Allods Online did look like it was shaping up to be a pretty good MMORPG. While I haven’t spent any time in the game myself, for the last little while all I’ve been hearing about Allods has been positive.
Even Syncaine who despises all things WoW and Themepark in the MMO world has been looking forward to Allods Online. Although, I understand that’s mostly for love. (Oh, the things we do.)
Unfortunately it looks like gPotato has dropped the ball when it comes to the cash store and is charging some ten to twenty times for items for US/Western players than it is for Russian players. (Even though cost of living is a lot lower in the former USSR, that’s a huge jump!) What’s worse, a recent post-soft-release patch has changed the game so that it’s now necessary for players to use the shop to progress where previously it was not. And that has put a lot of noses out of joint.
There’s a few calculations flying around the old interweb. Some are estimating that players will need to pony up around $75 a month for non hardcore play.
All in all, a PR nightmare for a company with an anticipated game.
Here’s what I think will happen.
gPotato has forgotten the cardinal rule of pricing. You can only charge a price that the market will bear.
Charge too much and no-one will buy your stuff. Too little and even though a lot buy it, you won’t make enough to break even.
If gPotato has misunderstood the market and are overcharging, they’ll very quickly find that no-one will buy from their game shop. If 20 USD for an extra six bag slots is too much no-one will buy the extra six slots. If the amount they want to charge players for perfumes to remove harsh death penalties is too much, no-one will buy them. (What’s worse with the DP perfumes is that people may just log out and not come back.)
gPotato will, if their prices are too high, quickly find themselves with no or few sales. They will then be forced to lower the prices to that which the market will bear. Otherwise they’ll go broke, quickly depending on cash or investment reserves.
They’ll need to act quickly too. If they don’t they could find themselves with few Western customers. It’s hard to see how they’d survive that, unless the Russian market can support them. (Now that’s another thought. It’s possible Allods will make a decent income just from the Russian market. The gouging of the Western/US market could be for cream.)
So… my guess. Expect to see the cash shop prices drop dramatically in the first month or two.
Massively is reporting that Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising the previously defunct game being developed by the still defunct Perpertual Entertainment has been rezzed. Well, at least the development has been given the once over by a friendly shaman.
A company called Heatwave Interactive has purchased all the IP rights to the game, and what’s more they’ve also bought all the assets.
At the time Perpertual were pretty darn close to getting the game finished, or so they were saying. (In fact they were in beta testing at the time.) If that’s true, Gods and Heroes may not be all that far off, although there is no mention of a release date. Not that I’d expect one at this stage, Heatwave will have something of a learning curve to get up to speed, at least six months I’d expect.
And since Perpetual dropped the game in 2008, there may be some updating of graphics and other assets to square with current tech.
Good news for everyone who was looking forward to the game originally. I’m sure there will be some happy gamers out there after having heard this news.
It also generates some hope for other games that have been cancelled due to a company closure. CME and the Stargate MMORPG spring to mind. Who knows, perhaps some other company will obtain the IP and assets from the bankruptcy firesale and complete that game too.
It seems that Ubisoft doesn’t kick a customer out of the game that they legally purchased, just dumps them back to their last checkpoint (in the case of AC2) and pauses the game until they get a connection again.
Oh yeah. That’s better. They still treat their customers like criminals, but at least they don’t have to reload the game.
My suggestion is that anyone who doesn’t want to be treated like a criminal, heads over to Amazon or any other supplier that allows customer reviews, and make your opinion count. Don’t lie about the game or the company, just let potential buyers know that Ubisoft is treating them like criminals and that a game like this isn’t worth buying. This tactic worked when EA tried the same crap over Spore (I think) with the DRM that limited activations. Ubisofts DRM is worse.
The big news item in the gaming world this weeks, aside from the various expansions and stats related to MMORPGS, is the completely dumbarse move by Ubisoft to add a form of DRM to Assassins Creed 2 that is so evil, it kicks you out of the game if you suffer even a momentary disconnection to your internet connection.
In other words, if you’ve ever suffered lag, ISP disconnects, interference to your wireless connection, or a cat suddenly choosing to sit on the router and unplugging it, then Ubisoft will stop you playing Assassins Creed 2. In fact, it the disconnection won’t even give you time to save your progress.
