Everytime I read that a MMORPG developer wants us to download the beta client (or whatever) from FilePlanet I cringe.
For one thing they have this queue that you have to wait in before you can start downloading, unless you are a subscriber. For another, they throttle the connection for non-premium customers to a slower speed.
Okay. So I understand their business model. They need to “encourage” downloaders to subscribe. I guess I can live with the queue and the slower speed.
What really pisses me off is that they don’t have a resumable downloader.
Last night I mentioned in a post that my download of the Fallen Earth beta client had six hours to go. That finished sometime in the early AM, probably around 3am to 4am.
I didn’t have time this morning to check before I went to work, but tonight when I checked, the zip file is corrupted. And no way to correct it other than to redownload a few more GB, for another six hours.
So here I am, waiting in the flaming queue once again. Looks like no Fallen Earth time tonight.
We are currently deep in Open Beta Season. With the upcoming releases of a number of highly (and not so highly) anticipated MMORPGs developers looking to put that final bit of polish on their games open the doors to the general MMORPG community in order to get some experience under wilder conditions.
The big problem is that most of the players who get into an open beta are just there for early access to the game. Generally, these players do precious little testing, and even less reporting of problems that they find. DM Osbon calls them the people who enjoy the cold comfort of discovering what present they are getting from a relative on their birthday, only to act surprised when they finally get to open it. In some ways a fair comment, especially considering that anything done in the open beta period is lost when the game finally goes live.
Of course since this has been the case for pretty much every open beta the devs are completely aware of this, and encourage it.
So if there’s no real benefit to an open beta, then why do developers conduct them?
Well there are some benefits. As I said above, the developers get to see how their game performs in the wild. They get to see how the servers hold up under close to release conditions. And there are some players who diligently report errors when they find them (/em puts hand up).
But the greatest advantage is the publicity that a company gets from putting their game out for all to see while it has the new game smell. There’s nothing like thousands of players giving your game the thumbs up simply because it’s all shiny and new. Age of Conan had that advantage with the specially prepared Tortage newbie area that couldn’t be left during the open beta. AoC received glowing previews (including from me) despite its unfinished state in the later game.
So really, what we call an Open Beta is really an Early Limited Access period, or better still, a marketing opportunity.
Now there’s nothing wrong with that. Companies should do marketing, and for a MMORPG dev, this is just one method.
For the player, the important thing is to recognise that fact, and to recognise that for the most part in an open beta you probably won’t see the content that is lacking.
For a truely useful open beta experience, look at the game beyond the shine and ask yourself the following questions.
What do I find annoying about this game?
What do I like about this game?
Do I see myself enjoying this for the next 1/3/6/12 months?
Do the devs appear to be hiding any content? If so how much?
These questions are important, especially if you’re considering special deals like lifetime subscriptions. But, don’t just look at the negatives. Do look at the shiny, after all it may be what attracted you in the first place. Give it some credit.
But above all. Remember. The open beta is a marketing exercise. By all means participate, but remember that and you should be able to make a informed decision on your subscription options.
Just read over at Biobreak that Cryptic has suddenly announced that the special deal they were offering, the lifetime sub and six months for $60, has been yanked and that everyone is up in arms. Cryptic gave the reason that the specials were a limited commodity. This was news to pretty much everyone interested in buying into those specials.
It occurs to me that the law in some countries — here in Australia at least, but I thought the US had the same sort of law — states that if a company puts an offer up for a certain time without any other limitations — Cryptic never stated a limitation in the number of copies available — then that company has to honor that. You see this with brick and mortal stores all the time. They advertise specials in a catalog, then don’t honor those specials, and end up either being forced to by the authorities, fined, or both.
I’m not sure if that’s a false advertising law or something else like contract law that applies here, but perhaps Cryptic should be reminded that in business you just can’t go around promising to do something and then not do it.
Update: (Via Massively) It appears that Cryptic did say that the special offer was an “until supplies last” offer in an announcement post on their official forums. So they probably haven’t broken any fair trading laws. Still, it probably would have been a good idea to make the limited supplies a crystal clear and repeated part of their message simply to have avoided the misunderstanding that has occurred.
