The Digital Continuum: Don't drink the casual koolaid
The word casual gets thrown around a lot in gaming these days. In particular, Massively Multiplayer Online Games have become a steadily larger genre to pump full of squishy casual fluff. Just recently the development studio Perpetual Entertainment was sold off to a company looking to insert said casual goo. The apparent word on the inter-street is that the new ownership is supposedly a media company that wants to use Star Trek Online as an entry point for the video game market. I believe the words "retargeting" and "more casual" were used to describe the change. The last piece of information given to us was that subscription fees could be dropped in favor of paying for optional in-game items.
The only way I can honestly see the more casual bent turning out well is if Star Trek Online follows the Guild Wars model. Said model being; create a polished game for fifty bucks, and in a year or so people can buy the optional expansion for another fifty bucks if they're so inclined. Since STO will be following the "Korean" model, this boat is already starting to sink.
Putting aside the fact that apparently many members of Perpetual have left the company in response; let's get a few things straight. The lifeblood of any of these games is grind. It makes the world go 'round and the sun go up and down. You can't have STO without grind no matter what model it's developed under. So what they effectively mean by "casual" is that we suspect they don't really plan on putting the amount of effort or polish you would expect from any MMO with a subscription fee. Instead what we'll most likely see burst from the chest of whatever space beast has laid its vile eggs within Perpetual Entertainment's chest is a cross between Maple Story and Star Trek Enterprise. You'll still have plenty of grind, it'll just be even less fun!
We're gonna get half-naked, green, super-deformed alien girls -- well, only if we're willing to spend ten bucks for ten thousand in-game "Perpetual Points."
Maple Story, for those of you wondering, is a free-to-play, 2D side-scrolling MMORPG released in North America on May 11th, 2005. It was developed by the Korean company Wizet and as of Feb. 2006 had pulled in around 1.5 million players in the North America alone, essentially making it the king of free-to-play. The game is touted as a casual experience, yet many people who play Maple Story do so as fervently as any World of Warcraft zealot. So the word they're using really should be accessible instead of casual. The business model is fairly simply, really. Just take a look at any of these games and you will find a very obvious pattern; simple design, free-to-play, pay for extra stuff. Many of us are familiar with the concept or may have at least heard of it at one point.
It's incredibly asinine. Why should anybody want to spend their cash on extra ships, phasers or whatever other Star Trek items they can think of charging for? Not only do you end up paying more money than a flat monthly fee, but you get a sub-par game to boot. It doesn't seem like a lot up front, but once you've spent just one dollar, why not a few more? Before you know it you've spent anywhere between ten or twenty dollars in a week or two on useless pretend junk. It seemed like you wanted or needed it at the time, but in retrospect, you paid for fake stuff with real cash. It's bad enough these games require us to toil away for hours to gain levels, but the free-to-play games taunt players with better items for just a couple bucks. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms about Maple Story is the pace of the grind, which at higher levels can reportedly take a month just to ding a level. That doesn't sound very casual to me. What it really sounds like is casual still means grind and in some cases it grinds your time and your money.
Most of the players in Maple Story and similar games are young kids, teenagers, or tweenagers at best. Their money comes from parents who they usually verbally bludgeon into buying a 10 or 25 dollar cash card. Star Trek hasn't been a strong franchise for roughly eight or ten years now, sadly. So how can you expect to create Star Trek Online with a model that largely only appeals to a group of players who have no interest in the IP to begin with? I certainly know that I don't play any of the free-to-play MMOs (I'm 23, FYI) and I'd wager most people in their 30s or older aren't going to be interested in the casual Star Trek Online koolaid, either.
The news is pretty unfortunate, because while the popularity of Trek lies mostly with an older generation, World of Warcraft can be thanked for pulling in plenty of older players. It would have been entirely possible for Perpetual Entertainment to create a niche game in the vein of Star Trek. All that needed to be done was to do the franchise justice. If they manage to do that, it wouldn't be very hard to imagine a fervently dedicated subscriber base. Instead the game may very well launch with minimal success and flounder down the road in the best case scenario. What's even more likely is an uneventful launch that everyone will ignore, simply because it won't really matter. I especially must stress that if enough key members leave Perpetual Entertainment it's all pretty irrelevant. At that point we may as well consider STO canceled for good.
There has been nearly no information released in regards to game mechanics. Personally I had imagined epic space battles between massive space craft, where panels fizzled or even exploded as you navigated, trying your best to follow the captain's orders. Away missions inspired by classic episodes that could be one-shots or even multi-tiered quests -- with a good plot twist thrown into the mix. I was even looking forward to just exploring the galaxy and seeing what kinds of spacial anomalies could be found. I'm sure everyone had their own expectations and hopes of what STO could have been for them. But for now, we'll have to wait and see.
