Editorials – Page 84

Top 5: More Tips For DarkScape Survival

[Update 10/2/15: A game update has rendered some of this list obsolete.]

The previous Top 5 tips for DarkScape has been insanely popular, but recent updates have made several options on the list either already obsolete or about to be obsolete. With that in mind, and considering I am further in the game than last week, I decided to go back and produce five more tips for survival in DarkScape.

5. Stay On Top Of Updates/Plans

This one is pretty important. Since content updates aren’t coming to DarkScape for a fair amount of time, you might be inclined to ignore patch notes during content updates. This isn’t advisable. For instance, if you didn’t check the patch notes you may not be aware that entering the abyss no longer skulls players, or that a toolbelt has been added, or why your interface has been set to retro by default after an update.

Right now Jagex are performing some heavy tweaks to the game in response to player feedback, tweaking certain features to make them easier in some areas and harder in others. If you don’t keep watch on update notes and particularly discussion on the developer streams (which you can find summaries of on the DarkScape subreddit), you won’t just be at a disadvantage against the game, but you’ll be at a disadvantage against other players.

It also helps to keep up with the forums to know what content is currently broken, because there is a fair amount of it (see #2). For further reference, the DarkScape wiki is slowly being populated.

4. Tier Bank Trading Made Easy

Three tiers of danger means three separate banks, each with their own supplies, each irretrievable in other areas. While DarkScape would like you to believe that moving items between banks is a matter of sheer danger, the truth is that there are enough routes to go down that finding one or two with minimal risk of player interaction, let alone players looking to randomly kill you, is pretty good.

When trading between low and medium risk areas, the closest route I’ve found is between Lumbridge and Al Kharid. Starting out at the Lumbridge Grand Exchange, you can head south and over the bridge to Al Kharid, reducing the amount of time spent in medium-tier areas. The level range in the low-risk portion of the travel only goes up to six while you spend, at most, six or seven seconds in the mid-risk zone before reaching the bank, which itself is patrolled by three guards in a very enclosed space. When trading back, just be aware that the medium-tier area extends to the end of the bridge on the Lumbridge side rather than the city entrance as it was when you came in.

For moving items to high risk zone, one of the safest routes that I’ve found so far is between Varrok and Canifis. If you haven’t been through the area before, you’ll need to kill a level 30 monster before you can proceed, but the travel from Varrok to Canifis is one that is sparsely populated with players and even less so with player killers. Cities like Ashdale, Zanaris, and Al Kharid have more open areas and lack choke points that pk’ers can nab you in, making them rife for smuggling goods between zones.

Initially this spot was supposed to discuss easy access to high-threat areas, due to the fact that the game automatically identified any zone as high risk until labeled otherwise. Areas like Death’s office offering easy access to your high risk bank have been fixed.

3. RuneSpan For Runecrafting/Nexus For Prayer

Runecrafting in DarkScape is a long, difficult, and dangerous affair, even more so before Jagex updated the Abyss so that it no longer skulls players effectively taking them out of towns for a full five minutes. If you’re looking at training runecrafting with a focus on pure experience, your best bet is to take on the RuneSpan activity. Available right off the bat at level 1 runecrafting, RuneSpan offers far better experience than it has any right to in DarkScape. Starting off at level 1, I managed to make my way to level 39 within an hour. Bear in mind, these experience rates are coming from a member with member experience rates, with no bonus experience.

While the entirety of RuneSpan is high threat (no guards, no limits on combat), I’ve found very little combat going on outside of the random troll. The time and resources required to move about in RuneSpan for the relatively low amount of players present makes player killing in the area a massive waste of time, even for the dedicated troll. Runecrafters in the area are more interested in crafting than killing. Which isn’t to say it is safe, I was killed once while writing this piece. After today’s update, your points are redeemed upon death.

Compared to RuneSpan, the Nexus is a lot more popular and prone to player killers coming in and ruining your day. That in mind, the mini-game is not far from the Lumbridge respawn point and is generally filled with enough other players that you should be able to slip around relatively unnoticed. Unlike Runespan, however, your experience at the Nexus is capped and will eventually come to an end. Once you receive 37 thousand experience, not counting the extra experience from bones, the event will no longer grant prayer experience.

On the plus side, thirty seven thousand experience will get you to level 40 assuming you begin the Nexus at level 1.

