Week In Review: Butterfly In The Sky Edition


Given that today is Sunday July 5th and not a Tuesday, it must be time to put out the Week in Review completely on time, and that means another weekly topic to think about. Today I’d like to talk about NCsoft, namely the idea that they are this evil corporation that murders babies (metaphorically) and would sell their own mothers if it meant profit. Take a look at the below graph that I have compiled detailing the sales of all NCsoft games each quarter between Q1 ’05 and the latest release: Q1 ’11.

I know how a lot of you like to claim NCsoft shuts down successful games that they don’t like, but consider this: Look at how low Tabula Rasa started out, then see how low it got to before it was cancelled. The first quarter for Others was listed as Exteel, but the game was grouped in to show higher sales. Dungeon Runners is never even referenced by name, just lumped in with “others.” Auto Assault is also never mentioned, and is presumably lumped in with “others.” It’s pretty obvious looking at this chart that NCsoft sets a bar for when they shut down games, and that bar is far lower than many of us would like to admit.

1. The Star Wars Galaxies Challenge: Week 1.

My first log of the Star Wars Galaxies challenge, or my attempt to level as high as possible by the time Star Wars Galaxies shuts down in December. My character is a Twi’lek smuggler named Qa’ashi currently residing on Tatooine if you’d like to visit me, she is level 17 and was created on server I don’t know. The point of this line of articles is to give my experience playing Star Wars Galaxies during its last months of life, and I hope to make this my staple for shuttered MMOs (I can only hope two games don’t shut down at once) otherwise I may need an IV drip.

So far the adventure has gone with its highs and lows. If you haven’t played Star Wars Galaxies the age really shows on an engine that almost feels like it’s falling apart. I’ve had a few times where missions bug and a creature I’m tracking doesn’t spawn where it’s supposed to, or the waypoint doesn’t update and I have to abandon the mission. Small annoyances, like enemies spawning inside of structures and not allowing me to shoot them, or strange lag bugs where enemies regain health faster than I can shoot them. I love the missions though, and I love my free house (which I am populating with posters) and promotional vehicles.

There are a lot of factions in Star Wars Galaxies, to the point where shooting just about any humanoid is likely to lower your standing one faction and raise it in another. My biggest issue with alignment is the random checks in cities. I’ll be running along and I’ll just see “You have lost 20 standing with the Republic” or “you have lost 20 standing with the empire,” and a quick look in the chat box will show an empire/republic guard has been following me shouting “stop! You must submit to a random security check for illicit goods or you will be suspect!” I get that the game is old enough to not have voice acting, but how about some sort of noise indicator? I only suggest this for the same reason a police officer can’t arrest me because I was walking down the sidewalk and didn’t look over my shoulder to notice he was flagging me down by waving his arms wildly but not saying anything or tapping me on the shoulder.

2. Eve Online: No Non-Vanity Items. Ever.

So the Eve Online scandal comes to an uneventful close with CCP promising to the CSM that there will be no non-vanity items added to the NeX store, there were never any plans, and there will probably never be any plans. Maybe. Perhaps. Now, obviously CCP could change face at any time, and to speculate on a time and date would be a big waste of time given it would add unnecessary flames to a dying fire.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that CCP started the cash shop far too early, putting out the expensive items before they could get out the cheaper items. They also messed up by trying to fight the community rather than explain the system to them right off the bat, and by comparing Eve items to vanity clothing you’d buy from a Japanese boutique.

Perhaps, as one poster put it, this is just CCP’s success getting to their heads.

3. At Least MMOs Are Honest In Their Draconian DRM.

I was looking forward to Capcom’s Resident Evil: Mercenaries on the 3DS, and I was planning on buying it used (or new when/if the price drops), until I learned about the game’s DRM. You can only have one save file, and you cannot delete the save. According to Capcom, you would think this was a restriction out of their control, as they claim that the game saves to the cart and thus cannot be removed:

In Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, all mission progress is saved directly to the Nintendo 3DS cartridge, where it cannot be reset. The nature of the game invites high levels of replayability in order to improve mission scores. In addition, this feature does not remove any content available for users.

If you want to get into specifics, MMOs have the most draconian DRM of any game on the market. You must maintain an internet connection, play on their servers, pay a subscription fee for many or don’t play at all, and if the servers shut down you are absolutely screwed unless someone somewhere maybe leaks the source and a private server is set up that often functions nowhere near the actual game. And God forbid you join a game that doesn’t get off the ground, your $50 and $15 a month for a year or so is gone, down the toilet.

