So apparently D3 will ship without any PvP.  I am a pessimist here, certainly, but after Starcraft got split into 3 games as a huge money grab, it makes you wonder why after 5 years of development they can’t put this system in – especially since it was one of their key selling points when they announced the game.

I guess the entire system re-write that happened a month or so ago was enough to tell them their game isn’t ready.  We’ll find out next week what the exact launch date is (once the media NDA lifts) and what systems are going to be included.

The good news is that Blizzard had a solid iterative development process.  They aren’t afraid to dump entire mechanics that aren’t working.  The bad news is that it took nearly 6 months of beta to figure that out – making any testing from this point forward seem rushed.

First off the bat, I am not a fan of IGN.  For a time Gamespot and IGN were my 2 gaming sites.  Then the whole Kane and Lynch issue hit Gamespot and I stopped visiting them and moved to GiantBomb.  IGN used to have quality articles but around the same time I stopped with Gamespot, IGN started putting out the oddest reviews.  Games with major flaws were scoring 9s.  Recently, they’ve been doing “reviews in progress” where the play a pre-release game and put up a 5-8 page review before their official review.  You know, the same content you can find from any beta player.  I remember the TOR pre-review and how the final review score really didn’t match what his experience was.  Oddly enough, their movie section I like.  Go figure.

Back on topic!  This is an op-ed piece from one of the more controversial IGNers on the whole Mass Effect 3 social issue.  First, that the ending sucked and players are petitioning and second that the day 1 DLC (on disk no less) are akin to robbery.

While I agree in principle that the ending is the ownership of the game company, the whole premise of the Mass Effect games was that your decisions mattered.  The ending has next to no reflection of that.  It’s sort of like selling a Star Wars game without Lightsabers (hello Star Wars Galaxies!) or a Call of Duty game without guns.  You’re going to piss people off.  Aside from that, the “link” novel Deception, that put Mass Effect 2 into 3, was so poorly written and flawed that readers actually built a codex of errors.  So bad in fact that BioWare is going to fix the book and re-release it.  But really, you don’t build up a space opera (it is) and then kill everyone off.

Second and this is more endemic to the gaming situation than the actual game, is day 1 DLC that is on the game.  Games are cheaper today than they were a year ago due to inflation.  I get that.  I payed 100$ in 1991 for Final Fantasy 4 – that’s about 170$ today.  Point – game devs.  Second step, day 1 DLC makes people buy new games.  True, if the DLC is actually included in the new game.  It wasn’t here and wasn’t in quite a few other EA games.  Point – players.  Third, if you don’t like it, vote with your wallet.  I certainly am waiting until everything goes on sale later on and I can get the game from something other than the EA store.  Point – me.

I wouldn’t say the Mass Effect universe is dead now but it’s certainly left a sour taste in people’s mouths.  BW had planned on releasing more games in that universe and I’d be willing to bet that those efforts are on the backburner now.  This isn’t Halo where the game mechanics are more important than the story.  Mass Effect is all about the story and people are feeling cheated.

It just feels odd that a company like BioWare, who espouses the value of story to a near sickening degree, would let something like this go by.  There’s something rotten in Denmark.

Blizzard has been doing a post-mortem on Cataclysm and MMO-Champion has some links to it all.  Of all the items listed, this one quote sticks out to me.

Finally, we wanted to deliver all of this content more aggressively. We know players can only wait so long for something new to do before they start to get bored. This has been a goal for some time, but it has been a challenging one for us. When you compare the graphic fidelity of a raid like Firelands to an older raid like Molten Core, you can imagine how it takes both more time and more people to make a raid these days. That’s exactly the opposite of what we want to be doing though, which is providing players content at faster rates.

This is a point of considerable pain for Blizzard that has been largely ignored for years.  UO and EQ didn’t really have this problem as the content was either so complex or hard that it was rarely consumed in its entirety by the next expansion.  Blizzard followed that mentality up until the end of Burning Crusade and honestly, even the competition was in-line.

Flash forward to Lich King (late 2008) and the era of Facebook games.  Even the iTunes store was starting to gain traction and Blizzard took the route of easy content that could be repeated in short time frames.  Sadly, they kept their raid structure well out of reach of the “common” person until nearly 4 years later so that the actual content they pushed out in patches was never consumed nor even planned on being consumed.  The “little details” like 1 dungeon every 4 months got consumed in 2 weeks and people just started quitting.

Move up to the start of Cataclysm and many, many games are on the market.  F2P is all over the place and Rift is coming along nicely.  Developers are keeping with the easy to consume aspect but also selling the content in small chunks at a rather rapid pace.  Balance is certainly an issue but with a breath of content to explore and nearly all of it being modular, devs can get a significant patch out every 1-2 months.  Blizzard remains firmly in the 3-4 month content race and when content does come out, it’s recycled content for 3-5 years ago.  Quite a head scratcher.

