moving-the-goalposts
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Some Assembly Required: Conflating story content and MMORPGs
A few weeks ago I poked fun at ArenaNet and its "living story" nonsense. As you might imagine, plenty of comments ensued, and I'd like to highlight one of them as a point of further discussion this week. Skoryy wrote (in part): "Since when did enjoying content, especially story content, actively require skill? Any literate person can read a book; why do I also need to know how to be a master crafter or master warrior or master whatever to get to enjoy the game's true content?" For further context, this was a response to the line of thinking that says successful games like baseball, chess, and RISK are not linear dev-driven content treadmills but rather a set of rules that result in endless permutations of player-generated content. When I first read the remark I was taken aback. I mean, really, my initial response to the "since when" bit was "since you decided to play an interactive video game instead of read a book!" And that's still true to a large extent. As I thought about the overall discussion, though, I sympathized with his perspective even though I think it's terrible that some MMO companies are hell-bent on conflating the definition of game with the definition of story.
The Soapbox: BioWare, meet ZeniMax; ZeniMax, this is BioWare
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Once upon a time, a group of decision-makers at a big AAA studio set out to brave the wilds of the MMORPG. This studio had several hugely successful single-player RPGs under its belt, and it also had quite a bit of consumer goodwill in the bank thanks to its pre-MMORPG efforts. The studio spent a ton, and I do mean a ton, of money recreating an MMO that already existed in dozens of different games. It also spent a ton of money trying to convince gamers and gaming press that it wasn't making a retread and was instead adding another pillar of awesome to the standard MMO formula. This studio was, of course, BioWare. Unfortunately for Elder Scrolls fans, it's also ZeniMax.
The Soapbox: Games-as-a-service sucks for the consumer
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. If you pay close attention to game industry marketing-speak, you've probably heard of something called games-as-a-service. It's an initiative that's been gaining momentum in recent years, as publishers and development houses look to increase revenue, strangle used game sales, and clamp down on both PC and console piracy. It's also championed by a few of our more clueless game "journalists," more often than not due to their (desire for a) cozy relationship with the aforementioned industry players. Put simply, games-as-a-service seeks to change both the definition and the public perception of the phrase "video game" from a product that you buy to a service that you rent, thereby granting developers and publishers complete control over the end-user's experience. If that sounds somewhat nefarious, that's because it is. It's also something that MMORPGs have been doing for two decades.
