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The Soapbox: That's not an MMO
You may not be aware of this, but Massively is a website focused primarily on massively multiplayer online games. It's kind of what we do. However, the world of MMOs in 2013 is far different from the world of MMOs in 2007, when the site was founded. The niche has changed and the games industry has evolved. There was a time when "online" told you everything you needed to know about a game because there was really only one type of online game. You knew in picking up an online game that you and some friends would be leveling, looting gear, and slaying dragons. It took a while for developers to notice that online play was actually a thing that could work in more than one particular format. Nowadays, online games range from traditional MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 and RIFT to MOBAs like SMITE and League of Legends. There's no clear definition for what an MMO is or isn't because so many games are massive, multiplayer, and online. Maybe it's time to embrace MMO as a broader term than previously thought.
The Soapbox: Gaming addiction isn't about games
When I was 21, I was miserable. I was stuck in a long-distance relationship with someone I couldn't trust and could barely see, I was stuck with no real career opportunities, and I had my entire lifestyle ripped away from me unexpectedly. I felt like I was willing to climb, but I didn't see any handholds out of the pit I was stuck in. The only thing I looked forward to was the end of the day, when I could crawl into a game and let my actual day-to-day life evaporate into memory. I wasn't an addict. Barely. This isn't a plea for sympathy; all of this happened years ago, and it's not where I am now. Things got better. This is a talk that we need to have about addiction because the few times that addiction gets brought up, it's addressed by people who seem to have only the vaguest grasp of the games involved. Addiction isn't a result of game mechanics or playstyles or subscription formats or anything else. It's a result of people.
The Soapbox: Community or comments
If there's one thing gamers love doing, it's insult games they don't play. Any news item, editorial, hands-on, review, or general pile of text dedicated to a few key games -- normally those with high profiles -- receives an instant and visceral response from a collection of commenters who seem to exist only to insult a particular game and berate its fans. Much of the time, these commenters have no actual experience with the game in question. Here on Massively, EVE Online and World of Warcraft seem to be the biggest magnets for such tomfoolery. Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic attract these behaviors as well, and WildStar is well on its way to becoming the next troll-favorite comment piñata. There's nothing wrong with not liking a game, of course. And a little conflict is good; why allow comments if everyone's going to have the same opinion? There's just one problem: If your opinion of a game is based on preconceived notions and not actual experience, that opinion is adding nothing to the dialogue. In short, you are trolling.
The Soapbox: A new mode of interaction
Video games are, by definition, an interactive medium. The entire point of playing a video game is that you get to explore the world, talk to the characters, slay the monsters, and reap the rewards. And you do all this with a keyboard and mouse or controller or futuristic headset or whatever. Players are in charge; players create their own experience. Every video game ever released hinges on player interaction to tell its story. Without the player, a game's inhabitants are meaningless pixels guarding empty checkpoints, staggering through the woods with a groan, or walking in endless circles selling bread. In order for a game to function, players must be able to interact with it. The only question is how.
The Soapbox: You will not wish you had spent more time gaming
Spoiler alert: You are going to die. It's inescapable. Maybe you fall off a cliff. Maybe you grow old and fade peacefully into the nether. Maybe hawk-wolves pick the lock on your front door and attack while you're frying eggs and trying to remember what you had planned for the day. Maybe you sneeze on the subway and your head literally explodes, ruining the morning commute of dozens of office drones. Whatever the cause and time, death is the inevitable conclusion to the story of your life. It can be neat, it can be messy, it can be expected, it can be a surprise, but it always comes. And no matter who you are, I'm willing to bet one thing about that cacophonous moment in which the world slows and you stare death in the face: You will not wish you had spent more time raiding.
Why I Play: RIFT
I've heard the common complaints. Heck, I've been the one issuing them from time to time. RIFT is too much like World of Warcraft. Its story often feels bland. Its 50-to-60 journey takes just this side of forever. Its cities are more like "one building and a couple of adjoining huts." Its dynamic content never lived up to its potential as the core feature of the game. Its races are some of the most generic in the MMO industry. And yet I play it. I love it, in fact; I have ever since I first tried it in beta. The sign of a worthy game to me is not perfection (as that does not exist outside of the deluded hopes of fans anticipating the next big title) but a game that succeeds despite its flaws. For every flaw RIFT has, I could name two ways that it's done a great job in entertaining players, pulling together the community, and treating consumers with respect. Free-to-play has caused a lot of folks to check out RIFT, some of them for the first time. Others who used to play are now returning because the subscription barrier is no more. So why do I play RIFT? Let me give you 20 reasons.