Even though the game still looks a little rough, and from all I’ve heard perhaps might do with some more developmental polish, I find myself intrigued at the almost Anarchy Online look of the game. That’s only an external perception through the videos and screenshots I’ve seen, and might change once I get some time in the game. As I type this the download still has 6 hours to go. Werit on the other hand compares Fallen Earth to Star Wars Galaxies pre-NGE, especially the crafting.
Certainly in more ways than one since my little household companion is spending the weekend at the vets with them attempting to bring a high feline fever down. Some of the conversations I’ve had with the vet make me wonder if she isn’t the veterinarian version of House in regards to our discussions of diagnostic techniques. Good news is the fever has dropped a bit, bad news is that they’re not sure what’s causing. Worse news is likely to be the bill!
But apart from puns about cats and cataclysms, there has been a lot more been said regarding Blizzards announcement during Blizzcon about the Cataclysm expansion. The weekend is usually pretty quiet on the blog front. A lot of bloggers seem to post less frequently on weekends (including me) but this weekends annoucement certainly put the cat among the pigeons… sorry.
The big news was that the rumors that leaked a couple of weeks about turned out to be true. Apparently the Blizzard guys weren’t too happy about that one. No one likes to have their thunder stolen (although, that does seem to be the Blizzard M.O. in making major huge annoucements and releases when other game companies are making theirs, perhaps they’ll know a little how it feels now) but the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the rumors took the edge off.
Myself. I was taking the rumors with a grain of salt like many other bloggers. I did however post a bit of conjecture about the nature of the Cataclysm expansion a little while back that was more than a bit tongue in cheek. In that I said that the Cataclysm would destroy old Azeroth allowing Blizzard to have players start at a high level instead of having to go through all those old levels. Probably the biggest surprise of the weekend’s announcements is that they are going to do just that. Well, not exactly that. Some zones will be apocalypized, The Barrens, Darklight Woods, but they won’t be upping the starting level as far as I can tell. BTW, are they destroying Stranglethorn Vale? If not, I hope at least those loose pages of the Greenhills of Stranglethorn end up getting consumed in the destruction!
The one thing that did occur to me reading all the news from the con was that it seemed an awful like Blizzard was heading down the path of the New Game Experience (NGE) that SOE went down with Star Wars Galaxies. (I did see that Genda had the same thought.)
There seem to be some substantial changes that are going to be made to the game, revamping old zone not withstanding, especially concerning changes to the game mechanics. This isn’t that surprising really. Blizzard have made changes to how everything, damage, healing, have been calculated before and this doesn’t seem to be something they would shy away from. As Genda said, it’s a brave move, but not so much because of the changes, but because they are happening in the context of so many other changes.
The most surprising thing to me was the announcement of the new level cap being 85 instead of 90 or 100, and the addition of the new Goblin and Worgen races.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the years regarding how Blizzard seem to be focussed solely on a vertical progression with World of Warcraft by simply adding to the level cap and adding more and more endgame raid content.
Personally I think its a positive sign for the long term health of World of Warcraft that Blizzard are looking at adding horizontally to WoWs progression. If the game only ever added levels, at some point it would become too daunting for new players to start, and for existing players to create alts. That can’t be good for a continued business plan.
As for release dates. It’s probably too soon to speculate, but in the past Blizzard have announced the expansion around six months before the planned release date which ends up becoming a twelve month time frame. Wildly guessing, I expect an initial date will be for second quarter 2010, with the game actually releasing sometime in November.
Of course, if Star Wars: The Old Republic ends up announcing a firm release date, Cataclysm’s date will be announced shortly thereafter to be in close proximity to Bioware’s release.
Now let the Cataclysm speculation and analysis begin!
Fallen Earth LLC, the company behind the upcoming Fallen Earth MMORPG has just announced the date for the open beta.
To get the beta, according to the press release, you’ll have to create a Fileplanet account and download it. I’m not sure if that means that it will be necessary to have a paid subscription, but that does seem to be the way that these betas are going these days.
