I’m long done with Fable III (or done-ish, since I still mean to do a couple of post game things, such as marrying some random villager. The same way I still mean to finish Fallout: New Vegas, Portal 2, and other games that I simply fail to pick up again after a break of some sort.) I had fun, but I wouldn’t really call it a good game, nor a particularly innovative one. There was one feature in it, though, that I haven’t seen done this way before. The game completely hides numbers during combat, which made it a lot more interesting.

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Nils posted last night about a post on Mind Bending Puzzles discussing the payment model of Memoir:44, a game labeled as free-to-play on Steam.  As it turns out the game isn’t actually free to play (surprise!), as you have to pay for each game you play after a certain amount of free games – a demo if you will. There’s absolutely no way to continue playing without paying after you used up your free games, so this is essentially a model of selling game time cards. But what if there was a way to earn free games by playing?

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“Gold farming is one of those things that make you want to quit writing science fiction because you could never think up something that weird.” – Neal Stephenson in his GDC Online 2011 keynote, according to Kotaku

My interest in Fable III was really low when it came out. I didn’t really enjoy the first game in the series and this one had quite low review scores all across the board. So I decided to skip it and kept that decision up until the last weekend when the game was on sale on Steam. I was sick at the time and couldn’t really play games that required any form of time commitment in front of the computer, so a single player game was exactly what I needed. My expectations weren’t high, and at first my distrust was confirmed. All I saw was a shoddy console port with lame mini-games and what might just be the worst NPC-relationship system ever invented. I kept playing though and now I’m … intrigued.

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You’ve probably heard about Glitch, the new bloodless MMO by tiny speck. It features a complex crafting system, all kinds of skill specializations and, most importantly, some very weird humor. I’ll admit, I had a laugh when I was first tasked with milking a butterfly, a task that required me to massage (with lotion!) said butterfly before. Otherwise it wouldn’t let me perform such an intimate act on it. You can also squeeze chickens for grain.

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“The biggest reason they matter is that they [pointless details] are the gears that make emergent behavior possible. But another important reason is that they’re memorable. Interesting. Quirky.” – Eric, at Elder Game

I was disappointed with Lord of the Rings Online’s legendary item system when I first encountered it. Things have not improved since. For one, I can’t throw a stone in Moria without hitting an orc that’s carrying a legendary item for me to pick up. (Once I’ve dealt with the angry mob of course. For some reason, throwing stones in Moria or even jumping into bottomless wells does not stir quite the response one would expect.) What the hell is legendary about an item that is about as common in Middle Earth as a smartphone is in Manhattan?

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“People can buy free-range chickens and baby bottles with no carcinogens. I want to buy games without lawyers.” – Klepsacovic

“Facebook games are invariably free to play. “Free to play” is a clever little phrase which masks the idea that they are possibly not free to enjoy.” – Tim Rogers

The title of this post is full of lies. There are still people who play in groups in MMOs and I don’t really know the reasons as to why the others don’t anymore. What I do know is why I rarely play in a group these days if it isn’t a group of friends. My freshest experience in that regard is in Lord of the Rings Online, but many other games before have suffered the same fate.

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