The Soapbox: Tokens suck!
A few weeks ago we reported on a somewhat silly article in which the author advocated that studios could and should charge players real money transaction fees to trade items. I didn't see a lot of people in favor of this idea, but I definitely agreed with one thing that he pointed out: MMOs have become increasingly anti-trade in practice. It's not something that I've thought a lot about recently, but once this article triggered some introspection, I realized that the issue of trade (particularly relating to restrictions) has become a growing frustration of mine. My veteran characters in several MMOs are absolutely loaded -- with basic currency, that is (usually gold). And yet I am sitting on this Scrooge McDuck pile of wealth with no useful things to buy because (a) everything seems to take tokens these days and (b) so much of the good stuff in games is bind-to-character (or bind-to-account). I started feeling fidgety and then I let out a grunt of frustration. Tokens, in a word, suck.
The Soapbox: The soft launch scam
Back in the golden days of video games, there was no such thing as a soft launch. Nintendo didn't send out test copies of Super Mario World to special "backers," and Sega didn't ship half-finished Sonic games with promises of further content updates. Games, for the most part, were played only after they were finished, printed, packaged, and shipped. Even on PC, beta testing was more of an earned honor exclusive to players that showed dedication to a title and its community. Here in these modern times of Internets and always-ons, however, things are different. It would seem as though developers need only make enough game content to shoot a reasonably convincing trailer before the publishing team can begin collecting money by slapping a "BETA" sticker on the webpage and offering fans early access. Over the last few years soft launches have become increasingly common -- especially for creators of online games. The line between "in testing" and "done" is becoming blurred, and publishers are reaping the benefits while players suffer.
On the eve of WWDC: What are Apple's three greatest innovations?
An awful lot has been written recently about whether Apple is has lost its spark. "Does Apple have an innovation problem?" asks the Washington Post. Forbes claims to lay out "Apple's innovation problem", although that piece is so muddled and lacking in specific details I came away more confused than illuminated. "Apple hasn't created an innovative product in years", claims inc.com. "Has Apple's innovation engine stalled?" asks USA Today. Fox News tells us "Why Apple is ailing." The Telegraph reports that "three in four investors [say Apple is] losing [its] innovative edge." There are hundreds, if not thousands, of posts like this, and many of them come from the mainstream media -- so it's possible that this is becoming, or is already, the view of the man in the street. It seems Apple has been stung by some of this criticism; Tim Cook took the time to reassure investors that "we're unrivalled in innovation," as reported by ZDNet. Phil Schiller slammed Android in an interview with the WSJ just hours before Samsung launched the Galaxy S4. And the "Why iPhone?" page added to apple.com has a tinge of defensiveness to it, at least to my eyes. Other people agree; Apple was named "most innovative company" in a wide-ranging poll late last year, for example. John Gruber wrote about how strong narratives can displace the facts. I think this is particularly true in tech reporting, which (let's be honest) isn't all that dramatic a lot of the time. As the sublime @NextTechBlog put it: "REVIEW: New Telephone Is A Black Rectangle That Provides Phone Calls, Text Messages, The Internet, And Other Applications, Plus A Camera" and "I'm Replacing My Old, Black Rectangle With This Brand New, Black Rectangle Because This One Is New". That's a pretty neat meta-story for almost every smartphone launch ever. You and I like to obsess over the details, sure; but most people don't care that much. People like you and I read tech blogs. To hook those other people in, though, the mainstream media needs a little drama, and if it doesn't have much to work with; well, it has to sex up whatever it can lay its hands on. Hence, Gruber suggests, the virulence of the "Samsung steals Apple's crown" meme. I think there's a related meme afoot also, though. It comes in two parts. Firstly, the idea that Apple under Jobs was an innovating powerhouse, constantly turning markets upside down or creating them from whole cloth with unexpected new gadgets. And secondly, that those days ended with Jobs's passing, and that Apple's innovating days are over. I think this is pretty risible, but to explain why I'm going to have to dig a bit deeper into what innovation, exactly. For Apple's critics, such as those writing the articles I linked to above, "innovation" seems