I find Electronic Arts' highly public lack of faith in SWTOR's business model disturbing. That said, the CEO may not be wrong when he suggests that the rise of non-subscription payment models is hurting some of the mechanics that MMO's were previously able to use to retain subscribers.
One of these is the daily quest. If you set aside the unnecessary loading screens courtesy of the personal starship system, SWTOR has a perfectly functional daily quest system. In fact, these quests offer large quantities of credits that can be used to unlock the pricey-sounding Legacy perks. These sorts of incentives are precisely the sort of thing I used to work towards in other MMO's, but in SWTOR I have yet to run a single daily quest.
World of Warcraft added daily quests in the content patches of the Burning Crusade expansion, starting in mid-2007. Previous reputation grinds had allowed players to choose the rate at which they advanced, while daily quests remove player choice by dictating how much progress is allowed each day. The game may offer you other things to work on - Blizzard plans to offer approximately 48 daily quests across half a dozen factions each and every day in WoW's new expansion along with expanded non-daily options - but you will advance no further towards any given objective until tomorrow.
Back in 2008, I was doing daily quests despite mostly the same objections. At the time, having access to multiple MMO's was generally going to cost you multiple monthly fees. Today's non-subscription payment models make it that much easier to simply switch to another game after collecting whatever low-hanging daily fruit I'm working on. I've started many daily quest chains - WoW's get more intricate with each patch - but continuing to repeat the content is less attractive when I could be doing something completely new in a different game.
I'm not convinced that Blizzard's brute force approach - earmarking over a quarter of the quests in the upcoming expansion as dailies to offer greater variety in the random pool - will solve this problem.
(Aside: I don't mean to over-emphasize one aspect of the daily quest, as there is quite a bit more - good and bad - that daily quests accomplish. There are social advantages to encouraging players to sign on daily, though these can become disadvantages if the incentives tell players not to help their guildmates until after finishing their personal daily quest quota. There are also potentially strategic choices to be made in what to go after first if the limit on quests - which WoW will no longer have - is low enough to be meaningful. Finally, extending the real world days required to finish the grind has obvious implications for games that charge a monthly fee, which was almost all MMO's back in '07.)
The Interactive Novel of Isengard
- LOTRO has always had NPC's involved in soloable portions of the epic story. Even so, this expansion feels like it's increasingly putting the player in larger conflicts involving large numbers of NPC's, presumably in preparation for the battles that are to come in the IP over the next few years.
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| Turbine appears to think this NPC is win for whatever reason. |
- Unfortunately, this setup leans very heavily on instances that actually forbid players to complete it in a group. I realize there are some logistical issues to be managed - how to handle player moral choices, SWTOR style, and how to balance the content - and I haven't joined a LOTRO group in years, but I don't see this as a good thing. In particular, Turbine spent a lot of effort a few years back building a scalable skirmish system but seems reluctant to use it in the story content.
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| Is Tec-Win some form of fighting game combo-breaker that makes this NPC superior to Win? |
- Like most recent quest-based MMO's, the story of each area (in this case, Dunland subzones) is told through lengthy chains of completely linear quests. At least Isengard's epic story explicitly offers the option for players who just want to follow the epic books to skip the side-quests in each area.
Judging a Pre-Launch Game By Its Beta (Or At All)
MMOGC has a post up wondering about judging The Secret World too harshly based on its beta. I can't speak to her experience, since I didn't really spend any time in TSW (before or after launch), but the story seems to run counter to the current trend.
Mark Jacobs notoriously talked a big game about how keeping a beta NDA up within a month of the product's launch is a vote of non-confidence in the product, only to keep Warhammer's NDA up until four weeks before the launch date. Today, four weeks is actually a comparatively generous amount of advance time for the closed beta NDA to be released. (Exception - Blizzard is still holding closed testing that remains in progress but free from an NDA for multiple months. Perhaps that's a quirk to their glacial development cycle?)
Instead, we see scheduled "beta events" which carefully manage what can be accessed by potential customers - or sometimes actual customers, since access to even these staged previews increasingly requires a non-refundable pre-purchase. From a marketing standpoint, these events are no doubt a huge success. Besides driving pre-sales, the limited and staged access fertilizes the grassroots, such that all the blogs are talking about the same parts of the same game at the same time for one weekend only. Meanwhile, all of the information that a customer would need to make an informed purchasing decision about the product remains sealed away for as long as possible.
I get what people are saying when they complain of feeling nigh persecuted for being overly enthusiastic about the upcoming hyped product. As gamers, their anticipation is perfectly natural. I think what we're seeing in this backlash is misplaced frustration on the part of each gamer that's also a consumer - trying to piece together enough information to tell whether to invest their time and money in a new product. As consumers, we're put in a position where it is all too easy to make the wrong call, whether it's purchasing an unfinished product, or, in the rare and fortunate case of MMOGC et al, in writing it off too soon.
Mark Jacobs notoriously talked a big game about how keeping a beta NDA up within a month of the product's launch is a vote of non-confidence in the product, only to keep Warhammer's NDA up until four weeks before the launch date. Today, four weeks is actually a comparatively generous amount of advance time for the closed beta NDA to be released. (Exception - Blizzard is still holding closed testing that remains in progress but free from an NDA for multiple months. Perhaps that's a quirk to their glacial development cycle?)
