Procrastination Amplification: Punditry on MMOs and games in general.
This is going to be a rough one people. I’ll have to come up with ten bad design decisions for a game I love and have been promoting for a while now. As usual these points will be in no specific order and incomplete. The ten good things will be up on Monday and I’m sure I’ll have a much easier time writing those. Either way, let’s go. More »
I’m knee deep in the Starcraft II campaign and greatly enjoying it even though I’m not at home and my laptop is not taking the engine well at all. You are not getting a review from me just yet because I haven’t finished the whole thing, but I’ll take this time to talk about Blizzard’s separation of single-player and multi-player modes.
One year ago today I made a snap decision to pick up video game blogging, set up a blogger.com account, and within minutes started typing away at my first real post. If you had asked me back then about my blog I would probably have told you that it was simply an outlet for my thoughts and that I didn’t expect it to go anywhere. I certainly didn’t expect it to be sitting on 170 posts a year later and going ahead boldly at three posts a week. Allow me to take a break from real content today and to talk about this past year instead as well as my plans for the future. More »
Blizzard has been good with cinematics in the last couple of years, but this is simply amazing. I’d watch that movie if there was one 
[Here's the link for those who can't see the embed: click me]
When Spore came out I was among the millions of players who was absolutely disappointed buy the game. The concept sounded great, the creature creator was fun, but then the actual game came along with, well, not so much game in it. Spore pretty much tanked, high piracy rates, low sales, even lower review scores. Unless you are trying to make a sequel that does everything better (and fails, I’m looking at you Black & White 2) conventional wisdom would tell you to abandon the name of your failure immediately and put as much distance between the two of you as you possible can. Our friends at EA/Maxis apparently know better though and give us Darkspore.
In little more than a week, Starcraft 2 will hit the shelves and I hear not all of you plan on buying it yet. Spinks thinks the game is too hard to get into for an real-time strategy newbie while other players don’t enjoy the competive aspect all that much. Bollocks I say (and will qualify below). Chances are that the game is for you anyway.
If you haven’t mail-ordered Starcraft 2 yet, chances are that you will be standing in a smelly game store on July 27th to get it. (You do plan on getting it, right?) If you don’t wish to leave your house or simply don’t want to waste time with installing and all that jazz, the newest offer at the Blizzard store might be for you. You can download the client now and then simply buy and activate it at 10 am on that Tuesday. Chances are you’ll be playing way before those of us who went for boxed copies.
Now, I don’t care too much about getting Starcraft II immediately (I’ll probably even have to wait a couple of days for delivery.) but if this was an MMO I’d be all over it. No lengthy installs, maybe even patches already applied and downloaded – sounds good to me. The one thing I don’t understand is that boxed copy owners can’t use the same service. Why can’t I download the game and then simply apply my boxed copy code to my battle.net account on release day? Seems like an unnecessary hurdle to put in the way of those who still buy retail.
I’m hardly greedy when it comes to coughing up money for MMOs. On the contrary, I try pretty much every promising MMO right when it is released and I’ve had no issues at all buying the last two expansions for World of Warcraft either (as collector’s editions no less). Now Cataclysm is coming up and seems to do quite a lot of things right. Still I’m pretty sure that this will be the one expansion I won’t buy.
Achievements have spread like wildfire in the world of gaming and are quite apparently here to stay. Me, I usually don’t like them at all since most of them are either trivial to get (You have found the jump button, achievement!) or require you to jump through hoops for no purpose other than to get the achievement (Slay 15 turkeys in 3 minutes.) Blizzard’s upcoming Starcraft 2 on the other hand contains a number of really well done achievements. The key seems to be to reward players for doing the right thing.
Blizzard just backed down from their plans to use real names for posting on their official forums. While I did not and still do not agree with all the people that cried foul over this – especially those who refused to even recognize any voice that was not of their opinion – I do applaud the move. Clearly this system was widely disapproved of and feared in the player base and the advancements it might have brought were too small to warrant alienating that large amount of players.
Don’t get me wrong, I doubt going through with this would have had a lasting impact on player numbers or even the number of forum posters, but there simply is no reason to go through with this against such resistance. That all said, I am quite sad about this whole affair. I’ve seen people I greatly respect drop down to blatant demagoguery regarding this issue which not only drowns any reasonable voices to the contrary, but also hides the real arguments that might exist among a pile of junk.
Aside from the whole discussion, I’m also quite sad to see that so many people still seem to be afraid to out themselves as gamers. In some cases this fear might not be reasonable, but in others it probably is. Gaming isn’t mainstream yet, but I sure thought we were past the point were gaming makes you a bad person or even a bad employee. I wonder how much of that is actually caused by anonymity… but I suppose I shouldn’t open that whole can of worms again.