2012 RoC MMO Year in Review

Green Armadillo at Player vs. Developer did a sort of cost-analysis/overview of his 2012 MMO expenditures and time, and I thought it would be fun to do something similar, with more of a focus on my "year of MMOs" and what they amounted to (if anything). So, here goes...



Star Wars: The Old Republic
TOR may have come out in December 2011, but I didn't get my copy until late January. My wife played this game continually for close to a year, but it seems that her interest (and that of her highly dedicated RP guild) waned dramatically after the game went F2P, at least partially due to the over monetization of the game going forward (paying for content previously announced as free, for example, and the souring of the community due to the flood of F2P gamers who are sight-seers and gawkers, and presumably not very RP-friendly).

For my own purposes, TOR has a great single player experience wrapped in a world of MMO suck. It has padded regions (Coruscant, for example) that drag on and on, and feel very tedious and grindy to someone like me who approaches this game less as a new Star Wars MMO and more as the KOTOR 3 single player experience we really wanted. Still, the free to play option opened it back up to me, and I find that being able to jump in and play occasionally is making the game more accessible and fun, now that I don't have to worry about a monthly fee. If Bioware/EA could just realize that a person like me would prefer to pay for a couple extra character slots and not have to subscribe, then we'd all be a bit happier.

Conclusion: SWTOR moving F2P was a smart move for certain types of players, but the game still has problems. That said, it's a casual friendly MMO if you can avoid falling asleep during the long slog through boring padded areas like Coruscant.

Tera
Tera was billed for its action MMO combat and its unique revision to an otherwise very Korean style setting. The game was pretty compelling, initially....but some odd hiccups left me cold in the end. A major problem was its early billing snafus; I signed up for six months on a deal when it first came out, but after four weeks I realized this wasn't a game I was going to care for in six months, so I tried to cancel the subscription. Surprise....they didn't provide for a way to cancel! I did get my money back, and in a twist of irony that changed my opinion of the matter from "they are sleazy con artists" to "they or their billing service are merely incompetent" I still got my six months of play time. Which I barely used until the tail end, in a bid to revisit and see if my feelings had changed. They did not.

Conclusion: Tera is a weird action MMO that is fun to play but it has some unfortunately disturbing undertones, a bit too much of the Korean Cutesy for my tastes, an excess of BDSM inspired armor and for all it does offer it just doesn't seem to feel as satisfying as other, better games out there (among which I would include Rift, GW2 and TOR). And their crappy billing issues soured me from ever letting En Masse have credit card or paypal info again, period.

Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 was heavily anticipated and I was ready for it on its first week or so of release. It's timing was atrocious, however (for me, at least), as I had gotten sucked into Rift and so found my precious game time seriously divided. GW2 is a fantastic game, but thanks to its Buy-to-Play model I have been able to safely play it just a bit, and othewrwise set it aside for now while I concentrate on the two other games worthy of my attention.

Conclusion: all MMOs should look at GW2 in the future, for both the payment model and for ideas on how to innovate. Not too closely...a future full of GW2 clones would be sad.



World of Warcraft
Blizzard sent me a 10 day "please come back" trial to Mists of Pandaria. I logged on, tried a pandaren monk, then jumped to the original Kalitherios who was still stuck in that god awful fhsibowl undersea region, was reminded why I left WoW during Catalyclysm and deleted the game, again.

Conclusion: WoW is getting very long in the tooth, and the only way to appreciate it these days is to be stuck with a low end PC, or otherwise avoid other games entirely.



Dungeons & Dragons Online
I was a HUGE proponent for DDO when it went F2P, and it was the first F2P game I also decided to invest in. I rationalized that if I spent $15 a month for a year, I'd have spent $180 in that time, and if I spent that (or less) on in-game purchases over time, then I'd be ahead.