But MMOs are a service, and it isn’t fair to compare an MMO’s DRM to a regular game’s DRM.

4. The Year of F2P And Revival

This has been an interesting year so far, with a decent number of titles being revived while others have gone free to play. We’re only slightly over halfway through the year, so there’s no telling what will happen by December, and then beyond. World of Warcraft debuts its unlimited demo, with players able to play up until level 20 for free forever.

Over at Global Agenda, Hi-Rez has announced that the free to play transition for Global Agenda has resulted in “ revenues are higher than they ever have been before” meaning more content at a faster pace. No doubt Age of Conan will report higher earnings this month, with Fallen Earth following next month, and City of Heroes at some point this year.

5. Speaking of Free to Play: Rock Paper Shotgun Free To Read

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/29/rock-paper-shotgun-goes-free-to-read/

Rock Paper Shotgun did a hilarious parody of the free to play announcement, with the reveal of RPS: F2R, a way for the Rock Paper Shotgun crew to take what was once free and monetize the hell out of it.

Of course there will be no need for readers to pay anything at all to read the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The first two paragraphs of every post will always be accessible to everyone, and readers can read them as often as they want, wherever they want, unlimited times*. The rest of the post will become available to those who make the RPS patented NanoPayments™, of anything from just $0.59® to only $299.99 per article. And Premium Users will continue to receive the same excellent service for exactly the same price as everyone else.
*Up to a maximum of four times.

You can read the entire article at the link above.

Free Because No One Would Pay For It


As much as I hate to say this, the old cardinal rule still stands. While games like Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings, Champions Online, etc went free to play because of the prospect of making more money, there are plenty of products that are free because no one would pay for them otherwise. Dungeons and Dragons Online is about halfway in between, going free because not enough people were willing to get past the initial payment barrier to make the game profitable, but that has no stand on the game’s quality.

I thought about this because of my podcast subscription to Real Time with Bill Maher, a political talk show that airs on HBO, a premium channel. The audio podcast, on the other hand, is available for free on Itunes, and it will remain free because HBO puts less effort into maintaining it than I do with my press (mmofallout gmail) email. Episodes premiere on Friday and don’t make it to iTunes until maybe Monday or Tuesday, if we’re lucky. This week, I managed to download the episode on the following Friday because the files were not uploaded correctly and would not download all week. For a lot of episodes, the podcasts had random skipping, looping audio, and other random issues. For the first few episodes in the season, the episodes weren’t even being uploaded.

The audio issues have been going on since about 2008, according to reviews on iTunes’ app store, so it’s pretty clear that HBO just doesn’t care about the podcast. Yes, it’s free, but I’d be willing to pay the same subscription I have for my other podcasts (about $6-7 a month) if HBO would offer it and increase the quality, not forget to upload episodes, upload them the same day, keep the audio from cutting out, etc. In this stage, however, the quality of the podcast sucks, and I wouldn’t pay a cent to listen to it.

So I thought: What games are such low quality that I wouldn’t pay a dime for them, cash shop or not, and the first game I thought of was Earth Eternal. Now, Earth Eternal was a quaint game, but structurally it was World of Warcraft with everything stripped away except for vendoring trash and killing mobs for quests. That’s it, and that’s why the company crashed after just a few months of the game running. There was no reason to buy anything from the cash shop because the game was so shallow that you never felt compelled to spend money on it. It’s like when you were a kid and your “entrepreneur in training” friend would try to sell you his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or that rock he found on the road that looked like Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s funny, until you realize he is completely serious. So you give him an Indian Brush Burn, eat the sandwich, and tell him to stop being such a dork.

I should clarify a bit on the quality aspect, as this doesn’t just apply to the quality of the goods. This is also why I become, and I’ll describe it as a few companies have referred to me, a “disrespectful ass” when I see some games coming out with subscriptions attached to them, and I poke fun at them for having no business sense or etiquette. To announce a shooter that has a subscription and is not Planetside (an open world MMO), you are turning that shotgun around and firing it directly into your feckless noggin. Sure, Global Agenda had a massive amount of initial sales, and when the time came for the subscriptions to renew that game’s population dropped like a drunk in a ball pit. I said the same thing when CitiesXL tried to charge a subscription for its not-really-massively-but-still-charged-as-such multiplayer system, and what happened? They shut it down. They then released a new edition of Cities late last year that featured no multiplayer. If it’s any consolation to people angered by Cities XL’s multiplayer, Monte Crisco as a company was killed off by Cities’ poor sales.