Given this, I won’t be buying AC2. I wasn’t too impressed with Assassins Creed 1 since it crashed my XBox 360 every five minutes or so it seemed. But even if AC1 ran flawlessly I wouldn’t be buying Assassins Creed 2. My internet connection often has little pauses that give a touch of lag in the MMORPGs I play. But AC2 will disconnect me.
The way I see it, companies like Ubisoft are now forcing players who have gone out an bought legitimate copies of games into acts of piracy.
If I buy Assassins Creed 2 and at the first kick out, I reckon I’d have two options, depending on how much I like the game.
Stop playing. I can be a little temperamental with games sometimes. It doesn’t take much to sour the experience. If Ubisoft kicked me out, I’d likely stop playing completely. I’d possibly then avoid Ubisoft games in the future.
Find a cracked version. If I really liked the game and wanted to keep playing with interuption I might be inclined to find a way to beat the DRM by downloading a cracked version of the game. (Although this sort of software is inheritantly risky. I’d probably just stop playing.)
The fact is that companies like Ubisoft are not preventing piracy by pulling crap like this on their customers. It’s not the pirates being affected. They’ll avoid the DRM in the first place and just download the game. No. It’s Ubisoft’s customers who suffer. It’s Ubisoft’s customers who will then go out and find a cracked version of the game. And it’s Ubisoft’s customers who have then discovered how much else is out there that can be downloaded free.
Congratulations Ubisoft. By screwing your customers you’ve increased the ranks of the people who will happily pirate your games.
You might have heard of a research project that Microsoft has been working on called Microsoft Surface. It’s essentially a touch screen that can recognise tagged objects. I get the impression that it was inspired by the vertical transparent user interfaces in that Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. There’s a CrunchGear article about it here and the video embedded below.
Now how excellent would this be for all sorts of table top games. The guys in the video are playing DnD, but it could be used for any sort of board or table top game, from Chess to a game of Warhammer.
I could even see standard computer games translated to this sort of surface technology. Anyone for Warcraft 1, 2, or 3?
I keep reading how the recently announced Apple iPad is a step forward in computing.
Sorry. It’s not. It’s a step backwards.
What it does push forwards is the ubiqiuity of computing devices as consumer electronics. It provides a propriety platform for users to access what was once solely the domain of computing devices.
Smartphones, the iPhone is just one of this class, have been doing this for some time. Ordinary people have been able to access the web, email, entertainment and productivity applications for some time. The iPad does take this a little further along. This is a good thing.
But as for computing. The iPad is a giant step backwards.
Computing has taken some giant leaps since the 1970′s mostly due to hardware coming down sharply in prices along with the advent of open platform computing. (I’m not talking open source although that has had a major impact.) What that means is that for the most part, if I see an application I want to use I can download it or buy it and run it on my computer without any one elses permission. If I cannot find an application I need, I can write it or have someone else write it for me. Also without anyone elses permission.
That changes with Apple.
The iPad will use the same application store as the iPhone does, and everything there is controlled by a gatekeeper. Apple. If Apple doesn’t want me to run Firefox on the iPad I won’t be able to. And this will happen because they don’t like flash which means I’ll be prevented from playing a million browser based flash games by Apple. If the app I’ve bought gets unapproved by Apple, there’s a good chance I’ll lose access to it, no matter how much I depend on it. The gatekeeper is a nightclub bouncer.
Apple have always zealously prevented competitors from emulating their products. And they’ve managed to control their hardware. But there’s always been the software that they haven’t been able to control. Until now.
It doesn’t matter who it is, Apple or otherwise. Gatekeepers are bad for consumers. And that’s why the iPad is a giant step backwards in computing.
Evizaer at That’s a Terrible Idea has just written an article called Gameplay is not Grinding in which he explains that it’s not simply a set of repetitive actions in a game that constitutes a grind. Evizaer states that a grind is present when the mental process of play becomes separated from the game’s meaning.
