So, up until recently, I was heavily involved in playing Shroud of the Avatar. It’s an okay rpg-like game, but there was a substantial learning curve involved and a heavy financial burden that was necessary in order to even become a somewhat productive member of its society. Sure, you could play for cheap, but like most things, cheap meant living cheap, and it was never really that much fun. But right before it was released, I invested heavily in the game, paying an absurd amount of money for a house and stuff (mainly a tiered system for joining), and even after that, I never really felt like I was going to become one of the better classed citizens around town.
You see, a lot of that was because in order to be one of those better-off citizens, you pretty much had to invest in the game back when it was in its kickstarter faze of existence. But I didn’t know about it until much later, so my chances of ever investing heavily in the game (and getting something out of it) never could happen. It’s like investing in Facebook AFTER its IPO. Sure, you might make a few dollars, but you were never going to make the CEO-like profits that you would have gotten by investing before the IPO. You were always going to be a second-class citizen.
So, while I haven’t completely left that game, I realize there’s not a lot for me there, so I’ve invested in going back to a previous game, one that I invested in since the beginning: Star Trek Online.
Now, Star Trek Online is one of those weird entities out in the MMO world, mainly because it probably should have gone out of business a long time ago, but lived long enough to be able to sustain itself and then reinvent itself as new Star Trek entities came on the scene to make it viable again.
And eight or so years ago, I paid about $300 for a lifetime membership, which means that I’m still racking up free money and benefits from the game that have made that initial investment completely worth it. But that’s not to say that I haven’t made it worth STO’s time either. I’ve put a lot of money back into that game, buying ships, in game zen currency (to buy other stuff) and even entire expansion sets when they were appropriate. It’s one of those games I’ve always felt was worth the price, even though I might have kicked myself almost every time I shelled out another hundred or so dollars.
But if you love Star Trek, and oh yes I do, then it’s really the perfect game for you. A lot of the game is grind, where you’re doing things that are just completely time consuming, like training skills so that you might one day actually use them, or fighting bad guys on some washed out planet so that you can build up enough of that faction’s marks so that you might one day be able to buy some ship engine you’ve always wanted that can only be bought by that faction’s store. Stuff like that.
But it’s got all of the pew pew you could ever ask for. And I figure that for the next three or four months (or until the next WOW comes along), I’ll be playing it on an almost daily basis.
And shelling out stupid money from time to time.
Cause that’s what they do best. Take your money.
And that’s what I do best. Give away my money. Not sure I’m all that satisfied with that realization. But I’ll be fighting some Romulans, so I’ll have to think about that later.
Some of you may find this relevant, and most of you probably won’t. It involves computer games, and more to the point, an MMO.
Recently, I’ve been playing Star Trek Online, which I’ve been playing off and on ever since it was first released back in 2010. Sometimes, it can drag on; other times, it can be just like being a part of the show itself.
So, a new update has occurred called Victory Is Life, which basically introduces the Jem’Hadar as a new character race (they were the bad guys of the Dominion from Deep Space 9). This new update is everything DS9, and a lot of the actors from DS9 are part of this update as well, providing their voices to their characters again.
Well, last night, I was playing through the new Jem”Hadar missions when I came across a mission called Quark’s Lucky Seven, which essentially is a Ferengi bank robbery type of story where you end up experiencing the story as the numerous Ferengi characters in the adventure.
At first, I thought this was going to be contrived and not worth it, but shortly into the story I realized that they had seriously upped the writing during this adventure. It was probably one of the best episodes the game has produced, and I would have to say one of the few stories I’ve played in this game that completely rivaled the best episodes of the show itself. There were twists and turns, surprises and just damn good writing and acting.
If they wrote episodes on this level throughout STO, it would probably be the most played game on the planet.
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.
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?
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..
Recently, NCSoft announced that City of Heroes Freedom is closing shop. NCSoft did this because it was trying to consolidate its properties, and (at least according to me) it chose to close a pretty profitable property to focus on its other crap…I mean games. In October, the game will shut down, and it will no longer be accessible.
Therefore, I decided to start searching earlier and try to find a new game. First, everyone who I know that games suggested Guild Wars 2, which was just released. But Guild Wars 2 is made by a company that is actually controlled by NCSoft, and after this announcement (and the closing of Tabula Rasa, another game I enjoyed), I’ve decided to avoid NCSoft products like the plague. That means no Guild Wars 2 for me. Besides, I’m really not in the mood to play another medieval-like game with orcs and elves (or some variation thereof).
So I came across The Secret World, which happens to be made by Funcom, which to my surprise happens to be owned by Electronic Arts. To be honest, EA doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to MMOs. It was the company behind Earth and Beyond, which turned out to be one fo the first MMOs to shut its doors while so many others were struggling but remained open. Under its Maxis-bought brand, it put The Sims Online almost as fast as it closed it down. To be honest, I don’t know if The Sims Online is still around, but it’s such a failure that even if it is still around, no one cares.
But, with no other real options, I decided to try it out. I refuse to go back to World of Warcraft because of how limited it is in depth. Their recent addition (or soon to be addition) of Kung-Fu Pandas really has me scratching my head, wondering what happened to that company, but that’s another story.
So I picked up a copy of The Secret World at Wal Mart. Why Wal Mart? I don’t know. I was there looking for a bookshelf and then decided I’d just pick it up because at $50 of a release price, I honestly wasn’t going to get a better or worse deal anywhere else. Sure, I could have probably found a cheaper copy through Amazon or some other obscure online dealer, but sometimes the hassle just isn’t worth the savings.