In the end, I spent more than that (and in fact bought about $50 of turbine points plus the expansion pack at half off on a Steam sale this year) but I also played it heavily for more than two years, and only in the last year did I lag badly. DDO has a huge disadvantage over other MMOs, that outweighs (for me) it's advantages: it has a major grind component, and it's XP is (except for slayer/explorer missions) tethered to mission completion. You can spend a long time leveling in this game if you play in the way I do, which is slowly, mostly solo, and with a methodical pace in mind. I have friends who can blast through this game from level 1 to 20 in weeks. I envy them, because they have a system. The system necessary to earn XP at the fastest rate in DDO is beyond my time frame or network of friends, unfortunately.

Conclusion: DDO is still great, but my love for it has been replaced by Rift. Still, I like to revisit on occasion, even if I've given up hope of ever getting to max level.

The Secret World
The Secret World is everything I want in an MMORPG with a modern horror theme, short of it being a single player experience. It has immersive, thoughtful storylines (with key stories fully voiced), a mature theme that's not just "adult" (although it delves in that direction occasionally, too) and a smart world that really meshes well with the modern urban horror/fantasy trend in fiction these days. However, it was subscription based for a while, and so like GW2 it was something I didn't feel I had time for with my Rift obsession.

Now, of course, that has all changed and TSW moved to a Buy to Play model just like GW2. This was a very smart move, and it has revitalized my interest in the game....more so even than for GW2, because while GW2 is an innovative drwarf-and-elf free fantasy MMO, TSW is a modern horror MMO that ditches the Tolkienesque fantasy entirely.

Conclusion: I'll be playing a lot of TSW in the future and plan to focus my money on their planned future content.

Age of Conan
I've tried to get back into AoC a couple times. Unfortunately their cash shop was pricey, the play mechanics felt clunky if you stayed away too long, and the game can't survive its main crippling issue (one that TSW fixed) which was that 90% of its primo A game content was front-loaded in the first 20 or so levels, and everything after that right up to level 80 suffered from a "rushed to finish" conclusion. I recently tried it--again--in the wake of some changes that opened up previously gated instances to F2Pers and I was shocked at how empty the game was (okay not really) and how it just doesn't hold up to today's crop of games.

Conclusion: AoC is a game I want to play, badly. Just not the one that actually exists.

Champions Online
When this went F2P two years ago I was in on day one, took advantage of their first two weeks of excellent discounts, and basically absorbed this game (as did my wife). Then we burned out as the game dragged along; the momentum could not be sustained by the title itself, which still needed more...sometuing...to make it better.

Perfect World Entertainment came along and snapped Cryptic up. At first this was bad; a merge of accounts between Cryptic and PW made accessing their games problematic for a while, enough so I gave up on trying. Eventually they got their act together, and by the time I got back in Champions Online was sporting all sorts of impressive new features. It now remains, like DDO, a game I like to keep installed even if i only jump in once every couple of months or so. Unfortunately it's not really that exciting to play (for me) anymore, and I hate the crafting/equipment mechanics of the game with a passion, but the character generator is bar none the best there is (now that CoX is dead).

Conclusion: it's worth vacationing in Champions every now and then, and Perfect World made Cryptic respectable again...a miracle!

Rift
Rift snuck in toward the start of the year and snagged me first with its Lite F2P through level 20 and then with its mixture of interesting story content and compelling mix of traditional and innovative gameplay. It is officially the first game since 2005 when WoW and the original Guild Wars sucked me in to grab and keep me for the long haul. The core game is so good I continue to mainly play it while I occasionally log onto my level 50 guardian warrior and explore the new Storm Legion content at an excessively leisurely pace.

Anyway, I don't need to blab on about how great Rift is, as I've done that a lot already this year. Suffice to say it's my top dog in the kennel right now.

Conclusion: I bought a one year sub along with Storm Legion. That's about as dedicated as it gets for me in the world of MMOs.

Next Year
I'm looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. I think some new titles like Firefall and Wildstar may be dark horses ready to sweep in and change everything up. I suspect more publishers will eyeball the B2P model just as much as the F2P model, and if industry analysts like Michael Pachter are right we may see a decline in the number of MMOs being pumped out as publishers grow wary of entering a saturated market.