Call of Duty’s subscription might work when it comes out, but I’ll say the same thing for this as I do for MMOs: They ain’t World of Warcraft, and you ain’t Call of Duty. You have neither the built up userbase or the tenure in the gaming world to pull off a stunt where only 2% of the community can opt in and still make you millions of dollars a month.

I used Earth Eternal as my sole example because it’s the only game that came to mind writing this article. I’m sure most of you can think of games that are free because nobody would pay for them otherwise. The fact that Earth Eternal was bought gives me a lot of faith in the genre, however, because if Earth Eternal can find a buyer, any MMO not restricted by legal issues (Star Wars Galaxies by licensing, for instance) has a chance of being bought and reintroduced.

$20 Says Darkfall "Relaunch" Is Free To Play


When was the last time you heard the phrase “this patch is like a completely new game?” In my line of work (work? Blogging), a whole lot. Such is the case with Darkfall, where on the Epic Blog head boss man of Aventurine Tasos Flambouras talks about a complete relaunch of the game. How much of a relaunch is it? Well it is certainly no linguine, and it is without a doubt not just an expansion pack.

This relaunch is not an expansion.

Thank you, Tasos, but we need more information.

It’s a new game we’ve been developing in parallel with the current version of Darkfall. The scope is massive, and it has been difficult to stay on schedule after several unexpected issues we’ve had with the current version, changes and additions we decided to make for the new version, some business developments, and the decision to add the siege system into this version of the game rather than in the relaunch.

That’s more like it. But let’s discuss the title of this post, and my assurance that this is likely a prelude to a free to play announcement, and continue reading the announcement:

There are shifting priorities having to do with business issues for this relaunch, and another part being some Asian developments we also need to take into consideration. We can assure you that everything we’re doing in this regard is in the best interest of our players and of Darkfall, and that the relaunch of the game will be very exciting for everyone.

I distinctly remember Dave Georgeson saying something along these lines shortly before Everquest II went free to play, when they announced big changes coming but wouldn’t actually announce free to play because the service was going to be considered a new game, because the existing community would have flipped the chess board and went home if they had to share space with the freeloaders. By that I’m referring to the comments about making this decision for the betterment of the community.

The current estimated completion date for development is August, which makes release somewhere between now and when Rift consumes World of Warcraft as the most subscribed MMO…In Burundi. At least we can be assured, despite the vague language, that this isn’t a prelude to Darkfall shutting down or being sold to Gamersfirst. It’s a new version being developed, Tasos isn’t in the process of lifting Darkfall up so he can suplex it.

$20 Says Darkfall “Relaunch” Is Free To Play


When was the last time you heard the phrase “this patch is like a completely new game?” In my line of work (work? Blogging), a whole lot. Such is the case with Darkfall, where on the Epic Blog head boss man of Aventurine Tasos Flambouras talks about a complete relaunch of the game. How much of a relaunch is it? Well it is certainly no linguine, and it is without a doubt not just an expansion pack.

This relaunch is not an expansion.

Thank you, Tasos, but we need more information.

It’s a new game we’ve been developing in parallel with the current version of Darkfall. The scope is massive, and it has been difficult to stay on schedule after several unexpected issues we’ve had with the current version, changes and additions we decided to make for the new version, some business developments, and the decision to add the siege system into this version of the game rather than in the relaunch.

That’s more like it. But let’s discuss the title of this post, and my assurance that this is likely a prelude to a free to play announcement, and continue reading the announcement:

There are shifting priorities having to do with business issues for this relaunch, and another part being some Asian developments we also need to take into consideration. We can assure you that everything we’re doing in this regard is in the best interest of our players and of Darkfall, and that the relaunch of the game will be very exciting for everyone.

I distinctly remember Dave Georgeson saying something along these lines shortly before Everquest II went free to play, when they announced big changes coming but wouldn’t actually announce free to play because the service was going to be considered a new game, because the existing community would have flipped the chess board and went home if they had to share space with the freeloaders. By that I’m referring to the comments about making this decision for the betterment of the community.

The current estimated completion date for development is August, which makes release somewhere between now and when Rift consumes World of Warcraft as the most subscribed MMO…In Burundi. At least we can be assured, despite the vague language, that this isn’t a prelude to Darkfall shutting down or being sold to Gamersfirst. It’s a new version being developed, Tasos isn’t in the process of lifting Darkfall up so he can suplex it.

