This seems to happen every year around this time.  What is it with the huge quantity of super quality games in the fall?

What do I have now?

• Borderlands 2.  Finished first playthrough, portion of 2nd.  Holy crap a good game.
• Torchlight 2.  What D3 should have been.  Completed 2 playthroughs, fooling around with other builds and mapworks.
• WoW:MoP.  Taking my time here.  Monk has the mechanics a Rogue should have had 5 years ago.  Pandaria leveling is better in pacing, pretty bad in execution.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown.  Reviews seem great.  Can’t wait to get in on this.  Next to Civ 1, the original XCOM holds the record for most hours played.
• Dishonored.  Talk about off the radar.  I like the stealth genre, to a certain degree.  This seems to have all the components I love about it plus the likelyhood of a series.

Not to mention a brand new 2 week old baby!  Holy Batman, what a great time to be gaming!

I’ve added a timeline section to this website, going over the MMO games I’ve played over the years and a quick synopsis of why I played and perhaps left.

I’ve been lucky on three fronts.  First, I’ve been in the beta for nearly every MMO I have played over the years and some that I didn’t.  WoW and Rift have been my best experiences in those regards.  STO and TOR were my worst (and incredibly similar).

Secondly, I’ve been writing guides for games for many years. I have some on popular websites for free, others on paid sites (Killer Guides for one).  These guides have paid for my computers, my entertainment area and my subscriptions for nearly 10 years.

Third, I have made money playing games.  UO made me quite a lot selling characters and houses and gold.  I’ve done it all the way through WoW and in D3.  I’ve always felt I could play a game more efficiently that the average player due to time constraints and figured I could make a buck selling that service after selling the items became taboo.

I can honestly say that games are better today than they were back in the day.  15 years ago, you had a choice of BBS games or UO.  13 years ago, there were about 4 MMOs on the market.  This year so far, we’ve had 3 AAA launches, 4 F2P conversions and 5 expansions. While there are certainly more lemons today, there are many more quality games to choose from.  It’s fairly easy to find a game that fits your style.

I’m Canadian, so by definition, I play hockey. Thinking about sports as a whole and how today gaming is somewhat parallel to the mass appeal of sports 20+ years ago.  While sports always have an elite level, only recently has it been as much about the psychological aspect as the physical.  This paradigm shift is also seen in gaming.  Games today are much more complex systems than simple muscle memory.  You need to see 12 different things at once and act accordingly.

Professional sports are an interesting read on people.  Single player sports, as games, focus on muscle memory and repetition.  The psychological aspect is personal, self confidence and learning to achieve greatness.  You can see this in tennis and golf fairly easily.

Group sports are different, as are games.  People have roles to fill and the demands of any given role are vastly different based on the sport.  Baseball is pitcher vs batter, with the fielders as a backup.  They only play if something goes wrong.  Hockey, soccer and basketball are group games where you need to pay attention to everyone on the field at all times.  Individual skill is still important but the ability to read a play makes champions.  Football (and rugby) is the outlier.  It’s the only professional sport that the average person cannot play past 30.  Each role has a different task and other than the quarterback and linebackers, no one really needs to read the play.  They simply follow instructions to the letter and success comes.  New Orleans is a great example of how not having instructions (as they have no coach this year) leads to failure even if you have a solid set of players.

Transfer that thought to gaming now and team based e-sports.  FPS games are more akin to hockey, where situational awareness of both sides is key.  The best Halo players are certainly individually solid but the team only wins if everyone plays as a team and looks out for each other.  PvP group games are more like football.  Players in EvE have specific roles to fill and if you try to fill another one, you will likely fail.  The success is based on the leader’s planning.

PvE groups, raids for most games, are a hybrid of both models depending on the game and difficulty.  The simplest of raids are like football, follow the plan and you win.  The harder ones (like Heroic Raids and Challenge Modes from WoW are a good example) require not only solid planning but great situational awareness.  Each game uses it’s own metric for this and gamers tend to flock to the one that best suits their need, baring social connections.

I will keep this thought in my pocket for future posts.  There’s definitely some more to be said on the topic.

I have young daughters and a wife who love Disney movies (long live the USB drive).  Watching the Little Mermaid made me think of how that story line was included in Kingdom Hearts and the sequel.

The first game was a rough take on action RPG with a decent challenge level.  The systems worked well, if not very well integrated.  The mermaid sequence was 100% 3d combat, which was (and is) pretty cool.

The second game went a different route, a fanboy route.  That version’s Ariel was a sing along.

So where the first game took a middle path for difficulty and content (enough challenge), the second one bifurcated.  Half the game was a cakewalk, the other half an exercise in frustration.  Gummy ships, Ariel, the tutorial and a few other spots could have been played by a 4 year old.  Most XIII bosses and the Pride Lands (to me) were frustration builders, even for someone who at the time played a lot of games.

