The Problem with GW2’s Questing
[Update: Please note the missing link photo]
Reading some of the positive comments about Guild Wars 2’s “Explorer-friendly” questing, I cannot help but feel… confused. I understand that there are people out there that do not like traditional questing. That is fine. The problem presents itself when ArenaNet decides to go through the motions and try and placate those of us who like our themeparks to have, you know, themes. And let’s not kid ourselves: Guild Wars 2 is a themepark. Maybe one with a few sandbox rides, but a themepark all the same.
Rather than attempt to explain the problem again, and why it is a problem how ArenaNet is handling it, I am going to simply show you. My apologies to those with 16.6k baud modems.
Step 1, Start doing the Personal Story.
Step 2, decide you want to help farmers for a while.
Step 3, Get a little ahead of the curve.
Step 4, Start getting worried.
_________________________
[Edit: The following picture was accidentally left out of the series, and provides some much needed context for the remainder]
Step Missing Link, I have done all that you asked.
If the above is not immediately clear, I was looking at my map to see if there were Renown Heart quests undone in my endeavor to finish level 7 and start the next step in the Personal Story quest. The only available quests were set for level 8 characters, although I never saw what was down in the South-West. While it is possible to quest above your level, GW2 makes it abundantly clear that it takes levels very seriously – as evidenced enough by the fact the game will de-level you down to the “appropriate” level for questing to be challenging. [end-edit]
_______________________
Step 5, Just do it.
Step 6, Back to doing what you want to do.
Step 7, Have some fun.
Step 8, Go play another game.
To be clear, I have nothing against an Explorer-based leveling game, or one that allows you to reach max level solely by PvP or chain-running Events or even grinding mobs. Hell, I do not have anything against strict sandboxes either, even if I do not play them all that much.
The problem here is one of coherency. The Personal Story thus far is perfectly serviceable, all the way up to the point where you choose to attend a dinner party and discover you need to go play outside for an hour for an entirely arbitrary reason, e.g. you haven’t leveled enough. As Keidot pointed out in the comments yesterday, it does make a certain amount of theoretical sense to structure the game this way. If you can level solely by the instanced Personal Story quests, what is the point of the outside world? Grouping them up better (instead of spacing each quest out by 2 levels) could potentially leave you performing nation-defining epic actions by level 10, diminishing the weight of your future exploits. Clustering them sounds good, e.g. 1-10 and then 15-25 (etc), until you realize that there had better be 5+ levels of interesting grinding/Event activities to participate in.
I do not have an easy solution to this problem. And believe me, it is a problem. It is one thing to be given a vague motivation to go out and do random Renown (aka Heart) quests, and be satisfied. It is quite another to be following a storyline and then be constantly interrupted to complete tasks that have nothing at all to do with the storyline itself. People talk about joys of not having to read quest text anymore, and maybe they even believe that, but this sort of textual background radiation is what differentiates the character and tone of one MMO against another.
And nevermind what this suggests more generally about the designers’ (future) abilities to pace their own content.
Guild Wars 2: First Blood
So apparently I still pre-own Guild Wars 2.
Have you ever received a rebate check for a product you do not remember purchasing? That is about how I felt towards this Beta Weekend part deux. “Oh. This is still a thing, isn’t it?” I asked myself, rhetorically. “Better get on with it, then.”
When we last left our brave adventurer, I was on Point 5. So…
Point 6: You will never be as cool as me
Exhibit A:
Go ahead, you can stare.
I was tempted to leave that glamor-shot in its full resolution – you know, for the ladies – but it is already dubious as to whether the RSS feed can handle this level of BAMF, let alone with an extra thousand unfiltered pixels. Horatio Mazuma simply has that effect on people.
Point 7: Combat still feels… meh?
I spent a lot more time playing as the rogue Thief this time around, aka Horatio, and I am beginning to doubt the… legitimacy (for lack of a better term) of the combat system. When running around with double-daggers, your five skills are:
- Auto-attack.
- Heartseeker: Leap attack; more damage the less HP target has.
- Leaping Death Blossom: jump behind enemy, inflicting 3 Bleeds.
- Dancing Dagger: Ranged snare that bounces between 4 enemies.
