Tag Archives: design

Used Games and the Future

Posted on by

So, here’s an interesting post on the future of used games and Microsoft’s current approach (well, more than MS really).

If the secondhand market is not having a major detrimental effect on the primary market, then why would it need to be addressed?

If it were the case for movies and games, then yes, I’d favor similar measures by music/movie industries to protect themselves against it.

Well, this is the disconnect I guess. You admit you only hold this view because of the detrimental effects (you think) are impacting the industry. You are asserting that a fundamental aspect of property rights and consumer rights as it has existed since the beginning of trade should be adjusted and recodified on a per-industry basis, not because it’s inherently bad or unethical, but just because you think it’s a threat to the industry’s health. Which means you are essentially arguing for protectionism for corporations–consumers are free to exercise their consumer rights only up to a certain point, but if that free exercise is perceived to threaten the viability of the industry, then their rights must be limited in order to save the industry.

I don’t think I can put into words my disgust at this demeaning display of groveling at the feet of your game developer overlords. Even a die-hard laissez-faire capitalist would not be so subservient, because even a capitalist would accept that sometimes industries die and that’s the way the world works. As much as I enjoy games, there is no inherent good in this industry. The ends do not justify the means here; there is nothing that makes the gaming industry inherently worthy of preservation, not to the point that would justify carving out a special exemption for them where used games are somehow magically not OK when they are OK for every other packaged good on the planet. Just because your favored set of content producers couldn’t properly adapt does not justify rewriting the rules of what “property ownership” means and fundamentally removing the ability to preserve, inherit, pass on, lend, and share its products.

The industry does not come first; consumers do. I have no sympathy for an industry that cannot properly stumble its way around a viable secondhand market like every other mature industry in the world. Sometimes your old product just isn’t good enough, and the way you solve it is by making a better product, not by forcing consumers to adapt to your archaic and myopic business model with your dying breath. If this industry can’t find a way to make money off the primary market — even with DLC and exclusive pre-order content and HD re-releases and map packs and online passes and annualized sequels and “expanding the audience” and AAA advertising and forced multiplayer — then, if I may be so blunt, fuck it. It doesn’t deserve our money in the first place. If an entire industry has its head so far up its ass, is so focused on short-term gains, and has embraced such a catastrophically stupid blockbuster business model in the pursuit of a stagnant market of hardcore 18-34 dudebros that it thinks it has no choice but to take away our first-sale rights as its last chance of maybe, finally, creating a sustainable stream of profits, then it can go to hell. It doesn’t need your protection, it needs to be taken out back and beaten until it remembers who its real masters are.

I especially have a hard time having any sympathy because so many of the industry’s problems are of its own making. They chose to focus on shaderific HD graphics over long-lasting appeal and gameplay; they chose to focus on linear scripted cinematic B-movie imitations that were only good for one playthrough instead of replayability and open-ended design; they chose to pour so much money and marketing into military porn and fetishized violent shootbang Press A to Awesome titles, exactly the kinds of games that hardcore gamers, the most likely gamers to trade in games quickly were prone to buying and reselling; and perhaps most galling, they chose to give Gamestop loads of exclusive pre-order bonuses while they knew exactly what Gamestop would say to those customers once in the store. They kept making insanely lavish and nonsensical displays of spectacular whizz-bang, despite that being exactly the kind of game most susceptible to trading after one week because there was nothing left to do with it. And now they’re discovering that putting so many insanely expensive eggs into one fragile and easily breakable basket is maybe not the most sustainable business model ever.

So forgive me if I find myself not caring one bit when the industry complains that it’s just so hard to sell six million copies of Gears of Medal of Battle of Uncharted Angry Dudes VII in the first week and that’s why they need to take away used sales for the entire platform. No, the problem isn’t at this end.

There’s just something so precise about this rant that I can’t help but keep reading it over and over again.

It’s strange that the market is still aimed at dudebros, yet in the same breath complaining that people outside that scope won’t buy games.  How selling 1 million copies of a game is seen as a failure… the problem is clearly not on our side of the equation.

