Today’s MMOrning Shot comes from Funcom, with Age of Conan’s 4.0 update and the release of the Dragon’s Spine. Dragon’s Spine is the first in a series of updates that will bring new content centered around the desert lands to the south and west of the city of Pteion. Check it out on Steam or from Age of Conan’s website.
7 Days to Die looks ridiculously awesome. I almost wish I hadn’t missed the Kickstarter for this game, but you can always pick up the early access for $35 on the main website. I think I’ll stick it out until the game is available on Steam.
Today marks the return of the Thursday Top 5 List, and this week I want to talk about pre-order incentives. There are many reasons to pre-order a video game, but not all of them are equally valid. As a matter of fact, a lot of them are either functionally useless or counterproductive. This isn’t to say that all of them are bad features, but they shouldn’t be on your list of major reasons to purchase the product.
Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.
Not to be confused with early access, beta access is a poor spending choice simply due to the nature of MMO betas: Glorified trial versions of mostly complete software. With the exception of games like Firefall, where systems can radically change based on customer feedback, the beta period is mostly a stress test for server infrastructure. So why would you pay for it? To uncover bugs that, if the past few game launches have anything to say about it, are reported endlessly and never fixed by the developer? Say a bug that existed in a game that allows players to exploit an auction house to duplicate diamonds from some astral dimension.
Paying for beta access is a bit like running for Congress. I’m sure there are people who do so to actually make a difference, add their input, and ultimately make a better world for others to live and play in. Otherwise you’re there to scope out the territory and gain an advantage over your “competition.” You find the best real estate with the best experience to level the fastest and obtain the best drops quickly, and if you really dive down the morality pit, find an unknown bug that is difficult to stumble upon and save it for your own use. So beta access is pointless for most of the right reasons, and useful for all of the wrong reasons.
Pre-order gear is a matter of heavy debate among gamers. What kind of gear can you give out, can the gear have stats, how much effort should be put into the design, should it be obtainable by other players, etc. Some developers go to the extreme to please both sides and end up pleasing neither, with statless gear that isn’t even technically cosmetic. We’re talking gear that doesn’t even alter the appearance of your character.
This comes mostly in the form of jewelry. The idea is exceptionally funny when you factor it into games where your character is so tiny that you can barely see their regular clothing, let alone a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, etc. What says rewarding loyalty better than a useless cosmetic item that neither your nor your fellow players can see? Nothing.
Anyone who plays MMOs knows how gear progression works. At the start of the game, you go through armor like a teenage girl and with a lot less discrimination. As you level up, however, the rate at which your find better gear decreases and you spend a lot more time with the equipment you are wearing rather than what you find in the field. At this point, you might look back and think “too bad I couldn’t keep that cool pre-order armor.”
This is especially disappointing when a developer clearly goes out of their way to design some great looking armor when you consider that the average new player will wear it for about ten minutes before coming across something bigger and better, if not as fancy looking. Eventually the clothing will be sold to a vendor, trashed, or sentenced to an eternity in the player’s bank vault, never to be seen again. The exception to this rule, of course, is a game that allows for separate cosmetic override slots. Some do, but not all.
Early access would be a great reason to pre-order in a perfect world where launches are smooth and servers are stable from Day -7. Unfortunately, this is reality, where MMO launches are stricken by server outages, large quantities of lag, queue lines just to get in the door, extended maintenance periods, databases going down, long download times, systems becoming corrupted, key generators going insane, and generally the downfall of humanity.
Opting to play an MMO on launch day is a bit like saying “I want my first experience with this game to be frustrating, and what I really want is to spend most of my time downloading emergency patches and waiting for the server to come back up. If you could throw in broken quests, queues, and bugs that might wipe my character/inventory, that would be great.”
Considering that analogy, early access takes all of those problems and turns them up to eleven. So why do we continue buying MMOs for early access? Judging by how forums tend to fill up on launch day with posts along the lines of “I have never seen another MMO launch go as badly,” I have a theory that these events actually exist in the Twilight Zone, after which only the developers and a select few in the community have any memory of what happened. I suppose rose tinted glasses or selective memory could be the answer, but they aren’t as fun.
I ranked this number one because it is one of the most common on this list and one of the most presumptive. Think about it: If you pre-order an MMO for the sake of reserving your name or your guild’s name, you are assuming that the MMO will never merge its servers, because doing so will render your purchase useless. Let’s say two people purchase an MMO on the same day and name their character Omali. Two years down the line, their servers are merged into one another, and someone has to give way.