- Cloak and Dagger: Inflict debuff and then stealth for 3 seconds.
Sounds cool, right? And it is. There is a kind of intuitive logic to those abilities, a sort of rhythm when you use them. Something woefully missing with many other weapon “combos.” For example, bust out a sword + pistol and you get:
- Auto-attack.
- Infiltrator’s Strike: Shadowstep to enemy, press again to teleport back to original location.
- Pistol Whip: Stun, then stab with sword.
- Black Powder: Basic shot + blinds nearby enemies.
- Head Shot: Basic shot + interrupt.
Those might sound alright, but in practice it just feels weird. None of those have a feeling of rotation or synergy, and it feels especially awkward to me when I couldn’t use Infiltrator’s Strike to “charge” to the next enemy because the return teleport option doesn’t go away for a long time. I suppose that this weapon combo may be better suited for PvP than PvE, now that I think about it. All I know is that the combat felt bad during this time period, and felt similarly bad when I was on the warrior unlocking other (possibly PvP) weapon skill sets.
Incidentally, the “play melee at your own risk” warning applies the same as before. I joined a “group” of players for a nearby event on two separate occasions with melee characters, and both times the mobs suddenly gained 2+ levels to “compensate” for the number of participants with predictably bad results. Nothing quite like running a level 6 event and then have a swarm of level 8 ghosts instantly spawn and mow down the front ranks.
Indeed, the more I experience the combat system in general, the less legitimate it comes across. Presumably you are supposed to be circle-strafing all the time to avoid positional damage, right? Or at least actively Dodging. But I am finding it incredibly difficult to ascertain the difference between a “Dodge this or else!” attack and a run-of-the-mill claw to the face attack. The mobs with a breath weapon? Sure, that’s simple. However, I am not in any particular mood to start memorizing the arbitrary Poker tells of a hundred different fantasy monsters when I am grinding XP yet again. In fact, let’s talk about that too.
Point 8: Quest Contortionist
By which I mean: the questing in Guild Wars 2 is disjointed.
You are given a “My Story” plot-driven series of quests which, at first blush, appears to be the “point” of the PvE game. There is some murder, some intrigue, a little treason, and enough hooks to get you to want to see where all this is going. But… you can’t. After finishing a quest wherein we decided to gather evidence against a particular government official, I found that the next step of the quest was 1.5 levels away. So… yeah. I opened my map, looked for a “quest heart” in my level range that wasn’t already filled in, and teleported to a field I knew bandits frequented so I could start farming the 0.5 levels I needed to gain before I could reasonably complete the quest hearts I found. Apparently there is an expectation that you will be filling in every heart and every Event in the area, or perhaps supplementing the XP gaps with WvWvW.
Or purchasing the +50% XP potions from the cash shop. Just sayin’.
Thing is, I did not care about these stupid farmers with their Israeli Settlements in centaur country. None of that had anything to do with the plot against the crown, which I was just in the middle of solving. Why am I out here again? There is zero connection. This is not equivalent to the sort of expansion-wide story arcs of WoW; this is literally a quest saying “I think Minister Wi was involved. Go gather evidence from that cave (Recommended level: 8).” And instead of doing that, I need to kill the spiders infesting the apple orchid because pies.
Point 9: Sharing is Caring
Remember how individual looting was the sort of wild-idea innovation that felt so good that you wonder why so many MMO companies did not jump on it earlier? Well, I have another one of those: individual resource nodes.
Genius!
If the picture is not clear enough, both myself and the esteemed Luke Duke [Ass] are mining the same Copper Ore node. As in, both of us are getting the customary 3 ore from this node. What makes this noteworthy is that to reach this node, we had to defeat 5-6 giant spiders to get there. Had this been, say, WoW or many other MMOs, I would have either glanced warily at my competition and went elsewhere, or attempted to ninja the node while Luke Duke [Ass] was occupied with spiders. Instead, we each had a common cause, a reason to work together, to get to the same exact location. It was 1+1 = 2, rather than the zero-sum game it typically is.
_________
More impressions about crafting and other miscellaneous items will have to wait.
The Pulitzer Prize for Videogame Narrative Goes to…
…Diablo 3, of course.
