Category Archives: Games

Mass Effect

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I really liked the original Mass Effect.  I played through 3 times.  It was, in my opinion, the best game BioWare has ever made.  Sure the elevators were slow and the Mako was stupid but the rest was extremely well polished.  Mass Effect 2 simplified a lot of the RPG elements (inventory, weapons, abilities) and focused more on the story.  It ended in both triumph (group combat) and stupidity (human/reaper hybrid) so I ranked it a bit below the first one.

Now the 3rd Mass Effect game is on its way (March 4th) and after the crap-fest that was Dragon Age 2, BW has decided to try a different model on their game.  There are 3 game options.  One is RPG heavy with challenging combat, one is story heavy with little to no RPG elements and the last is combat, where the dialogue choices are all taken and combat is really hard.  I am curious as to what the majority will play.  For me it’s the RPG side.  I felt way more connected to Sheppard in the first game than in the 2nd, even though the scope was larger in the second.

Anyhow, I decided to replay both games to get a save ready for the 3rd.  My original plays were on the 360 (which I’ve pretty much retired) and finding the original for the PS3 is next to impossible.  So I got it on Steam.  Now, the 3rd is only available on Origin (EA’s online store) so I’ll have to transfer some stuff but the game plays pretty well and the loading times are really short.  It’s nice to see a PC interface too as the console version was buggy for me, unless you wanted to play it as a shooter.

So the goal over the next few weeks is to complete both games, then use those saves for the 3rd.  Should be fun!

SWTOR Sales

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DarthHater was part of the quarter sales call for EA (shareholders can call in I guess).  They say that 2 million copies sold, 40% through their online service.  That seems reasonable.  In today’s age of PCs, people don’t go to stores to buy software as much. Steam is awesome.  Origin… has work to do.

The really interesting part is that they have 1.7 subscribers (either trial period or currently paying) and 1 million concurrently.  They go on to say that most (emphasis theirs) are paying.  That’s as low as 51%.  If after a month SW lost only 15% of their subs, that’s impressive.  After playing the game I would say that the number is wrong as the servers have way less people than when the game launched and the first two weeks.  I was running some PvP last night with 50s and I saw the same groups, over and over again.

Oh ya, the average session was 4 hours at a time.  I know I put in close to that time for the first 2 weeks but now the sessions are an hour or two before bed.  4 hours doesn’t say how much per week though, explaining why there are still plenty of players below 50.  Heck, I would say the majority are under 50.  Just goes to show how hardcore some of the other players are to keep that 4 hour playtime as an average.

I don’t want to be more negative but the real challenge is keeping those players past the 3 months mark.  Rift took a beating from it I’m sure (they have a 20 level F2P option now) and I honestly believe Rift is a better game.

Rift Free for 20 Levels

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Here’s the story.

Basically you get all the classes, characters, starting zones, capital cities and teen zones for free.  Considering you can’t unlock the last classes until level 13, this isn’t a huge amount to show.  Still, it takes about 4 hours to get to 20 and the starting zones are pretty sweet.

If you haven’t played Rift, this is a great chance to try it.  In my opinion, it’s the best MMO on the market right now.

WoW Going Free to Play?

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First, let’s look at the games on the market that are subscription based:

  1. World of Warcraft (7 years)
  2. EvE (5 years)
  3. Rift (1 year)
  4. Star Wars Old Republic (1 month)

Let’s look at the games that swapped to Free to Play, from subscription, in recent years.

  1. Dungeons and Dragons
  2. Lord of the Rings
  3. Everquest
  4. Everquest 2
  5. Star Trek Online
  6. Age of Conan
  7. DC Online
  8. Champions Online
  9. Fallen Earth

I think it’s fair to say that the subscription model is simply dated and saturated.  There are only so many people willing to pay a fixed fee for MMOs when there’s viable competition with no fixed fee.  This in turn makes you wonder if/when WoW will swap to F2P as well.  The pokemon expansion sure does sound like it would work well for F2P or at least microtransactions.  There are plenty of F2P games that offer the exact same experience with no monthly cost.

I think the major difference between the first 4 games is perceived value for the price.  WoW updates at a snail’s pace, 3 content patches per expansion, every 18-24 months.  EvE is even slower but the content is player driven and if you play the game “right” you can play for free.  Rift has had 7 content patches and it’s not even a year old yet.  SW had it’s first patch after a month.  If I was to compare them all, it sure would make you wonder why I would sub to WoW instead of the other three – at least in terms of value.

So my guess is that before WoW’s next expansion there will be a new business model.  That will include more microtransactions, which will push another 25% of the player base to other games.  WoW will go F2P within 2 years.

Diablo 3 Gold Making

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You know those gold guides for WoW where there really wasn’t anything new in them?  Just sound market sense?  Well, the same guy who did big with WoW is doing it for Diablo 3.