Secret World is Suddenly B2P (not F2P)

Got the email today....with no fanfare or announcement I was aware of, The Secret World has opened its doors wide for everyone (announcement here) who buys the game with a one time purchase (correction from earlier, I did not realize this initially!) This is actually a very good game, even if I couldn't justify the expense of an extra sub for a game (with the limited time I have to spread between so many of them). In terms of "Secret World F2P vs. Star Wars: TOR F2P" The Secret World will win hands down.

The release info indicates that merely playing the game as-is is now totally free. You can buy the game before Expansion #5 and get all expansion content for free (so I guess further expansion content will be paywalled) and if you sub monthly you get perks, including $10 of cash shop money, a distint item, a cool-down XP bonus generator and a 10% discount (a membership discount, I guess) in the game store. Unlike SWTOR, this is, I feel, the smart way to run a F2P franchise: give them everything, then make them want to buy the extras.

I'll be reloading The Secret World tonight, I think! Guess I'll queue it up next to Rift, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III and my never-ending obsession with Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

The Secret World's Earnings

MMO Fallout has an interesting bit of news here. Funcom looks poised to sell itself off? The Secret World might reasonably have 50K subscribers, based on reported earnings and cash shop revenues? Interesting stuff. It tempts me to try harder to resub and get some playtime out of the game. My wife played it for several months but as of last month she's not renewing.....I'll have to ask her if its because she's exhausted the content of the game, lost interest in it, or simply can't justify it due to a weak community (she's ultra-social when it comes to MMOs). She's been playing a lot of Rift lately, too....the new expansion smell lured her back; also, I think Rift's got a really healthy community and a pretty decent RP crowd for what she's looking for.

I'd like to try The Secret World again but for the following problems I like to keep complaining about: Funcom ruined my trust a while back with Age of Conan and thus will never be allowed access to my personal credit card info again, but Paypal and Funcom seem to have communications issues, too, as whenever I try to pay that way Funcom seems unable to process the order, and their customer service people can only offer the suggestion that if I wait long enough it might actually process. Yesh... not gonna happen. Paypal has a very precise way it works, and timing is everything; if every other processed order I put through Paypal happens a certain way in a certain amount of time, regardless of whether its a national or international purchase, I expect Funcom to fall within those parameters. Since they don't, it leaves me suspicious that they are doing something different....and different smells funky when it comes to my money.

So yes, this was another thinly disguised Funcom rant, with my ongoing lamentation that I don't understand how two games I should be playing and enjoying a lot, both set in genres or based on fiction I love so much, could be in the hands of a company that has more than earned its euphemistic title of Failcom. Gaaaaaah!

Speaking of Conan, I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea that  Arnold will be reprising his role in a KIng Conan movie. The irony that Arnold himself is older than Conan was in his final tales (from Conan of the Isles) when he sailed off to the west and disappeared is probably, of course, entirely lost on whomever is working on this movie. The good news is that we can continue to treat the Conan film chronology as the funky alternative universe stuff it always has been...

So much for the Revolution!

Well I am happy to have the 3.5 books again and while I'd like to us them, it looks like (as I expected) doing so will be tantamount to my getting into dentistry and pulling teeth in a matter of weeks. Maybe further down the road....but Pathfinder has its fangs very, very deep.

4E interest still percolates among some players, but not enough in any one spot at the same time for group consistency. While I managed to get a legitimate 4E game started two weeks ago it has already led to a quiet rebellion...or at least a decision this week to switch to low-level Pathfinder. My concession is I'll keep running the campaign I intended (which is a return to Chirak after a lengthy absence) although if I had my way I'd be running straight 3.5 or 1E, just so I could enjoy the fancy new books and keep the game under a D&D title. all me a brand whore, but I kinda like the idea of playing legitimate, official D&D. Heh. Hell, I'd be happy to stick with 4E even though I know it would be once more a count-down to when I grew frustrated with the limited board/minis scope of the system.

Well, the blog serves one great purpose if no other: its a vessel for me to write about the games I like but hardly ever get to play! So expect more 1st edition stuff as time permits. Maybe even more 3.5 analysis. We shall see...

