In retrospect, I’ve decided to limit “ignored forum posts” to the subject of computer games.  After covering the topic of Eugenics, Insanity, and Intelligence vs Age, I realized that I’m just coming off as pretentious and overly self-interested.  Besides, I’ve already a fairly formidable stake in covering gaming, which is my primary hobby anyway, so I’d best stick to the subject of games alone.

While I’m at it, I think I’ll jump back over to my blogger spot over at geldonsgaming.blogspot.com.

WordPress.com is a very effective hosting solution for blogging, their Digg integration was one of the many features that brought me here, but I am a bit bothered that they won’t let me edit my CSS without paying, nor monetize in any way while inserting their own advertising.  The WordPress guys might be the coolest cats on the Internet but, dude, 100% of the take plus pay you for most customizations is not a fair trade for content generation, even factoring in hosting and the WordPress software.

I blame you, Internet.

Right now, I’m taking a usability class mostly focused on making Internet websites.   We’re told that the best way to design a website to be usable is based off of 3 laws of Steve Krug‘s:

1. “Don’t make me think.”
2. “It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.”
3. “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what is left.”

The bottom line, according to this foremost authority on Internet usability, is that Internet users are to be regarded as ignorant fools who are too busy to be bothered to apply themselves towards anything.

Just how far this extends is hard to say.  Internet forums certainly reflect this mentality.  But what about popular media?  I could certainly name quite a few pieces of music, movies, TV, books, ect that are primarily targeting the stupid.

To think that the human race has come down to this.  Well, I’m not going to adapt a “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude.  I’m going to take the higher road of developing my own software that works on these usability rules:

1. “The user may not want to think, but can be warmed up to the idea if you go about it carefully.”

2. “Delivering a shallow experience just so the user won’t be intimidated is an inconsequential achievement versus delivering a deep experience in bite-sized pieces.”

Why?  Because Krug’s approach is why we got ourselves into this fix to begin with.  When you encounter idiocy, you should be attempting to educate it, not enable it.

Perhaps it’s time I move on to some other platforms?

I’ve been solely a PC user for awhile, and I wonder if this might be part of the problem.  Though we have our exceptions (e.g. Braid) it seems like the larger body of American PC developers are addicted to the shallow cash grab.  Maybe what happened was that the majority of the smart American developers left the pirate-infested PC market?

Out of a desperation (I was morbidly depressed for hanging around a GameStop for over an  hour and not liking any of the games for my current platforms) I bought a PSP over the weekend.

I haven’t regretted the purchase.  A lot of these games are more satisfying than the kinds of games I’ve been exposed to lately.  I’m not wapanese (I’ve also run into some good European and Russian titles lately) but I’m afraid the prevalence of Japanese titles may be a large part of this.   It’s reassuring to know that the American cash grab addiction has not fully infused the developers in all other countries on Earth yet.  (Granted, Nintendo’s focus on the casual as of late indicates the infection is spreading.)

My success with the PSP, coupled with my noticing how much of its content is online distributed, clues me towards another likely source of awesome.

I now deeply suspect I’ve put off going to the iPod/iPhone/iPad platform for too long.  I hope to have enough money set aside to get an iPad when they come out in a few months.

Who knows?  Maybe I’ll even become a developer for the software for that platform.  In the meanwhile, I’ll continue working in BYOND.  It is, at least, quite good for prototyping.  Developing an incredible innovative game is tough, but I have found a far easier goal: developing simply to get better at developing.

If I owned a PS3, then there would be Heavy Rain.  No big loss: I’m not sure it does anything that Shenmue didn’t already do better (except graphics… and that’s hardly surprising considering Shenmue was originally developed for the Dreamcast).

The two big PC games to be excited about over the later half of the month were M.U.D. TV and Supreme Commander 2.  I’ve played the demos of both games, and I’m not impressed.

M.U.D. TV’s main problem is that it has an overly monotonous interface. You manually click to walk your avatar from room to room. Each room’s task is essentially setting up queues.

