Technologically Obsolete

Last night I finally admitted defeat.  I am no longer playing The Secret World.

Don't get me wrong, I liked TSW.  But my computer just can't handle the game since Issue #6 was launched.  I'm not even in Egypt but my computer still crashes.  I'm not really surprised.  When I bought the game I knew the specs on my graphics card weren't up to spec but the game ran anyway.  Apparently time and development finally caught up to me as I can no longer run the game for any length of time (i.e. 15 minutes) without the game freezing up and crashing.

I guess I'll have to settle for playing 10 year-old games like Eve Online.

 

An In-Game Break

I don't know what it is about this time of year but my attention wanders from actually logging into Eve a little.  Back in 2011 I jumped into the Rift beta and played for a month or two before determining I was sick of elves.  Last year I spent January playing way too much Star Wars: The Old Republic and didn't really get the thrill back for playing Eve until I got to Fanfest.  This year I've pretty much only logged in to set my skill queues for the last two weeks. 

Am I disgruntled with the Eve?  A little bit.  The whole "macros are legal after all for a class of players" thing pisses me off.   I normally don't get upset with people making lots of money.  If someone can figure out how to do it within the rules, more power to them.  I just question whether clicking on one button that allows me to perform hundreds of tasks in game really follows the spirit of Eve.  If I wanted that type of game play I would have stayed in World of Warcraft where players using mods to enhance their abilities is an accepted practice.  Let's just say right now anyone who uses these macros and then complains about market bots gets no sympathy from me.

So while I cool off I'm playing Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World.  I think my time in GW2 is drawing to a close as I reached level 78 last night.  I finally got my leatherworking over 225 so I no longer have to farm mobs for cotton.  I also have my jewelry skill over 250 so I have a new set of recipes to learn and my only hold up is mining gems.  I need to get to 400 in each to max out those professions.  And I am progressing nicely in my personal story but haven't reached the level 70-80 quests in that chain yet.  I only have 26% of the map explored and haven't tried PvP yet but the game doesn't interest me enough to start up a new alt or try to grind up for a legendary weapon.  At least not right now.

The Secret's World continues to amaze every time I put on my headphones.  The sounds are just amazing.  I paid $30 for the game and I think I'm getting my money's worth.  I've played close to 100 hours now and I'm just finishing up The Savage Coast.  I did do the "Strangers from a Strange Land" mission that led me into the Blue Mountain zone where I ran into two ravens, Muninn and Huginn.  Before CCP created tech 2 cruisers Norse mythology had two ravens that sat on Odin's shoulders.  I'm working on the Slayer deck but right now I'm beginning to doubt whether I want to play that.  I think the decks are like Eve's certificates.  They are a guide to what works for those who don't want to theory craft.  Unlike Eve, however, each deck comes with a set of clothes once you learn all the skills.  I might start learning some more weapons than sword and assault rifle.  Right now I can wield the Q7 level of both weapons.

Just because I'm playing other games doesn't mean I'm not covering the shenanigans in Eve.  I finished listening to Ripard Teg's interview with Xander on Crossing Zebras and only have three more interviews to listen to.  And of course I will have a bit more to say about the whole market macro situation.  But for now I'm going to run about on virtual dirtballs for a little while longer.

The Digital Dozen: 10 July 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 8 July 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	55.3	53,220
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	8.7	8,402
3	5	The Secret World	6.2	6,002
4	3	Aion	5.4	5,174
5	4	Eve Online	4.8	4,639
6	7	Metin 2	3.9	3,723
7	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.5	3,411
8	10	APB: Reloaded	2.8	2,733
9	6	Tera	2.8	2,682
10	11	Maple Story	2.5	2,410
11	12	Need For Speed World	2.0	1,957
12	9	Guild Wars	1.9	1,832

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 132,288 

Once again the Xfire community increased their time spent playing MMORPGs on Sunday, posting a 1.5% summertime increase in hours played.  The big gainers were led by The Secret World (+51.7%), Metin 2 (+18.7%) and Maple Story (+10.6%).  The big losers were Guild Wars (-37%) and Tera (-22.5%).