On an unrelated note, I have spent the last couple days trying to play The Secret World. They have an option for recurring payments through paypal, which is good, because I had a bad experience with a credit card setup with Funcom on Age of Conan long ago, and didn't want to repeat that. Well, despite being set up for reasons unknown I couldn't log on. When I went to check my account it said the payment wasn't processed and needed my action to confirm it. Still didn't work. A customer service on their live chat (it was nice that they had live chat) said it could take two days to process paypal payments. I went over to paypal, and they showed that I had Funcom all set to pay monthly and that the only thing missing was the actual payment. I gave it a while, then in frustration decided this was yet another warning flag with Funcom, just like the Age of Conan incident a while back where I ended up massively overcharged after a long wait to get a sub going, and cancelled the recurring payment option through paypal.

I want to play your games, Funcom, so why won't you meet me halfway? I wanted to give you my money, but you wouldn't take it. I guess I might just wait until The Secret World goes free to play after all...

The Secret World

My wife and I both jumped into The Secret World over the weekend. It wasn't planned that way. In fact, I hadn't planned to get TSW at all, but Green Man Gaming had a sale, I had some moolah sitting in paypal and the synergy sort of overwhelmed my common sense, and the next thing a knew I had TSW sitting on my desktop (along with Spec Ops: The Line, no thanks to an Amazon sale, and a few other odd balls). I personally blame Steam....I had been saving up some extra paypal money (it's real money, yet so easy to throw away on digital crap) specifically for an anticipated Steam July 4th sale and Steam let me down. I hear the sale will start this Thursday....we shall see. Don't disappoint me again Gabe!!!!

So anyway, The Secret World turned out to be a fascinating and welcome change from the usual MMO fare. Depending on how you approach this game you may find your experience varies, but I think that if you meet the following criteria you will find it an utterly fascinating game:

Six Criteria for Enjoying The Secret World:

1. Burned out on fantasy tropes in MMOs

2. Always felt that there was a gap in the MMO market for a setting heavily influenced by Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Neil Gaiman, Brian Keene, Richard Mattheson, and others.

3. You have always loved Unknown Armies, Hunter, Call of Cthulhu, Conspiracy X or Kult from back in the day, also love MMOs, and would like to see how those flavors go together.

4. You have played and enjoyed the Silent Hill franchise and often thought to yourself, "the only thing I wish there was more of was lots of random players running all over this mist-shrouded town with me."

5. You would like to play the closest thing (outside of Day Z) that exists right now in the special genre of "zombie apocalypse survival MMO" (at least in the Kingsmouth starting zone).

6. The concept of a skill-based freeform leveling mechanic without handholding sounds appealing to you (but give it time, all MMOs that have tried any variant on this inevitably have to add in templates for guidance as a significant portion of the MMO crowd needs a certain amount of idiot-proofing to play).



TSW is an interesting game, and its one I am greatly enjoying right now because it does stuff just differently enough to have a distinct feel from the other MMOs out there. It's theme (a supernatural conflict in the modern world) is fresh, its writing is crisp, its voice acting is professional and engaging, and the multitude of stories that weave together as you play through the game is utterly fascinating. It's like Funcom paid attention to what went wrong with Age of Conan and actively worked to avoid the same situation here. Shocking, I know!

I won't talk specifics about TSW, but some generalities instead: the game focuses on some sort of mystical apex of conflict, in which three secret societies, each working both with and against each other (mostly against, but individual agents can work together in the field) seek to gain an edge in the cosmic scheme of things while repelling what appears to be an ongoing supernatural invasion from cthonic mythosesque forces drawn from myth and nightmares. The first key battle zone is in the town of Kingsmouth on a small New England island that is sufficiently remote that the besieged townsfolk are forced to deal with a zombie outbreak with no aid other than the outpouring of supernatural agents from the secret societies that have decided to intervene.

Your character is a sort of supernatural superhero who is gifted with powers through a strange dream ansd a visitation from a supernaturally charged bee (that later it becomes apparent comes from the benevolent Yggdrasil-like spirit of Agartha at the world's core). You are a free agent, albeit about to get recruited into the Secret War by one of the three factions that all rely on gifted agents to get their job done.