Some MMOs will decide who keeps the name based on creation date and recent activity, while others will simply knock them both out and whoever logs in first gets the name. Whatever path they decide, someone is going to lose what they paid for. Name reservation really only works if it prevents any player from using your name on any server, ever, including you. Allow you or someone to make a character with the same name on a different server and you run into problems if the servers merge, making the purchase pointless. Restrict anyone from using the name and you run the risk years later of the creativity well drying out and players needing to resort to calling themselves xXx_EpixPwn_L3gOrlaz582_xXx just to find a name that hasn’t been taken yet, and boy does that do wonders for everyone’s level of immersion into your world. Implement a unique handle system like Perfect World Entertainment does and you fix the duplicate problem but can no longer advertise name reservation as a benefit of pre-ordering.
I know some of you are thinking that nobody pre-orders a game with the primary, or at least major, objective being to reserve their game, but they do. One of the most common complaints I see on forums whenever a game merges servers are people complaining that they pre-ordered for nothing. Forget the head start, exclusive benefits in the form of digital or physical items, and any play time taken along the way, I have actually seen people declare years of gaming in a particular title as meaningless because somewhere down the road they were forced to make a slight alteration to their handle.
You have no idea the rabbit hole you step into when you mention server mergers. Which is why I don’t anymore, mostly. And it is absolutely advertised on quite a few MMOs as worthy of being placed on a bulleted list next to the digital items and head start.
Today’s MMOrning Shots comes to us from the upcoming JJ Abrams Star Wars film: Star Wars Episode VII: The Lens Flare Strikes Back. In reality, it is a screenshot from Bioware’s upcoming expansion to Star Wars: The Old Republic, also known as Galactic Starfighter. Releasing this winter, Galactic Starfighter is a digital expansion focusing solely on getting space flight off of its rails. This also means that there will be no new planets, no increase to the level cap, no new story missions, no new PvE content. The digital expansion will be solely focused on PvP.
On the other hand, the expansion will be available for free. Subscribers will receive access on December 3rd, 2013 with preferred members joining them on January 14, 2014, with free players tailing behind on February 4th. If all goes well, hopefully this will lead to PvE space missions ditching their rails as well. You can check out the expansion website here.
At 11pm today I did what any normal person would do: I purchased Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and played in the dark with my headphones on. The best image I can think of to describe playing Amnesia is to remember back to when you were a child and you would wake up in the middle of the night to use the toilet or because you were thirsty, etc. You are old enough by this point to know that monsters don’t exist, but still…was your door always that far away from the bed? Does the house always make these noises at night? It sure is dark, and that shadow illuminated on your wall looks a lot like someone standing at your window. Don’t look, it isn’t real. In fact you might just be in a dream where nothing is off limits. Don’t blink. What was that noise? It’s coming from under the bed, or is it downstairs? There shouldn’t be anyone downstairs. Come to think of it, I never realized my bed had just enough room for someone to hide under and grab my legs. I think I’ll wait until morning.
That, in a nutshell, is the first hour of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, except with the knowledge that yes, the monsters are real. And they will murder you.
(Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in 2010 and subsequently shelved into the MMO Fallout archives. I don’t remember exactly why I cancelled it, but it is likely because I wasn’t sure if the nonspecific publisher that I mention threatening to sue me was serious, but I wasn’t going to find out by poking them with a stick. Enjoy)
Why are gamers so obsessed with the thought of customers suing companies, companies suing companies or companies suing customers? The last time I can think of a lawsuit being applicable would be when Sony released Trials of Obi-Wan right alongside the major changes to Galaxies that made a good amount of its content useless or so incompatible that it was removed. That was misleading to users, and possibly would have resulted in legitimate grounds for a lawsuit if Sony hadn’t quickly stepped up to offer refunds. But Star Wars Galaxies was a long time ago, what we need to focus on is the present, or at least the past couple of years.
I’ve seen an increase in the word “lawsuit” over at the capital city of trolls, occasionally referred to as the MMORPG.com forums. Every day there is inevitably a thread about how some developer is going to be, or should be, sued over an update, lack of an update, or just general dissatisfaction with the title in question. Cryptic should be sued for making Champions Online free to play, Turbine should be sued for making Lord of the Rings free to play, and Bill Roper should be sued for apparent crimes against humanity, depending on who you ask.
My favorite point of lunacy is when the fanboys of one game try to “incite” their developer of choice to sue another for making a “clone.” I’ve seen plenty of threads claiming a developer should be sued by Blizzard for making a WoW clone (exclamation mark for quests), while today I came upon a thread stating that Perpetuum Online should be sued for being “Eve Online but on the ground.” Even your good friend Omali has been threatened with lawsuits because someone believed enough that I was on a “crusade of misinformation,” and “had the goal of damaging their reputation,” among my readers by, in their words, reporting on news that put the company in a bad light. They were kind enough to mention me in a press release as an unaccomplished nobody, however. I take my attention where I can get it.