It’s an interesting thought for me because when I was writing my Is It Time To Make Levelling Hard Again? article my primary concern was with the difficulty of keeping the grind out of a game while extending the time it took to get to the level cap. If we forget about non-levelling style games for the moment, it almost seems to be a set of mutually exclusive ideals to either minimise grinding or to extend the time to the cap.
But Evizaer might just have the answer.
If what we call grinding is simply a separation of a players mental process from the games meaning, then perhaps reuniting the two might minimise the grind while at the same time allowing a slower pace through the game. Let me explain a couple of things.
First, what I think Evizaer is getting at here is the concept of meta-gaming, or in MMORPG terms min-maxing. If all a player is interested in is getting to the end-game with the most powerful character possible, in order to be accepted into the end-game content (raids, PvP, or whatever.) Then that player will stop being interested in the meaning of the game and will start only doing the things that will help achieve this goal. Quests now stop being entertaining stories to play through and become a more efficient way to get experience. The relevance of a quest falls soley in to how it helps the player get to the end-game.
We see this in the World of Warcraft guides that recommend the fastest way to get to the level cap is to not do Instances because the XP per hour is less than grinding quests. The fastest way to the top is to forgo the less efficient content. I’ve been guilty of this myself when I’ve just dumped gray quests because the rewards, both XP and loot, are not worth the time.
The problem often is exacerbated by the quests themselves being highly repetitive. The kill X monsters quests are especially bad for this because they don’t offer a story, or really any meaning. These quests are really just an excuse for the eco-system in the area, or as filler content to help the player get out of an area. Developer 1: “Hey look, I’ve just filled this area with a bunch of skeletons.” Developer 2: “Hmm. I’d better write a quest then.”
Quests are presented solely as a way to advance, not as ends to themselves.
So where does that leave us?
Perhaps one of the solutions to the grind is to give the player a reason, aside from just increasing the character stats, to interact with the content. What if doing that quest doesn’t give you any experience but opens up a possibility to advance your character in another way? What if the reward offers the choice of a new skill, or perhaps even opens up a new area in the game? What if heading into that dungeon and finding a magic sword opens up a whole series of events that would allow you to enjoy a terrific story?
Would that be enough to reunite a games meaning with the player and eliminate the grind?
BTW, notice I said ‘interact’ there, not ‘kill.’ But that’s for another post.
One of the most critical aspects of any story, is that there be conflict. No book about a guy who has a normal, uneventful life would become a bestseller.
For some reason us humans seem to like conflict. We find it entertaining and it draws us in. We love drama and hurt feelings. Just look at how many drivers slow down to gawk at an accident scene.
I suspect however, that both Tobold and Syncaine are aware of the effects of controversy, and are simply playing to the crowd. Tobold especially over the last few months has been periodically posting about how he manages criticism on his blog, and he’s certainly right to set ground rules for comments on his blog. Tobold’s complaints about Syncaine, and the frequency of their occurence, seem to me to be more about getting visitors to his blog than about hurt feelings. Otherwise Tobold has got some really thin skin, perhaps too thin for a blogger.
But, as I said, controversy gets traffic, and both these bloggers have been around long enough to be aware of that.
I checked my achievements on my XBox 360 the other day and noticed that the last time I played Mass Effect (1) was September 2007. That was shortly after Mass Effect was released, and I played it through fairly quickly.
In fact I did miss a whole lot of stuff in Mass Effect. I simply played the side quests as they came up and followed the story line, and before I knew it — woosh, game over. I think I completed it in around 20 hours.
So it happened I was out on Sunday about ten days ago and on my way home dropped in to my local game store and picked up the sequel, Mass Effect 2.
That afternoon, and over a few evenings and the following weekend I picked up the story of Commander Shepherd where I left off. I finished it up late on Sunday afternoon a week after I bought it. This time I was determined to do most of the side quests, and while I still didn’t I think, I did quite a few (and all of the loyalty quests.) I didn’t really explore outside of the main systems except where I had to. This time I ended up somewhere near 35 hours of played time according to the save game timestamps.
(While I’m not going to reveal any spoilers other than the first minutes of story for Mass Effect 2, I’ve got a couple of tips that while helpful might be considered spoilers. )
First a recap.