to be defined mostly as "entering or creating new markets" and Apple's innovation showreel is the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Consider the Fox News piece, which seems to be pretty typical to me: Since October the price of Apple shares have fallen from $700 to about $425. No one should be surprised -- the company has been misstepping for a long time. Without the genius of Steve Jobs for neat, wholly-new products, it is going to take tougher management, and a change in the company's core business strategy to match its past record of profitability. Apple's remarkable success was premised on being first and better with a succession of new products, dating back to the earliest computers to smartphones and tablets. It was greatly aided by a superior operating system, which provided a more elegant and user friendly experience than rival Microsoft offerings, and the fact Apple both wrote the software and designed its products. This thinking leads to people pondering "what fields could Apple enter next" and in turns leads to people calling for Apple to prove its innovation credentials by releasing a smartwatch or a television, to name but two of the Rumours That Will Not Die. However, I strongly believe this view of 'innovation' is reductionist -- I think concentrating on innovation at the product level glosses over too many details. If we're really going to seriously look at whether Apple has become less innovative we're going to have to be a bit more clear about exactly what we're discussing. Defining innovation Let's start by considering what we mean by innovation in the first place. The concept of innovation is a bit like art: everyone knows it when they see it, but ask five people to define it precisely and you'll get a dozen different answers. The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines innovation as "the introduction of something new; or a new idea, method, or device" and defines innovate as "to introduce as or as if new". Merely defining it as "making changes", however, is rather shallow and overly broad. When Apple released speed-bumped MacBook Pros in February, for example it had certainly changed something old into something new; but few would put that in the same sort of class as the release of the iPad mini. It seems to me that if we're to debate the merits of innovations then we're going to need a framework to weigh up the qualities and quantities of very different kinds of changes. When I first started drafting this post, the Wikipedia page quoted a set of multi-faceted definitions I liked; they've been removed now by some capricious editor so I'll summarise them here instead: Innovation as novelty: Most people would agree that for something to innovative it has to be new in some way, either in and of itself or the application of an old idea in a new way or a new context. Innovation as change: The most potent innovations provoke changes, perhaps opening new doors for the user to work with. In the best cases, they might change whole industries, creating new product sectors or new ways of thinking that entirely replace the old. Or to put it another way: these are the changes that a company will be remembered for in fifty years. Innovation as advantage: Assuming anyone actually wants the innovation, then it seems reasonable to conclude that it'll convince people to buy the innovating product. Hence the company will sell more stuff than it would have done so otherwise. The most significant innovations, I claim, will be those that score highly on all three of these fronts. Bubbling under: candidates that didn't make the cut There were a number of possible things I considered for inclusion in this post but ruled out for various reasons. I dismissed the iPhone, iPod, and so forth because I believe it's more interesting to say "no whole products." To say "the iPhone is innovative" is, to my mind, reductionist and frankly not that interesting. I want to dig into which specific bits of it are innovative, and why. So I ruled out entire products and instead chose to focus more closely on the individual features of products. I ruled out the graphical user interfaces, something which certainly caused industry change and Apple certainly played a crucial role in the history of. As with entire products, I think it's perhaps a little sweeping to count "GUIs" as one innovation -- I think it would be more interesting to dig deeper into individual elements. However, I must confess that most of the real cutting edge early stuff predates me; my involvement in computing only goes back to the mid '80s and I don't want to overreach by claiming I'm familiar enough to be a good judge of what is "most innovative" from that era. If your memory is longer than mine, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments on what you think might be the biggest innovations from Apple of that era. I'm going to confine the