12-25-2011, 09:33 PM
I do like recorded statistics and am completely in favor of games doing a better job of recording them. One of the best things in EVE is the "killboard" concept that records your kills, your deaths and all of the major factors of the battle including who was in it, what ships they were flying, what loot the dead people dropped, etc.
You could have "advancement" in the sense that you gain ranks or leaderboard position or something. That's perfectly fine. As long as it doesn't translate into I'm driving a Tiger tank and you're driving a piece of crap Czech tank from 1938 because I played for 2 years and you didn't. (I'm also okay with some ramp-up, but the pace should be tied to the complexity of the object. I don't need to cast "Fireball" for a week before I am ready for "Fireball 2". I might need a week to drive a Czech tank before I'm ready to understand the Tiger, though.)
I also think there's a question of "disenfranchisement" -- are games meeting the desires of most human beings who would like to play games or have "MMORPG gamers" been culled into an audience of advancement whores with the other gamers simply being disenfranchised because there is no AAA MMOG game that meets their needs?
It's like having a restaurant that only serves seafood and draws big crowds so you declare that seafood is the most popular type of restaurant and the others can only ever be niches. And then you compare your 50 million dollar business to Bob's Hot Dog Cart on the corner and declare that this is further proof. I know FPS players and RTS players (and even RPG players) who do not play MMORPGs because MMORPGs do not meet their ideals for a good game. We assume WOW is the desire of the majority but we don't really know that. What AAA game has really tried to meet the needs of an FPS audience? Or an RTS audience? We've got the big successful seafood restaurant but everything else is either another big seafood restaurant or Bob's Hot Dog Cart. Nobody ever risked opening a big new steak house.
In fact, I think Rift shows the risks of trying to do the WOW cookie cutter. Nine months after launch and they have a need to merge servers. And all indications are they did everything "right" -- everything WOW-like, and more. Lots of new content, new bosses, new gear, more advancement, etc. I think something the executives are going to have to think about is whether the risk of doing the same thing is becoming greater than the risk of doing something new.
You could have "advancement" in the sense that you gain ranks or leaderboard position or something. That's perfectly fine. As long as it doesn't translate into I'm driving a Tiger tank and you're driving a piece of crap Czech tank from 1938 because I played for 2 years and you didn't. (I'm also okay with some ramp-up, but the pace should be tied to the complexity of the object. I don't need to cast "Fireball" for a week before I am ready for "Fireball 2". I might need a week to drive a Czech tank before I'm ready to understand the Tiger, though.)
I also think there's a question of "disenfranchisement" -- are games meeting the desires of most human beings who would like to play games or have "MMORPG gamers" been culled into an audience of advancement whores with the other gamers simply being disenfranchised because there is no AAA MMOG game that meets their needs?
It's like having a restaurant that only serves seafood and draws big crowds so you declare that seafood is the most popular type of restaurant and the others can only ever be niches. And then you compare your 50 million dollar business to Bob's Hot Dog Cart on the corner and declare that this is further proof. I know FPS players and RTS players (and even RPG players) who do not play MMORPGs because MMORPGs do not meet their ideals for a good game. We assume WOW is the desire of the majority but we don't really know that. What AAA game has really tried to meet the needs of an FPS audience? Or an RTS audience? We've got the big successful seafood restaurant but everything else is either another big seafood restaurant or Bob's Hot Dog Cart. Nobody ever risked opening a big new steak house.
In fact, I think Rift shows the risks of trying to do the WOW cookie cutter. Nine months after launch and they have a need to merge servers. And all indications are they did everything "right" -- everything WOW-like, and more. Lots of new content, new bosses, new gear, more advancement, etc. I think something the executives are going to have to think about is whether the risk of doing the same thing is becoming greater than the risk of doing something new.