Future of Gaming

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Free to Play always leaves a dirty taste in my mouth.  My first experiences with the genre were when Facebook games like FarmVille starting popping up all over the place.  Extremely aggressive monetization schemes push me away – like a used car salesman I guess.  Some games have done pretty well by it, like DDO, where the proper game is solid and you buy more content for the game as you progress.  I like the concept of a free trial and buying modules; that makes sense.  What I don’t like is a game like TOR where you are given the entire game for free then nickel and dimed to get access to content not ever actually owning the content.  Mind you, reports are pretty strong that lockboxes are keeping the game afloat since nearly every single update to the store includes a new lockbox package.

I am assuming I’m not alone in this distaste as the F2P genre is in the middle of a rather significant upheaval at the moment.  Zynga is all but dead, iOS/Android apps have monetization barriers, Cryptic is taking a new business model, TSW is seemingly on its last legs and Planetside 2 is suffering from fairly massive player drops.

Take this with some salt but I see it a lot like the days of DAOC, EQ and UO, where choice was the prime determinant for games.  You like PvE?  EQ.  You like PvP?  DAOC.  You like sandboxes?  UO.  You like a mix of them?  Too bad.  F2P has such a glut of gaming choices today that no sane person is going to play your crappy game and give you money when the next game over gives a much better experience for the same cost.  If you like goblins that jump on pogo sticks and wave chickens, there are bound to be 2-3 games that can offer it.

Path of Exile

A prime example of this new paradigm is Path of Exile.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, the game provides an extremely full and rich quality experience.  There are plenty of F2P action RPGs either out or coming out, but I can’t think of a single one that provides the depth and customization that PoE gives for free.  Think of your typical loot based game where you have crappy loot and great loot.  PoE gives you the ability to upgrade the worst loot in the game to be better than anything that can drop, if you roll the dice properly.  Since the game is barter-based, there are no gold sellers.  Micro-transactions are all convenience based since you can’t outright buy power due to the fore mentioned gear customization.  One of the smartest moves they’ve done is to target a niche and under promise and over deliver on their product.

I can see this as the future of F2P, heck online gaming as a whole.  Scope your target audience, budget accordingly, get the core requirements and systems down pat, communicate it with the audience and then deliver a bug-free, polished experience.  There’s just no way today that a new IP can come out of the gate and expect to sell millions of copies in the first week or month.  Target small, reach it, and then slowly build out.

My Concerns with EvE

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While I think that EvE is a good benchmark for PvP sandbox games, I have the underlying impression that it’s painting itself into a corner.  To be noted, I feel the same way about WoW, though MoP was quite a break from the mess of Cataclysm.

If you follow EvE you likely follow Jester’s blog.   Prolific blogger is only the tip of the iceberg.  Of interest is a recent post on the current state of the game at the macro and micro levels.  A long but educating read for sure.

The thing about WoW is that while the game still caters to hardcore raiders, over the years, the game has expanded to attract more player styles.  The devs are the ones holding the real controls of the game as the cart can only follow the rails with a themepark.  If you don’t like the game, you have one throat to choke.

EvE on the other hand is a different beast, where the devs are only able to provide tools and modest controls.  While CCP might want the game to go in a certain direction, they cannot force null-sec to change unless they bring massive changes to the game structure -at great risk of pushing long time gamers out completely.  For a game that presents itself as a PvP game, there’s remarkably little of it outside of ganking – with the odd large battles occurring from time to time.  In fact, the massive battle a few weeks back was looked upon with derision since it essentially happened by accident and was fought over nothing.

EvE is at a point where the game isn’t about spaceships and moons and travel.  It’s about backdoor deals, scams, trades, alliances and stalemates.  It’s like there are two completely different games in EvE.  The starter experience is the complete opposite of the latter end.  And you can’t even bother entering the 2nd part of the game if you aren’t willing to make ridiculous sacrifices along the road.  And the joke is that CCP has stated multiple times that the people in high-sec are funding the null-sec playstyle, essentially the sheep are funding the wolves.

My concern isn’t with the game today, it’s with the direction of the game today.  Null-sec is moving towards larger, slower alliances with no middle or small alliances.  New players are put into a spot of eternal ganking or subservience to the large alliances to see anything outside of high-sec.  There’s no middle ground left.  The worst part isn’t that CCP is ignoring this – they are not – it’s that the people with the real control, the low-sec alliances, don’t see a problem in the first place.