You walk over to the elevator down to the lobby.  You walk over to the advertising agency and pick up some advertising contracts.  You walk over to another room to buy employees (“wage slaves”) and TV shows.  You walk over to the elevator back up to your TV studio.  You walk over to the archive room to drag your contracts and shows to the archive.  You walk over to your executive office to set up the scheduling of those shows long with the commercials.  Repeat until sick of it – later chapters will merely add more places to walk.

When push comes to shove, the game would have been better served by a GUI that simply gives you a large TV scheduling grid with the ability to pick up/develop new shows and advertising on the side.  This would have prevented a lot of cutesy multimedia from manifesting, but these aspects entertain for only a few seconds anyway.

Supreme Commander 1 started with Total Annihilation‘s excellent mechanic of allowing you to queue a number of orders in advance (regardless of if you had the resources for them at the time of queuing).  Then it added formations and the ability to do this seamless zooming out to an orbital view and back to tactical view to get to where you want.

Supreme Commander 2 starts off on the right foot with a specialized research tree that simultaneously streamlines out the admittedly redundant 3-Tier unit system.  I also sort of appreciated how you no longer need to build storage to increase the cap on the amount of energy and mass you can hold.

However, it’s all downhill from there:

• You can no longer queue orders in advance because it requires an immediate investment of resources you may not have.   This makes it impossible to queue up elaborate base building orders beyond the first few units.
• The ability to get units to move in  formations appears to have been removed.  They will automatically attempt to form their own formations… but this removes vital player investment.
• The experimental units are a lot weaker, if easier to build.  This really removes the whole mystique behind them, as well as their value as a stalemate breaker.
• You’re no longer able to zoom out and in as accurately or as far out as in the original – the perspective has been shrunk.
• Even the coloring of the units seems a bit overly toy like – that only reinforces the overall feeling that the sequel has been dumbed down.

Supreme Commander was worthy of the name because you felt like a Supreme Commander.  You had a great deal of power to use as you see fit, and with great power comes the great responsibility that you could really screw up badly if you were careless.   Supreme Commander 2 does the opposite, it severely diminishes the power you have to issue orders specifically to prevent you from overextending yourself.   The result feels a lot more like a standard RTS.   Having lost a great deal of what made it unique, Supreme Commander 2 carries only a tentative grasp on the title, at best.

Games As Unflattering Social Commentary

It worries me.  What is it that motivates a largely Indy developer such as Gas Powered Games to gut the core niche from one of their main franchises in order to conform to a simpler, mediocre standard of gameplay?

The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that their target audience is just a whole lot stupider now than they were 12 years ago when they released Total Annihilation.

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of X-Com Apocolypse, another 12-year-old game, and grimly noticing that it has oodles more depth and sophistication than games I have played in years.  I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time: gaming satisfaction.

When the entire gaming development world seems to be bent on developing shallower and simpler games, it brings about a crisis of confidence.  Maybe the professionals who make games these days are right.  Maybe I’m wasting my time trying to develop my own game to counter this.  Maybe today’s gaming audience really is that much stupider now than they were 12 years ago.

• Two weeks ago, Star Trek Online was released.  I had voiced earlier that I was concerned it lacks a sense of “fundamental purpose” that makes a MMORPG interesting.  Recently, I decided that this is due to a lack of immersion.  I’ve asked for a refund for my lifetime subscription and hope that Cryptic Studios is willing to oblige (if not, it will at least linger as a powerful lesson).
• One week ago, I had finished Mass Effect 2.  I spoke at length about it: good enough to finish, a qualified continuation of the original, but with some design decisions that made have soured my optimism for Mass Effect 3.
• I then moved on to BioShock 2, which was eagerly consumed in the space of a couple days.   It was a enjoyable experience that managed to upgrade the original BioShock in nearly every single way.  I only wish there was something left of it to play.  (The multiplayer was ambitiously executed but passe.)
• This weekend, I purchased Fort Zombie (discounted to $2.50 on Direct2Drive at the time of this writing) and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat (fresh to Steam this weekend).  These turned out to be excellent acquisitions whose use of dynamic content and immersion (respectively but not exclusively) put MMORPGs to shame.