It’s the Economy Stupid

Posted on by

With all the talk about economies and market, I’m reminded of a note from ex-Diablo 3 head Jay Wilson while at GDC2103.

…the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they’d provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

Which in hindsight, is probably one of the most ridiculous statements ever made about MMO economies.

Remember now, Blizzard runs World of Warcraft, a game that supports over 9 million players and has had an auction house since launch.  And that service interacts with absolutely every single character, without exception.  How you can come to the conclusion that a game that is based 100% on gear, tradeable gear mind, would not use the Auction House is mind-boggling.

But this isn’t a post about how history has shown that WoW’s economy was a fluke but more about the fact that very few games are able to purposefully implement a real economy.  Everyone that has tried to replicate WoW’s has failed – including GW2 – in that nothing matters but the current end-state.  Anything you acquire up to that point is essentially meaningless.  Games that take a holistic approach to gear, where it matters more than end game (UO and EvE are two examples) have had long-term success.

A quality, long lasting MMO clearly requires a functioning economy.  It is invariably the glue that connects the various systems (crafting, PvP, PvE, etc…) and rarely gets the appropriate amount of thought.

That being said, the game itself has to be fun to have a non-niche appeal.  Otherwise you reach games like A Tale in the Desert, which is a great game but not one many have heard of.

Here’s hoping that both Wildstar and TESO are paying attention.  Economy drives the playerbase and the playerbase drives the game.

Marvel Heroes – First Impressions

Posted on by

This post is brought to you by Marvel Heroes and the illusion of depth.  (That’s a pretty good pitch.)

The whole jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none concept shows up when I played Marvel Heroes.  I paid the $20 for 2 day early access and a different character, Rocket Raccoon.  I’m not one for day 1 access, as I have yet to see a single game launch smoothly (GW2 and Rift come close though).  For sake of argument, day 1 was last Wednesday and it has been a “soft” launch of sorts readying for the 4th.

Marvel Heroes is an action RPG but more of the loot piñata variety, akin to Diablo and Torchlight.  In contrast, DCUO and Neverwinter are clearly RPG MMOs with action elements.  Given my play schedule, as much as I love the second type, I really only have the time for the first one.  Looking at Steam, I have way too many hours into Torchlight 2, which turned into my go-to game after the D3 shenanigans.  I like the concept of random dungeons, random loot and comparing gear for a slight advantage.  I had 3 Outlanders, just to try out different builds.  A glaive build might need a wholely different stat, talent and gear spec than a poison build.  I did the same in D2.  D3, well you didn’t need a new character what with the slotting and the way gear worked, you couldn’t swap anyways.

Back to Marvel.  You get a choice of 1 of 5 characters to start, and they give you another free one (random) after 15 minutes of play.  After that point, any character you want has to be either purchased with cash or found as a super-mega-rare drop.  And the drops are player bound, so no 3rd parties farming here.  From a cash-stop perspective, I get that.  You’re essentially given access to all the content, for free, with 2 character options.

Here’s what you get in the game right now.  You get a single Act with 8 chapters (+prologue), enough to get you to level 30.  Once you finish those 8 chapters, you run daily/group quests for the remainder at a massively reduced experience rate.  This is very similar to Diablo 2’s end game I suppose.  You get a form of gambling with the crafting system (which requires materials).  This is more or less Path of Exile’s crafting system – which I think is awesome.  You get 1 weapon slot and 3 gear slots.  These have traditional stats but also can boost your powers.  These are reasonable stats too, where an item 10 levels above isn’t necessarily better.  So the complete opposite of Diablo3.  You get costumes to change appears.  Medals that provide a passive boost (more damage, stuns, etc…) that drop from bosses and 2 artifact slots that provide passive boosts as well but scale with level.  I have one that increased ranged damage by 30% (which is crazy powerful if you think about it).  That content is good.  It’s free too, so that’s a great deal.  There’s no real “end-game” but there never really has been in ARPGs loot piñatas.  D3 and Torchlight 2 have tried (I rather like T2’s map works and replays).