Is this really what you want? I’m all for justice and protection of creative rights, but this goes far beyond protection and into the gaming community’s dark void of hatred and vindictive blood lust. It isn’t enough for some people to just play the games they like and ignore those that they don’t, there is a very vocal minority that spends a lot of time actively campaigning against anything that isn’t in their liking. I suppose if there was some moral or ethical factor, this rant would even exist. There isn’t, so it does.
Stop talking about lawsuits. It muddles the water and makes legitimate cases more difficult to notice.
Was changing MMO Fallout’s menu layout necessary? I would argue yes.
So what does this mean for categories? Right now I have three main categories which will be expanded to:
Reviews and Previews replace “Why Aren’t You Playing,” and “Beta Perspective,” but only because having that on the menu would take a lot of space. The “(p)reviews” we do will remain mostly the same, impressions pieces which highlight positives and negatives of the games without a final overall score. Overall, not a whole lot is going to change here.
The process is mostly to make the website more accessible, as well as more manageable by myself.
Missing Worlds Media has made it official: The Phoenix Project, codenamed for the upcoming spiritual sequel to City of Heroes, will be called City of Titans. While originally the Phoenix Project Kickstarter campaign was supposed to begin September 8th, unfinished paperwork and some restructuring of the team caused a few delays. The good news is that everything has been square away, and the Kickstarter is set to launch October 2nd. Speaking to Incgamers, President Sara Quinn thanked the community for their support.
“We are immensely grateful to our community for their continued support and understanding at this somewhat fraught time. They have been amazing, and without the morale boosts they provided, this would have been much harder on all of us.”
You can check out City of Titans at its main page.
(Source: Incgamers)
The good news is that Star Wars: The Old Republic is now safe to launch. Players who logged in earlier today were surprised to see that their clients had already begun downloading patch 2.4, which isn’t supposed to go live until tomorrow. I say surprised because upon the client restarting, they found out that the game had to completely redownload, all twenty gigabytes. The response to players affected? Bioware suggested maybe not playing until tomorrow’s maintenance, unless you’re alright with sitting through the download.
As some of you have already noticed, we unintentionally released the patch data for Game Update 2.4 this afternoon at 2:46 pm CDT before its scheduled deployment. If you have already begun patching or completed patching, we recommend that you do not run the Launcher until after tomorrow’s maintenance. If you do not run the Launcher until tomorrow, you will only have to patch Game Update 2.4. If you do (or already have) run the Launcher again prior to tomorrow morning’s update, you will need to re-download the entire game client.
The update has been fixed, although people who began patching will still have to download the client, just not as much.
The previous patch data has now been restored. If you are just now logging in, you are fine to play normally. Those of you affected by the patch this afternoon should exit the game and either repatch immediately or wait until after tomorrow morning’s update. Please note that if you repatch today, it will be a larger patch – around 12 gigs, rather than a more normal sized patch tomorrow.
Is it working or is it broken? Only sith deal in absolutes.
(Source: The Old Republic)
The good news is that Star Wars: The Old Republic is now safe to launch. Players who logged in earlier today were surprised to see that their clients had already begun downloading patch 2.4, which isn’t supposed to go live until tomorrow. I say surprised because upon the client restarting, they found out that the game had to completely redownload, all twenty gigabytes. The response to players affected? Bioware suggested maybe not playing until tomorrow’s maintenance, unless you’re alright with sitting through the download.
As some of you have already noticed, we unintentionally released the patch data for Game Update 2.4 this afternoon at 2:46 pm CDT before its scheduled deployment. If you have already begun patching or completed patching, we recommend that you do not run the Launcher until after tomorrow’s maintenance. If you do not run the Launcher until tomorrow, you will only have to patch Game Update 2.4. If you do (or already have) run the Launcher again prior to tomorrow morning’s update, you will need to re-download the entire game client.
The update has been fixed, although people who began patching will still have to download the client, just not as much.
The previous patch data has now been restored. If you are just now logging in, you are fine to play normally. Those of you affected by the patch this afternoon should exit the game and either repatch immediately or wait until after tomorrow morning’s update. Please note that if you repatch today, it will be a larger patch – around 12 gigs, rather than a more normal sized patch tomorrow.
Is it working or is it broken? Only sith deal in absolutes.
(Source: The Old Republic)
MMO Fallout 