STAR COMMAND – Set Phasers To Disappointment


Admittedly I didn’t know a whole lot about the game going in. I saw a trailer and skimmed over the Kickstarter page along with a few other articles. What I thought was going to be a deep and satisfyingly was instead shallow and broken. I honestly can’t believe I chocolate-rabbit’d myself so soon after writing that. I suppose I have to take partial blame for expecting too much. Wait… No, no I really don’t. They essentially promised as much in their Kickstarter campaign. Anybody who sunk any substantial money into Star Command must be fighting waves of nausea.

Star Command Review

Visually, the game is great. They did a fantastic job with the pixel art and the aliens and ships are fascinating to look at. They obviously went for a Star Trek feel and I think for the most part they nailed it. Unfortunately it just all goes downhill from here. The combat, ship, crew, and diplomacy (or lack thereof) mechanics are all bad. They really are. I probably shouldn’t make sweeping statements like that but I honestly can’t think of a single redeeming feature among them.

The entire game is based around tokens. Win a battle, get tokens, spend tokens on upgrades or crew. Good luck being able to afford anything, though, when you have to constantly replace your crew. Parts of your ship also use different types of tokens to dodge attacks and fire special weapons. The problem is that you not only need to wait for the rooms to charge up, but then you need to spend a token. Unfortunately you can only hold 2 tokens of each type at a time. After that you have to generate tokens, introducing an additional timer into the mix.  The same is true for shield regenerators, etc. It’s a completely stupid and broken system. I just don’t understand why they created, essentially, 2 different usage timers. It would have been great if they just let you buy and stock ammo, but there’s none of that.  Read on.

Rift F2P


Rift is going free-to-play on June 12th.  To me this was never a question of if Rift would go F2P, but when.  Rift’s numbers are declining as all games do over time.  To be honest, they made it quite a long time for never quite being a true blockbuster success; much longer than most.  EQ lasted forever because it initiated a paradigm shift.  WoW is still doing relatively well for the same reason.  Rift is/was just another good game.

Trion’s big marketing strategy with this F2P transition is to clearly state that players are getting complete AAA MMO experience for free.  You only have to pay for certain things like boosts, mounts, gear, and expansion souls.  All story, all level, all raids — all content is free.

That’s a great strategy, and really the only one I believe can possibly work for a true “AAA F2P” MMO (if such an oxymoron exists).  Let’s look at their execution.

rift free to play

All content in Rift will be completely free.

Subscriptions

Having a sub to Rift gets you boosts.  Whether they’re slowing everything else down like SWTOR, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  As a Patron (their name for a subscriber) you can get bonus mount speed, more reputation, more tokens, more currency, loyalty rewards, and those types of things. It’s the whole “you want to pay money to not be at a disadvantage” trope. Will it be enough to get people to subscribe?  Personally, I don’t see the real benefit.  I’d rather buy these as I want them individually.

Selling Gear

Here’s the big one.

“We will also have gear for sale. Our guidelines for gear on the store are generally as follows: The best gear in the game must be earned and high-level items on the store must also be available to be earned in-game.”

That is vague; I can interpret that to mean you can buy the best gear in the game.  All X are Y but not all Y are X type of logic.  Regardless, it’s pay-to-win unless your definition of winning is to only have the best stuff instantly.  If I can buy the second best stuff right when hit max level, then jump in the next day with the second best gear and start earning the best, that’s winning to me.

This whole conversion is going to do really well for Rift.  I’m absolutely positive that they will see more people playing, and more revenue as a result.  However, F2P is a short-term strategy for MMOs.  Trion forfeits Rift’s credibility and sense of being a genuine AAA game.  Transitioning to F2P will do very well early for the game, but it will expedite the end even if it only makes people consider there being an end, thus that in and of itself diminishing their future possibilities.  Rift’s love group is being served with the realization of the game’s mortality, and I’m confident that the long-run will suffer as a result as those love-group-players lose their desire to stay and start looking for a game without a future dictated by altering design to earn the most money.

I’ll give the game a shot now (I was going to anyway since Raptr gave me 30 days free AND the expansion free…) and maybe give the game a bit of coverage from a ‘how does it play free’ perspective.  That’s precisely what Trion is hoping thousands of people will do.

Genre Drift


morrowind

Elder Scrolls becomes less of a deep RPG and more of an action game with each iteration.

