve done before. There are new lands to go to, but I haven’t felt like they’re all that special. The one event they did have that I truly enjoyed was a nonstop situation where huge golems attacked and you had to join with dozens of people and fight a long battle to kill them. That was a once a year thing, and now it’s over. So, it’s back to the grind. So I finally just stopped playing, looking for something new.
Which brought me back to Defiance. Defiance is one of those games that was a lot like the now defunct game of Tabula Rasa, where you basically grab your machine gun, shotgun or whatever, and fight invasions that are sometimes completely out of control. But you pull the trigger and let loose endless streams of bullets. It’s kind of fun. But it’s limited fun, in that it needs a lot of people on at all times, and these battles are sometimes harder to find than you would imagine. When they happen, they’re a blast, but other times, I find myself just staring at the world map (it’s mostly San Francisco, Marin County and Silicon Valley, or what’s left of them after an alien destruction thing happened) and hoping something pops. And quite often, nothing does. So a lot of this game is just me staring at the map, thinking, man I wish something would happen.