Mass Effect 1 introduced humanity as a recent addition to the galactic community. We are just starting to take steps in exploring both the stars and the politics of the galaxy, and just like the introduction of the new rich to old money, humanity is barely tolerated.
But there’s a threat, which is where Shepherd comes in. It seems that every 50,000 years or so an ancient species of machines called Reapers sweeps through the galaxy purging it of the species that have risen to the stars. (This is actually very reminiscent of the Revelation Space trilogy by Alastair Reynolds.) And guess what… it’s been nearly 50,000 years since the last purge when the supremely powerful Protheans were wiped out.
The Protheans left the Citadel space station by the way. That’s where the Council meets. They are representatives of all the major alien species, except humanity.
So anyway, Shepherd assembles a team and heads off to investigate some strange happenings, works out that the Reapers (actually just one called Sovereign) have coopted a machine hive-mind species called the Geth to do some nasty stuff. Shepherd fights his way through a bunch of scenarios and ends up defeating Sovereign and his representative, Saren. In a nutshell.
Mass Effect starts shortly after that when Shepherd’s ship, the Normandy, is attacked and Shepherd is killed.
He’s okay by the way. His frozen dessicated corpse is found and through the marvels of modern medicine and a rogue shadow organisation called Cerberus is brought back to life two years later. Not many like Cerberus by the way. They’re considered a racist human supremacist group, and noone really trusts them.
Cerberus then send you out to recruit a team and get to the bottom of a mystery, all the humans on a number colonies are being abducted and noone is doing anything about it. Now, through Shepherd, you are.
For the most part I really enjoyed Mass Effect 2. The missions to recruit the team members were interesting, and once recruited each team member had a mission available to unlock his or her loyalty power. (TIP: It turns out that loyalty is really important later in the game, if you aren’t able to gain a team members loyalty for some reason, don’t use them on the final critical mission or you’ll lose team members.) These were great. Not only were the missions well thought out, the loyalty missions especially gave marvellous insights into the characters. Jack’s loyalty mission was especially poignant.
The gameplay has been simplified a lot too. That has both good and bad points. Personally, I like heavier RPG tropes in my RPGs. I like the numbers and stats and putting together a streamlined character. Mass Effect 2 forgoes that, but it still works. It plays more like a shooter, but has an emphasis on story.
The other bit of greatness is the voice acting. I had to pause the game a couple of times and check the credits to be sure, and true enough, there is some great voice talent. Martin Sheen voices the Illusive Man, there’s Claudia Black (SG1 and Dragon Age), Seth Green, and a bunch of other well known names. And it’s really well done voice acting too. This isn’t a one take good enough job that plagued earlier games.
There were a couple of downsides though.
First, I have a standard def plasma TV. For the most part games look pretty good. Mass Effect 2 not so much. The graphics weren’t crisp and it was bloody difficult to read any of the popup messages (or any on screen text for that matter) while sitting only six or seven feet away. ME1 the graphics were gorgious and crisp. ME2 bleh. And there were no real options to adjust other than brightness and some blur mechanism that didn’t seem to make any difference.
Some reviews of Mass Effect 2 didn’t like the hacking mini-games. I didn’t mind them, and it was easy to upgrade to make them trivial, but once that was done there wasn’t any challenge. They just sort of wasted time. Sort of pointless really.
But the big bad of the game, and I put this last because it was really attrocious was the scanning mini game.
Scanning has two reasons. First, you can scan for anomalies. These lead to missions, but there aren’t all that many of these. However, you also scan for resources, paladium, platinum, iridium, and element zero. These elements are required to research upgrade to your weapons, armor, ship, and prototypes. (TIP: Make sure you upgrade the Normandy’s defensive and offence systems to the max. I didn’t and lost a useful team member on the final mission.)
The problem is that scanning is the most boring chore ever to be put in a video game. It involves (on the XBox) going into scan mode, holding down the left trigger, and dragging a reticule over every inch of a planets surface. When the sensors start pinging, you launch a probe (The ship has a capacity of 30 probes initially upgradable to 60) which collects the minerals detected. You then continue to scan until you have probed all the resources of the planet. It takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes to scan an entire planet. The worst thing about scanning is that upgrading everything as much as possible is essential to complete the game, and to do that you have to scan/mine.
