It's been some time after the release of Guild Wars 2 and updates are trickling into the gaming blog/news community.  Tobold had an interesting post regarding falling play numbers for GW2.

This is not a surprising result to me or many other people.  In today's game environment, new mmorpgs only have a small window of opportunity to make a mark.  GW2 attempts to keep this window open with their buy2play formula.  The company is, in essence, trying to recoup their expenditures as close to the front as possible.  Then glide on store purchases.

So at this point, a fall in the number of hours played are not a worry for GW2.  What would cause worry is a fall in store revenue.  Anet has not released any kind of serious financial health information on the game (except that it sold 2 million copies), so we can't tell if their store is a success or failure.

Since the game marketed itself as casual friendly and no subscription, the creators may have counted on the ebb and flow of players.  They released the game knowing that Blizzard was going to send out a big expansion (Pandaria) in the same time frame.  I feel they knew they would lose players to the biggest game in the industry.  The question is, how much did they plan around that fact?  Will Anet crumple into a heap much in the same way that SWTOR did when it flagged in numbers?

It is still too soon to tell.  As for me, my own hours in the game have flagged.  This is not due to falling interest in the game.  I still enjoy it.  But I find myself engaged in RL activities and I feel that is much healthier than loafing about in an mmorpg.

Also, for the record, I did not buy nor do I plan to buy Mists of Pandaria.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude toward WOW right now, especially since I felt burnt from the Cataclysm expansion.  The expansion I am thinking about buying is, crazy enough, RIFT's Storm Legion.

Why?

So my time in SWTOR was a bust.  I did not pay for a subscription after my 30 days of free play time expired.

Incidentally I was given promotional time in RIFT.  Which I used to create new defiant based characters on a new server.  Not long after it was announced that the server for my original characters was being downgraded to a trial server.  So all my original characters had to be moved elsewhere.  I liked my original server.  It made me sad to see it disappear.  After that event, I lost the will to keep playing RIFT.

Another game I dabble in, Wizard 101, expanded to a new area called Zafaria.  It was interesting but it didn't catch my imagination as the previous areas.  Also Wizard 101 is in a strange state, it has attracted a great many raiding gamers.  So now the game is tuned to grinding for gear in numerous raid level instances.  They have changed their gear for mitigation stats and class boosts but with barely any morale on them.  The NPCs have been given boosts in damage and health.  All of this is not really that terrible.  But considering that the game began as a hobby for young children in grammar school and junior high, the high level raid type atmosphere at end game is extremely unnecessary.  KingsIsle was in a great position to experiment with different end game experiences because their main audience was not yet used to the WOW mmorpg end game paradigms.  Did they? NOPE.  They just tacked on raids and gear grind.  Thanks KingsIsle.  Now, like other mmorpgs, Wizard 101 end game story instances are only available for the 5 to 20% of the playing audience.

I'm not even going to get into the inflation on items in the company store.  There are many threads about that in the KingsIsle forums, and none of them have been addressed.  And it looks as if they never will be addressed.

This leads me to LOTRO.  This is where I went after I left SWTOR and I've long since given up on WOW.  I liked the expansion last fall called "Rise of Isengard".  It had interesting stories and well done phased content.  However there were a great many bugs in instanced areas.  Plus I was deeply disappointed that Turbine did not commission new music from composer Chance Thomas (I'm hoping this will rectified in the upcoming expansion this fall).

But as like all mmorpgs, I've hit the raid or lie fallow paradigm.  And the more I see this gated tactic in games the more I ask WHY?  WHY? WHY?  Why spend a great amount of monetary resources on end game stories, instances, items etc that only 5 to 20% of your paying audience will see?  WHY FUCKING WHY?  It doesn't make any sense and it is the very example of insanity.  You know what happens with this gated shit?  Every night, in any given MMORPG, are spammers looking for those last few players to fill out a raid.  PST! PST! PST!  And the people willing to go on these runs are denied because they are not geared for the encounter.  Because you have to run the instance to get gear for the instance.

