This weeks question is for those of you who have quit an MMO (so virtually all of you). What level of interaction do you keep with your estranged title? Do you forget all about it and move on to your next title of choice, or are you one of those people who turns on jihad mode and begins a crusade to bring the game and company down because they did something that caused you to quit? Do you keep watch to see if they improve upon what made you quit to begin with, or is it a matter of once they lose your interest, it’s gone forever?
I can’t explain my interest in Hellgate Global. When I played the game at launch, I wasn’t too interested in it. In a way, I had the same reaction to Hellgate as I did with All Points Bulletin, in that it was a shooter/sword/RPG that tried to combine the best of both worlds, but ended up not doing either in a unique way. Essentially, it was Diablo, but played from a different perspective, and I lost interest in the same fashion I lost interest in Diablo: Going through similar looking dungeons (often the same dungeon several times for different missions) over and over again. And yet, I’m signed up for the beta. I could not give a single valid explanation why, other than that I paid the money for the boxed copy.
1. Yoshi’s Cookie: I Admire the Final Fantasy XIV Team
Say what you want about Final Fantasy XIV and odds are your complaints are very valid. What you can’t say is that the current development team, lead by Naoki “Yoshi” Yoshida, lacks motivation. Reading the producer’s letters, I can’t help but admire the devotion and passion that Yoshi and his team have put into Final Fantasy XIV in the past few months. Development has been steaming forward, with a ton of needed updates to turn Final Fantasy XIV into a viable product. FFXIV is functionally a great game, but it needs content and direction so players are doing something other than grinding exp and taking up the same leves over and over again.
What Yoshi has proven is that the team is not above slashing content that doesn’t work, or making drastic changes to other content. Among the updates in the works are the complete removal of physical levels, reworking the battle system, changing the job titles to be more recognizable, introducing grand companies and an achievement system. You can read the list of planned and currently in-the-works updates here.
2. Omali, Why Do You Hate Gamersfirst So Much?
I don’t have a personal grudge against Gamersfirst, I just have very low confidence in the company’s ability to police their own games, mainly because the company has absolutely failed to police their own games. The titles they do maintain are filled to the brim, as I’ve said before, with cheaters and gold farmers. So although I’d like to believe Gamersfirst when they say they have the cheaters all figured out, that’s exactly what Jagex said about gold farmers in Runescape, and I have the feeling Jagex has better resources for catching cheaters than G1.
Those of you who frequent MMO Fallout are well aware that I refuse to join in on the “I hope ___ game fails because I hate ___ company” trash that populates video game forums, and that it’s rather rare that a game comes out that can be labeled purely garbage. Just to name a few examples, DC Universe is a game I harp on, and my issues are not in the gameplay, but its longevity. The original All Points Bulletin had a lot of promise, but needed a real identity as either a shooter or an MMO, but not both. Earth Eternal had less bugs than any other game I’ve ever played but had almost no content outside of kill quests.
I want All Points Bulletin to become Gamersfirst’s big title that will come out and virtually lobotomize all of the cheaters that Realtime Worlds never dealt with, that will inspire the company to run the gold farmers out of their other games. If they are unable to, hopefully Gamersfirst will be able to survive the disappointing reception. Realtime Worlds didn’t.
3. Let’s See Some More Games Revived.
Let’s go over some titles, shall we? Earth Eternal is being revived by a Japanese company, APB by G1, Star Trek Online was revived by Cryptic, Gods & Heroes is entering closed beta under Heatwave Interactive, T3fun is bringing back Hellgate London, and there are probably a few more I can’t think of right now. If The Mummy can get an MMO deal, I want to see some of these other defunct MMOs come back.
I want to see Tabula Rasa brought back, because with all the changes that the developers made in the two months before the game shut down, a lot of the community’s problems were fixed, albeit too late. Shadowbane should be brought back now that the existing version wouldn’t suffer the same problems of the original run (remember the Shadowbane reboot?), and would be run by a single, stable company. I want Dungeon Runners brought back as a free to play title with a cash shop, so the game can financially support more than three people. But above all, I want Tabula Rasa brought back, so I can shoot Richard Garriot in the face with a level 40 shotgun for allowing his team to screw the game two ways to Sunday.
4. I Don’t Have Autism.
The reason I set up MMO Fallout is because of my fascination with the business side of the genre. This is one of the few sections of the gaming industry where a company can’t just throw a game into the open, occasionally lower its price, and then get to work on the sequel. Currently, I feature over 70 MMOs on the category list, including news for games I don’t list (Guild Wars among them).
I noticed a surge in this after Minecraft really gathered steam, and that’s the amount of people who are equating what they see as hard work to autism, and I’ve had a few people asking me if I have autism. First of all that’s an incredibly offensive thing to ask someone, and as a random person on the internet it’s none of your damn business.
Next, I want to make something clear about MMO Fallout. I have a job, I work around generally between 25-30 hours a week at my retail job that I’m using to pay for my car and insurance. I subscribe to, at most, two MMOs, by virtue of my own wallet and time. Writing articles for MMO Fallout takes up a couple of hours of the day at most, spread out throughout my free time. So I wouldn’t call MMO Fallout my “second job.” More like a hobby I’m using to get myself trained for my ultimate end-game (as you’d see in my about page, talk radio).
5. Taking MMO Fallout To The Next Level
I’m going to start trying to get some interviews with different developers. When I call MMO Fallout a hobby, that doesn’t change how serious I am with expanding this website into something bigger. I have a lot of ideas on what I want to do with this blog, and simple text based articles aren’t going to cut it.
MMO Fallout 