So here we are in 2012 where the consumer is willing to buy content that will only last a few weeks, maybe a month and a bit, then move on.  An MMO tourist if you will.  Think about it, you could spend 15$ a month and easily play DCUO, LOTRO, DDO and Fallen Earth with cash to spare at the end.  Rift has had 7 major content patches since launch.  TOR has had 1 since launch (3 months now).  Blizzard has had 3 since Cata launched 18 months ago (yes, 18 months already) and their next expansion is at least another 3 months down the road.

Looking at the structure of the MMO world today and Blizzard’s inability to stop the hemorrhage of players it’s fair, I think, to point the finger squarely at Blizzard and say “if you want me to pay you, give me something to pay for” as the alternatives are currently all more attractive.  Blizzard has always seemed to be ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation but in this single regard, we’re looking at a lumbering behemoth trying to be agile.  Time remains to see if they can actually put their words to action.

Let’s say the game is an MMO and has the following features:

• two factions
• 8 classes, 1 of which restricted to each faction
• pure DPS roles
• significant lack of class balance
• hard set race/class combinations
• single talent trees, need to visit the city to respec and pay a fee
• questing accounts for 25% of the experience gain, rest is dungeons/grinding
• no PvP zones – need to play on a PvP server to PvP
• 1 to 2 hour dungeon runs
• no raids
• item sets with no bonuses
• basic mounts at mid-game, high end mounts require weeks of cash making to afford
• no fast travel, need to manually move around the map
• crafted items, no real use other than potions and enchanting your items
• faction grinds
• auction houses are city based and not shared across the faction

I ask this because this is the feature set that World of Warcraft launched with in 2004.  I should know, I played at the time and I still thought it was amazing.  Why you aks?  Because my alternatives were Ultima Online (1997), Everquest (1999), Asheron’s Call (1999) and Dark Age of Camelot (2001).   That’s right, there was a 3 year gap between the last game and WoW in terms of AAA MMOs.  When WoW came out it polished all the bad stuff in the other games, made it look good (really good for a 3d game at the time) and added some features.

That being said, if you were to compare that feature set then to today’s gamespace, you couldn’t get 100 people to buy it.  The same goes for all the other games that came before it.  If they were to relaunch now, with the feature set they had when WoW launched, they would fail.  They still exist for one reason, people have grown with the games.  Find me someone who started playing UO in 2009 and I have some canned steam to sell you.

Massively’s last Soapbox covers this topic from another direction.  The claim that an MMO can only succeed if it does X, and only X, is ridiculous.  There are literally dozens of successful MMOs on the planet, some are P2P, others F2P and others are even hybrids.  There are multiple paths for each game to try and the goal at the end of the day is to make money.  When there is no more money to be made, the game shuts down.  Looking at UO, you would think it would have shut down after 15 (!!!) years, even with people claiming the game died years ago.  Yet here we are, still looking at it going fairly strong.  If you spend your time complaining that a game 5+ years ago did it best and aren’t playing that game now, it really comes off as hypocritical.

Now from the other side of the same coin, perhaps you don’t like a game because of feature X.  In the past, if you didn’t like it you had to suck it up since there weren’t any real options.  Today if you don’t like a game there are plenty others that are willing to take you in.  This does mean that people are moving around more, trying new games and old ones, to find that combination of features that pleases their palette.  There is no “perfect” game for the masses.  If there was, we wouldn’t have so many working at the same time.

Syp has a good MMO timeline that shows what game launched when and which ones are no longer with us.

I’ve already posted what I think about how BioWare and EA are handling the Mass Effect 3 launch.  The cherry on the sundae is IGN though.  I mean really.

The entire review screams “I bought this review”.  I really couldn’t care less how good the game is when the entire screen is plastered with ads for the game being reviewed.  We’re at a point in the industry where the big guys throw money at the wall and hope something sticks and the small guys take a brilliant idea and perfect it.  2011 was an amazing year for gamers, specifically the fall period.  This year though, other than ME3, what is there to look forward for on consoles?  Assassin’s Creed 3 and maybe Bioshock Infinite? PC players will get Diablo 3 (maybe) and a dozen other smaller games.

It’s an interesting time to be a gamer – even more so for a console gamer.  It just seems like if you’re not an FPS player, there just isn’t a really good reason to own a console anymore.  PCs (and laptops in particular) are just making such a strong push with their distribution models and plain ol’ variety that my boxes are collecting dust in the basement.

Anyways, here’s hoping BW can hit one out of the park this time.  DA2 and SWTOR were such huge disappointments that this is really the last kick at the can I can give them without future blind purchases.  Right now, Naughty Dog, Rocksteady and Blizzard are the only other ones sharing that list.