I signed in for the first time on Saturday. Essentially, if you don’t know what the game is about, it’s a three sided game (a lot like Dark Age of Camelot and every realm versus realm-like game released since) in which you play either a member of the Illuminati, the Templars or the Dragon. I started off as an Illuminati, and it’s a hybrid version of the “real” Illumnati, except for reasons that I haven’t really figured out, they’re headquartered in New York City. The game makes the point of stating that this isn’t the Illuminati we all know and love, but I think that’s more for legal reasons than anything else (and a fear of the real Illuminati targeting developers for revenge or other such nonsense). The Templars makes a point of indicating that it’s not “really” the Templars of history but a new version of the Templars that has its origins recently, although their history stretches back through time and embraces the old ways (huh?). They’re headquartered in London. The Dragon is the “Asian” mystique group in which all sorts of Japanese-like mysticism are combined into a mish mash of ridiculousness, where voice overs recreate bad acting from the 1940s when white actors used to pretend to be Asian by speaking badly. The part that doesn’t make sense for me is that the faction is so grounded in Japanese-ish nonsense, and then the faction is headquartered in Seoul, which is Korean, not Japanese. I haven’t spent a great deal of time walking around Seoul yet, but I suspect that I’m going to see Japanese writing, although I hope the developers were smart enough to realize that some people might actually speak and read Korean well enough to recognize that Japanese isn’t Korean and Japanese writing in Seoul is pretty damn out of place.
Regardless of what side you choose, your starting character starts in Kingsmouth, Maine where zombies seem to be getting out of control. Yep, zombies. And ALL of the enemies you fight are essentially some kind of zombie or zombie-like hybrid. I understand that demons show up later in the game in other areas, but so far it seems very limited in the kinds of things you fight.
The story isn’t all that great either. Essentially it boils down to this narrative:
“Hey, you, stranger, you’re not going to believe what happened. This morning, zombies tried to take over the town. Nope. Not sure where they came from or why. But they’re everywhere and I really need a can of tomato juice from the local grocery store (that is overrun with zombies), so would you be a dear and head over there for me and get me some? If you do, I’ll give you a couple of bucks for your trouble.”
This may sound like a complaint thread, but it’s not really meant to be that way. First off, the game is interesting in that it’s in our time, not in some fantasy land that exists in some weird dimension. No, this world exists in our world and seems to be happening while the rest of the world is oblivious to what’s going on, thus, the secret world. The three factions are in conflict with each other, but when they meet in a place like Kingsmouth, they all work together but then go head to head when they end up in a pvp area (which I have yet to find being such a low “level” character).
Which brings up the subject of “levels”. In The Secret World, there are no levels. Instead, you get ability points (AP) and skill points (SP). You use those to buy new abilities and skills that help round out your character. It’s like someone who played Ultima Online liked the idea that there were no levels in UO, but you just improved your skills instead and tried to update that for the 21st century. It’s a noble idea, but the one problem it causes is that people aren’t exactly sure how they stack up with/and against other players. To be completely honest, I don’t know how I stack up against any creature I come across until I actually start fighting it. I went to the area next to Kingsmouth last night and killed the first mob of bad guys I came across. The second one schooled me like I was a converted ghost in a Pac Man revival. So, I have no clue how to figure out if the monster I’m looking at should be attacked, avoided or worshipped like the god it is.
Another problem I’ve come across is apparently a bug in the game design in how it interacts with a laggy system. I have an assault weapon specialist who has a leech heal ability, but it works about 70 percent of the time because I’ll be fighting a mob of zombies and then every time I press the button for it (and I press it a lot), it gives me a message of “you don’t have a consistent line to your target” or something equally unhelpful. This can happen when I’m standing in front of the target, poking his chest with my finger, and it will still not let me use the ability. Which means I either get lucky with my other abilities, or I die.
In this game, I die a lot. As a matter of fact, there’s a GREAT quest story of trying to find an old killer that was never brought to justice, and the only way to do it is to die yourself and follow a mysterious group of white ravens that help you solve the mystery. Strangely enough, that doesn’t actually count as a spoiler because so much more has to be done that you’ll kind of figure that out, or you’ll end up just quitting the game out of frustration.
One of the things that seems promising is the possibilities of unexplored ground in this game that I haven’t yet discovered. It seems to be very much like a game that has a lot of mysteries and secrets, which is generally my kind of game. But I’m fearful that it will collapse into one of those grinding MMOs where there’s no important concept that you’re exploring through the game. An example: I’m playing an illuminati character. I would like to see that the organization has many secrets that I have to uncover, and those secrets need to be important to the game itself, not just some lore I click on to add an entry to my lore book. I would like to see that new areas of the game open up after you figure certain things out. That, to me, would be so much cooler than finding harder to find lore buttons in the middle of nowhere and having no reason for doing so.
One of the real problems the game faces is that so few people seem to be playing it. The developers aren’t really responding well, playing the “nothing’s wrong…it’s going just as planned” card, which usually gets played right up until they shutter the store, And EA will shutter it. Don’t ever think anything different.
But I’ll let you know more as I get deeper into the game. I had a three day weekend to fully explore what I could. I suspect that there’s FAR MORE that I haven’t seen yet. My hope is that whatever I have yet to discover ends up being interesting and fun.
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.