2. Taking Advantage of Oversights

JagexLauncher 2015-09-24 20-21-03-57

DarkScape is (to the best of my knowledge) officially considered “experimental,” another name meaning any issues that should have been considered have not, leaving players at the mercy of Jagex to eventually fix them. In this case, if you were looking to finish your achievement diaries or a number of quests, look again. While Jagex has been rolling out updates to fix these oversights, DarkScape’s restrictions on teleporting left players literally unable to complete quests because the game won’t move them with the quest rewards in their inventory.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t currently existing oversights that can be taken advantage of before they are fixed in the coming weeks/months. For instance, right now it is extremely easy to craft blisterwood weapons assuming you finish the quest line required to craft them. Jagex has detailed plans to make blisterwood weapons much more difficult and costly to craft, as right now they are high-tier equipment that can be mass produced with little effort (other than the quest line).

There are plenty of things to take advantage of outside of that example, including how easy it is currently to smuggle items between risk zones (see above). Keep an eye on the forums for other shortcuts.

1. Only Use What You Can Lose

This one likely goes without saying, but always play with the mentality that you will probably be killed and lose whatever you are carrying. That said, you don’t necessarily want to go out constantly with just a weapon/tool and no armor or food on you, you’ll just be easy pickings for even the least equipped killers. This is where welfare equipment, gear that is cheap and can be easily replaced, comes into play.

If you’re making a decent amount of money, you can go to shops or the Grand Exchange and buy your welfare gear in bulk. If not, your best bet may be to level up relevant skills (mining/smithing, crafting, fletching) and use the resources you gain leveling in order to build the equipment you’ll be using for your own protection. While it won’t deter everyone, a player wielding just a weapon is less likely to attack a decked out player with full armor and weapons of his own, and you’ll be better equipped to fight back/run away and get to a safe zone.

A few of your inventory slots should be dedicated to food to survive or teleportation to quickly escape, but be aware that teleportation is slower in DarkScape than it is in RuneScape, you can still be killed even using rune-based town teleports.

Top 5: Tips For DarkScape Survival

DarkScape is out and that only means one thing: Prepare to die a whole lot, and lose your items. Since DarkScape isn’t just RuneScape with open world PvP, MMO Fallout has put together some opening tips for players looking to make a start in this new world.

5. Get A Head Start

If you’re anything like me, it’s been so long since you’ve been a low level in RuneScape that you are unaware of what conveniences are available for new players. Go to Burthorpe and talk to Mary Rancour in the building above the Heroes guild and ask her for free stuff. She’ll give you a dwarven army axe, a multi-tool that will come in handy with the toolbelt disabled. The dwarven army axe acts as a steel-tier hatchet, pickaxe, as well as a needle, tinderbox, chisel, knife, and a low level weapon. She’ll also give you a steel full helmet, combat potions, and teleport tablets.

You can pick up various free items at vendors all over RuneScape. Right off the bat, you can complete activities like the god statues which give a massive head start in slayer/prayer experience as well as construction. Beginner quests Shadow Over Ashdale, Demon Slayer, and Blood Pact can be completed for good starter equipment, not to mention combat experience. If you lose any of these items, you can always go back and pick them up again for free.

4. Know Your Bank Restrictions

Banking in DarkScape is miles away from that in RuneScape and even Old School. Unlike its standard counterparts, your bank in DarkScape is split up into three areas: low threat, medium threat, and high threat. Adding onto that, you’re going to find bank space very limited: 100 spaces per zone, less if you’re a free player. Not only are the banks separated, but so are the Grand Exchanges. You cannot home teleport between areas with any items on your person, and you can’t use rune-based teleports between threat zones.

What does this mean? Effectively, it means your goods can only be transported in the area they were found. To bring your gear to higher/lower threat zones, you’re going to need to walk it over the border and hope that nobody kills you in the process. Banks within those zones are shared, meaning you can gather resources in Varrok, home teleport to Taverly, retrieve the items from your bank, walk them over White Wolf Mountain, and store them in Catherby to retrieve in Ardougne. You can’t, however, bank something in Lumbridge and then retrieve it in Seer’s Village.

Part of the goal is to create three separate economies and create a new form of income, by allowing players to move items from zones where they are cheaper to zones where they are more valuable. It also means spending a fair amount of time hauling goods between zones. That being said, players should still go through the new-character process of unlocking lodestones as quickly as possible. Energy is back to how it was a few years ago, meaning it recovers very slowly. You’ll need the lodestones for easy travel.