Super Meat Boy had just pulled ahead with the judges, until this narrative bomb dropped:
Technically, I guess this constitutes a spoiler…?
Do not let that last line wash over you; let it sink in. “Auriel, archangel of Hope, has been captured by Rakanoth, the Lord of Despair.” Hope had been captured by Despair! Is there a word to describe a metaphor so superficial and goddamn literal that it becomes a mockery unto itself?
All I can think of is “nadir.”
Neither the Diablo series¹ nor the hack-n-slash genre is exactly known for their compelling narratives, and that is fine. Campiness has its place, and that is fine too. But the shit Diablo 3 attempts to pull with a completely straight face is simply ridiculous, bordering on insulting. It feels like placeholder plot, especially in a severely truncated Act IV.
Take, for example, the exchange I posted above. Scroll of Fate? What does it add to this story that such a thing exists, or that the character is outside of it? I am not talking about the idea of a Scroll of Fate and an unbounded main character – that is perfectly fine as a story device, such as in Kingdoms of Amalur, etc – but the Diablo series has never been about that. Remove that bit of dialog (please), and nothing materially changes about the narrative. Maybe there is a tie-in between the prophesy at the beginning of the game and this Scroll of Fate, but that link is so tenuous that the writer is either being too subtle by half, or in wont of an editor with a backbone.
And then there is the Enchantress, whom is introduced as a character by being a wizard kept in stasis for 1,500 years to aid the hero in his/her prophesied time of need. While there was apparently a legitimate attempt to have this add something to the story, I could not help but think that maybe the Prophet should have let the Archangel of Fate look at his crib notes since the hero was apparently featured in them.
It could be that all of this is a setup to an expansion (or two) in which we explore all the random, seemingly banal things the companions said. But, again, that would necessitate a level of subtlety on the part of the writer(s) that is simply incongruent with the John Madden-ning the Prime Evils do throughout every step of Acts II-IV. “What’s that, Diablo? I will never close your portals to Hell? I will never close your other portal to Hell? I will never make it past your lieutenant? I will never make it to you in time? I will never actually read in-game text that is not magic item properties after this and all subsequent playthroughs?”
Damn, you’re good.
¹ I realize that this is actually an arguable point. As one forum poster described, the narrative was much more poetic and Biblical throughout (most of) D2 at a minimum. The Moldy Tome, for instance.
Console Exclusives Need to Go
It is 2012. We should not be living in a world in which I cannot play The Last of Us without buying a six year-old, $250 console. I mean, look at this:
Metal Gear 4 wasn’t enough, but goddamn if The Last of Us pushes me to it. Probably not really, but who knows what kind of holiday sales there will be between now and then. Hopefully one that includes the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD pack, MGS4, and… err, the Uncharted series? Am I missing something else exclusive to the PS3 worth playing?
Also, looking forward to Far Cry 3. Luckily, it will be on the PC.
The Diablo 3 AH is Dumb
The Auction House in Diablo 3 is stupid. By which I mean dumb. Idiotic, even. Both Auction House and whoever designed it. And not because of what it may or may not do to the entire balance of the game, but because it is poorly designed period.
You can sort by Buyout price, but not Bid price. Presumably the latter is disabled because the Bid mechanic itself is broken. Much like eBay, you specify your top bid amount and then things are auto-bidded up until someone has the new highest bid. Except the Bid price is not updated in the main auction pane, nor is it reliably updated when you hit refresh. The only true method of discerning the new high bid is to bid once so that it goes to your Auctions page and looking at it there.
By the way, you cannot sort by Time Left either. At first, I thought Blizzard was doing this for our own sakes so as to not recreate the eBay-esque last-second sniper fields. But it occurs to me that the sellers actually win when people do last-second bid wars; the losers would be Blizzard themselves when they get 100,000 people spamming the Refresh button and eating up all their bandwidth.
The AH has a 46-page limit. It is thus possible that if you are searching for any old magic weapon in your level range, sorting by lowest buyout price may leave you with no auctions with buyout prices at all since “null = lowest.” If you want to ONLY look at auctions with buyout prices, you will need to specify a maximum price. Put something cheeky in there like 10,000,000g or whatever, and then sort from there.