Third time's a charm:  After the disastrous launches of Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, Funcom finally appears to have a decent launch of an MMORPG with The Secret World.  As expected TSW jumped ahead of both Aion and Eve Online but failed to post Tera-like numbers and jump ahead of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Whether because of Funcom's reputation or the upcoming release of Guild Wars 2 next month many players indicate they are waiting a month or two before giving TSW a try.  This trend may work out in TSW's favor as the Funcom offering may avoid the rapid decline in playtime suffered by recent titles like SWTOR and Tera.

 

Another game, another decline:   Nine weeks after the full launch of Tera, the game shows the pattern in the Xfire numbers observers have come to expect of MMORPGs.  

 

 

In the nine weeks since the launch weekend, Tera has experienced a 70.3% decline in the number of hours played by the Xfire community.  This decline corresponds closely with the 62.7% decline suffered by Star Wars: The Old Republic from 1 January to 4 March.  Will Tera manage to stabilize its numbers?  If Tera continues to mirror SWTOR's performance, the release of Guild Wars 2 could actually knock Tera out of the Digital Dozen.

The Biggest MMO Stories Of 2012 So Far

On Friday I posted a story in which I analyzed Massively's lack of coverage of the Burn Jita event in Eve Online on 27-29 April.  While I could understand why Massively reported the way it did, I disagreed with the decision because I thought they were missing covering an element of one of the major MMORPG stories of the year.

My criticism led to the obvious question: what are the biggest, most significant stories currently out there in the MMO space?  Below is a list of 5 items that will make it onto most people's top 10 story list of 2012 at the end of the year.

1.  The success of Star Wars: The Old Republic:  I maintain that the success of SW:TOR is the biggest story of 2012.  With a speculated development cost of nearly $200 million, EA has stated that the game needs to attact 500,000 subscribers to make money.  As a game that doubled-down on the DIKU model of games by utilizing massive amounts of voice acting, a successful run could leave investors believing that only big companies spending huge amounts of money can make a successful MMORPG.  And we could see a hardening of belief that games must be theme-parks to make money.  A crippling failure of the game could lead investors to believe that investing in MMOs is too risky and thus slow down development of AAA games if other new games can't be successful under a different model.  Looked at this way, SW:TOR is a lose-lose proposition for those who dislike theme-park MMOs.  I'm awaiting the verdict to see what direction the industry will follow.

2.  The selling of New Eden:  While EA/Bioware's major innovation is the introduction of voice-acting, Icelandic game developer CCP is thinking completely outside the box and in another universe with its plans for its Playstation 3 exclusive title DUST 514.  CCP along with Sony worked together to make DUST 514 free-to-play; the first MMOFPS designed as a free-to-play on a console platform.

But the unorthodox moves do not stop there.  DUST 514 is linking into the same universe and same server infrastructure as CCP's flagship game, the PC MMORPG Eve Online.  Eve Online, unlike every other large MMORPG, has all 400,000 accounts sharing the same game world.  Add in all the players of DUST 514 and the universe of New Eden will break Second Life's record for the highest number of peak concurrent users on a single game world.

In a genre in which game developers are often criticized for a lack of imagination, CCP is taking huge risks with innovative ideas.  That makes DUST 514, Eve Online and the crazy pack of space vikings in Reykjavik one of the big stories in 2012.

3.  Pandas in Azeroth:   Anytime Blizzard releases an expansion for World of Warcraft the MMO world takes notice.  This year's expansion, Mists of Pandaria, will attempt to stem the decline of players from Azeroth and keep WoW with over 10 million subscribers.  Will a horde of kung-fu pandas save the day?  Everyone will be watching.

4.  Guild Wars 2 is finally here:  The long awaited sequel to ArenaNet's Guild Wars is currently in beta and due out sometime in 2012.  Based on the Xfire numbers from 29 April Guild Wars 2 should solidify the belief among gave developers that cash shops are good and subscriptions are bad.  But according to ArenaNet, the story is not just about financial succcess.  The company claims to have improved upon the genre's standard questing mechanics and made character development and progression unique.  If true, those ideas will transform MMORPG development in years to come.