3. Resources Have Been Moved

If you haven’t started DarkScape yet and are already planning your leveling route, don’t bother. In creating three distinct threat zones, Jagex also took the time to relocate resources around with the higher tier goods resting comfortably (or not so comfortably) in high threat areas. For example, you won’t find lobster or harpoon spots in Catherby anymore, those are gone. Where did they go? You’ll need to find them, or wait until guides start popping up.

For people looking to quickly level up, the shuffling of resources is sure to put a wrench in your operations.

2. Be Wary of Griefers

DarkScape’s respawn mechanic currently makes the game very open for griefing. In some cases, players will sit in banks that have easily accessed second floors (stairs/ladders) and come down to the main bank area to attack someone before quickly moving upstairs. Since the game allows you to change your respawn point, many players have taken to repeatedly assaulting banks, either in the hopes of killing players or with the goal of simply disrupting your banking.

One popular method of griefing at the moment is to run into a bank with an active skull and retribution, a prayer spell which causes the player to explode upon death. The player is immediately killed by guards and explodes, damaging the players around him. Said player then respawns nearby and starts the process over again.

1. Be Very Mindful Of Where You Click

The presence of PvP everywhere (and I do mean everywhere) has made the game very dangerous, even for those who don’t necessarily want to go around killing everyone they see. In DarkScape, banks and most towns are patrolled by very powerful guards, level 138, certainly high level enough to take on most of the playerbase at this time. Guards will immediately attack, stun, and instantly kill players who are skulled (those who attacked other players).

What this usually leads to is an incident where a player will enter the bank, misclick and accidentally attack another player, and then immediately die. If you accidentally attack another player, your odds of getting out of the bank without dying are quite slim, meaning you lose everything you were carrying on you and respawn somewhere else. When getting back into town with a big haul, always be mindful that you are essentially one click away from losing it all.

To mitigate this, you can do two things: Turn on one-button mouse or always right click to bring up the context menu before you bank. Left clicking to bank in a crowded (or even not so crowded) area is playing with fire, and you’re liable to get burned.

[Column] The Death Of Out-Of-Genre Subscriptions

I casually refer to the 2009 – 2010 time span as the Suicidal Subscription Pact, where business logic in gaming decreed that subscription fees must be tacked on to genres that had previously been available for just the cost of the game. The time marks one of the last eras of businesses unsuccessfully copying functions from World of Warcraft without even the most basic understanding of why they worked, in this case taking the subscription fee with no idea on why World of Warcraft justified a continuing payment.

Now MMOs are no stranger to subscription fees, even if only a small minority manage to hold on without going free to play or shutting down, but the years I’m referring to point toward a number of developers who decided to branch out the concept of monthly tithes into other genres, and were rewarded with deep financial ruin and often bankruptcy as a result. And while any business must take risks in order to innovate, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that these games never had a prayer of succeeding, sadly with little relation to the actual game quality.

Monte Cristo is actually the first business I contacted as a junior MMO reporter, to voice my concerns that their plan to include a subscription fee in Cities XL would be a disastrous idea. The idea behind the subscription was to fund the servers, naturally, but the company also believed that the lack of competition would allow them the space to do as they please. With SimCity still four years away, the number of AAA city building games with online components could essentially be counted on a single, finger-less hand, with the only alternative being the wealth of Farmville-style free-to-play browser titles that gamers were increasingly growing sick of.

As I predicted, Cities XL released and consumers responded to the mandatory subscription for online play with a definitive “nah.” Even with the market cornered, Monte Cristo couldn’t get players on board and shut the service down less than a year later due to a lack of subscribers. Given the option of Cities XL or nothing, the market chose nothing, and Monte Cristo went bankrupt a couple of months later.

All Points Bulletin, Global Agenda, and Hellgate: London mark three attempts to bring the subscription fee into the shooter realm, with all three failing miserably but only two of the three companies going under because of it.

With All Points Bulletin, Realtime Worlds had the idea to sell an online shooter at full price and then charge hourly for access (with the option of unlimited monthly subscriptions). While functionally different from its competition, APB essentially started the race at a disadvantage, having to convince gamers that an online shooter would be worth not just a subscription fee in a genre where it didn’t exist, but an hourly subscription fee.

