The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: MMO Design (Page 2 of 36)

Those Unwilling To Learn From History Are Doomed To Repeat It

At least Wildstar is willing to try something different.  While I’ve been on the plane to GamesCom, both Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online were kind enough to elaborate on their billing model — which is the classic subscription model.

Elder Scrolls Online has this to say:

“Charging a flat monthly fee means that we will offer players the game we set out to make, and the one that fans want to play,” Firor told the website. ESO will also include 30 days of play with the purchase of the game. “Going with any other model meant that we would have to make sacrifices and changes we weren’t willing to make.”

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Yer Killin’ Me, Wildstar

It probably comes as no surprise that I have discovered religion about Free 2 Play in a big way.  It’s very clearly the way that the future of the genre is going, and any new competitor that enters the space is going to face immense competition from the rest of us that now provide a pretty substantial amount of gameplay for free.  Right now, WoW is the only successful subscription-only MMO in the west, and even they seem to be sticking their toe in the pool. Continue reading

Black Gold’s Shiny New Microtransaction Model

I’m all for innovating inside of the monetization space for games, but innovation implies better, and I’m not sure this applies.

Black Gold Online’s file save mode will record your playtime data, showing all materials and equipment looted in that specific timeframe. Players will be given a choice to purchase that specific “save” if you wish to acquire all of those items… This system aims only at paying for rare materials and high level equipments: Basic materials and equipments can be looted immediately without purchase.

I believe this translates to “you have to pay us for the right to actually keep any rare loot that you’ve found.”  Doing this on some level isn’t unusual: SWTOR and Dungeon Runners limit the ability to equip epic items you find (one purchase unlocked the right to equip those items in both games), and Team Fortress 2 and Guild Wars 2 will drop chests that can only be opened with microtransactioned keys.

Of course, it’s difficult to tell for sure, since I’ve read it 3 times and, even with the helpful examples, am not exactly sure that I’ve gotten it right. That being said, anytime a customer base doesn’t UNDERSTAND your business model, they’re going to be extremely reluctant to give you their credit card information.

WoW Considers Joining the Modern Age of Gaming

Congratulations to Rock Paper Scissors for uncovering and confirming that Blizzard may be looking at dipping their toe into the microtransactions pool in some territories.  As someone who has gone through the transition myself, I am completely welcoming and want to tell them from the outset that the water is fine.  That being said, it would be nice if we could get observers and the press to stop equating with evil (‘dark… alchemy’) and ‘panic’. Continue reading

Why PvE Content Will Be a Coral Reef

This was forwarded to me not too long ago.

Game developers often release PVE content that is like a Coral Reef, i.e. it’s relevant for a period of time (e.g. for some part of an expansion), but eventually with vertical progression (levels and/or gear), players outgrow that content and it’s essentially dead. By the next expansion, the previous expansion’s zones are ghost towns and only visited by those people leveling new characters through them. Over time, what you have is a world where 80% of the zones are no longer relevant, and only 20% is. That is, you have PVE content that evolves like a Coral Reef, and this is primarily due to the unsustainable nature of vertical scaling.

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Just Mostly Dead…

The primary problem with the concept of Permadeath in MMOs has always been in a vast disparity between the emotional connection that different kinds of players have towards their characters.  For hardcore roleplayers, their characters are a work of art and passion, personas built over hours, days or months of collaborative playtime with their peers.  For the type of cold-blooded murderer who likes to bathe in the pixellated blood of noobs, though, their avatars aren’t very important.  They are a tools, a means to an end, a hammer in the toolbox used to bash in the hopes and dreams of the innocent.  PK them?  OK, we’ll just make another. Continue reading

World of Tanks Steps Tentatively Away from ‘Pay to Win’

This article is significant, in that World of Tanks is considered the premier ‘pay to win’ success story in the North American market.

The core basis of “free-to-win” is to remove all payable options that could be viewed as giving a player an advantage in battle. Revenue will come from sales of non-advantageous content, such as premium vehicles, personalization options and the like.

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GDC11 Presentation: The Loner

My GDC presentation, The Loner, was a reprisal of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at AGDC.  I’ve updated the slides in the sidebar (convenient link here) to point to the new slides, which are cleaner, neater, and offer some additional information.  Massively covers the talk here. The talk wasn’t very full, as it somehow escaped being in the Conference-at-a-glance guide or on the conference overview boards, but the response was pretty good.  Here, SW:TOR’s board warriors took my talk and made a poll asking ‘What Kind of Loner are you?’ Continue reading

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