I called this entry “A Criteria For Excellence” because I think that being exposed to all these games lately has sort of solidified a better-than-usual understanding of the kind of games I’m genuinely interested in playing.  Games which take themselves seriously, with reasonably deep and satisfying gameplay, and ideally with dynamic content that enables a good amount of replayability.

Consequently, the number of games I’m willing to purchase has drastically decreased.  I’ve a mental lens that only picks out a specific kind of diamond out of the rough now.  Most modern MMORPGs lack adequate immersion to be virtual worldly enough to be worth a monthly subscription.  Games in general are simply affairs whose casual player focus excludes me handily.

Games like Spelunky, Dwarf Fortress, or Fort Zombie have shown the way.   Without enough alternatives, I should really return to my own game development.

Speaking of which, while BYOND is generally where I want to be (a tile-based multiplayer native platform) I recently made good on purchasing a Student Edition of Above Creative Suite 4 Web Premium while I was still in school.   As long Adobe’s educational activation department doesn’t find me disqualified for it somehow, I’ll soon have a very powerful professional suite of game development to look forward to learning the ins and outs of.

While Mass Effect 2 is generally lauded as the superior product, I would say it’s more of a matter of give and take between the two games.

• One annoying aspect of Mass Effect 1 was the cumbersome inventory.   Mass Effect 2 compensates by eliminating the inventory entirely and replacing it with an upgrade mechanism.  I’m grateful for the lack of bloat, but disappointed in the resulting hit to depth.
• Traveling the planet surface in Mass Effect 1 involved a great deal of cumbersome driving.  Mass Effect 2 removed planet travel entirely.   You take a shuttle directly to your destinations, and ore is recovered via a simple mini-game.   It feels as though a substantial mode of play is missing, making Mass Effect 2 feels like half a game compared to the first.
• Mass Effect 2 improved the ground skirmish experience via a locational damage and reloading mechanic.   However, it changed so radically that it feels like a different game entirely.  The underlying RPG mechanics are as comparatively dumbed down as the new inventory is.
• There’s an overall shortage of content.   I completely exhausted the content of the game (there’s nothing left to do at all anywhere in the game universe) with all the current DLC available installed.  It took a little less than 21 hours.(Exploration missions are very minimal, with only about a half-dozen separate arcs of 1-3 missions to be found.   Most of the content is related to the recruiting and loyalty missions behind party members.   The main quest in Mass Effect 2′s is actually pretty short and forces the player to go through the party recruiting/loyalty arcs to compensate.)
• As a consequence of the main quest being so short, Mass Effect 2′s story is not as nearly as deep or gripping as the original.  Though I’ve read reviews that praise the ending of Mass Effect 2, I felt it was barely satisfactory.

Overall, Mass Effect 2 flows better, but it lacks substance.  Compared to the first game, the experience has less sense of exploring virtual space and more simply hammering through scenarios.  If this is what we have to look forward to in Mass Effect 3, the magic of the original may have been lost forever.

• Was it because I’ve enough geek in me to have a thing for Star Trek?
  No, but I’m sure that helped.
• Was it because the gameplay is fairly tolerable – a rarity for an MMORPG?
  No, but this, too, probably helped.
• Was it because I have great and unwavering faith in Cryptic Studios?
  No, after Champions Online, Cryptic Studios /cons dubious to me.
• Was it because I believed I would honestly get ($240 divided by $15/mo) 16 months of play out of this?
  No, that would really surprise me.

Honestly, it was mostly a combination being curious about what owning a lifetime subscription to a major MMORPG would be like and having mentioned (both here and on the official forums) that I’d never pay a periodic subscription for an MMORPG again.

I knew exactly what I was getting to, and yet, I still have some buyer’s remorse… the main trouble is that this game lacks so many of those important, yet subtle, MMORPG touches.