You end up with a rather linear path of progression that is identical for every future character.  Gear upgrades become the way forward.

On to heroes.  There are currently 22 characters, each with 3 “talent trees”.  I’d love to say there was some depth in those trees but I’d be lying – 5 or 6 choices per tree.  I’d also be lying if I said there was some semblance of balance within a character or between them.  Some skills are drastically superior to others and some other skills seem to do nothing at all.  If I said you could deploy a turret to assist in fighting, the default answer is “cool, a bit more DPS”.  In actual fact, that turret is more like a tank since it fires once every 2 seconds, can’t track a moving target (everything is moving) and somehow manages to taunt enemies.  Captain America, for those who bought him earlier since he’s “sold out” now, is a one person wrecking ball AND tank.  It makes it less fun to be in an area or in a group and you realize that your character is drastically underpowered/overwhelmed while other characters are breezing through.  I thought we were all super heroes?

The irony of all this is that even with the shortcomings, the game is fun.  It might be immersion breaking to see 4 Hulks on screen but it sure as hell is fun to see them all jumping on Venom.  It’s fun turning a corner and going “12 guys there, what to do?  Charge!”  It’s fun comparing two pieces of gear, with completely different stats to see which style best fits me.  The designer in me is screaming “why did you make this system work this way” and the gamer in me is screaming “I love that you made this system this way”.

I think I’m screwed.

Marvel Heroes – What Early Access?

Posted on by

You may or may not have heard that Marvel Heroes is coming out soon.  June 4th is the launch date.  Live.  Similar to what Neverwinter did, there are founder’s packs available.  $200 gets you every character, a few bucks in game and access 7 days early.  More on that in a bit.  $60 gives you 5 characters, less bucks and 4 days head start.  $20 gets you 1 character, pennies and 2 days head start.

A lot of people harp on Neverwinter since it’s in open beta and not truly “launched”, even though it’s taking in money.  The advantage to this model is that you can take down the servers daily to patch things up – which they are still doing.  The first few days were a mess but now, the game is quite playable.

Marvel Heroes on the other hand…they’ve been up a total of maybe 20 hours out of 72?  They are down right now and have been extending the downtime since 6AM this morning. When you promise access to a “launched” game on a specific date and are unable to deliver, this causes problems.  People, for some weird reason, take time off work and other duties on launch day to play the game like maniacs.  It’s pretty textbook OCD if you ask me but hey, to each their own.  When you say you’ll do something for money and then YOU DON’T, then there are going to be issues.

This reminds me of when UO launched and the servers were horrible to start.  There was plenty of downtime and for a few years, daily maintenance.  The box the game came in said 24 hours available, so out came the lawsuits.  EULA’s since then prevent that from happening.  That being said, today word of mouth is much more deadly than a lawsuit.  If the vibe out of the gate is negative, the game is going to tank hard.  RIFT has a positive beta and (ok) launch, did great for a long time. DCUO did not and tanked.  TOR isn’t much different here.

Maybe from this point forward there is no early access.  Maybe it follows Diablo 3’s concept of staggered entries (which itself had bad PR due to length).  Maybe you just soft launch and if people want to buy founder’s pack, sell them non time-sensitive features.  It’s obviously harder from a buy-to-play perspective, but in the F2P model, soft launch the crap out of a service to make sure there’s quality.

Launch day can break a company.  It’s impressive that companies are still repeating the same mistakes from 15 years ago today.

Blizzard Design – Lessons Learned

Posted on by

Rohan and Syp got me thinking about how developers are forced to be iterative in terms of addition rather than in terms of subtraction.  What I mean by this is that any given game that expects longevity cannot regress in terms of feature sets.  People have expectations upon purchase and business models are dependent on having clientele – MMOs triply so.