Nostalgic Future

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Let’s talk a bit about nostalgia and the impact of looking forward, which seems to be all the rage with Mark Jacobs’ Camelot Unchained announcement.  I know I’ve touched on this topic a few times now but it seems like it needs a new look given the blog-o-sphere’s penchant for “old” games.  Just quick side-note here – I find it hilarious that Keen is playing a pirated version of UO, hosted by a 3rd party, playing for free and then complaining that the rule set is not one he agrees with.

Here’s my premise for nostalgia and its impact.  A game will grow so long as its core demographic gameplay elements remain stable.  EvE has grown because at the core, it’s been relatively the same experience with a few tweaks (albeit some major) to the game as a whole.  Anytime there was massive change, a significant drop happened.  WoW has grown over the years and cycled out its demographic at multiple points along development. 

This is an important distinction.  I do not know a single gamer that has not played WoW at some point.  I know of very few that have ever played EvE.  Of those players, the amount that have played EvE and still do are high while those that have played WoW and still do is quite low.  This is due to WoW being multiple games over the years (group-centric, quest centric, challenge centric, casual centric, story centric, etc…)

When someone comes along and says “X was the best game ever” they are pointing to a place in time where a single game appealed to their core needs.  DAoC was the “best ever RvRvR” because it was the ONLY one for a long time.  UO was the best PvP sandbox for the same reason.  When Trammel came, the core mechanics of the game changed and people moved on.

If you’re a game developer, make damn sure you have a target audience in mind and that you build for that audience.  Make sure your decisions are with that group in mind.  TOR’s failure is that the core demographic is clearly in players making alts and re-running the levelling content but was marketed towards the general MMO population.  DCUO is a perfect example of targeting the console crowd yet marketing to the PC.

Camelot Unchained will succeed if Mark Jacobs is able to target a specific demographic (admittedly small, say 50K) and cater to those needs without bleeding in the financial aspect of “moar playerz”.  This is the same concern I have for Firefall which seems to completely revamp its systems on a quarterly basis.  The same concern I had with D3 when it redid all skills 6 months before launch after 7 years in development.  And finally, it’s the main reason I have my doubts about Wildstar trying to appeal to everyone and succeeding.

Causation without Causality

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You know how they say people go to the internet to find people they agree with?  I always try to find some dissenting voices – if those voices can clearly communicate.  Tobold, Keen (not Graev, since I agree with him 99% of the time) and Syncaine tend to do the best job that I’ve seen so far.  Just to be clear, I don’t always disagree with them, just more often than not.  I would say that the common thread for all three is that they are incredibly nostalgic and unlikely to take change well.  Plus they are much more meta about gaming than I am.  I also think that’s why they get so many people posting on their topics, since they tend to take a very different approach than most.

Take Syncaine’s post about the problems of depth.  Read through the comments a bit to find that while the concept of the post is sound, the arguments used within are less so.  If Syncaine is the target demographic for PvP and has 3 accounts, is that the baseline we should assume?  PvP doesn’t run the economy as ISK needs to come from somewhere – and that is PvE.  Sort of how in WoW nearly all money in the system is now generated from  Daily Quests.  EvE is a success story in marketing and development for being able to keep so many people active.  It is not a success story to show that a new game today should have the same amount of depth.   If EvE were to launch today as it did back in the day, it would fail.  Not a question.  Others have tried with the same model, minus the community, and have all failed.  Worse than the PvE ones.

Game succeed and fail for dozens of reasons in terms of gameplay but they all fail because they don’t have enough money to keep the doors open.  No matter how good your game is, no matter how deep it is, you need people to play it.  People who are willing to invest in a game, PvE or PvP or Sandbox combination, are invested in their current game.  There aren’t 500K people out there who are willing to subscribe to a game long term because they are already subscribed to another game out there.  Developers need to aim smaller, much smaller and build from that point.

Gold Spam is Gone

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One of the things I think everyone on the planet has a distaste for is gold seller spam in games.  Some games it’s absolutely ridiculous how pervasive it can be.  WoW used to be really bad until gold became next to useless in Cataclysm since everyone could get thousands a day with next to no effort.  Any game with a monetary system that actually makes sense is going to be spammed.  Read into those last 2 sentences a bit…Games that are Free to Play to start are the worst offenders (see TOR lately, or LOTRO).

