LoL by name and by nature

A few months ago I attempted to play League of Legends (LoL). I am quite a fan of the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) style of arena-based RPG formula. However at the time I could not manage to actually get past the LoL game launcher due to some apparent retardicity in said launcher. After about half an hour attempting to make the game work I gave up thinking, "fine, it's a free game made by some amateurs turned pro, they need some time to iron out the kinks. I'll try again some time in the future."

Fast forward to ten minutes ago, where I saw an advert that their first proper competitive season is about to start up and that now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. Splendid! I attempt to log on to the website:



Right. Clearly I must have got this far last time. Seeing as how I used my generic gamer name, I'm sure I used my generic gamer password too:



Hmmm. No, I haven't forgotten, but oh well. Let's just reset the password so we can get on with playing this reportedly fantastic game:



Ahh, the unknown problem. That wonderful catch-all error message that turns your coding ineptitude into a summer breeze.

If you can't even make a basic website that will let me download the game, I'm not going to entrust you with any more of my time. My game time is already quite limited, as evidenced by the solidly put together couple of dozen or so games just sitting not even installed in my Steam catalogue because of the veritable gaming smorgasbord that we are provided with these days. LoL? Yes, I think I will LoL in your general direction now.

As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

Ergh.

From the words "this is the trooper.... he'll be our main tank" there was a sinking feeling in my gut. It was all downhill from there. I'm trying to decide whether the Jedi "holding aggro" is more of a slap in the face to the Star Wars legacy, or whether the honour goes to the smuggler throwing "light heals" around.

Luke: I'm excited for that new Bioware game.
Obi-Wan: That's no Bioware game. It's a space WoW.
Han: Bioware are too awesome to make a space WoW.
Luke: I have a very bad feeling about this.
Chewie: Unnggggghhh.

I'm turning Chinese, I think I'm turning Chinese, I really think so...

Another milestone met in Australia's long term strategic goal of turning into a communist dictatorship.

Irony

Ravious rightly points out that with all the free to play options open to MMO players these days, if you want to hang on to your subscribers you need to be giving them a steady stream of content. Give them a lump expansion and they'll burn through it all in a week and won't be paying you next month.

This is frankly what I assumed my subscription dollars would be buying when I first started playing MMO's. I see a steady stream of content becoming the standard way of operating for the MMO 2.0's of the near future.

It's amusing that the plethora of free to play games is going to force the improvement of subscription MMO's. I get the feeling that the "best of both worlds" (a steady stream of content without a subscription) is going to be Guild Wars 2, with the Guild Wars 1 War in Kryta event system acting as a test-bed.

Just release it already.

*Shooooom* feel the speed of the incremental hype train.

Bioware MMO may contain insufficient WoW

Disturbing news - Bioware appear not to be copying World of Warcraft for their upcoming Star Wars MMO.

The horror!

(...)

Seriously?

There are two types of people that still play WoW. There are those who love WoW and the only possible game they will ever play is WoW 2.0 when Blizzard releases it. Then there are the ones that play WoW but truly do yearn for something more.

I just have to reply to some of what Darren said in his post:

"Their expectations for what an MMO should be looks to be waaaaay off from what gamers expects an MMO to be"

Gamers, if we're speaking generally, expect MMOs to be steaming piles of doggy doo-doo. Therefore we can expect that SW:TOR will be waaaaaay off from that. Excellent.

"Bioware intends to re-train an entire generation of MMO gamers who’ve been suckling at WoW’s tit for the last 6 years"

It sounds to me like Bioware are targeting a much larger audience - gamers in general. To the majority of these, the prospect of another epic grindfest doesn't exactly appeal. I imagine they'd be quite content not to disrupt Blizzard's current teeting arrangements, as it will allow them to pull in a much larger pool of people. Not to mention that their forums will be relatively free of "be more like WoW" vs "go back to WoW" comment threads.

Not that I'm saying SW:TOR will break WoW's subscriber numbers. Bioware have a tough hill to climb because MMOs have such a bad name amongst the general gamer population. But to me it sounds like what they're offering is a lot more entertaining then:

"click through the text in these games and don’t read. Click-click-click…look at quest log….go kill 10 froogles"

And a quote from the interview that I think shows that Bioware may actually have considered all Darren's points:

"...people tried to convince us these limitations were canon... you could not, in fact, put interesting bits in an MMO because that was now sacrilege."

Somehow I trust Bioware's judgement in producing a fun game for me to play.

Official ArenaNet Guild Wars 2 blog is up

I started writing about MMORPG's a couple of years ago (on another website, hopefully now buried in the mists of time). Like a lot of people I went through an exciting brainstorming phase where I proposed all sorts of crazy ideas to try and improve the MMO genre. Looking back now, some of it was good. Some of it was ok. A lot of it was short-sighted drivel.

While I have come to accept that I may not, in fact, be about to sigle-handedly revolutionize the entire genre, there's one thing that I can tell from this experience. ArenaNet is a lot better at it than anybody else has ever been.

The revolution is here my friends. Game on, Blizzard. Game on.