Want to sort by weapon DPS? Good luck.
Because that makes sense.
Apparently the “Sort by DPS” script only looks at at the vanilla weapon DPS without factoring in any bonuses, such as +damage or +weapon speed. Which would be one thing, if some secondary script did not compute that exact thing in the DPS column. So if you are using this method to look for weapon upgrades, make sure you check several pages in to be sure some errant +10% weapon damage stat doesn’t outclass all of the items on the first two pages. And, of course, don’t forget how your class’s primary stat will likely further affect things.
Also, big props for the Blizzard designer who thought it would be a keen idea to have the Repair All button not apply to items in your Stash. Since you cannot sell items on the AH with durability damage, it becomes a fun Hide-n-Seek mouse-over minigame (or a Memory one, I suppose) each time you are forced back into the game when the item you want to sell has 48/49 durability.
In other news, I beat the game on Normal with the Monk. Because, hey, Barbarian was fun but I have played the first Act nearly a dozen times already. The pop-up after the final boss reminded me of something though…
Must have been brothers from another mother.
My current time /played says 14 hours and 5 minutes, but that includes however long it took to breeze through Skeleton King in Nightmare. I remember the very first zombie in Diablo 2 kicking my Necromancer’s ass in Nightmare – the weakness of any skeleton army build is needing unused skeletons – but perhaps my ill-gotten AH goods have been keeping me ahead of the curve. Or perhaps the difficulty wall is down the road.
Regardless, I will probably keep playing the Monk until I’m forced to kite as a melee character, at which point I either see if I can stomach another character through the campaign or simply play something else more deserving of my time, as the case may be.
In Fairness
If it appears as though I am being unduly harsh towards Diablo 3, it is probably because I am juggling at least two other extremely fun games simultaneously: Tribes Ascend and Battlefield 3. My normal M.O. is to focus on one game to the exclusion of all others until completion, perhaps for this very reason, e.g. I start making unfair comparisons. Do I really want to gain 7 levels on the Witch Doctor to get a summon that won’t die instantly to mob packs, or do I want to charge through a photo-realistic shooter and knife that cocky sniper right in his camping throat?
Also, explosions.
This sort of thing just happens.
So what has been going on lately is a division my time between those three games. And since I have already covered my Diablo 3 experiences, it seems only fair to talk about the other two.
Tribes Ascend Impressions
I never played any of the prior Tribes titles, although I know of them by reputation. After many weeks of suggestion, a friend of mine finally convinced me to download this ostensively F2P title. I cannot speak of the fidelity of the experience as compared to the past games, but I do find it quite enjoyable.
The biggest thing I want to mention though, is how HiRez handles the F2P side of the game.
It is, in a word, insidious.
Right up front, they tell you that if you become a VIP member, i.e. spend any amount of money, you will get a permanent 50% boost to XP gains. While I am typically inoculated to the sort of XP boosters that are common in F2P-land, the knowledge that for every match that I waffled on the issue would be half a match’s worth of XP lost got under my skin right away. Indeed, considering that you can unlock classes/upgrades/weapons with either XP or gold (RMT), it felt like a decision between a double whammy or double rainbow. And the $10 minimum buy-in? Seemed reasonable anyway.
And that’s when the thumbscrews come out.
First, there is a “deal of the day” that discounts anything from a weapon to a class to anything inbetween by 25-50% gold. Then, you get a +1200 XP bonus from your first win of the day. So already it is giving me the same vibe I get from Steam, wherein I feel like I need to at least log on for a few minutes to see what’s what. Getting that first win is not always forthcoming, and while you are stewing on an embarrassing loss, you get to thinking about that 240 gold (~$3 at the worst exchange) or 100,000 XP (~29 VIP matches or 45 free ones) weapon that would wildly change the nature of whatever class you like. Or whether you should go ahead and splurge a few thousand XP and upgrade your current gear to get extra grenades or armor or whatever.
The game is still fun, and it is great that you can go check it out for yourself to see if it’s your own cup of tea, but I vastly prefer these F2P game companies to NOT have my number down to the second decimal place. For my own protection.
Battlefield 3 Impressions
Meanwhile, BF3 can have all my digits, if you know what I’m saying.