Anyhow, when I look at action RPGs like Diablo and Torchlight the same problem occurs to differing degrees.  D2’s set stat system had trade chat spam but it was out of game.  D3’s auction house, I’ve covered on dozens of occasions now, but remains to say that it’s one of the largest gaming failures I have ever seen from a player perspective and not from a developer’s perspective.  Torchlight’s randomness and upgrade system makes trading impractical on the long.  Gear is important but character builds more so.

Then comes Path of Exile.  Action RPG in the same vein as D2 and Torchlight.  Stat based, tons of gear and walls of trade.  But no 3rd party spam.  Why?  Because there’s no money.  Every single trade is bartered with PCs and NPCs.  Want that sword?  2 orbs of transmute.  Axe?  Maybe two scrolls and an armorsmith piece.  I am curious as to how this works out in the end but the best part is that any spam in game is from other players.  And that’s the type of spam I actually WANT to pay attention to.  Not having to filter out gold spam is such a nice thing, I didn’t realize how bad it was in other games until now.

Punching Through

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I find it interesting that in a typical MMO, I’m moving through the story to get to the combat.  You know, the stuff that’s repetitive and burns people out like nobody’s business? As much as I like the social aspects of MMOs, the actual game part is severely lacking.  I don’t feel any investment in my character or the game outside of the meta.

Transfer that thought for a minute to single player games, where evidently the entire game revolves around you.  Clearly you need to be the king of the game, the be-all, end-all and the story is naturally tailored around that.  Choices matter because they are contained and you’re not affected by others.

I’ve played a couple hours of Ni No Kuni now, a JRPG of simple design but amazing execution.  While yes, you do take the prototypical white knight the portions outside of the main story are the true gems.  Your companions matter in more than simply being numbers – each means something.  The Wizard’s Book is more akin to the WAR Tome of Knowledge, slowing growing in complexity as you progress through the game.  Visual art and sound are so consistent and engaging that you don’t realize you’re in a game, more like a movie.

I miss the feeling of purpose and discovery that I get in single player games compared to the MMO space.  It seems like the latter is more of a lobby with numbers in order to chat rather than a game proper.

Nostalgia vs Reality

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With all this recent talk from diehard nostalgia blogs about UO, it makes you wonder what game they were and should be playing. I mean if you’re willing to pirate an IP, why are you not playing the legit client?

If you removed the trammel/felucca split from UO today, would the game be different? Would the PvE folks who were camped for 4 years somehow decide to come back? I loved UO, even with its faults. I made a LOT of money selling plots of land and characters. The latter was a time investment, the former was a clear limitation due to squatter’s rights. I’m sure I could have made a business of flipping houses on eBay.

UO had 95% of the game right. Sadly, that 5% remaining was a core concept of the game that failed in execution – murderers and consequence. There is a very, very good reason UO subs dropped like a rock when EQ came out. Probably related to the fact that EQ had only a smidgen of PvP compared to the massive push on PvE. EVE is a great example where even the PVP aspect is only consumed by a tiny (though vocal) minority.

This sort of bleeds into the WAR debate of what was done right vs what was done poorly. A lot was great but the portions that mattered were done poorly. SWTOR is the same, where the obvious investments actually had next to no long term appeal. The only themepark that has had any success in the subscription model is Trion and I’ll assume this is due to their business model of aiming for a small sub count. I mean if you’re aiming for a million, then you need to offer WoW. If you’re offering that, why would someone from WoW swap years of investment? Aim small and build rather than aiming big and tearing down.

Would UO have been better with consentual PvP? Griefing would have still happened certainly. With more punative costs to “murderers”? This would have potentially deterred most. If UO Forever, which is played by admittedly more hardcore players, is unable to contain their “murderer” problem, then what possible hope did the game ever have?

Nostalgia is one thing. Actually seeing the patch notes show that the core problem from 10 years ago still exists should be enough to finish the point.

MMO Sub Fees Are Like the Dodo

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IGN has an op-ed piece on subscription fees for MMOs up for debate.

World of Warcraft is casting a long shadow with eight years of iteration and fresh content under its belt, asking anyone to pay the same for a new release seems ludicrous.

Above all, this is the most important quote to keep in mind for the argument and it applies to more than WoW – it applies to EvE just as much.