In WoW (and Rift too actually) I used spreadsheets to figure out costs and profits.  I found out the base cost of making all my glyphs and if I could make 20 gold per, I would make it.  It took a while to get some good numbers to base and get all the skills ready but I tried it for a month and made over 200K gold back in Lich King.  Consider that a player, starting from scratch, to acquire all skills and all mounts and some gear would probably need about 5K total (due to cash taken while leveling) you can see how this was a fair amount.

Anyhow, D3 is going to have an auction house but for real money (as well as fake money).  Blizz will take a cut, so there will be always more money going in than coming out.  Sort of like eBay.  The main difference is that none of the items you buy are real.  So you get into a legal issue where Blizzard will have to either make you sign a waiver saying none of the items are yours, even if you bought them OR they will have to insure items in game.  Which do you think they’ll do?

The point remains that people will spend real money to buy things, just like they did in Diablo 2 and most MMOs.  This time, Blizz will ensure they get a cut and essentially set a ceiling for gold farmers.  The bottom will still be gold farmers though.  That’s not going away – especially with the quality of bots today.

Ironically the person selling the guides was banned from D3 beta for selling the guides.  He can’t make money off the game during beta.  An interesting proposition.

Imperial Agent

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So I started yet another alt since it’s still practically impossible to get any group going at 50.  I already have a 50 Sith Inquisitor (mage or healer) and a Bounty Hunter (mid-range tank).  I decided to try an Imperial Agent – you know, the suits running the starships?  They have two advanced classes, Sniper (long range DPS) and Operative (mid range DPS or Heals).

First, the play style.  You have a limited energy bar, it regens automatically but at different rates if you have less than 60%.  More = faster.  Bounty Hunter is the same.  This makes it so spamming skills does not work. Which, technically, would make you a horrible emergency healer compared to an Inquisitor.  Anyways, you start off with ranged attacks and 1 melee attack.  Your biggest move requires you to be crouched.  Cool I’m thinking.  I hit 10, take Operative and all of a sudden, I no longer have any worthwhile ranged moves.  I’ve turned into a Rogue, having to be behind the target.  Since most combat is against 3 players, sure does make it hard to live through it!  By far the hardest character to play and survive with.

Story next.  The class quest is probably the best so far.  You actually feel involved as a spy and it makes sense.  Either they patched some stuff out or I wasn’t high enough level but I missed a good half-dozen quests on my way to 16.  I have played a  solid dozen characters to 25 (though most inquisitors during the beta) so it’s weird not having those around.  I’m about 2 levels under where I should be and that’s concerning.  My Bounty Hunter wasn’t 50 when she finished her last quest and I was resting in cantinas for extra experience every log out.

Companion now.  The first one – and the first one for each class is the one you should use forever – is a ranged tank.  A piss-poor ranged tank.  Wears light armor and has no extra shielding, so if I end up against anything tougher than 3 normals, she’s dead.  With other classes, taking an elite was hard but 90% doable.  Now I die about 50% of the time because the tank simply cannot tank.  Plus the character looks cool but has a horribad story.

Cool tidbit, SWTOR emailed me when my character hit 10.  I didn’t get that for the other classes so maybe this one needs explaining to players?  I do know that the only people playing IA are in PvP and that you’d be lucky to find one sniper in 100 players.  A pure class (especially DPS) is dead in 2012.  WoW’s dual classes killed them (Pandas have 3 classes) and Rift’s ability to have 2-3 roles and 5 builds at any given time has changed the landscape of MMOs.

Anyways, it’s an interesting class where the story is better than the playstyle.  A lot better.  Which is pretty much the polar opposite of the Bounty Hunter.  Wonder which one people will want to play at 50 when the story is over?

More !

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The internet is full of interesting things!

Total Biscuit has an interview with the lead designer on end game content for SWTOR.  The answers given are great I’m just curious as to why they aren’t currently in game.  Just more fuel that the game didn’t launch when it was ready.  Still, it’s nice to hear stuff is planned and those plans make sense.

WoW news again!  Blessing of Kings (a hardcore raider) has a nice post about how Blizzard tried to appease the hardcore and lose 2 million subscribers.  Ipso facto, hardcore raiders are not the target demographic for WoW from a business perspective.  My previous post explaining how the LFR (looking for raid) tool has helped WoW players see content (and thus provide value for effort for Blizzard) is a shinning example of this.  Sort of like a company that spends 90% of it’s time developing something that only 1% of its clients will use and sells it at the same price.  Stupid.

Posted in WoW

SWTOR Population Counts

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Here’s an interesting site TORStatus.  I play on Sith Meditation Sphere.

The numbers are basically a scale of 1-5 based on BioWare’s description of server population – Light to Full.  My server is usually Standard with a few spots of Light.  When I started it was full a lot of time time and heavy the rest.  I’m not sure if BW changed the numbers behind the words, perhaps that’s it.  The metrics show that there’s a 5-10% drop in clients since last week and I think that number will increase next week due to subs coming up.