How High Can I Get? Star Wars Galaxies Edition


I did this back when Tabula Rasa announced that it was shutting down, and wanted to do the same with Chronicles of Spellborn but never managed to download the proper client in time. When Star Wars Galaxies announced that it would be shutting down this December, I took it upon myself to start up an entirely new character, no aid from others, and see how far I could level it before that time. Those of you who know me will know I am notoriously slow at leveling in any MMO, so the idea that I might not get to 90 in the course of six months is a very real proposition.

My character, a Twi’Lek smuggler class, is currently at level 13, and I will be posting updates on my progress in the weekly “Week in Review” section. Hopefully I won’t have my usual distraction from the handful of games going free to play this summer-oh hey Hellgate and Age of Conan!

DC Universe Adds Microtransactions


I’d love it if WordPress didn’t write my URL before I’ve finished writing the title for the post. DC Universe today launched its move into microtransactions. Right now the game only offers three items, with more on the way no doubt. The items are proto-bots offering convenient repair on the go, vault tickets offering access to the vault instance, and a pack of five vault tickets.

I’ll let you guys throw around the slippery slope theory on how this is the lead up to free to play and pay to win, and call Sony ‘$OE’ and John $medley.

Age of Conan: Free To Play Comes Today


Age of Conan’s anticipated romp into the free to play world goes live today with the release of Age of Conan: Unchained. Heading over to the Age of Conan website will greet you with the above splash page. The game servers came down approximately two hours ago, and will be offline for another six (estimated). When the game comes back online, players both free and paid will be able to log in and see the new changes, not the least controversial will be what Funcom decides to stick in the cash shop.

You can see the trailer below. Blood and Glory, Funcom’s attempt at hardcore PvP (with looting players) does not go live with this update.

To those of you still confused about what is being offered for free, read this. Yes, I am aware that the Free to Play update was originally called Unrated.

World of Warcraft: The Endless Trial


Haters gonna hate. Blizzard announced today that the previously 14-day trial will now be indefinite. Players can experience all that World of Warcraft vanilla has to offer, up until level 20, with no time limit. Players are also able to sample sections of Burning Crusade, and may create Draenai and Blood Elf players. Players looking to buy into the full game will find the World of Warcraft Battle Chest at a pretty good price at their local stores and on Blizzard’s website.

And who knows, perhaps this could lead to a free to play option at one point in the future. Not any time soon enough to hold your breath over, but sometime…in one dimension or another.

Sony Station Pass Discount Is Here!


Much talked about, not really examined deeply, Sony has come through with their promise to reduce the price of Station Pass. Starting today, players can gain access to the entire Sony Online Entertainment library for $19.99 USD. In addition, players who purchase longer term plans will find that the prices have come down on 3, 6, and 9 month subscription packages.

You can find the whole list of details here. I’ll remind you again that certain games must be owned for the subscription to become active. For example, you must purchase the client to Star Wars Galaxies before you can play the subscription as part of the package. Star Wars Galaxies will only be part of the package until October 15th, in preparation for the game shutting down.

Mortal Online: Not Against Selling The Game


Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but so is speculation. Ever since the sale of Earth Eternal following its almost invisible launch and shut down, I am convinced that any MMO has a potential buyer as long as the owners are willing to sell. Over on the Mortal Online forums, Henrik Nystrom has posted the type of long, rambling message that only I could beat or fully appreciate, in which he talks leadership, testing, and potential buyers for Mortal Online.

His somewhat frustrated rant can be summed up rather effectively: StarVault would love to have more testers, better tools, and more developers, but they don’t have the resources. You may remember that Mortal Online is running at a loss due to a lack of subscribers, resulting in two cost cutting measures according to the company over the past few financial reports. Henrik then goes on to speculate on selling the game:

If there is not enough resources we will have to adapt and see what options we have… There are plenty of major companies that have their eyes on Mortal, and have had so since the beginning. They know exactly what is needed to develop and release a game such Mortal on your own, and that alone is a huge accomplishment which we are proud for. They know its almost impossible to develop a large scale such MO with such small team and they are very eager to get their hands on both the game and the team.

Henrik then points out that if StarVault does sell the game, the buyer may very well change the core of the game.

If they share the exact same vision with full loot, full pvp, monthly payment however is another question. Which I guess why most of us is here, us the devs as well, but if it means that if some of those core features changes when a company have the rights for it and it gives a bigger player base then that’s what they will go for most likely.

You can read the entire post at the link above, but it sounds like StarVault’s financial troubles are stinging more than they did a few months ago.