Let’s consider the two main items in the news.  Titan has been restarted (I think this is the 3rd time) and Blizzard has plans on a D3 expansion.  The former isn’t surprising given Blizzard’s track record.  They have released the following games of note: Wacraft (1/2/3), Starcraft (1/2), Diablo (1/2/3) and WoW.  You would be hard pressed to argue that any given game in a series was a departure from the previous – simply an iteration on a given model.   To top it off, Warcraft and Starcraft are nearly direct IP thefts from Warhammer.  So in 18 years, Blizzard has 1 new IP and plenty of experience tweaking the ones they built all that time ago.  Blizzard takes very few risks so that they don’t alienate their massive playerbase.  If Titan ever does come out (they need a new codename for it), I don’t see it as being something completely new, just an iteration of an existing IP and format.  It’s worked for nearly 20 years.

The second news item deals with people’s expectations of Diablo 3’s feature set.  Consider the PS3 version has no online requirements and no AH – the two largest complaints against the PC version – many view this as a sign that those features are going to be removed from the PC proper.  Hold on a sec here.  We’re a year in and the PS3 port still isn’t ready.  We’re not talking about taking a console game with a set configuration and making it work on a bajillion PCs.  We’re talking about the other way around, which usually has more to do with the UI size and controller layout.  If it’s taken a year (arguably longer since this was rumored many years ago) then perhaps this egg is a bit tougher to crack.

In systems design we have disparate systems, integrated systems and synergistic systems.  Disparate ones are completely separate and have next to nothing to do with each other.  /gems in EQ is an example.  Integrated systems have parts that are shared between 2 or more systems.  LFD/LFR systems are here.  Synergistic systems are ones that are separate in terms of mechanics but complement each other in game.  Crafting in most cases fit the bill.

D3 was built with the AH in mind.  Stats play a much larger role here than in any other game I’ve ever played and there were clear benchmarks required for survival in Inferno when the game launched.  I can’t think of a game where 1 item level had such a massive impact on player power.  Because the Diablo model is 99% of the loot you find you can’t use, this requires a sink for the gear.  In the past it was selling/gambling.  With an AH, maybe gear you can’t use (as a Monk) someone else can (say a Wizard).  So you try to sell it.  Let’s say you find one piece of “decent but not great” gear every hour.  4 million other people are playing and doing the same.  Think about that for a second.

If Blizzard wanted to remove the AH, they would have to change the entire mechanics of how loot dropped and how monster power was calculated.  The “floor” of gear suddenly drops by a large factor and people will have a much harder time progressing.  All of a sudden, crafters become attractive (just like gambling was in D2).  Plus you still have millions of players using the AH to progress today and a rather large item gap between the top end and bottom end.  Some people don’t farm Inferno for their gear, they farm for other’s gear to make cash to buy their stuff or use the RMAH.  That and the entire business model of D3 is predicated on the RMAH.  Even if the expansion offered an off-line no-AH mode, then you’d have two similar but different games.

I don’t see an easy fix here.  I do see a lot of lessons learned, lots.

Neverwinter – That Could Have Gone Better

Posted on by

I bit the bullet and bought some more epics for my Cleric last night.  That got me to the 8300 gearscore (8328 I think I had) to give the Tier 2 dungeons a shot.  Queuing for a T2 dungeon was instant, even without a dungeon delve active.  Load it up, unequip all my gear to address the threat bug (go naked, re-equip) and look at the party.  2 wizards, 1 rogue and a great weapon fighter.  No tank.  Well, this should be fun.

We died on the first pull.  Not like a little died but more along the lines of stepping in dog poo wipe.  I let the party attack then put my Astral Shield down.  5 seconds later, everything but 1 target are on me.  I used a lot of potions that fight but still died. Without a healer, the only character than can survive for any amount of time is a well-played Rogue.  That wasn’t enough here.

Tried it again and this time we made some progress.  The wizards remembered that they were called Control Wizards for a reason.  They kept things together, the GWF and Rogue took care of the damage and I healed.  We couldn’t just run up to enemies either, we needed to pull them to us to avoid the natural chain pulls that occur in the game.  Aggro ranges are odd.

We get to the first boss, some guy with a mouth for a head.  That’s got to suck.  Anyways, he has 3 spawning pools around him that continuously spawn adds, 4 at a time.  So not only do you have a giant mouth attacking you, there is like a dozen enemies at the same time.  Threat being non-existent without a tank, I died a few times.  We somehow had the boss teleport to our spawning area and that let us kill him and move on.  Weird bug.

