Friday, June 11, 2010

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.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Just release it already.

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

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

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.