scope of my article to the last fifteen years or so. I've also ruled out iOS itself (or, as we called it when it first arrived, "iPhone OS"). Like Harry McCracken, I also think the first iPhone owes a significant debt to Palm OS: the full-screen apps and app launcher comprised of a regular grid of icons are both very similar concepts, and notably different to how Apple designed the Newton. To my mind, the greatest innovation iOS offered was how it brought a large number of features together and made them work in a brilliantly accessible way; but I think that accomplishment, as significant as it was, is eclipsed by the things I list below. So here's what I did come up with, after some hard thought and bouncing ideas around in the TUAW newsroom. Third place: Retina/HiDPI displays Apple introduced the "Retina display" with the iPhone 4 in June 2010, since when it's rolled it out across various iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Defining "retina" as "a screen where the pixels are too small to be individually perceptible at typical usage distance" (which is a claim that stands up to scientific scrutiny), these screens were immediately very popular, offering a degree of visual fidelity that few had seen before. Now it must be noted that this was not the first ultra-high-density display in the world. I remember salivating over the IBM T220, a 21" monitor from 2001 with a breathtaking 3840×2400 screen and a $22,000 price tag. At 200 pixels-per-inch, at a distance of 17" it was a true "retina" display, with a pixel density only slightly below today's MacBook Pro with Retina display. The T220's resolution even tops the now-cutting-edge 4K format. It required three DVI cables to drive it to an even remotely sensible refresh rate of 41 Hz, because of the sheer data rate necessary to keep this monstrous screen fed. It was sold to a handful of customers, mostly for use in medical imaging, physics labs, and other specialised applications. Still, this behemoth is (clearly!) in quite a different category to a smartphone retailing for under $1000. The Retina display's innovation was not just skin deep, either. Quadrupling the number of pixels on the display means you also need four times the graphics memory and four times the bandwidth, just to maintain performance parity; then you also need a correspondingly more powerful graphics chip, and you have to do all that without compromising battery life, or weight, or making a device you can't sell for a reasonable price tag. This is why many of Apple's devices like the space-compromised iPad mini don't yet have retina displays. Apple was the first to climb this technological mountain -- but far from the last. Since the iPhone 4's release in 2010, no high-end smartphone has dared to arrive without a similar pixelicious screen. As Apple has spread Retina-quality (or HiDPI) screens beyond smartphones and into tablets and laptops, so other manufacturers have followed also, with devices like the Chromebook Pixel arriving with rMBP-class screens. So, to sum up: novel? Certainly in terms of consumer level devices. Change? A big fat check. Advantage? Difficult to gauge -- sales of Retina-equipped devices are high, for sure, but then the iPhone and iPad were already wildly successful before they were introduced. I think it's hard to imagine that retina displays didn't help, however. Second place: Capacitive multitouch I think the iPhone was a good deal less innovative than many people believe. You might have seen this snarky image by Josh Helfferich doing the rounds on forums and Twitter, purporting to show how the iPhone changed the phone market. The inconvenient truth it glosses over is that the iPhone's basic design -- a black touchscreen slab -- was far from unheard of at the time. To name just one example, consider the HTC TyTN, which was the smartphone I had before my first iPhone, and predates the latter by six months. But there was one piece missing, one thing no-one else had, and it was key to massively increasing the appeal of this design with consumers. The clue is in the two elements of that HTC that are radically different from the iPhone: it has a stylus, and it has a physical keyboard. It needed both of those because it lacked a screen that worked when you touched it with a fingertip. The TyTN's resistive touchscreen worked only on pressure, and needed the precision of the device's stylus to function. To my mind, the capacitive multitouch screen was by far the most innovative feature Apple brought to the market with the first iPhone, enabling an intuitive UX built around touch, swipe, and natural gestures such as pinch-to-zoom. There were compromises though. Fingers splodge over a much larger screen area than a tiny stylus tip, so on-screen buttons had to get bigger to compensate. That meant screen size had to increase too, by quite a lot. iPhone early adopters will probably remember