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The Daily Grind: Do you like staggered or modular launch schedules?
Regardless of your feelings toward Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general, you have to admit that it's starting to have an impact on the way games are made. More specifically, two of the larger crowdfunding projects -- Shroud of the Avatar and Star Citizen -- are doing away with a traditional launch date in favor of a staggered release schedule. Star Citizen has already released a playable piece of pre-alpha content, and just yesterday we learned that Shroud of the Avatar's initial client will be available as early as next month. What do you think about these newfangled rollouts? Do you like the opportunity to see games in their raw, pre-beta states, or do you prefer to wait on a more traditional or feature-complete release day? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Mog Log: Relaxing with community answers
Sometimes, all it takes to see an answer is a subtle change of attitude. For the past month or so, I have been trying to spend every ounce of spare time available on Final Fantasy XIV, but I'm starting to relax a little bit because I realized just how silly it is. I would rather enjoy the journey and get there when I get there; level 50 will come as it does, and hopefully by that point my fellow AETHER members will be able to craft spectacles. Until then, let's just relax a bit and indulge a few questions with answers, yes? Gente asks: Why is Final Fantasy XI the only game getting a holiday event? There's no Halloween event for Final Fantasy XIV this year, no. There will likely be one next year, however, as the development team has stated there are events in the works for as early as the end of the year. Considering past experience with Square-Enix and this most ghoulish of holidays, we can expect it will feature an inordinately useful item and a surfeit of ghosts within the city walls.
The Mog Log: Gil rules everything around me
My original plan for this week was to step back into the experiment with soloing that I started in Final Fantasy XI what feels like an eternity ago, but the recent updates about Final Fantasy XIV's market system prompted a comment that interested me. A reader noted that the auction block in Final Fantasy XI was partly responsible for the enormous gilselling issue that's plagued the game more or less since its release stateside, with the theory going that the market wards and so forth in Final Fantasy XIV were a specific response to this. It seems fitting, in light of all of the gilselling issues that we've gone through in Vana'diel, to take a look at the sordid history of the currency in the game and at how likely it is to translate to the new kid on the block. I don't think the problem lies so much with the sellers as with the environment that Square-Enix unintentionally created, as well as with the perfect storm of circumstances that devalued the currency of the game to near-worthlessness with no alternatives. That's right -- it's time to look back six years or so to the launch of the game in the U.S.