I find this to be an extremely puzzling and often frustrating occurrence among games. At one point you will be playing a certain game, and as time goes on maybe the sequel. Before you know it years have passed and you are on game number 4 or 5 in the series and somehow it’s gone from being an RPG to a straight up Action game or whatever the scenario may be. I don’t even know how to describe this. The only thing I can really think of is possibly Genre Drift? Is that a thing? Well I’m making it a thing and if it’s already been thought of then I’m officially taking credit.

The game that made me think about this recently was Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move. It’s a downloadable title on the 3DS eShop where you control tiny clockwork Marios and guide them to their destination. There has actually been several of these game over the years, except they never started out that way. Let me go back…

Back in 1994 Donkey Kong came out for the Game Boy. It includes the first 4 levels of the classic Donkey Kong arcade game and features Mario pitted against his gorilla nemesis but that’s really where the similarities end. In this version Mario can perform a handstand maneuver and jump, do some kind of side flip, pick up objects, etc. It’s great and there are a crapload of levels. Fast forward to 2004 and a follow up game (or maybe relaunch, I’m not sure) was released called Mario vs. Donkey Kong which has essentially the same game mechanics except every so often there is a level where you have to help little clockwork Marios get through dangerous obstacles. Two years later we’d get a sequel, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis, except you don’t seem to control Mario at ALL. Hell, you don’t even use the control pad. You tap the screen to direct little clockwork Marios around. This was followed up by Minis March Again, Mini-Land Mayhem, and now recently Minis on the Move. What was once a platforming game with puzzle elements is now purely a puzzle game. I’m not saying the later games are bad in any way, but they are a huge departure from the series roots. It’s mind boggling.

It’s also happened in several other instances. If you look at the Elder Scrolls series you will noticed that with each new iteration it becomes less of deep RPG and more of a straight up action game. Mass Effect was an RPG with shooter elements but it kind of did a reverse into a shooter with RPG elements. Granted the drift is more gradual with these examples and not as steep a change as is the case with Mario vs. Donkey Kong, but you can obviously see genre drift.

Now I’m not saying that any of these changes are necessarily bad. I actually enjoyed all the games I mentioned. However there is a definite change in how the games work and often results in compromise to gameplay elements, which does tend to polarize people. I know that a lot of the time I expect a game series to maintain certain features and qualities and build upon them rather than chip away and compromise them. This can lead to expectations that aren’t met and possible disappointment. I’ve seen it happen quite a bit.

It kind of reminds of the radar/spider graph or whatever that they use in Pokemon games when you feed pokemon different gummy types. Depending on which trait you raise more it tends to pull the graph in one direction and away from another. The more you pull towards tough and cool the less cute you are. Similarly it seems the more you drift towards one genre the more you drift away from another. I realize this analogy is really obscure and likely only makes sense to me. At least it does in my sleep deprived state.

I’m not trying to say the change is bad or anything. Well, admittedly I am not a fan of change but that’s hardly the point.

Why I’m excited for WildStar


WildStar MMO

Over the past few days I’ve had this horrible pit in my stomach caused by an acute lack of MMOs to play.  Looking around to remedy my situation, realizing nothing will currently cure me, and hoping there was something in the future, I turned to a game that I’ve only had slightly visible on my radar: WildStar.

wildstar epic content

WildStar will have episodic, phased, open-world, and undoubtedly instanced PvE.

WildStar isn’t trying to be the next best thing. I don’t get this feeling that the developers are trying to overly-innovate or convince people that WildStar is creating some new reason to enjoy MMOs.  I see a zany unique IP with which the developers are having fun.  All of the videos are just cool — that’s deep, I know.  But seriously, there’s a significant amount of ‘different’ stuff in a ‘cool’ way without really being technically ‘new’.

WildStar will have episodic story content, typical questing, battlegrounds, raids (I read there will be 40-man raids), and supposedly open-world leveling on top of customized content that I think is being handled with phasing. All of these can be fun if done right, but what I’m truly excited for are the Warplots and housing.  Build up a base then taking it into a battle against another guild that has built up a base sounds really fun.  Customizing a house to the level of what’s been shown in WildStar is something I have always loved.

wildstar housing

Amazing housing and base building are the driving force behind my excitement.

I don’t need every MMO to reinvent the wheel, but I demand that every MMO at least try to do something better and different than their competition/predecessors.  With a zany new IP being really driven home by over-the-top stylized gameplay, and what appears to be a team embracing the themepark mechanics in their own way, I think WildStar shows great promise.

To sum it all up, we can analyze what WildStar does right, and what it gets wrong, later.  For now, it just looks fun.

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