Now that I think about it, things are oddly coincidental. Freshman year of college, I came to the dorms with my big bulky Gateway computer loaded with Diablo 2. Then I was introduced to Battlefield 2 my Junior year and played it with a depth of intensity that rivaled even my most solipsistic WoW days. And now the circle is complete.
In any case, there were some concessions made in BF3 to the CoD movement – the removal of the Commander role being the largest – but trying to sneak around the backside of a tank to plant some C4 while jets dog-fight in the air above you is exactly the same. Indeed, what has been the most difficult part of the acclimation process is training yourself to ignore the wildly amazing graphics and actually find the dudes you are supposed to shoot at.
Also, you die really fast. Bullets are OP. Until you are shooting them, then it sometimes feels like you’re shooting a Terminator.
That guy won’t be back.
Technically BF3 has the same sort of unlocking mechanism Tribes does – complete with “shortcut bundle packs” for a whopping $40 – although it feels in no way necessary. As much fun as I will have once I finally unlock Claymores, I am having plenty fun already with the “base” classes.
One of the things I have always loved in BF2 that is back in full force is the incentivising of teamwork. Killing a guy results in 100 XP, with headshots adding +10 XP. If you notify your team about a hostile soldier’s location (i.e. look at them and press Q) and someone else kills them, you get 10 XP. Shoot at a dude in cover, while your teammate circles around back and kills him? 50 XP. Help cap a flag? 200-250 XP for making the flag neutral, and another 200-250 XP for capturing it. Giving your teammates ammo or health packs is 10-20 XP per tick. If a member of your 4-person squad chooses to spawn at your location instead of a normal spawn point, you get 10 XP. Reviving a teammate as the medic ahem, “Assault” class is 100 XP. And so on.
In a very real sense, this is exactly the genius of the series. You do not have to be a pro-shooter with lightning reflexes to A) have the most points, or B) make a difference. You can lead the boards by going 0-10 and simply playing support to those with better shooting skills than yourself. More importantly, matches are not All or Nothing, zero-sum affairs. You can lose and still come out with more XP than most of the players on the winning side. This is the way I wish more MMOs were. Things would need to be tweaked, of course, but what exactly is the point of the winners walking away with three times the Honor of the losers? I join a lost-cause match in BF3 and you know what? I fight exactly the same as if we had a chance, because that is what’s fun and I won’t be punished for “wasting” my time.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see if I feel the same a month down the line, as I acknowledge that my spiritual experiences with Battlefield 2 might be overwhelming the rational centers of my brain concerning the sequel.
So far, very good.
Design Notes I Like to See
From the latest Dev Blog:
That said, we also wanted to let you know we’re keeping a close eye on Inferno. The intent of incoming damage is that it should be a very consistent drain on your health, and mitigating that drain is a major part of what makes Inferno mode difficult. Right now, there’s a lot more damage “spikiness” occurring than feels right, and that’s one major area we’re looking to adjust in patch 1.0.3. While we don’t have any specifics yet, our design goals are to support and promote build diversity; continue to ensure that a mix of champion packs, rare packs, and boss fights are the most efficient way to acquire the best items in the game; and ensure that all classes are viable in Inferno.
[…]
We’ve also seen some people saying our intention with Inferno is just one-shot you to make it difficult. While damage is a bit spikier than we’d like, we’re actually seeing a pretty significant number of people attempting Inferno without sufficient gear. There’s a good chance that returning to the previous Act to farm upgrades will do the most to help you survive. That said, we’d like to shift some of the focus away from survival and more toward using a variety of offensive tactics to succeed. Survival will still be important, but finding ways to maximize your damage while staying alive is more exciting. We’re not particularly concerned with whether or not a boss is “beatable,” though it should feel epic and challenging to defeat it. We’re more concerned with ensuring that acquiring 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor and taking on as many Champions and Rares as you can remains the most challenging and rewarding way to play.