It didn’t matter that Realtime Worlds was offering an unlimited play time option, it didn’t change the fact that they thought APB was deserving of an hourly fee, for a premium priced game in a genre that hadn’t yet been touched by cash shops in the west. Perception is a big deal, and in many minds the simple presence of an hourly subscription (that really only existed to make the unlimited version seem more enticing) showed a bravado that they weren’t willing to do business with.

And it didn’t help that APB was an underwhelming game, from the numerous bugs and gameplay issues to a lack of diverse content, the fact that it was a driving/shooting game that failed to deliver on either the driving or shooting, the kerfuffle over Realtime Worlds attempting to embargo reviews. Perhaps as a sign of how poorly managed the game was, players didn’t even get the luxury of knowing when the servers were turning off until the day of.

To add insult to insult and top complaints of unnecessary monetization, the company even introduced advertisements into its voice chat service that could be removed with, you guessed it, another subscription.

For all of its gloating and taunting the competition, Global Agenda was not a success, in fact it’s a case study I’ve used when talking about market failures.

Like Cities XL and APB, Hi-Rez Studios offered gamers something that they couldn’t specifically get anywhere else, the ability to fight for territory control in a hub-based first person shooter. And like the other titles on this list, consumers opted out when presented with a subscription fee. While Global Agenda is still running on free to play, updates came to a halt years ago.

It’s important to note how crucial player perception was in the inevitable marketing failures that were the games on this list. Essentially the developers were pushing the game to two types of consumers, neither of whom really wanted anything to do with them. MMO gamers had the free to play revolution around that time offering them far more content heavy games for free, and for subscription, while shooter fans already had the entire genre to play without paying monthly.

And finally we have Hellgate: London, the game that coined the phrase “flagshipped.” While billing itself as a first person shooter on a level with Diablo, Hellgate: London also demanded a $10 monthly subscription to access subscriber-only loot, hardcore mode, special pvp arenas, more storage space, the ability to create guilds, and access to customer service.

While a novel idea, Hellgate once again found itself competing in an arena where similar games (dungeon crawlers) were already offering their games for no additional charge. None of them were first person shooters, mind you, but as we’ve learned from this list, you can’t slap on a few changes to the base and demand more money.

Flagship Studios later went bankrupt, providing up to fifteen months of “lifetime membership” to the people who ponied up the $150, also cementing the eternal grudge that some gamers will bear against Bill Roper.

As far as trends go, the implementation of subscription fees into pseudo-MMOs was one that the gaming community soundly rejected and a major pitfall that, in my personal opinion, should have been obvious from the start. The games I mentioned above aren’t the only ones to fall into this trap, but they are the most notable.

What’s interesting is that every game on this list, with the exception of Global Agenda, was eventually picked up and run under a different studio with Cities XL seeing successful sequels rather than a straight free to play spinoff, in a way proving that the issue lay heavily with the monetization strategy and the subsequent perception of the company as greedy and selling a not-so-premium product for premium prices.

Rant: Customer Service Doesn’t Get Much Worse Than A Full Guild Suspension

As you read this, Daybreak Game Company is busy cleaning up the mess of another incident in a series of customer service missteps. This time it involves the unfair suspension of several hundred (sources place the figure at least 400 and possibly upwards of 600), in a guild-wide three day ban in retaliation for the actions of one member. Yes, an entire guild had their accounts suspended because one player broke not the terms of service, but player-agreed rules.

Here’s how the story goes: Everquest’s lack of instancing means that the community has to compete for raids, leading to a raid schedule agreed upon by the leaders of the top guilds. If your guild isn’t scheduled to raid, and they do so anyway, breaking the rotation can result in penalties levied against the entire guild. Yes, the entire guild, even you members who don’t raid or might raid every once in a while.

That’s exactly what happened when one player from the Modest Man guild was recorded on video killing mobs outside of the Sky raid. In total, the player allegedly killed two mobs with a multi-box group of five accounts. The player was reportedly booted from Modest Man before Daybreak Game Company handed out a three day suspension to every single member of the guild. The suspensions were quickly overturned with players being allowed back into the game, but the policy that would hand 3-day and potentially 7-day suspensions to entire guilds still seems to be in place.