There’s also a preorder available that gives a mount called the Wasteland Runner which actually has better stats than the standard mounts.
There are four games due for release in September, and Fallen Earth is currently the front-runner for at least a portion of my gaming time. The reason for that is simple. It’s a post-apocalyptic game, and as far as I’m aware it will be the first MMORPG in this genre.
I hugely enjoyed Fallout 3. I know there were some criticisms, but I thought it was a great game with a lot of depth and replayability. I’m also a bit of a fan of apocalyptic, post or during, books and movies, so it’s about time for a MMORPG.
Unfortunately I won’t be either getting into the open beta, preordering, and possibly won’t be there on release. Time is not really on my side with my current contract rapidly running out. I was slated for a 2 month extension, but that’s been reduced to 1 month based on new budget cutting measures, and even that month is in doubt. So the next two weeks will be hard pressed to hand over my work to another team member before the contract expires at the end of August.
Even then, when I’m not working, gaming will still have to take a backseat — I’ll need to figure out some way to make an income in a climate where my set of skills aren’t currently in demand.
I expect that instead I’ll forego the launch day blues and wait a month or so before I buy Fallen Earth.
I haven’t really followed this one, haven’t posted about it here until now, but I’ve seen a bunch of info, screenshots, and some video about it around the place. It does seem like a gorgeous game, visually. It looks likes it could be fun.
Well, maybe not mine, but just saw this today on Brain Needed Space, the new blog about anything by the former Big Red Kitty, Daniel Howell.
Howell stopped blogging about World of Warcraft a few months ago now, as he had stopped playing the game. The BRK blog was an extremely popular and well-written blog, full of humour and insights into the life of a World of Warcraft hunter. It seems he had some fans among the WoW development team too as this little homage item was included in the 3.2 patch. Looks like a nice smelling gun too.
Big Red Kitty Tribute Gun
So there you have it. Proof that the developers of the games that we love do sometimes read our online ramblings, and that they sometimes even take notice.
Now if only such proof existed for those forumites who are always complaining that the devs don’t read their forum posts!
Cryptic have announced their pricing for a subscription to Champions Online. As expected, there will be the usual 15 quid a month subscription that everyone gets. However, Cryptic have also gone the LotRO route and are making available a lifetime membership for $200 or a six month option for $60 dollars (saving $5 a month.)
I don’t think I’m going to take either of those options.
It’s not that I don’t think lifetime subscriptions are a bad thing. I did buy the LotRO lifetime sub when the game was released and I’m glad I did. As a fan of both the books and movies I knew I was going to have this game on my harddrive for a while.
Even though I don’t play LotRO as much as some other games ( it’s more of a diversionary game for me) the lifetime sub has saved me the hassle of unsubcribing everytime I stop playing for a few months, and has saved me a bunch of cash as a result.
I like the idea of lifetime subscriptions. I’d like to see every new game (and perhaps some of the older ones) offer lifetime subscriptions. They might find their active numbers improve.
But Champions Online is only currently offering their extraordinary subscription options until the end of August.
The game gets released on the 1st of September so if I want the special offers I’ll have to make my decision site unseen…
Because the beta NDA is still up. There’s no real info from the beta players available that I can base a decision on.
And that leads me to another point, not everyone in the beta is going to buy Champions Online. Okay, that’s pretty obvious but, the reasons I’ve heard for these decisions is that these beta testers don’t really like the gameplay. That does ring some warning bells.
Normally I wouldn’t mind buying a game sight unseen. I do my homework more often now so there’s less risk, but in this case there’s not a lot to check out. It’s one thing to buy a game blind and play out the free month if the game is a dud. It’s quite another to buy the game AND pony up another $200 or $60 dollars extra if the game isn’t that great.
So, I’ll probably give Champions Online a few weeks before I have a looksee. And of course, there’s Jumpgate Online later in September, and Fallen Earth with it’s post-apocalyptic setting is also very tempting.
I’m just wondering if I should subscribe at release for any of them.