Anyhow, I was on last night in prime time and there were less than 130 people on the Fleet.  It took me a half hour to get a group and it wasn’t a hard mode.  Then it took me 10 minutes to get to the dungeon.  I was on the fleet so I had to Leave Fleet -> Enter Ship Zone -> Enter Ship & Fly to Ilum -> Zone into dock -> Zone into Orbital Station -> Zone into Ilum & run to instance -> Zone into instance.  Each arrow is a loading screen.  Let’s compare to WoW.  I want to group, I press the LFG group and I’m ported to the dungeon.  One loading screen.  In Rift, I press the tool, I’m ported to the dungeon.  In either of them if I didn’t use the tool I would fly (mount or flighpoint) to the dungeon and zone in.

All in, it took nearly an hour from the time I logged on til the time I killed the first bad guy in the zone.  That’s a tad too much.

WoW Patch 4.3

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World of Warcraft released its final patch for this expansion (4.3) on November 30th, 2011.  So we’re a few days short of the 2 month mark.  MMO-Champion has break downs of the success with data charts and whatnot.  Let’s go over the recent one.

First, some basic numbers.  WoW has about 10 million active players, based on their financials.  A guild attempt at a raid has 10 or 25 players, with the latter usually being a bit easier.  100 guilds have defeated Heroic Madness, the most recent hard-mode raid, after 2 months.  So in the best case, 2500 people out of 10,000,000 have completed the content.  That’s 0.025% of all players.  Ok.

Just the basic raid itself has interesting numbers.  1 month after the raid launched, 4% of players had completed it on normal and 34% had completed it on easy-mode (LFR).  The previous raid tier didn’t have easy mode and after months of it being 0ut, and nerfed to heck, only 17% of the entire population’s characters (players can have more than 1 character) had completed it.

All of that to say that Hard Mode raids are statistically a non-issue.  One quarter of a percent of people actually bother with them.  Less than 15% bother with normal mode, even months after release.  Easy-mode however gets 1/3 of all players, seemingly a worthwhile investment.

I’ve said it for a bit but hardcore players are dead and hardcore gaming is not mainstream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in WoW

A Month!

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Been sick for over a month and just finally getting over it.  I have a dislike for the holidays as well, they never really feel like holidays.

SWTOR

So I hit 50 with my Sorcerer a while ago and there was nothing to do since I was one of 20 on my server.  I then leveled a Bounty Hunter and now there’s about 50 people at level 50.  At peak time, there are 120 people in the “zone to find people”, which includes all levels. I do see people looking for groups, so tonight I’ll give it a shot and see.

Having leveled two evil characters on the empire, I can say that 90% of the content is identical but that extra 10% has nothing to do with fun bosses and mechanics, it’s just different cutscenes.  And poorly done on the Bounty Hunter too.  Sorcerers have a kick ass story and the ending is truly great.  But really, it’s Star Wars.  You know the magic using guys are going to be better.

Interestingly, though not surprisingly, there is a massive imbalance between Republic and Empire players, with 3-4x the amount on the Empire side.  I saw this in beta.  When classes are identical in nearly every respect and character avatars are all humans (though red or green or blue), the only thing pushing you to a faction is story and the dark side is so much better it isn’t funny.  Not sure how they are going to fix that.  Also interesting is that players are not taking the pure DPS classes.  When every class can DPS within 5% of each other, why in the world would you take a pure DPS class?  Take a tank or healer who can also DPS.  This is even worse for the melee DPS class in a game that hugely favors ranged attacks.  Quite stupid planning.

Anyhow, the gameplay from 1-49 is good and solid.  Crafting makes sense in that context, so do upgrades.  It’s KOTOR3 all the way and you can play alone without any problems.  50 is pure garbage where crafting skills mean nothing, there’s no way to find a group other than standing in 1 zone (out of ~20) and spamming chat, raids and dungeons are bugged and the best items in the game are worse statistically than the 2nd best. BW clearly has no experience in making MMOs and they have released a game that is simply not ready.  Oh, their test servers have no level 50s and the last patch was a high level content patch.  Want to know how that went?

Games

Sort of on the same idea is Raph Koster’s recent post – Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.  The argument that fancy screens and movies where you sit and watch do nothing different than putting in a DVD and eating a bowl of popcorn.  Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.  Using his example of Batman – Arkham City, there are quite a few instances where you to do X in Y amount of time to see a 30 second clip (thankfully there are many more spots where that’s not the case, play the game!).  If the entire game was doing X in Y for a big Z, you’d probably enjoy it the first time but not the second.  Especially if that took 20 hours to do the first time (cough FF-13).  SW is in that group where the story is great the first time but the mechanics are the same as in every other game. Once you’ve done X in Y 10 times, do you really want to do it again 1000 more times?