A mixture of hope and apathy

At the moment I’m kind of adrift on an uninspiring sea of MMORPGs. There’s no siren call strong enough to tempt me into paying a subscription fee, I’m just not finding anything particularly alluring. Too much of the same old same old I suppose. So instead I’m just fiddling about with single player and F2P stuff, whilst I wait for one of the more interesting online games on the horizon.

As always I am tempted to return to EVE, but also as always, it’s just not life style friendly enough for me and my regular AFKing. Alas, I can’t see me being able to play EVE the way I would like to anytime soon. Though it’s probably a positive thing that real life prevents me from doing so, as I know EVE can devour you like a Sarlacc with the munchies. For now I’m mainly playing Star Trek Online. Just nipping on for an hour here and there to play through episodes or missions and set my next batch of Duty Officer assignments running. It’s free to play, quite engaging and I’ve always had a soft spot for STO. That said, the game won’t ever be my long term MMO love affair, but is more of a regular casual flirtation, perhaps with the occasional tongue. Flashing eyes across the office, the odd late night drinking session, but not quite worth a divorce.

Oh, I've downloaded RIFT again and will dick about the free 1-20 bit. Not logged in yet.
The only other online game I’m playing at the moment is Tribes: Ascend. It’s free to play, the cash shop is not essential and most importantly, it’s fun. This reimagining of the classic Tribes 1 and 2 is getting better and better and I recommend people try it out. Just be warned that it is not like your normal online shooters. It’s MUCH faster and you have to learn to lead your shots a lot more than normal. It’s all about predicting people’s movement and it can take some getting used to. Anyway, it’s a good game and recommended.

At some point soon I will be making use of my 2 weeks free in both WAR and DAoC, but I doubt very much I would subscribe to either in the near future. Obviously I’m a fan of both games, or at least what they once were, it’s just that WAR would really need to do quite a lot to make up for the Wrath of Heroes disappointment. The less said about that the better. Actually, as I write this I’m changing my mind slightly regarding DAoC. There is a bit more chance that DAoC could persuade me to take up a month’s subscription. It did grab me last year, surprising me how well so many things still played and looked. I swear if that game had a decent UI update it could see a reasonable resurgence.

Aside from those retro distractions, for me it’s all about the upcoming games; Planetside 2 and Mechwarrior Online. There’s a load more Planetside 2 news appeared in the last couple of days, which I’ll gather up and post about soon. Mechwarrior is continuing to drip feed news at a slow steady rate, though we’re still waiting to see some in-game footage. I hear we may see something soon however. Mechwarrior isn’t a MMO of course, but this blog is about stuff that interest me, so meh whatever. Oh and Hawken looks great. Me like mechs.

Elsewhere, I’m not totally writing off Funcom’s “The Secret World”, yet I don’t find myself particularly caring about it either way. To be honest I’m not quite sure why. Despite my many misgivings regarding Funcom, I do like what they try to do and certainly TSW has many features that tick my boxes. My apathy confuses me slightly. If I don’t get on the beta then I doubt I will try it until well after launch.

And on the subject of apathy… If for a moment I take off my Hat of Trolling+3, yes Guild Wars 2 has much potential and does look like some serious PvP goodness. That doesn’t change the fact that it will never be a game I get excited about and I still find it hard to motivate myself to write about it, but it’s certainly one I would like to see realise its PvP potential. Obviously Kill Frenzy and I will try it out.

Hopefully sometime soon we’ll start to get more news on Dark Millennium Online and World of Darkness. Both games are perceived as being on rather rough seas, what with the challenges faced by THQ and CCP, but I guess we just have to wait and see what news arrives. I still have high hopes for both games, purely due to their settings. Actually that’s not true. I have some confidence in CCP to deliver something interesting and hopefully sandboxy. Plus THQ have some excellent 40k games in their stable, so we know they’ll do the 40k universe credit when it comes to atmosphere at least.

I think that’s it for major MMOs of interest to me, can’t think of anything else. There are a few small games I have an eye on, but they’ll get posts of their own at some point. Oh and for the record, Diablo 3 I’m indifferent to and World of Warcraft Panda bear stuff just doesn’t work for me. Sorry Blizzard, as if you care lol :D

F2P failed game nonsense

This isn't new news or anything, but I only just spotted this particular quote:
"Free for All... has drawn hundreds of thousands of new and returning players to the virtual world, increasing Champions Online's online concurrent user, unique login and revenue totals by over 1,000 percent."

That's from a statement by Cryptic (months ago I know). That's a pretty clear demonstration of how dramatic an effect F2P can have on an MMO, particularly as it has one of the magic words "revenue" seeing that huge increase. Not as nice as if it was profit going up like that and of course since Cryptic ended up getting sold by Atari we might assume that there were other issues regarding profitability for the company as a whole, but that's not necessarily related and regardless, you won't make decent profit if you don't have decent revenue.

Something I've heard from a game industry type people lately is that the MMO community needs to get over our self imposed stigma of a game going F2P meaning a desperate last throw of the dice after failure. Sure it can transform the fortunes of a struggling or "failed" game, but it can also be a hugely beneficial move for a game that is doing well. This should be obvious to us really with more and more game developers looking at going with F2P from the off. Planetside 2 for example is a proper big deal game and that's going to be F2P, in fact from the noises coming out of SOE it seems like all of their MMO games will be F2P in future.

I've spent a lot of time sneering at F2P games. Justifiably I think actually, what with them historically being all those eastern grind wank bollock games of hideousness. But that's then, not now. Things are moving on and it seems most people are saying F2P is the future and that SWTOR will be the last major subscription MMO. Will it be the last? I don't think anyone can really predict that with utter certainty, though there is a good chance of it I would say. Personally I think that the Guild Wars style of Pay2Start-Free2Continue will become the method of choice for the developers. Backed up by a cash shop of course.

Whatever does happen, we can however be sure that the MMO market has changed and F2P is no longer synonymous with fail. We just need to get over our preconceptions.