And then there is this bit about the crafting:
Other areas of concern have been both the gem combination system and Blacksmith leveling and crafting costs. The intent, especially with the Blacksmith, is that he’s leveling with you, you’re able to use him as an alternate source for upgrades. Our design goal is that once you get to level 60, his recipes are actually good enough to help fill a character’s potential itemization gaps. To correct these issues, we’re looking to adjust the Blacksmith costs for training (gold and pages) and crafting from levels 1-59, and reduce the cost of combining gems so that it only requires two gems instead of three (up to Flawless Square). Both of these changes are scheduled for patch 1.0.3.
I had been avoiding crafting altogether because A) what’s the point when you have access to the AH, and B) what’s the point when vendoring magic items is more profitable than Salvaging them? Then again, the Commodities portion of the AH has been down since launch (I believe) and I am somewhat convinced it was precisely to get people to do their own crafting/salvaging.
In any case, after hearing the news that maybe the endgame isn’t supposed to be about endlessly kiting mobs around, I leveled up the Monk up to 17 to get Seven-Sided Strike. Decently fun ability. While I was moving talents around, I decided to give Crippling Wave another try as my left-click ability now that I unlocked a Rune for it. As soon as I did this, I ran into a pack of the flying wasp creatures and proceeded to get kited the fuck around. I cannot imagine a worse feeling than getting kited around by a mob in a hack-n-slash game.
So I logged back onto the Witch Doctor, looking for that cave with the first piece of the sword. As I was walking around, I encountered one of those bull-like creatures with the charge attack. That one move by an otherwise unremarkable mob one-shot my Zombie Dogs.
All of them.
Translation: Fuck this game.
While on the level 6 Wizard, it occurred to me that I have no particular desire to kite things. If a bunch of zombie torsos leap (!) out of the bushes, I do not want my first instinct to be to Frost Nova and left-click myself away. Nor do I want to wait for however many levels it takes to get the spells necessary to actually deal what feels like some legitimate damage.
So I did the only thing left of me. I uninstalled rolled Barbarian.
Two Lords A-Leaping~
Now, this? This feels good.
P.S. And this doesn’t look bad either.
Baby WoW
I am about five hours into Diablo 3, and I think I am done with the game.
What’s wrong? Two words: “baby WoW.”
Issue 3: “Baby WoW”
As I was playing co-op with an ex-WoW friend, he uttered “baby WoW” as the description of what these sort of games made him feel like he was playing. And you know what? I’m starting to feel the same. That is kind of the whole schtick of hack-n-slash, of course, the mowing down of corridors of mobs while you mop up the loot debris field in the wake of your passing. It is also tough to criticize spam-clicking in a world of rote ability rotations and the common “strategy” you develop for the execution of the average MMO mob.
At the same time, while I was going through Diablo 3 I could not help but feel somewhat patronized. This Skinner Box lever is completely unadorned. Of course, if you prefer yours fast and loose, then get ready to go to town; I may just turn in for the night instead, if its all the same to you.
That was written about a month ago in my Diablo 3 Beta preview. I am not sure what exactly I was expecting to be different between then and now… perhaps that my perspective would change? As I mentioned in that article, I am a storied veteran of the hack-n-slash genre, so my present disposition towards the gameplay is somewhat surprising. Or maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, given that the bulk of my H&S resume was pre-MMO.
What really drove the point home though, was when I decided to look into the crystal ball and see what my level 16 monk had to look forward to in Inferno difficulty. First, came the forum posts which lamented a blunt non-viability. Then came the Youtube videos.
Compare:
Part 2 (of 4) Monk killing one elite pack in Act 4. It takes him over 10 minutes of kiting.
Witch Doctor in Act 2. Sure looks fun.
Wizard in Act 2.
The reoccurring theme here is kiting. Lots and lots of kiting. Now, I am not here to denigrate the skill it takes to kite properly. I am simply saying: kiting is not my idea of compelling gameplay. Kiting to allow your abilities to come off cooldown is worse. Kiting in a game where by default left-clicking an area could root you in place and attack the very mob you are trying to get away from is worse still. Diablo 3 is not a movement game. This is not an MMO like Guild Wars 2 or (presumably) TERA wherein you have Dodge buttons and position is important.
There appears to be only two distances in Diablo 3: Immune in Melee or Running Away.