Instead, we see scheduled "beta events" which carefully manage what can be accessed by potential customers - or sometimes actual customers, since access to even these staged previews increasingly requires a non-refundable pre-purchase. From a marketing standpoint, these events are no doubt a huge success. Besides driving pre-sales, the limited and staged access fertilizes the grassroots, such that all the blogs are talking about the same parts of the same game at the same time for one weekend only. Meanwhile, all of the information that a customer would need to make an informed purchasing decision about the product remains sealed away for as long as possible.
I get what people are saying when they complain of feeling nigh persecuted for being overly enthusiastic about the upcoming hyped product. As gamers, their anticipation is perfectly natural. I think what we're seeing in this backlash is misplaced frustration on the part of each gamer that's also a consumer - trying to piece together enough information to tell whether to invest their time and money in a new product. As consumers, we're put in a position where it is all too easy to make the wrong call, whether it's purchasing an unfinished product, or, in the rare and fortunate case of MMOGC et al, in writing it off too soon.
DDO Directions
According to my New Years resolutions for 2011, my highest level DDO character had been parked at level 7 for over a year and a half. This week I finally hit level 8, a milestone level in that it allowed my 6 Ranger/1 Rogue/1 Monk to finally pick up the Tempest two-weapon fighting specialty I'd been planning towards since I built the character. While the content of the newly released expansion focuses primarily on high level characters - in fact, there is a promotion going that allows players to skip all the way to level 16 in order to quality for the earliest expansion content - a number of things have changed since the last time I played.
What difference, a year
First off, I finally bit the bullet and forked over most of the platinum on my character to a vendor for a medium collectables bag. Failing to pick up collectables puts a huge dent in your income potential, but my character currently has over two dozen different non-stacking items across the two bags. This move single-handedly solves most of my inventory woes, and has been a huge impact on my quality of life.
Next up are a variety of mechanics changes. Though my ranger was built assuming I would wear robes to take advantage of monk stats, I found myself in a middle ground where it wasn't quite worth ditching light armor. Through a variety of mechanics changes designed to make the game's hit and defense calculations scale better, I'm now able to run around in monk robes with better defense than I had before the patch.
That all aside, the big change from my time away from the game was a matter of perspective. A huge part of the fun for me is in designing and building characters, but I had initially found that the learning curve was too steep and opted for a cookie cutter forum build. The results were effective but relatively boring - a character who basically autoattacks to victory with some off-healing skills and buffs, preferrably complemented with a healing companion. Reviewing the new character options beyond level 20 prompted me to examine whether I could make my current build more interesting, and I think I've found a way to revise the character into a sword-wielding monk that almost looks intentionally designed that way.
Focus on one or many?
Looking ahead, I have a choice to make in terms of future advancement. Focusing on one character offers significant perks over time, but it's also a risk in a game where it is all too easy to render a character unplayable through poor design choices. Then again, the problem with diversifying - e.g. through the new upgrade to veteran status allowing players to roll up level 7 characters at will - is that you can get bogged down in a single stretch of content and get tired of it, which is arguably what happened during my last stint in DDO.
On the plus side, I have some resources I can spend - both on my current character (who will either become my main or become permanently abandoned) and on my account. The one big perk to free to play models is that all the stuff I paid for back in 2010 is still around waiting for me if I decide to stick around this time. We'll see where that takes me.
What difference, a year
First off, I finally bit the bullet and forked over most of the platinum on my character to a vendor for a medium collectables bag. Failing to pick up collectables puts a huge dent in your income potential, but my character currently has over two dozen different non-stacking items across the two bags. This move single-handedly solves most of my inventory woes, and has been a huge impact on my quality of life.
Next up are a variety of mechanics changes. Though my ranger was built assuming I would wear robes to take advantage of monk stats, I found myself in a middle ground where it wasn't quite worth ditching light armor. Through a variety of mechanics changes designed to make the game's hit and defense calculations scale better, I'm now able to run around in monk robes with better defense than I had before the patch.
That all aside, the big change from my time away from the game was a matter of perspective. A huge part of the fun for me is in designing and building characters, but I had initially found that the learning curve was too steep and opted for a cookie cutter forum build. The results were effective but relatively boring - a character who basically autoattacks to victory with some off-healing skills and buffs, preferrably complemented with a healing companion. Reviewing the new character options beyond level 20 prompted me to examine whether I could make my current build more interesting, and I think I've found a way to revise the character into a sword-wielding monk that almost looks intentionally designed that way.
Focus on one or many?
Looking ahead, I have a choice to make in terms of future advancement. Focusing on one character offers significant perks over time, but it's also a risk in a game where it is all too easy to render a character unplayable through poor design choices. Then again, the problem with diversifying - e.g. through the new upgrade to veteran status allowing players to roll up level 7 characters at will - is that you can get bogged down in a single stretch of content and get tired of it, which is arguably what happened during my last stint in DDO.
On the plus side, I have some resources I can spend - both on my current character (who will either become my main or become permanently abandoned) and on my account. The one big perk to free to play models is that all the stuff I paid for back in 2010 is still around waiting for me if I decide to stick around this time. We'll see where that takes me.
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