It also doesn’t address the underlying problems here. The fact that, as one player put it, a single player can “blow a 4-6 hour block for a whole guild” is ridiculous, a sign of a game far out of touch with today’s expectations. The idea that Daybreak is willing to suspend an entire guild, hundreds of players in total, for the dissociated actions of one member (who was kicked out) is unacceptable, regardless of it being overturned, and the fact that it was even considered for a moment to be an appropriate response should be worrying to Daybreak’s customers, aside from perhaps the toxic portion that supported the decision.

But ultimately every fiasco that seems to come out of Everquest’s timelocked servers is Daybreak’s fault, fostering and encouraging an atmosphere of exclusion, and nothing encompasses the attitude of a company that once stated that casual players don’t deserve to access content like Nagafen, than punishing an entire guild for the actions of one person. Again they pretty quickly reversed the decision, but they went ahead with it in the first place. And that is the problem.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

How ArcheAge’s Server Mergers Will Work

ArcheAge is getting closer to its planned server mergers, and Trion Worlds has dumped a massive amount of information on how the process will work. In total, twelve servers will be merged into six, divided equally between North American and European servers. For players on affected servers who do not wish to be part of the merger, they will receive a free one-time transfer to a server of their choice (with some exceptions based on populations). Characters involved in the transfers will be moved on September 8th.

While players will need to change their name if there is a conflict on the destination server, if the name is available at the point of transfer request it will be reserved and inaccessible to other players. Players waiting for the merge are required to pack up items on their land or risk losing them when the merger comes. Finally, players have the option of starting new on one of the two fresh-start servers.

Server transfer signups begin August 25th and end September 4th, with requests being processed on the 8th. You can find more information regarding restrictions at the link below.

(Source: ArcheAge)

Neverwinter VIP: $10 A Month For $37 Worth Of Keys

Perfect World Entertainment has released details on an upcoming subscription system for Neverwinter. Dubbed VIP, the subscription plan acts as both a membership and running loyalty program at the same time in that it levels up the longer a player subscribes and offers more bonuses as the months progress. To top it off, you don’t lose VIP rank if you unsubscribe, you simply start off where you left off the next time you add another payment.

What caught my eye, however, is the fact that immediately at VIP rank 1, the first, the player begins receiving one enchanted key per day for the entirety of the 30 day subscription. At the cost of 125 Zen per key, this runs to 3,750 Zen or approximately $37.50 worth of keys if you log in every single one of the 30 days and manually claim the key. 3,750 Zen worth of keys for 1,000 Zen in investment.

To top it off, if you’re the kind of hardcore person who can conceivably make 1,000 zen in less than a month by converting Astral Diamonds, you can get VIP for free. And if you get lucky and get some rare drops from the boxes you open, you could sell those on the market for Astral Diamonds and fund another month.

Just something to think about.

(Source: Neverwinter)

How Free Can You Be: RuneScape Revisited

How Free Can You Be is a series of columns that I started back in 2013 that never went anywhere, so it’s a concept that I’ve been sitting on for some time. For the first entry, I’ll be looking at MMOs and how much of the game can be accessed without spending a dime. Most of these games, I imagine, will involve someone spending money at some point, but the end result is that you, the reader, will know how much content you can access without ever registering a credit card or buying a game card. For games with optional subscriptions, we’ll also talk about avoiding paying more than the flat monthly fee.

I picked RuneScape as the first game for this column because it has changed quite a bit since our 2013 coverage. The introduction of tradeable bonds has changed the dynamic by which players can purchase and enjoy RuneScape’s content, and I would be remiss if I continued the column and left the previous coverage inaccurate.

1. Membership

Membership in RuneScape is different than other MMOs because while the game is technically free, it is absolutely required to access a grand majority of the content. Members have access to more skills, better equipment, more quests, combat abilities, transportation, leveling methods, bank spaces, grand exchange slots, and activities, emotes, and more. While Jagex regularly insists that the free to play part of RuneScape is a complete experience in itself, it really serves as a taste of what membership has to offer.

This is where bonds come in. A bond is an item that is purchased from Jagex and then sold on the Grand Exchange to others for money. While this does mean that someone pays real money, it allows both free players and members to enjoy otherwise paid goods essentially on someone else’s dime. At the time of this publishing, bonds have stayed pretty still in the nine to ten million gold range, however prices can fluctuate up and down.