5.  The Secret World has no class(es):  Up until now, the top MMORPGs except for Eve Online all used character classes to guide their players and levels to give them incentives to move through the content.  Funcom is joining CCP in making a game without classes and levels with its new game The Secret World.  The game is also breaking tradition by setting the game in the modern world, linking to Facebook and having to conduct research online to complete quests.  Not reasearch as in the best way to beat an NPC.  Research like in university.  I anticipate a lot of puzzles.  While EA/Bioware made a super theme-park in SW:TOR, Funcom is attempting to pull off what promises to be a unique game.  Can they pull it off?  If so, The Secret World's Creative Director and Senior Producer Ragnar Tørnquist will have stuck a blow for originality, or at least against conformity in the genre.

Those are my five top stories so far in 2012.  I expect the list will change some as unexpected events occur, but I expect all of them to fall in the top ten MMORPG stories of 2012.

Where Is The Originality?

I started to drop out of popular culture long before 2005 when I started playing World of Warcraft.  Television was lame, with reality TV making an introduction with Survivor and American Idol back in 2002.  Movies?  Besides The Lord of The Rings trilogy (2001-2003), I didn't see anything of interest.  Music?  Country music isn't exactly mainstream, although Taylor Swift and appearances on The Apprentice by Trace Adkins and John Rich put the genre a little more into the spotlight.  Books?  Science fiction and fantasy isn't mainstream either.  In short, I was out of the mainstream and enjoying life.

I wasn't aware just how unoriginal popular culture has become until I looked at last year's top 10 list of movies in terms of worldwide gross.  Here they are:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
3. Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides
4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
5. Kung Fu Panda 2
6. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
7. Fast Five
8. The Hangover Part II
9. The Smurfs
10. Cars 2

Nine of the top ten movies were sequels.  And after having a drill sergeant we called Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want to watch the tenth movie as I might become traumatized.

But are MMORPGs any better in terms of originality where their intellectual properties are concerned?  Looking at the five most popular Western MMOs from yesterday's Digital Dozen post, the answer is discouraging.

The 800 pound gorilla of the genre, World of Warcraft, started with an IP created for their successful Warcraft RTS games.  By the time WoW launched on the 10th anniversary of the release of the Warcraft franchise, the game was the fourth one set in the world of Azeroth.  While very successful, as an intellectual property not very original.

While unoriginal in its application to an MMORPG, at least Blizzard created the IP, unlike 3 of the other 4 games in the top 5.  The #2 game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, relies on the Star Wars universe and LucasArts is listed as co-publisher of the game along with Electronic Arts on Wikipedia.  The #4 game, Lord of the Rings Online, relies on the world created by H.R. Tolkien, although Turbine does not have rights to works like The Silmarillion.  The #5 game, Star Trek Online, uses the universe created by Gene Roddenberry. 

That accounts for 4 or the top 5 games.  What about the #3 ranked game, Eve Online?  Bucking the trend amongst the most successful MMORPGs (and movies), CCP created an original intellectual property we now know as New Eden.  CCP didn't just create a world and then leave story generation to players.  Over the past nine years CCP has added to the story to the point that the lore information was reorganized into the Fiction Portal in the Evelopedia.  With thousands of pages of information, famed explorer Mark726 of Eve Travel in conjunction with Seismic Stan has published a lore guide on Freebooted that gives a rather long summary of the Eve Online IP.

But Eve Online launched in 2003.  Are we condemned to see major game studios pushing unoriginal intellectual properties to us?  I don't think so.  Last year's surprise hit Rift climbed as high as #5 on Xfire among video games of all genres and last week was the 11th most played MMORPG.  In April, Funcom plans on releasing The Secret World, an MMORPG in the modern world with the premise that three ancient conspiracies are at war with each other and with ancient evils.  A game about conspiracies promises a lot of originality in looking at myths and legends.

Perhaps the most intriguing use of an intellectual property may come from Curt Schilling's 38 Studios.  Schilling hired R. A. Salvatore to create a world for the company's Project Copernicus that was used for the sRPG Kingdom's of Amalur: Reckoning.  In 2004 Blizzard released an MMO based on a world created for a RTS series.  Will Project Copernicus launch to a ready-made player base already invested in the Amalur world?  CCP had a lot of growing pains as it slowly climbed up the charts.  Has 38 Studios found a winning formula, at least as far as their IP is concerned, to avoid that?