I'm so sick of this, it is getting to the point where I don't want to play these games anymore.  And I'm sure a great many psychologists would encourage me to give up the gaming hobby.  Yet I go on.  Something has to give one of these days.  I suppose.  Or maybe a group of developers will get it and design a game that is inclusive to all players and doesn't use the gated tactic.  Or maybe not.  Most likely not.

My VR Photostream

My Flickr photos in Pummelvision from Melponeme_k on Vimeo.


I discovered the link to Pummelvision on GoSpeed Racer's webpage.

Its an interesting stream of all my VR travels including a few flashes of my RL photos.  It is the RL that looks bizarre in this grouping.

Rift

So I joined the last 3 betas on Rift and have been playing the game for the last month or so.  I was impressed enough with the game to pre-order.  Now I'm in the Head-start program.

Is this game breaking new ground? Well, only if you consider breaking well trod ground something new.  Rift is not the next step in mmo games.  It does take what was good about certain other "games" and exploit them well.  I see a lot of other games in Rift.  I see a great deal of Warhammer Online artwork and game concepts in Rift.  I also see a lot of WoW in the game.  As well as Lord of the Rings Online.  Again, Rift has taken the best of the innovations and created a very solid game underneath them.  Plus they have managed to create a very nice buzz around their product which has led them to 1 million head-start accounts.  It is still speculation if they will gain a million more with the official release on March 1st and will be able to keep all their subscribers in the coming months.



The game has two opposing forces, called Guardians and Defiants.  One side being "good" the other "bad".  The variation of this mmorpg theme standard of opposing forces in Rift has made me extremely uncomfortable.  The player characters in this Rift setup are, for all intents and purposes, all powerful deities.  Unlike other games, in which the gamer is an average, every day nobody, learning to take part in a campaign...Rift characters are gods.  The NPCs treat the player characters as gods.  The cut scenes are bombastic, with a booming narrator crowing about the player's sanctity.  Let me just say it bluntly, I felt as though I were watching fascistic propaganda.  This game is the very example of Susan Sontag's Fascist Aestheticism idea.  I am aware of the dangers of these ideas floating around the internet at the moment.  But I'm not sure how this is affecting the people who play Rift or other games like it.  I can only conclude that these types of UR Fascist ideals soften us up for the real thing when it takes form in some kind of political ideology.



My discomfort has extended all the way to the actual character models themselves.  There is little option to personalize these characters.  They remain, first and foremost, fantasies of the developers.  Instead of being a projection of the player's will, they are just theme park vehicles for the player to ride in.

The characters have only one skin color....WHITE.

If you want to be something else, you can be purple or maybe blue.  But those colors are for baddies...i.e. Defiants.  If you are good in this game, you are caucasian. You are not black, you are not asian, you aren't even any other ethnicity under the sun.

Like I said....Fascist Aestheticism in all its glory.

The models also have this strange ideal of a misshapen small head to large body ratio.  If you check my portrait screenshot, you can see the head/body disparity.  It looks like a voodoo head on a regular body.  Why this is so, I have no idea.  During beta, many players complained about it, including myself.  But the models were never changed.  I'm not sure if they could be changed.  I also have a feeling that the developers are staunchly against the change because these characters are THEIR fantasies not OUR fantasies.  We are going to take what they give us and like it.



The actual gameplay is smooth.  There are minimal problems.  Probably the most glaring problem right now, is that people can't roll on the servers they want.  The beta servers which survived release, are all intensely popular and have long wait times for entry.  It has led to a lot of wailing on the forums.  I could not get on my beta server, so instead I created a character on a new server.  Which has a nice population and no wait times.  There are enough people to take part in public Rift quests.  These Rift invasions are fun and rather exciting.  I'm not sure how successful they will be in the long run as population thins out.  Hopefully the developers have kept this eventual problem in mind.

I don't believe that I will stay with this game past my initial subscription.  Mainly due to the problems with the game that I have listed. These problems are all artistic and thematic.  The technology platform is rock solid.  And the gameplay is virtually problem free.

It all depends on taste.  Will it be a WoW killer?  No. But it could give all mmorpgs a run for their money for a bit.  Before the next shiny is released.