I understand why they did it, some parts were to appeal to other player types.  What happened was that the people expecting the easy game reached bosses they simply could not kill, while the people expecting a hard game found very boring spots.  Those expecting the challenge of the first game, well they were simply out of luck.

To top it off, the game sold like hotcakes. I would guess only a fraction ever finished the game.  Probably why game companies are still using the business model of appealing to multiple player types.  Who cares if they finish it or not, as long as they pay you right?

Blizz reports that they sold 2.7 million Mists of Pandaria copies.  We know that about 700K of them are boxes, so the rest are digital.  The rest are obviously digital.  They also state that they are back above 10 million players, a 1 million boost from the last quarter.  This is strange for a few reasons.

First, this can only include non-asian sales as the game only came out on Oct 4th over there.  Second, if the game increased their player base by 1 million, that means that only 1.7 million existing players bought the expansion.  That’s about 20% of players.

So of the 8 million existing players that don’t have the expansion a few things can be surmised.  A big chunk must be in Asai.  A massive chunk. Also, a fair amount of accounts are likely part of the 1 year buy in for Diablo 3 and haven’t played WoW in a while.  Finally, some people simply are not interested in MoP.

Overall, I would say the number isn’t disappointing or spectacular.  Just odd.

Rob Pardo, head of Blizzard, has a neat interview with Game Industry, where he describes his path along the gaming front.  It’s an interesting read since he’s been around for a long time and seen things that would make most people’s hair turn white.

He has interesting ideas in regards to business models (F2P vs Subs vs Single Player) and the design trends.  Of note:

Definitely. I’m personally a big fan of game designers being involved in the monetization design, because that’s what will ultimately make for the best game. A lot of times I think those become very disconnected in the industry. Someone that’s more business-oriented or production-oriented will graft a business model onto a game because that’s what they think is going to drive the most revenue, but the game doesn’t really support it. That’s one of the things you’ve seen a lot with the subscription-based business model. I personally think subscription-based business models can still work, but you can’t over-value your game. There’s been some games in the past where they’ve put the subscription model on it because they thought they could get away with it. The reality is if you’re going to do a subscription model you need to deliver an immense amount of premium content over time, because people are going to be looking at as ‘If I’m going to be $10 or $15 per month, what am I getting month after month?’ If I’m not spending enough hours in your product, it’s just not going to make sense as a value proposition.

 

I bolded the part I think is relevant.  Some games have a business model before a single piece of code is written, others have it tacked on at the end.  This is part of the problem games have with converting to a F2P model.  The D3 link here is that the game was designed primarily around the RMAH.  Sadly, the entire game was a pay to win scenario at launch.  It sure does make it hard to find balance though.  If the gear is too good, RMAH runs everything.  Gear is too crappy, no one uses RMAH.

A worthy read nonetheless, just to see how an old school Blizz employee sees how the path of gaming is going.

Syncaine has used the past few logical points to try and push EvE as a market success.  Let’s take a look at the argument, using his strategy.

First we’ll go back to the Player Success vs Company Success issue.  The former is a subjective criteria of success, based on the number of players who not only play but play for a long time.  The second is an objective criteria based on the length of life of a game and the quality of updates to it.  Since they each impact the other, they are related.  No players, then the game shuts down.  No game, then no players.

Simply, if a game makes it past the first year, it would be simple to state that it is a success.  This is caused primarily by the fact that the company sets a bar for the number of players needed to keep the game afloat.  The quality of that success however, remains to be seen.

For that, we can look at the quality of the updates.  I would argue that this is new mechanics and new content.  Simply adding new content (new raids, skins, items) is simple.  Adding new mechanics (new events, rebuilding combat, flying) requires a complex planning structure.  EQ 1&2 are more about content.  WoW has expansions of mechanics but patches of content (which is why people think Blizz takes too long on patches).  EvE has had a fair share of both.

Is EvE a success in these terms?  100%.  Is WoW?  Yup.  So is LOTRO, DDO, Rift and a half dozen others.  TOR, DCUO and a few others are not though.

The second portion of the argument is that EvE is a mass-market success.  I don’t think so.  You can’t even say that about WoW.

70% of the US plays video games.  Over 250 million people.  That’s excluding Europe, Canada, Australia and a pile of other countries.  EvE has 400K subs (the wide majority of whom play multiple accounts).  You’re talking about 0.1% of all gamers.  World of Tanks has 18 million registered players.  That’s not even the same ballpark.

The classic MMO game, with a persistent world and stat based gaming, is a niche.  A noticeable one.  The reason people even talk about EvE today is because WoW paved the road.

Is EvE a success?  Certainly.  Is EvE a mass market success?  Not even close.  Is it in the top 10 for subscription classic-MMOs in the west?  Yes.  Why isn’t that enough?