One bond is worth 14 days of membership without any downsides, so any player capable of making around five million gold per week as a member (which many players will tell you is not a difficult feat) will have little problem funding their membership. Given the cost of bonds, you’ll have to level up quite a bit in free to play before you are capable of making that kind of money as a member, be it through combat, skilling, or gathering goods and selling them. Gamers who are able to play the market and flip items will find making the required amount easier at lower levels.

2. Solomon’s Store

Solomon’s Store is RuneScape’s cash shop, and it operates on two currencies: Loyalty points and Runecoins. Solomon’s Store stocks everything from pets, extra bank space, cosmetic outfits, weapon overrides, emotes, animations, and more. The good side is that, with one or two exceptions, the items are permanent. While many items are available for purchase with loyalty points, some can only be bought through the use of Runecoins.

Loyalty points are accrued through consecutive months of membership, with the stipend increasing with each passing month. Runecoins on the other hand must be purchased with real money or by redeeming a bond, meaning real money must change hands at some point along the transaction. Bonds can be redeemed for 195 Runecoins, slightly less than $5 worth of the currency purchased for straight cash.

While time consuming, the ability to purchase and redeem bonds for Runecoins and membership makes it feasible to acquire anything from the Solomon Store given enough time. Unlike Marvel Heroes, for instance, with eternity splinters locked behind time gates, a player’s ability to fund themselves is entirely based on how fast the player can make money, making this more of a venture in ability rather than grind.

The other benefit is that those who have no problem paying the membership subscription but don’t want to pay into the cash shop can still obtain everything available from Solomon’s Store with skill and patience. Some items can only be purchased with loyalty points, meaning using bonds to buy Runecoins can only get you so far.

3. Treasure Hunter

Like Solomon’s Store and membership, Treasure Hunter (known as Squeal of Fortune) has been drastically altered by the ability to redeem bonds for keys. As with Solomon’s Store, one bond gives you approximately five dollars worth of keys, 15 in total. In addition, players receive a non-stacking daily stipend of keys that reset at midnight GMT, one for free players, two for members, and three for premiere club members. In addition, players can obtain keys randomly as drops and by completing quests or promotional activities.

What sets Treasure Hunter apart from Solomon’s General Store is that the rewards are completely luck based, making this RuneScape’s equivalent to a lockbox in other MMOs. As a free daily activity, it is handy for a few free bonuses here and there. As a method of acquiring items, as I’ve said in the past, it is a waste of both time and money. Jagex has ramped up the efforts to sell Treasure Hunter keys through limited time items that are only available for a few days. In some cases, Jagex has introduced tradeable rares through limited Treasure Hunter promotions.

So it is possible to obtain as many Treasure Hunter keys as you’d like without spending a dime, provided you’re willing to put the work into buying bonds.

4. Conclusion

Ultimately RuneScape is pretty friendly to free players. Those who are willing to put in the work to make money can subsidize their memberships off the backs of those willing to pony up the real money for RuneScape gold. I do get the feeling that the cost of bonds is rather low comparable to the ease with which a skilled player can make money, meaning that the community isn’t exactly falling over itself to buy bonds and gather up the items in the cash shop.

In regards to Treasure Hunter, buying bonds to redeem for keys is still a waste of time and money, but at least you can rest knowing it wasn’t your money being wasted.

Trion Worlds Promises Defiance Announcement At Gamescom

Last week we reported that Trion Worlds had opened a thread on the Defiance official forums, requesting that people submit questions for an upcoming Q&A session. The results of the Q&A are available for viewing on the official website, nine questions and nine answers. When questioned on a roadmap for future content updates, Trion answered that more details will be released at Gamescom and PAX.

Right now, we are working on some non-expedition content for upcoming updates. We can’t say much, but we do plan on releasing more info at Gamescom and PAX Prime. You get a hint about what is happening with Dark Matter in the latest Arkbreak Expedition.

You can read the rest of the Q&A at the link below. Gamescom and PAX Prime take place in August.

(Source: Defiance)

[Column] Gamers Never Rejected “Art Games”

Let me just start by saying that I hate the premise of this article. Not because of the ideas within, but as a gamer who has spent the better part of the past ten years, if longer, trying to make the argument that video games are indeed art, when not pushing against the idea that they make people violent.

So if we, as gamers, argue that all games are art, it leads to an important question: What does that make an “art game?” Ask around and you’ll likely hear a pretty consistent answer: A game with no combat, minimal interactivity, created by an independent art house developer trying to convey a personal message/experience. If I had my way, ‘art game’ would be a redundant term, but I can’t always have my way.