Moving on, we get to see more and more of these giants who deal 75% of my health in a single hit.  Fun!  There were some absolutely insane pulls on this trek and my hat is off to the group for surviving it.  Very impressive.

Then we get to the last boss.  He’s a super mega giant with 2 friendly giants around him.  Plus some other trash. And there are what seems to be 4 portals in the room that summon Berserkers.  If you don’t know what these guys are, they start off weak and once they hit 25% hit points, they hit like a convoy of Mac trucks.  I can heal 2 of them at once but 4, plus 2 giants, plus a boss?  What?

First attempt was ok, we killed one giant them got swamped.  Second attempt we tried to nuke the boss. I put Astral Seal on the boss, which causes players to heal when attacking.  That turned the ENTIRE ROOM on my butt and I died within 15 seconds.  Third attempt was tying to clean out a side of the room, no luck there.  Did I mention everything respawns in the boss room when you die?  No?  Anyways, we wiped a solid 6 times and everyone was out of repair kits at the end.   Healing isn’t the problem, threat is.  And it’s a massive one.

See, I’ve been spoiled by WoW and every other LFD tool in existence.  Games have 3 roles, tank, healer and DPS.  A LFD tool should fill in those slots appropriately.  That a Cleric is the only class that can heal and that a Guardian Fighter is the only class that can tank, you would think this would be simple to implement.  Healer/Tank + 3 anything else.  I mean anything.  Worse is that if someone leaves your group, you can’t replace them.  Aghhh!

Guild runs are cool but I have yet to find a guild that runs more than 2 teams at any given time.  And because dungeons are long, you could wait an hour or more for a team to be ready.  LFD with a premade group and people to fill the slots makes sense.  Just for the love of pete, please make sure there’s a tank and a healer or just don’t make a group.

Neverwinter – Tanks but no Tanks

Posted on by

Le /sigh, horrible pun.

Given that there wasn’t a dungeon delves active last night during my session and I had sat in the queue for 15 minutes as a Healer, I swapped to my second character, Asmira the Guardian Fighter (/tank).  I used the Gateway service while leveling and once you hit level 10, you can craft.  Getting to level 10 takes about 2 hours from creation so I did that a while back.  Crafting has one particular field, Leadership, which gives in-game experience, cash and rough astral diamonds.  People who hit 60 on day 1 used Leadership (plus real money to speed up the training) to get there.  Leadership can also give you access to crafting materials that sell decently.

On top of it, after level 11, you can pray to the gods every hour.  This gives you some experience and every day, 2 different types of tokens.  If you miss ~48 hours of praying, you lose all of 1 type of currency (which has a max of 7).

Right, so I play my cleric almost daily.  During that time, I also log in the tank to pray to get the tokens and for the experience.  Realize that I did not kill a thing or do a single quest after level 10 and using this daily prayer and Gateway/Leadership, my tank was sitting at level 22 last night and had ~100K in Astral Diamonds.  Sadly, he had no cash so no mount.

The advantages to leveling offline are pretty clear, you skip a fair amount of content and the early levels, especially before 30, are somewhat unbalanced due to a lack of skills. I can live with that.  The downside is that you are undergeared by a fair amount.  As a ranged player, this ins’t a big deal.  As a tank – not only are you taking way more damage than you should but you’re hitting with a toothpick at the same time.  Not a great combo.  Thankfully the AH is there and people post at stupid low prices.  Quick gear up.

Now for actual play.  Oh wait, I need to assign 12 skill points and redo my layout.  I like that part. Do I ever miss the old talent trees of WoW, where each level you actually got something, even if it was a small increment in power that nobody noticed.  I got to press a button!  I digress.  The tank needed to get a companion, so a healer was in line.  Off I go into the wild!

And then I died.  Forgetting about combat advantage (don’t show your back), how to block properly, how to NOT knock people into another side group and a bunch of other details that I never really needed to worry about as a ranged healer.  I dusted myself off and went back to work.  This time I pulled everyone to me, circle strafe and all that jazz to get them lined up, then AE attacks for the win.  Worked out pretty good if I do say so.