friends asking how we carried phones that were "so damned big", a puzzling attitude now in this world of 5.5 inch smartphones -- but it made sense in the context of a time when for many years the fashion was for ever-smaller phones. (An aside. A common meme in the Appleverse is that the original iPhone 3.5" screen size was some sort of platonic ideal for one-handed use, as proposed by Dustin Curtis. I think this is bunk, if only because it only works for people with fairly large hands and quite flexible thumb joints, which can only be some small proportion of Apple's desired target audience for the device. I think it's much more likely that the way Apple designed the screen was as follows: (1) work out the minimum width that can hold a QWERTY keyboard and still have the keys wide enough to be typeable on (2) multiply width by 1.5, desired screen aspect ratio, to calculate height (3) There is no step three. Look at an iPhone keyboard some time -- it's hard to imagine typing on it if those keys were even just a few pixels narrower. Just a personal theory. Any Apple engineers reading this are quite welcome to let me know off-the-record if I'm correct.) Novel? I've never encountered any prior devices that used capacitive touch, so if anything did exist I'm pretty sure it was very obscure. Change? This is where Hefferich's picture does have a point -- although all-screen smartphones were not unheard of before the iPhone, they were rare. Now there's very few models that aren't cut from that cloth. So yes. Advantage? Arguably, this was the iPhone's biggest unique selling point -- and Apple has sold nearly half a billion of them now, plus the iPad. I think that's a yes too. First place: Microtransactions Now for the big one. For decades, e-commerce experts were crying out for some feasible way to charge consumers for small amounts ($1, $2 and such) without being eaten alive by the credit card fees and transaction costs in the process. What new forms of commerce could be enabled, they would wonder, if this was achievable? We could unbundle albums, and sell consumers individual songs. We could sell them individual TV show episodes instead of box sets. We could unlock all sorts of interesting economic models that simply cannot exist with microtransactions. Then Apple quietly built exactly that for music, turning that industry on its head in the process, and then changed everything again by rolling it out for apps. Think of the impact that this has had. Without microtransactions, the App Store would be far less vibrant; with no middle ground between free and (say) $10, there would be orders of magnitude less developer interest. That bracket between free and how much apps used to cost before the App Store is where almost all of the interesting stuff is. And that's before we talk about the revolution in the music industry, now shifting to an almost entirely digital model, powered by microtransactions, and other digital content distribution channels, undergoing the same seismic shift. Novel? I think so -- I cannot find any substantial adoption of microtransaction commerce before iTunes, with the arguable exception of e-cash systems which skirt the issue of card fees by loading a smart card with some sort of alternate currency. Not really the same thing, in my opinion. Change? Without a doubt. Microtransactions enabled the app market, which everyone has copied, and dramatically changed how we can buy other kinds of digital content. Advantage? Content lock-in to the vibrant App Store ecosystem is probably Apple's greatest asset in terms of encouraging customer loyalty at phone contract re-up time. I'd say for sure this is a compelling advantage. So why does Apple bore people now? Wall Street seems to define Apple's innovation according to a simple narrative: Apple enters an existing product category (portable music players, smartphones, tablet PCs), turns it upside down, redefines it, and a few years later, ends up owning it. So all Wall Street wants to see is Apple doing that again and again, to new categories: televisions, smart watches, who knows what else. But when we examine Apple's track record in more granular terms, I think we come to the conclusion that genuine, feature-level innovation is very hard and consequently very rare. I don't think there's any evidence at all that Apple has become less innovative. Sure, Apple hasn't produced anything breathtaking new for a little while now, but when we look back over the last fifteen or so years, it's always a few years between the real big-hitting innovations anyway. So something's probably on its way -- many of you said as much in our recent TUAW poll. But! These are only my opinions, and this is a highly subjective topic. Perhaps you disagree entirely with how I've defined innovation, or perhaps you agree with my framework but think I'm an idiot for overlooking Feature X. Comments are open. Have at it!