The three societies are the Illuminati (techno-information control freaks), the Templars (quasi religious militant order), and the Dragon (gamblers of fate and luck). I haven't messed with the Templar side of things yet but have dabbled in the Illuminati (my main, called Dadaist on the RP server) and made a Dragon character too (Futurity). My wife has a main on the Dragon side. One cool thing about this game: she's outstripping me for time, but in terms of leveling, there's no such thing so I've found it possible to group with her more often than would be feasible in other MMOs where she'd already have left me in her dust. Kinda cool.

The Secret World's strength lies in its story, its presentation, and its unrelenting willingness to make plots complex, thoughtful, and often puzzle-laden. Even crafting is a bit of a puzzle. The game lets you access a browser while playing (smart, that) and actively enourages you to lean on google to help solve puzzles. This probably will only be as effective as the time it takes for someone to construct a complex wiki or FAQ on all the puzzles, but the principle is really cool. I've run into at least one that my wife had no trouble solving but I was stumped on (until some random passerby showed up and solved it for me).



Graphically the game is impressive, and its one of only a small handful of games that challenges my PC. It seems to suffer from some similar issues as Age of Conan (being the same core engine, I think), such as not running well on DX11 for my PC despite the fact that every other DX11 game I have runs just fine (so just like with AoC I actually had to set it back to DX9 to run well; still looks good, though).

As with all MMOs combat is ubiquitous. You'll kill a lot of zombies, deep one-things, draugr and stranger in the opening area, and much more to come based on the many screen shots and trailers I have seen. It will take me a while to get through this opening area (it's HUGE!) at the rate I play, but I am looking forward to seeing what the game has to offer in the future.

TSW is a subscription-based MMO. I am fine with this. My experience so far has been that I tend to spend less money on average on monthly susbcription fees than I would if they were trying to gouge me with Freemium or purchaseable content as is normal for F2P games. However, TSW is trying to have its cake and eat it too with an in-game store that is loaded with all sorts of extras (mostly cosmetic) that you can buy. I'm not sufficiently vain that I feel the need to purchase such frivolities, but given that every single vanity item or mount World of Warcraft has ever pumped out has somehow ended up in my wife's account, I figure it's only a matter of time before she snags some items from the store.

Is there someone who should stay away from TSW? Maybe. I would not advise one to play if you just "don't get" the horror genre or the supernatural/paranormal genre of novels that have flooded the market in recent years. I would not play this game if you are uncomfortable with modern or adult themes (i.e. the Dragons use sex as a means of attaining the supernatural energy necessary for certain spells such as a vision in the intro area). If you have ever found WoW's talent trees to be a bit troublesome or annoying to figure out, then TSW is definitely not for you. If you ever read American Gods or Butcher's Dresden Files and didn't like it, then TSW is really not gonna appeal. If you find long voiced conversations in story plots to be a tedious thing you fast forward through to get to the pvp....then, well, they have pvp (haven't tried it yet) but this game is probably not for you. I've heard complaints from a few of my wife's cohorts in SWTOR that they thought the controls were too "sluggish" to play and enjoy (such complaints from a heavy pvp crowd btw)....if you're focused on the controls being sluggish as a key detraction, then you're sort of missing the point of this game. I would describe them as being slightly more realistic and less spazzy than a typical MMO; anyone who's ever played survival horror games will not notice anything wrong with the controls at all. My wife noticed it, but she quickly adjusted.

So anyway, I'll try not to neglect the blog too much, but I am planning on playing a lot of TSW in the next few weeks...it's got that compelling "want to play" quality that is hard to find in the jaded landscape of MMOs and burnt-out MMO players these days. I have to say that it's been a good year as an MMO fan for me, if only because Rift and The Secret World have both reinvigorated my interest in this type of game.

I will definitely provide more feedback on it as I play further along, and open up more regions. I'm very interested to see what else the game has in store, given just how impressive the Kingsmouth area is.