Small instance was next and these always end with a boss.  Bosses as a healer are fun, you just sit back, heal from time to time and whack a mole.  Adds come around, tank picks them up, you AE or knock them into some hole.  Bosses as a tank are a test of patience.  You’re dealing little damage, the companion ain’t much better and once the adds spawn (they always do), you need to take them down before they take down your companion.  I think this is a good thing, in the end, as it forces tanks to understand HOW TO TANK multiple creatures at end level.  I remember leveling my cleric and I found that the higher I got, the better the tanks got.  As if the leveling process weeded out all the bad ones.  It’s just not possible to reach max level as a tank without a solid understanding of the mechanics.

It’s certainly a different paradigm.  My Cleric, as per the videos I’ve posted, does everything to avoid the big hits and red circles.  My tank however, is so damn slow, she needs to block to get through them.  Going from “get these damn things off me” to “why won’t you attack me you bum!” is a fun change of pace.

Now if only the game could find a way to teach DPS to play smart. -er.

Neverwinter – That Was Different

Posted on by

In the previous post is a picture of my character.  The purple items are tier 1/2.  As you can see, there are a few slots that I need to fill out.  The cool thing about the Queue system (very similar to LFG) is that it tells you up front what to expect as loot in a given dungeon.  Seeing as how I need a belt and a rings, I queued up for Cragmire Crypts.  I also queued up for a few more dungeons (you can queue as many as you’d like) but CC prompted me before I had a chance to add too many more.

A side note here, the game has ongoing events during the day that add extra rewards.  Sometimes it’s extra PvP currency, sometimes extra XP from the Foundry and a few more.  One in particular is called Dungeon Delves.  This one guarantees a personal chest at the end of a dungeon, if you ENTER the dungeon during the event.  Could take you 4 hours to finish but the chest will be there.  I’ve only done one, but it gave me a decent ring.  The ring was bind on pickup though, hopefully this isn’t always the case.  Would hate to trash repeats when I could put them on the auction house.  (gamer says do this, the design freak says this is a bad idea).  Without the event, there are only 2 drops a dungeon.

I had mentioned a few times in the past that grouping in Neverwinter was tough in that a few items were quite different than the standard WoW seems to have put up.  Threat is extremely hard to manage on multiple enemies.  During boss fights, Cleric will take nearly all the attacks because of this.  The days of just AE blasting enemies are gone since boss trash are practically mini-bosses in themselves.  Also, the group finder tool is incapable of balancing groups outside of a healer and a tank.  I had one with 3 rogues, two of whom dropped right away.  The queue system is also unable to add more people to an on-going run and since you can’t teleport people to the group, it effectively kills any run as soon as someone drops.

So, grouping is harder since people have to pay attention.  Healing is tougher since you’re going to get hit a lot (I healed nearly 3 million the last run and average HP is ~20-25K per player).  Chaos is higher and you need to better use your skills or things will go bad and go very very bad.  The thing about today is that the players at 60 are not casual.  To be at 60 today means you put in a fair amount of time and that raises the skill bar a tad.  I am certain this will change with time, as it has with every other game.  Bell curve and whatnot.

This run went well.  Very well in fact.  Enemies died quickly.  We only had 3 people die to bad luck.  The last boss was a mess mind you but he died and none of us did.  The entire run at max level took about 40 minutes.  I remember doing it while leveling and it took well over an hour.  Made some new contacts, had a blast.  Would do it again in a heartbeat.

And here’s the real kicker.  The Queue system works instantly during a dungeon delve.  If that event is not active, you could wait 30 minutes.  It’s crazy what incentives will do.

The Hiccup with F2P

Posted on by

If you follow MMOs, then you’ve likely noticed a trend in that F2P games are generally seen in poor light and a last recourse for subscription games.  People talk about the monetization of F2P games, while they only talk about the content of subscriptions.