The Soapbox: How to run a successful Kickstarter campaign
The past few years have seen an absolute revolution in the games industry, with an explosion of studios securing funding through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. In a time when banks worldwide are tightening their belts, Kickstarter represents a lifeline for indie developers and a way for the bigger studios to work on their own projects free from the need for outside investors or publishers. But with the growing number of projects seeking funding each year, developers are facing stiff competition and the rising challenge of running a successful campaign. Most developers don't release all of their stats or write up advice and insights following a successful crowdfunding campaign, and those who do are often lost on obscure blogs that don't appear when you Google for advice. But I'm in the unusual position of both being a games journalist and having successfully Kickstarted a small game project (unrelated to MMOs and my work on Massively). Six months ago, I ran a campaign for my new sci-fi 4X game Predestination, and in the process I learned some valuable lessons on what works and doesn't work on Kickstarter. We've since published the campaign stats and gone on to help a few other campaigns hit their goals. In this article, I run down the lessons I learned the hard way during the Predestination Kickstarter campaign and give some advice for developers hoping to get funded.
The Soapbox: Diablo III's auction house ruined the game
After his departure from the Diablo III development team, Game Director Jay Wilson released a statement that the introduction of an auction house "really hurt the game." While players predicted doom the moment the Real Money Auction House was announced, Jay argued that the gold auction house was equally to blame for the game's fall from grace following its absolutely stellar launch sales. I don't normally agree with what Jay has to say on Diablo III, but in this case he does have a very valid point. Diablo II was consistently popular for over a decade thanks to its immense replayability. At its core, D2 was a game about building new characters and gearing them up by any means necessary. Every enemy in the game was a loot pinata just waiting to be popped, and players farmed endlessly for a few sought-after unique items. You almost never found an item that was ideal for your particular class and build, but you could usually trade for what you needed via trade channels and forums. Blizzard claimed that the auction house was intended just to streamline this process, but when Diablo III launched, it was clear that the entire game had been designed to make the auction house almost necessary for progress. The fault here lies not just with the concept of an auction house but with the game designers. That's right: I'm here to argue not only that Jay Wilson was right about the auction house ruining Diablo III but also that it was his own damn fault.
Why I Play: PlanetSide 2
I was this close to saving myself a lot of time by finishing this article with only a few simple words: Why do I play PlanetSide 2? Because it's fun. I'm pretty sure my boss would want me to expand on it just a bit, however, but let me drive those three words home: Because it's fun. I think we are all familiar with the word "fun," but it's something that we really don't hear enough about in MMOs. I don't think we play MMOs mainly because they're fun; I think we play them because they pull out other emotions in us, emotions like wonder or awe. They might help fill in social needs that are sometimes hard to fill out in real life. These are all positive and worthy reactions, but they're different from sheer fun. I have oodles of fun in PlanetSide 2. Gobs of it. Barrels of fun. The fun is powerful in this one. You get the point. PlanetSide 2 actually makes me laugh to myself, makes me yell at the screen -- you know, those noises you hear from someone who is having a blast. Of course, there are a few other reasons I play PlanetSide 2 as well, so I'll fill you in on those.
The Soapbox: MMOs are to kids what MUDs are to us
I love MUDs. When I go through a several-hour long MUD session, I feel as if I took part in a greater story, and most of the fun was not based on stats or gear. MUDs let me escape into a world because they are about story first. I think I'm pretty rare, though. I can't find many other writers who seem to write about MUDs unless they are referencing them like some sort of relic from the past. The truth is that MUDs are still being loved, played, and enjoyed by thousands. Covering MUDs is as important as covering any other MMO. They're still part of the bigger picture. I'm sure many of you reading this now could not care less about MUDs. You might have played one years ago, but generally they are seen as the cute elderly citizens of MMOdom. That's cool if that's how you feel, but now think about this: The new generation, kids between 13 and 20 years old, will look at many of our large PCs and 20 gig MMOs the same way modern gamers look at MUDs.
The Soapbox: Your MMO is going to die, and that's OK
There is no question about it: Bringing games online has fundamentally changed the way we play and interact with one another. Thanks to the web, we can share games with our friends from thousands of miles away. We can hang out with people who live in other countries and learn about human beings who exist in completely different realities. Playing MMOs is an incredible, unique experience that gives players an honest chance at turning their favorite personal hobby into a full-on social engagement. For any of these experiences to be possible, a game must be connected to the web. Without a server humming away in someone's basement or the cold, dark corridors of an MMO developer's hushed office, the games we talk about here on Massively simply wouldn't exist. The side effect of this online requirement is that every online game, no matter how popular it may be at the moment, has a finite lifespan. Eventually, your favorite game is going to die. This is a good thing. Here's why.