When SWTOR came out and people got to max level in a month or so, they looked at the game and then said “what now”?  The problem wasn’t that SWTOR didn’t have much to do (ehhh) but that compared to it’s competitor, it had a fraction of the things to do.  RIFT suffers from this as well and to its credit, it contains more in the recent expansion pack than WoW currently offers (minus pet battles) but even at that, it struggles to maintain market share.

It is extremely hard to argue that any new game coming to market can succeed with a subscription model unless it can maintain a core set of users and not require more than say, 200K players at any given time.  Other than WoW and EvE, the next game with the highest subscription is RIFT or LOTRO with about 250,000 subs.  200K, to me, would be a massive success.

This brings us to the The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar.  The former has been blunt to state that it’s going subscription while the latter has been mum on the subject.  TESO is directly competing, in every shape and form, with the existing fantasy themepark tropes and I see no reason for it to be able to break the 200K mark.  If the Star Wars IP can’t maintain the numbers (remember, it dropped subs by 90% from 3 million), how can this one?

Wildstar is a wild-card though.  While it does take the fantasy setting it is less themepark and more sandbox/themepark hybrid and doesn’t seem that it will require the same break-even point as TESO.

Are subs dead?  I wouldn’t say so exactly, more that subs are going to be smaller in scope and that any dev expecting to get a subscription game to market AND pull more than 100K players is taking a massive risk.

Final Acts

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I just finished Darksiders 2 and while the game as a whole left a lot of positive, I can’t help but notice a growing trend of games that just call it in for the final act.

Act1 I cleaned out an entire land with 4 dungeons, Act 2 was even bigger so that the combined play time was well over 20 hours without any effort to “complete” areas or anything other than the main quest.  Act 3 was compete in under 2 hours, with only a single dungeon.

There are quite a few games that seem to just give up at the end and rather than increase the challenge, they increase the difficulty by just plunging massive enemies in your way rather than continue the run through the game.  Diablo3 is a perfect example where rather than provide new zones and challenges, they fill the screen with dozens of enemies and bosses.  COD/MOH are pretty similar too.  Maybe this is supposed to make me feel more powerful?  Like I’m some sort of deity that can take on any challenge?

It’s interesting that RPGs typically take the complete opposite path, where the entire game opens up at the end.  Like all of a sudden you’re finally strong enough to take on hundreds of challenges rather than a single gauntlet.

Small rant aside, I have to say that Darksiders2 was a great game.  For the price I paid (~15$), I got nearly 25 hours out of it, clearly putting it into my value bucket (of which 1$ per hour is my lower limit).  I think I would have been happy with just 10 hours too, so I got some extra goodness from the game.  Refreshing.

Darksiders 2

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Darksiders 2

Over the holidays I picked up Darksiders 2 and I’ve put a few hours into it with some pleasant surprises. While the setting is simple enough (4 horseman, angels & demons) it has the comic book feel that Joe wanted. There’s a “big-ness” to everything which just feels right. There’s a good spread of bosses and they all seem to get bigger and badder as you go along. The story takes a couple odd turns but nothing too out of the blue.

From a gameplay perspective, it’s more akin to Zelda than I would have thought. There’s an overworld with travel on a horse. The majority of dungeons are about puzzle solving rather than continuous combat. There are 4 general skills that affect puzzles with the traditional grapple hook and teleportation. There’s a cool character split mechanic, allowing you to work in tandem with yourself. Combat is like most action games, weak attacks, strong attacks, combos, special attacks. Your weapons actually make a difference though, as all gear has stats and some weapons attack at different rates (maces vs gauntlets). Plus the weapons can be upgraded, adding a nice little RPG mechanic.

It’s hard to pick a weakness other than the typical “Zelda” weakness of not wanting to complete anything past the final boss. There are plenty of side objectives but in terms of relative power/effort, they rarely seem worth the time. Mind you, one particular side quest was well above my character level and I died multiple times, which was fun in itself.

I’ve completed 2 of the 3 acts and I’m still entertained. Each zone is designed into chunks, so you can drop in, play for a bit and feel like you’ve completed something rather than the extra long chains of other games. While I like God of War’s combat, no one can say that Kratos is relatable, the story is anything near quality and that the dungeons don’t bleed into each other. Darksiders is a nice break from that tradition and I’m hoping someone buys the IP from THQ and continues the quest.