• There’s no real virtual worldly landmarks – even where you can find landmarks, there’s an infinite number of copies to make each landmark feel insubstantial.
• Lacking landmarks, I feel as though I’ll never really bump into other players as I would in an old fashioned MMORPG.
• The other players’ presence is quickly mentally streamlined out of lack of necessity.  Perhaps because the balance is set in such a way that you need them for nothing.
• As is usually the case, there’s no real dynamic content: barring developer additions, the universe never changes.  The only thing that changes is your character as they climb to the maximum level.  As far as a true RPG narrative goes, it lacks.

The above video, which is a parody of MMORPG gameplay, demonstrates how a sort of camaraderie builds in a true virtual space.  That I feel this is missing is the true source of my buyer’s remorse: it’s just not as fun having a lifetime subscription to a game that lacks the essential point of what makes an MMORPG feel like one.

So, knowing that they have obliged requests in the past, why don’t I go ask Cryptic Studios for my money back?  It’s because there is no alternatives to look forward to.  Take it or leave it, this what all new MMORPGs are like these days: heavily instanced, completely static, and casually accessible to the point of losing themselves.

Maybe it’s not true buyer’s remorse.  Maybe I’d make the same choice again now.  $240 for a lifetime subscription?  What an excellently frugal idea – an extra expensive subscription whose main purpose is to powerfully remind you why you need never purchase another MMORPG subscription in your lifetime.

Who were the lucky purveyors of fine entertainment who managed to weasel yet more cash out of this student?  Bioshock 2 and two animes from Kyoto Animation.

I mentioned that good games like Mass Effect 2 come around maybe once or twice in a year.  Here we are in January and I’ve encountered the second such game: 2KGame’s BioShock 2.  Perhaps I should revise my statement to say a half-dozen?

2KGame’s BioShock, released in 2007 (I can’t believe that it’s been 2 1/2 years) was a game that told a very compelling story of a secret underwater Utopia called Rapture.  It was created by a society of artists, engineers, and scientists who embraced the Ann Randian principles of eschewing all government and religious interference in favor of personal gain.  It was, of course, ultimately doomed…

From the perspective of an accidental visitor in the 1960s, what awaited a player of BioShock was an unforgettable experience.  There were many incredible sights to be had and a plot that featured an incredible twist that I would hate to ruin.   Best of all, the game itself was pretty damn good… although the balance was not flawless, with supplies being a bit too easy to come by (for survival horror) and dying being largely inconsequential.

Bioshock 2 is the sequel, placing the player in a different perspective entirely, taking place some time after the original and giving us a continuation upon an already marvelous story.   We now play a whole new protagonist who has a completely different role in Rapture: as an important part of it instead of as an invader.   Also included is a new multiplayer mode that puts the player in the role of a citizen of Rapture being tasked to be a product tester in the form of open PvP scenarios.

2KGames went well above simply tacking on the end of the first game, and I expect BioShock 2 to be a good investment of 50 entertainment dollars.

Of the two Kyoto Animation animes I picked up, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is undoubtedly the more cerebral.   I managed to get the complete first season for $38 off Amazon.  A fair bargain, to be sure: it’s very hard to find 380 minutes of English dubbed anime for that price!

For the most part, this is a slice-of-life anime centered on Haruhi Suzumiya, an unusually-energetic high school girl bothered by the mundane realities of life.   The story is told from the perspective of Kyon, an unusually rational but otherwise normal high school boy for whom Haruhi would seem to have an attachment on despite his annoyance at her irrational behavior.

At Kyon’s accidental suggestion, Haruhi forms an unauthorized high school club, the S.O.S. Brigade, with an official goal of “finding aliens, time-travelers, and ESP users and having fun with them.”  On surface, it’s really more or less Haruhi bullying those around her into performing everyday activities that strike her as fun, but beneath the surface a unique supernatural story becomes apparent.

The other members of the S.O.S. brigade soon reveal themselves to Kyon as being members of different agencies who are carefully monitoring Haruhi.  It seems that she has a mysterious power to change the fabric of reality to her subconscious whims, kept in check only by her being a generally sensible girl who is completely unaware of her power.   Keeping Haruhi from having such melancholy as to reject reality is important, otherwise the entire universe may be remade overnight!

