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Chaos Theory: The Secret World's Tokyo barrier
Blue Mountain: On the road through The Secret World adventures, this was the zone that would make or break many players. It's the point when you had to really start crafting your decks more carefully and applying synergies. Not all who felt the blow of this particular skill check powered through, making it a barrier to continuing on to Egypt and Transylvania as well as completing the story mission. Well, now there's a new barrier in town: Tokyo. As much as I had looked forward to the Issue #9 content, and as much as I am enjoying the content now that it is here, I have to admit that Tokyo is the granddaddy of barriers. Not only are there barriers to getting to the content, but there are some to enjoying it once you get there too. And any one of them might cause players to give up on Tokyo and The Secret World before experiencing the whole update. So to help folks avoid smashing into any barriers unexpectedly and leaving bruises, let me give you the scoop on what lies ahead.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XI's future might just be bright
We might not have another roadmap for Final Fantasy XI just yet, but we have the next best thing: a letter from producer Akihiko Matsui talking about what's at least being gingerly planned for the next year. More accurately, it's about delays in the existing roadmap, the state of the game, and what Matsui plans to do about it in the near future. While the letter itself is a little old at the moment, I'm going to be honest and say that I keep re-reading it amidst a mixture of disbelief and hope. I've been getting up on the same soapbox for almost three years regarding Final Fantasy XI's biggest problems, and Matsui's dispatch by and large seems to indicate that the team in charge of the game right now is aware of exactly these issues and actively wants to correct them. This is kind of staggering. It's the good sort of staggering, but it's the sort of thing you don't expect to see, especially not from a game with a lot invested in gleefully ignoring the rest of the world. But this could mean that despite FFXI's age, next year could be the best one for the game in a long while.
The Mog Log: Throwing out the barriers
If you're starting Final Fantasy XI fresh right now, you'll have the most fun if you have absolutely no idea how much stuff you have to do -- not just because it's intimidating, although that's certainly an element, but because it's a huge pile of things that you can't do by yourself in any meaningful fashion. You have to rely on charity or making friendships based solely on your charming personality because you've got pretty much nothing else to offer when you start off, and no one at level 85 really wants to go farming for subjob items yet again (to say nothing of gysahl greens). These sentiments are not new. This is not something that I have never said before or a thought that had remained unexpressed for ages until just this moment. I've long talked about the fact that there's a huge barrier to entry for the game, one that essentially locks the game in for the people who are playing right now and no one else. But for all that talk, I can also see some very good reasons to keep those barriers in place because they're providing some useful functions -- or at the very least, they're not actively harmful.
Wizard101 voyaging to China
Never underestimate the power of magic or kids accessing their parents' wallets. That's what we've learned from KingsIsle over the past few years, as its Wizard101 has grown into a powerhouse slugger that knocks down barriers of all types: age, social groups, and most importantly for the accounting department, world regions. Today we've learned that KingsIsle has struck a deal with Taomee Holdings Limited to bring Wizard101 to China, and in so doing greatly expand the game's market. Taomee specializes in online gaming that's angled for children, so this seems like a perfect match. Chinese players should see a localized version of Wizard101 sometime next year. KingsIsle also says that Wizard101's website netted over 13 million unique visitors during the month of July, a strong indication of just how big this game has grown.
Team17: XBLA publishing is much harder now
Team 17's Martyn Brown believes the barriers to self-publishing on Xbox Live Arcade are becoming more difficult to break through. The studio director tells GI.biz that it's "massively" harder to get games on XBLA now, saying that there just aren't "many gaps in the portfolio" and the top sellers are mostly established IPs -- like his company's Worms games. Brown believes that new developers without established connections need to make titles that cater to the platforms. He expresses that Sony "tends to like the new stuff" that isn't necessarily mass market, while with Microsoft "you're really going for the commercial mass market audience." The takeaway from this is that as digital distribution goes from being the new frontier to becoming the norm, it's going to have similar issues as current brick-and-mortar retailers.