Really, the game designer who thought of this rediculous exercise in boredom should be demoted and forced to test other stupidly designed game systems every day for five years while listening to elevator music until he or she learns how to recognise good gameplay from bad. Bad game developer. No twinkie.
I honestly can’t believe that this got past Biowares quality control processes. I found myself yearning for the horrible driving experience of the first Mass Effect.
However, while that part of the gameplay was significantly bad, Mass Effect 2 has enough good points going for it to make it an overall enjoyable experience.
After the release of Mass Effect, it’s taken around two years for ME 2 to come along. I really hope ME3 gets here well before another two years pass. I want to see what happens.
Once upon a time it was standard procedure for a MMORPG developer to make it tough to level.
The games not only didn’t give players much experience for a kill, or for completing a quest, they put obstacles in the form of tough death penalties in the gamers way as well. Everquest, the original, deducted experience upon death that could even drop a players level if he died enough times. EQ also had huge wait times for mana and health regeneration which added to the time it took to level. Asheron’s Call added a penalty called Vitae that weaked a player and had to be worked off before tackling the tough mobs again.
These penalties meant that it took a lot of time to reach the level cap in those games. I’m not sure how long it took from go to whoa in EQ, but it took over two years for the first player to reach the level cap in Asheron’s Call. And that was when the cap was 80, it’s now something like 270.
Contrast that to todays games.
Today, on the STO forums I read that there are some players in Star Trek Online who have already reached the level cap of that game. That’s getting to the cap in about a week of play.
The question I have to ask… is that too fast?
Some folks will answer in the affirmative, and will claim the best way to enjoy a new game (especially one without much end game content) is to take it slowly. And, there is a lot to be said for that viewpoint. I tend to be one of those kind of players. I can level quickly if I want to, but I tend to take my time and look around or do silly and pointless things like swim around the continents in WoW looking for ways to get into high level areas from the back. (Unfortunately, there are none I’ve ever been able to find!)
But that viewpoint isn’t the only valid viewpoint.
The thing is that there will always be players who really enjoy quickly racing to the top. The person who does this might have a competitive nature, or simply just be in a hurry. It doesn’t matter what a developer does, or how much lower level content is in the game, there is a percentage of players (possibly significant) who will not stop to smell the flowers, and will just race through.
And if a player enjoys playing the game that way, there’s nothing wrong with that. To say otherwise is the same as having hardcore players complain about casual players, or adventurers complain about crafters. One persons grind is anothers fun.
So. Is it time for MMORPG developers to make levelling hard once again?
Perhaps a better way to phrase that question is should MMORPGs be implemented in ways that it takes months to reach the cap, not days?
I’m not suggesting that we go back to the bad old days of huge level killing death penalties, or hours of play sessions spent sitting around medding or waiting for boats, it’s a good thing those ideas have fallen by the wayside. What I am suggesting is that developers find a way to slow the levelling process while still allowing players to be active in the game.
Currently though the only real way to do this is by grinding, either kills or quests, and that’s not all that acceptable these days either.
Or maybe, the solution is to look somewhere other than the classic class/level system for player progression. Eve Online relies on a real time based approach. So long as a player keeps skills in training, it doesn’t matter how much time they actually spend in the game, and it will always take years to reach the skill cap. A player is then encouraged to enjoy the game rather than racing through.
Something that I’d like to see is to give a game more horizontal progression. EQ2 has tradeskilling, player housing, and collections to keep players busy. It’s entirely valid to spend entire sessions combing low level areas for harvests or shinies needed to complete collections. Expanding on this could be as simple as providing new systems. Allowing players to have more say in the game’s economy, or perhaps introducing a system for player and guild politics (ATITD with it’s voting systems, and Eve with its alliances) would give players more options, and would have the added benefit of more interaction and player dependency.
In any case, I believe that MMORPGs are going entirely in the wrong direction when it comes to the speed of levelling by making the level cap achievable in the first few days of play. By doing so they’re just ensuring that subscriptions are cancelled when the player runs out of things to do. If a player exhausts the content in the free month, is there any reason to subscribe?