If there was a Harry Potter tailor-made for Japanese audiences, it would be this: part high school slice-of-life, part supernatural thriller, part soap opera drama, and part excuse to see cute, well-animated anime girls in zany situations.  It’s little wonder this anime was so wildly popular.

There is a second season, but it’s not up for sale in the U.S.  It’s probably just as well, because the second season is largely just a remastered version of the first season.   There are new episodes in the second season, but eight of them are actually just the same episode retold 8 times with different clothing and perspectives, a deliberate plot device that probably should have been 5 episodes shorter.

For those looking for more Haruhi Suzumiya outside of the anime, there’s quite a few mangas and light novels.   I can recommend the light novels – though they are quite succinct in their Japanese to English translation, there’s a certain enjoyable quality to them.  A full-length movie based off of one of the light novels, the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, is in development.

I picked up the Lucky Star OVA from Amazon for about $16, but I was not able to get the complete series because they pulled the more typical move of breaking the series up into 3-episode DVDs that they sell for $26 a pop.  The actual English dub is very well done, which might account for the higher price.

I think a good way to look at Lucky Star is with consideration towards the Golden Girls, as there’s a definite symmetry: just as the Golden Girls explored the humor of being past their prime, the Lucky Star girls pick up the opposite age spectrum of being girls in high school before their prime.  There’s a sort of off-the-wall humor to everyday situations encountered by people in an off-center age range.

While the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was more cerebral, I have to say that the Lucky Star series is more likely to be one that I would enjoy watching over and over again more.   Perhaps this is because Lucky Star is a rapid-fire comedy show that changes gears more often.  It also includes a “lucky channel” bonus segment at the end of each episode that features a burnt-out pop idol anime girl and her long-suffering assistant.  Even the unique credit sequences of bad karaoke are enjoyable to watch.

The last episode was a genius series finale, but it’s too bad it was so well wrapped up: I would like to see more Lucky Star.

No, I’m more concerned that I spent perhaps a quarter of a budget that was intended to last me 5 months on a week.  Some of this was for my books, which is commendable enough.  The rest largely went to eating out (a decidedly lazy habit of mine) and entertainment expenses.

I’ve plenty to entertain me already, and could probably entertain myself regardless, and therefore any entertainment purchase is hard to justify.  However, I like to think that, at least as far as entertainment expenses go, I’ve been frugal:

• $55 on some Zalman headphones, very well reviewed and probably the cheapest way to get some reasonably good quality 5.1 sound (outside of crafting your own with potentially poor results).
• ~$45 on a Dungeons and Dragons Online, but on things that will persist forever rather than become inaccessible in after only 3 months of $15/mo subscription payments.
• ~$60 on Mass Effect 2 which, as far as I’m concerned, is a mandatory gamers’ purchase on a magnitude that may be seen maybe twice in a year.
• And then there’s ~$45 I spent on Global Agenda, a soon-to-be-released game from Hi-Rez Studios… which is, of course, what I’d like to talk about today.

In Global Agenda, you take on the role of an “agent” in a post-apocalyptic future run by a single mega-corporation following World War III.   Grown in a lab with biological augmentations that make you a highly specialized weapon of a sort, you are freed in a raid performed by other such agents and are released to realize your fate…

… as someone grinding for cash and experience points via performing tons of various “missions” which are basically just 15-minute long first-person-shooter experiences of either 10 on 10 Player versus Player or 4 against the world Player Versus Environment variety.

As repetitive as this sounds, it’s not so bad.   The primary reason being that, unlike so many other games you’ll see out there these days, Global Agenda’s gameplay is quite reasonably satisfying.  It’s also a bit varied in that you can choose whatever you’re in the mood for fairly rapidly.  It’s a very well encapsulated microcosm as any good game should be but few truly are.