Let’s get one thing straight off the bat, games need to make money.  It’s simple math.  A subscription model provides a stable income that you can project into the future with.  Generally, you don’t need to worry about your next week’s pay and as long as you don’t tick off the userbase, it’s pretty consistent.  F2P games, well, they require a continual investment to keep funding consistent.  Developers haven’t yet found the right balance of items to keep people pumping in money and have essentially devolved everything into lockboxes.

Would I play for free for 20 levels, then pay 10$ to get access to another 20?  Very likely if the game was good.  Would I do it for every character?  Maybe 2 or 3 of them, if the value/time equation made sense.  Once you have it though, you don’t need to buy it again.  Would I buy dungeon sets? Yup.   But again, that’s a 1 time purchase.  GW2 sort of worked this way, in that you buy the box, have access to everything.  B2P works when you have people coming and going.

Long-term though, this model doesn’t work as people have nothing to buy.  Paying 2$ to get a week’s pass to PvP makes sense if you PvP alot.  It doesn’t if you want to try 3 matches.  I think TOR did a pretty good job in this regard, where if you’re in the F2P version, you can buy passes for the high level content.  Since it’s consumable, it is a guaranteed money sink.  If I was planning on consuming a lot, the I’d go the subscription route.  Value for money and all that.

My personal thought is that all F2P games should have a subscription model for heavy consumers.  It should provide you with access to all the content with that subscription, including credits for the cash store.  If it means you wait 2 months to get the credits, then so be it, but it should be there.  All items that can be bought for cash, should be able to be sold on the AH.  Neverwinter and TOR do this decently.  All items that can be bought for cash and provide “power” should be 1-2 tiers below what can be acquired by in-game means.  Customization options should be consumed on use but allow you to save settings and try stuff out before you buy.

Personally, I think we’re on the breakpoint of a sustainable F2P market.  Lockboxes are not the future and are likely to be the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.  I am extremely curious to see Rift’s take on this, as they have always provided great value for money and understand the player’s perspective more than most.  It’s the reason I’ve kept subbed to them since launch, even if I don’t play as much as I’d like.  We, as a gaming community, have to move beyond the discussion of what payment models are good and which are bad and simply to the core of gaming – is this worth my time/money or not?

XBOX One Launch – Hmmm

Posted on by

So the time came and went and Microsoft surprised next to no one when they showed next to nothing related to games and everything related to a new home media center.

Here’s a decent comparison chart between both the PS4 and the X1. I’m actually surprised that with 3 months of time between the Sony event and this one, that Microsoft couldn’t come up with something better than Kinect 2.0 and group Skype.

The real question heading into today was if the new X1 would require a persistent internet connection.  The answer is a definite maybe – Microsoft posted some stuff then deleted it.  From what we do understand, games will require a physical install, load instantly, and likely require a fee to transfer to another account.  Essentially killing the used game industry in a small blow.   Interesting.

Consoles are used as access points for games.  X360 and PS3 are very poor experiences compared to PCs today.  My PS3 can take 2 minutes or up to 10 depending on if there’s a patch I need.  My PC is just always ready.  My PS3 is tethered to a single screen, my laptop can connect to anything.  I have a controller for both.  The difference between what I’m typing on today and what was shown was the media console.

How exactly is cable TV and movies going to work on a console?  They spent 30 minutes on those features, which I’m sure Comcast, Bell and Rogers are asking questions about too.  Integrated with locally installed content?  Ok, I have that already.  With live TV?  What’s that going to cost?  Swap seamlessly between it all?  With 8 gigs of RAM?  That, to quote a great mind, is unpossible.

So after a few hours to think about it, I don’t see how Sony or Microsoft really gained “points” with the gaming crowd with either demonstration so far.  Neither showed anything that qualified as games.  They all touted more realism and more polygons, like every other console launch ever.  I do know Sony is aiming for a more “low cost/free” approach to gaming and that Microsoft is really adamant to keep the “pay me now and later, and some in-between too” model.  Considering that BOTH new consoles are service-based rather than simply tools to get to games, I am extremely curious to see how both companies will monetize the bells and whistles they’ve been touting.