You may rightly ask “Why let this bother you?” After all, I just zoned into Act II and am only level 16. It could very well be that I beat Normal mode once and then uninstall. And the answer I would give would be “I’m not having fun right now.” The abilities so far on the Monk are boring to me. Fists of Thunder + Thunderclap Rune was great when I got it… at level 6. Since that time, I am still waiting for something new to “change” my gameplay in a comparable way. And it is looking as though if such a skill exists, I won’t be getting it until well past the end of the game.
So… yeah.
For now, I started a Witch Doctor in the hopes I will have enough fun summoning zombie dogs and spiders and such to last me until the end of the game. I would have started out with the Witch Doctor originally, but when the Skeleton King one-shot my 60 second cooldown in the Beta, I sort of figured that that play-style would not be viable later on. If that is still the case, well, I will be jumping off that bridge when I get to it.
Memorial Day Sales
In case you haven’t seen them yet, there are a bunch of sales going on this weekend.
There is a fledgling new indie game marketplace called Because We May. Until June 1st, all of the games up there are 50% off or better. Those include:
- World of Goo ($2.99)
- Osmos ($2.99)
- The Binding of Isaac ($1.99)
- Psychonauts ($4.99)
- Q.U.B.E. ($7.49)
- Cthulhu Saves the World & Breath of Death VII Double Pack ($1.49)
- Dungeon Defenders ($7.49)
EA finally got (one of) the memo(s) about why Origin is terrible compared to Steam, and now all (four) Origin games are 50% off. This includes:
- Mass Effect 3 ($29.99 but see below)
- Battlefield 3 ($29.99)
- BF3: Back to Karkand DLC ($7.49)
Amazon is also a place where sales occur:
- Syndicate ($17.99)
- Total War: Shogun 2 ($7.49)
- Mass Effect 3 ($25.99)
- Saints Row the Third ($16.49)
- Mirror’s Edge ($4.99)
Finally, Steam appears to be selling EVE for $6.80 again. Still not pulling the trigger just yet.
In An Age 
Shooting the Moon
May 25
Posted by Azuriel
As you may have heard, the companies behind Kingdoms of Amalur and the followup MMO are basically out of business. While I am sensitive to the dangers of schadenfreude, and loath to quote the same guy twice in three days, there was something about Keen’s final good-luck paragraph that struck me oddly:
Kotaku is reporting that 38 Studios only would have been saved if Amalur sold 3 million copies.
Let that sink in. Three million copies or bust. Depending on who you ask, Amalur sold between 400k and 1 million.
I dunno, I am of two minds on the implicit lament in Keen’s quote. I do consider it a serious problem that the barrier to entry for RPGs (and games in general) has gotten so high as to choke out all but the biggest studios. Remember the thousands of garbage NES games on the shelves back in the early 90s? Most were bad, but at least it appeared as though someone with a good game concept had a realistic chance of getting their cartridge on store shelves.
On the other hand? I feel like it is a bit unrealistic. It is easy to hate on Call of Duty when a “new” one is pumped out every year… but Black Ops sold 25 million copies. MW3 made $1 billion in 16 days, and that was seven months ago; god only knows how much it’s up to now.
Desiring fresh and new things is fine, but it’s code for “I’m not getting catered to.” At some point, you have to ask “Who can afford to cater to me?” If Amalur’s direction was your thing, good for you, but the market clearly couldn’t support it. So… Curt Schilling should have settled for less, designing a less expensive game with a lower break-even point. But would any of us have been satisfied with that? Would you be fine playing an indie-level MMO or other game? Would you be willing to lower your (obviously high) standards to meet the developers making the actual games you’re talking about?
I am probably not coming across very clear; in fact, if any of that makes sense to you, let me know, because it kinda doesn’t make sense to me. It is just that whenever I see a lament about how a “horrible MMO will see the light of day” as compared to presumably a good one on the cutting-room floor, I cannot help but shake the “Whose fault is that?” retort. The publisher? The fans? Or our own unreasonable expectations?
Whatever the case, I always a respect for those who attempt to shoot the moon. Win or lose, you always leave with a story – which is more than most.
Posted in Commentary
6 Comments
Tags: 38 Studios, Curt Schilling, Kingdoms of Amalur, Potential, Shooting the Moon