Massively Multiplayer?  Probably not.   But excellently featured nonetheless…

The term “massively multiplayer” gets thrown around a lot lately on a genre of games which are rarely truly so very massively mutiplayer anymore.  As I elaborated on to an unhealthy degree in my last entry, there’s a problem when a game becomes overly “instanced” in that the world becomes divided to the point of no longer seeming so very worldly, to the point where I would no longer spend a $15/mo on any such game.

Yet, this practice of instancing has nonetheless caught on because highly instanced games are a whole lot more robust for technical reasons.  So it was perhaps no surprise that, upon encountering two games that would seem to be usurping the throne of 2003 Planetside as “massively multiplayer first person shooters” in Huxley and Global Agenda both heavily employ instancing.

Of course, if either allows me to play without charging me $15/mo, the question of whether or not they’re so very instanced is no longer a factor….

… so instead, I’ll just say that I currently prefer Global Agenda.   Huxley is not without merit, it has a more of a cinematic experience focus and includes a much more robust quest-driven system, but there’s nonetheless quite a few good reasons to prefer Global Agenda:

• Global Agenda’s matchmaking mechanism is a very slick, one-click experience.  Your click being a choice of PvE or PvP and at which difficulty.  Unless you encounter a string of bad luck, you should be able to easily find a fight within seconds of announcing you are seeking it.  If you’re not a fan of pickup groups, you can also have your teams assembled from the start.
• Fights are neatly encapsulated in 15 minute segments that should make the casual players very happy, while there’s simultaneously quite a bit of content for the hardcore to enjoy unlocking and consuming.
• There’s a pretty good level of customization.  This is both cosmetically and functionally.  Your character has several slots of your equipment to upgrade or dye, with an augmentation crafting system.  The skill system does not allow you to take in all skills/equipment at once, so several players of the same (4-class) system may play quite differently.
• I’ve found that Global Agenda is very well balanced.  In PvE scenarios, the AI-driven opponents are no pushovers and will require teamwork to overcome.   In PvP fights, the classes have important niches and enjoy the type of balance that only months of refinement could have brought about.  Another important point is that levels aren’t everything: you won’t find yourself unable to touch a player simply because they’re 20 levels higher than you.
• It’s mostly a free-to-play game in that, once you’ve bought the box, you can pretty much advance to the maximum level without paying a dime.   Unless you want to participate in the Agency versus Agency fights or access certain higher level content.  (There’s conflicting information about whether or not Huxley will allow itself to be played for free — the official FAQs say “probably not” while the existence of “Huxley Lite” suggests it will.)

I think that, above all else, it was seeing a screenshot like this which got me to decide this really is worth the investment. It's an actual Risk-like conquest map that 10 on 10 agency-on-agency fights are done over who owns (and reaps the benefits of) actual plots.

To speak briefly in hardcore vernacular, you can think of Global Agenda in much the same way as you would Planetside in that it’s essentially Tribes gone Massively Multiplayer.  Compared to Planetside, the fights are not really massively-multiplayer, but finding a fight is a lot easier, those fights play out a lot cleaner, there’s more achievement mechanisms in play, and actual PvE scenarios.

The bottom line is Global Agenda delivers more fun than you’d typically get for what you pay for it and that’s good enough for me.   It could very well be a sneaker hit, provided enough people hear about it and try it out.   In the end, even for a fellow in an income-limited stage of his life like myself, Global Agenda’s merit was enough to push the game into purchase territory.

When EverQuest was first released in 1999 (though it was not the first of its kind) it seemed incredible to be able to play in a world with thousands of other players.  However, over the years, MMORPGs became less exciting, and for many different reasons.

• There were now a whole lot more of them, and so having thousands of players being in the same virtual world was no longer so very novel.
• Perhaps observing World of Warcraft’s extremely unusual success (and completely misinterpreting that as simply being more casually accessible) or perhaps because development of a cutting edge MMORPG is very (very) costly, many MMORPGs have attempted to become more mainstream.  The fallout is, as if oft the case of art that has gone mainstream, they rapidly became shallow and uninspired.
• Instancing has caught on as a popular and effective means of load balancing and content distribution, but the players know that they’re not all playing in the same world anymore, and for many (“most” is hard to prove) this meant that the sense of a true virtual space was gone.