If you haven’t realized by now, this is mostly set around the recent failure of Tale of Tales and their game Sunset. I’m well aware of the developer’s response and demonization of the industry, gamers, and capitalism, and their overall attitude following their departure from the gaming scene. I touch on that near the end.

One idea I’ve seen pushed by the supporters of Sunset is that its failure is proof that the gaming industry needs to “grow up” and “mature” to join the other mediums, a fallacy if I’ve ever seen one. What other mediums? Television? Where the highest rated cable shows for 2014 were Game of Thrones, Major Crimes, sports, Nascar, and reality shows? Or film, where eight of the top ten grossing films of last year were riddled with sex and violence? Or perhaps in novels, where the best-selling list is dominated by the likes of 50 Shades, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and Bill O’Reilly?

If you want to put gaming on the same pedestal as other mediums of art, it holds up pretty well. Even the artistic side of gaming matches up against the other genres. A few big successes, a bunch of smaller successes, and a whole lot of failures. The industry is saturated on all levels, and there isn’t enough consumer time and money to go around when just about anyone can release a game and hundreds of new titles add to the clutter on Steam on a weekly basis.

But the thing about Sunset is that the more we try to rationalize why the game failed, the closer we should be getting to the realization that sometimes success or failure can’t be explained. Sunset was focus tested, marketed to specific groups, and at the end of the day it sold 4,000 copies and knocked its developer out of the gaming industry. Sometimes you can do everything right and still wind up failing. The game was never going to sell millions of copies and I doubt that Tale of Tales expected it to.

To say that games like Sunset have no place in the genre is a farce, full of condescension from the gamers claiming to speak for the market and from those on the outside talking down to the community like we’re all a bunch of uncultured morons. The idea that a walking simulator is doomed to failure doesn’t hold water in a reality where games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Ether One have made a comfortable place for themselves. The industry is massive, it outperforms Hollywood, and as with film the people who call themselves gamers aren’t a hive mind that agree on everything (and often don’t seem to agree on anything).

If the gaming industry was truly populated by dullards banging controllers, we wouldn’t see unconventional titles that manage to grab hold and survive despite the hailstorm of “I don’t know what people see in this.” Games like Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, and Gone Home attract substantial audiences and loyal followings. The horror genre has seen an entire subsection of games built on the idea of not being able to fight back (Amnesia, Alien: Isolation, Outlast, etc), and Telltale has managed to grow an empire on the strategy of episodic gaming and powerful narratives that make us feel our feels.

The evidence of diversity in the gaming community is no more obvious than when you consider that the anti-indie sentiment has been able to grow alongside animosity towards AAA developers. More and more, people turn toward the indie community as a source of content that is deemed too risky or not profitable enough for big publishers who seem all too concerned with making the same low risk cookie cutter games year after year. People are getting tired of AAA gaming pushing out titles at premium prices with content slashed to sell at a later date, for a title that despite its massive budget can’t even make it out the door without game breaking issues.

On the other hand, people are getting really sick of the shenanigans coming from the indie development scene, between the unprofessional behavior of certain developers either trolling, constantly arguing, or throwing temper tantrums whenever someone responds negatively to their game, to the entitled reaction from other developers and their blogger friends when their games fail in the market. People who think that consumers have an obligation to throw money at them because they made a thing, and inevitably when the game fails the blame is put on the market, with the implied or explicit reason being that gamers are too uncultured/stupid to know what they want.

One of the earliest popular Youtube videos was from a vlogger Chris Crocker going on a rant about people criticizing Britney Spears, culminating to one point in the video where he says “you’re lucky she even performs for you bastards.” This is a mentality that I see a lot in gaming, both in the indie and AAA field from producers and customers. That we, the consumer, should just shut up, pay up, and be grateful that we get anything at all, and just be happy that the content creators are willing to grace us with their presence and work.

To say that Sunset failed because its genre has no place in the industry is inaccurate, as is saying that it failed because gamers don’t support indie devs. At the end of the day, it didn’t sell, but its failure isn’t indicative of a greater problem in the industry, it shouldn’t have PC gamers worried as some publications have stated, and it shouldn’t put off other people who might be interested in trying their hand in creating products. It didn’t sell and the blame definitely doesn’t fall on the consumer.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the subject.

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