The Soapbox: My lore problem
"In the distant forests of El'quen, a dark evil stirs. Marrowgore the Unhunter, imprisoned for a thousand years in Cauldron Lake by the Eye of Son'drak, has broken free. Now, he and his evil BoneSlurpers stage an all-out war on the United Provinces. You, a freshly christened hero known for valorous acts both on and off the battlefield, must take charge of the Sacred Axeblade of Loqtai, harness the power it contains, and send the Unhunter back to his watery prison. "But first, can you get me nine wolf pelts?"
Why I Play: Villagers and Heroes
Villagers and Heroes, formerly called A Mystical Land, surprised me. I had gone several weeks if not a few months without logging in to the game for longer than a half an hour, so you can imagine my surprise when I realized that the game not only had been improved but had added systems that I thought it never would. In other words, the game was suddenly a world, a fully realized browser-based MMORPG. Despite my feeling that the game was going to languish in state of semi-completion, suddenly it had housing, more crafting, a better UI, and a fully stocked cash shop. I've streamed the game before, but now I find myself logging in a lot more than ever. And now, after hosting a livestream with associate designer Cameron England (embedded after the cut), I'm really having fun with the game and have noticed that it offers a lot more than games that are much more well-known. This is why I play Villagers and Heroes.
The Soapbox: You can't go back again
Returning to an old MMO love is a tradition for us vets, isn't it? I see people doing it a lot, and I'm certainly not immune to giving in to these whims. It usually starts out mild: hearing a friend talk about the game, remembering a good time you had in it, or seeing a big chunk of shiny new content come down the pike. Suddenly you've signed up again and logging in like you never left. It feels so familiar. It feels so alien. And that's when you realize: You really can't go back again. It's a dreadful realization, one that makes you lunge for the clock and attempt to turn back time with a sheer force of will. Stages of grief set in: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Sometimes you work in "snack food binge" in there as well. Why, you wonder, can't this be just like last time? It's a game, so why can't you recapture the same magic?
The Soapbox: Dispelling the 'easy' myth
A few weeks ago, I took a nice long look at World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. Then I wrote about it. My impressions, like most things on the internet, were met with both ardent agreement and defiant protest. Everyone has an opinion, especially when it comes to World of Warcraft -- some people love the game, some people hate it, and some give it a resounding "eh." I don't mind people disagreeing with me. People react to games differently, and what works for me may not work for you. But there was one specific critique that rose, repeatedly, in the great debate raging in that article's comments section. A critique that, frankly, I cannot abide: "World of Warcraft is too easy."
The Soapbox: Be as bad as you like
There are a lot of reasons I love MMOs, but one of the reasons is the fact that there are so many possible goals in any given game and so many different reasons to pursue them. Even in games with more limitations, you've still got a surfeit of character options, moreso than in almost any other genre. I love to roleplay a character who wouldn't normally be the main character of a story, explore what makes her tick, and give her space and the ability to be heroic and skilled as she deserves. What I'm less enthusiastic about is when someone asks why in the world I'm playing a particular race and class combination because obviously my character is now sub-optimal. There's an emphasis on optimization in most MMOs, a push to create the best possible version of a character in gameplay terms that I'm not entirely on-board with. It's one with comprehensible origins, but it's unfortunately taken on a lot of ugly dimensions that sometimes short-change what MMOs can be.
The Soapbox: No sympathy for cheating
Some years ago, a good friend of mine was chatting with me after he had received a three-day suspension from Final Fantasy XI. "I don't see why they suspended me," he said, with what I assume was an exaggerated shrug and a hang-dog expression. "I mean, I was using FleeTool, but I was just hacking my movement to be faster in cities. It's not like I was really cheating." "So you were using a known cheating tool." "Yeah, but just in the cities." What followed were several sentences from my end filled with so much profanity that attempting to type them out here would make it look as if my vocabulary consisted almost solely of the word "redacted." He had been expecting some sympathy from me, some compassion for his plight. As it turned out, I didn't have any. If you get nailed for cheating, you deserve exactly what you get.