EverQuest charged $9.89/mo.  Today, even factoring in inflation, these and other factors assure that $15/mo for a massively multiplayer online game is no longer in any way reasonable for a gamer such as myself to be expected to spend.

Furthermore, there’s a number of better alternatives:

• Guild Wars has demonstrated that you can run a highly-instanced game servicing hundreds of thousands of players via a peer-to-peer distribution mechanic and keep a development team afloat with just the price of the box and a semi-yearly released expansion.  Guild Wars 2 is in development.
• Imports from the wired East have been “F2P” (short for free to play) for awhile, there’s hundreds of them, a few of them (such as Runes of Magic or Atlantica Online) are easily as good as pay to play counterparts.  They entice the players to play with a free price and, once hooked, they are easily tempted to purchase things to enhance their play experience.  Even if only 10% of the players pay, if you can fish in 20 times more players, F2P can be a more profitable model.
• Sony’s Free Realms would seem to demonstrate that these principles work just as well in the West, at least insofar as getting well over ten times as many players to try the game within the first few months of operation as were ever subscribed to EverQuest at any one time.

Dungeons and Dragons Online… enjoyable specifically because it’s F2P.

I bought Dungeons and Dragons Online back when the game was first released for full price.  I barely played it at all before I felt my self feeling as though $15/mo was more than I was willing to pay.

It was a good game, featuring novel game mechanics and a refreshingly different approach from most MMORPGS in the way it handled replenishment of health and a robust combat system that was both visceral and tactically appealing.

This, essentially, is Dungeons and Dragons Online.

However, although it was a good game, even better than the typical casually-accessible MMORPG facsimile, I couldn’t shake that this was no virtual world.  Whether it was a walk through the city, visit to the player-congregation areas (taverns) or having to repeat the same dungeons time and time again, there was a heavy reinforced feeling:

“Why should I be spending $15/mo on an experience I can already get from a free to play game?”

Alt-a-holicism set in shortly.  My time with Dungeons and Dragons Online game was up.  Until now.

Despite this history with the game, this weekend I spent $48.75 on Dungeons and Dragons Online to gain some 4000+ points.  True, the game no longer has a subscription fee anymore, but I essentially decided to repurchase the box all over again.

Why?

1. Partly because the heavily instanced model really feels a lot more comfortable when I don’t have to pay a monthly fee.  It’s clear that (at least for me) there was a invisible dividing line of instancing between being truly massively multiplayer and non-massively multiplayer instanced, and Turbine had crossed that line just about everywhere in the game.  When Dungeons and Dragons went free to play, how instanced it was became a non-factor, and I was free to enjoy it for what it was.
2. But there’s a deeper, more pervading reason a well.  Because (barring Turbine going out of business) that $48.75 was a much more credible investment in the future than another $15 a month down the hole with nothing to show for it but access.  There’s a much greater sense of ownership here: what I bought here feels more as though it is truly mine, an investment I could enjoy all my life.

This game demands $15/mo.  How differently does it really play from the last video?

When Champions Online was released last September, I spent $99.00 on a discounted 6-month subscription because I did not want that kind of pressure.   However, I ended up regretting that purchase because I became thoroughly burnt out from it (probably because the stingy balance killed a lot of the superheroism appeal) and several of those months went unused.

I like Cryptic Studios, I wish Jack Emmert the best from many happy hours in City of Heroes, but I’m not renewing a monthly subscription to Champions Online.  Ever.  The reasons are written on the wall of text above: MMORPGs are no longer novel, they tried too hard to appeal to a casual audience, and its too instanced.   The only way I’m going to keep playing Champions Online is if they go free to play.

I’ve decided that the same will go for Star Trek Online or an MMORPG made by any other company.   MMORPGs are just not worth a monthly subscription to anymore, not given all the free-to-play alternatives out there.   At least from the perspective of this 27-year gamer, it’s a decision that heralds an end of an MMORPG era.