Righteous Fire Juggernaut

Man wearing lots of armor that is red and black themed standing in a desert region staring up at a giant pyramid with a floating inverted pyramid on top.
Brimstone Sands from New World on PC

Good Morning Friends! It has been a while since I have done one of these roundup posts but that is what you are in for this morning. Over in New World, I feel like I am running on fumes a bit. I do this thing where I get an idea in my head and then I obsess about that idea and when it is eventually accomplished… I end up fairly burned out as a result. My new world version of this was the gear farm series, and now that I have largely finished that… I am struggling to find my next goal. With the start of Winter Convergence, I ground up my faction and now in theory need to spend copious hours following the train and grinding tokens to get kitsch. I’ve also started Brimstone Sands for the first time and lord is that an interesting area. I think I need to just focus on questing out there to get my feet back under me and get to a place where I am deeply enjoying the game again.

The Tequatl World boss fight from Guild Wars 2 where a giant undead dragon attacks the coastline and several dozen players have to take it down in several phases.
Tequatl World Boss from Guild Wars 2 on PC

I’ve also been poking my head back into Guild Wars 2 again and while I am mostly rudderless there I am at least trying to get back in the habit of collecting my daily freebies. Occasionally I do so in a timely enough manner to be able to catch the 6 pm CST Tequatl. This is still my favorite event in the game and quite possibly the first thing I ever did that really sold me on the grandeur and possibility that group content can really have. I need to get back enough into the swing of things to start doing the meta for Cantha and get my siege turtle. I have been growing Kelp in my personal instance for a while now and am hoping that I have enough stockpiled to feed my babby turtle when I finally get one. I greatly appreciate the drop in/drop out nature of Guild Wars 2 and how I can spend an entire evening following the world boss train if I want to… or just not and that is also okay.

Heavily armored warrior wearing red and black gear with a braided brown beard, an eye patch, and a glowing red eye standing in a scrubland region dotted with ornate houses.
Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls Online

I’ve been visiting The Elder Scrolls Online again and as much as I really want to get back into some questing there because I love the story… I am struggling with it a bit. Mentally I keep comparing the combat in ESO to that of New World and ESO keeps coming up on the losing end of that association. To be completely frank… combat in ESO feels sorta boring. It is a lot of light attacks and heavy attacks with a lowered emphasis on hitting abilities. The time to kill seems way too high for me to enjoyably rip through encounters. Granted I have always played a tank and maybe I should focus more on one of my other characters. That said I am not really sure that anything is going to feel great now that I have seen what a more action-oriented MMO can feel like. Like I am certain that the New World style of combat is not everyone’s jam, but the interplay between weapon abilities feels far better than what ESO is providing currently.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build for Path of Exile

I think I have landed on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the Path of Exile league starts tomorrow. I contemplated a lot of things including a more spin-to-win style build of the cyclone that a friend shared with me. Righteous Fire is something I tried a few leagues back but never really converted from the leveling skill over to RF… which I think was a massive mistake on my part. I went off in my own direction because I happened to be enjoying the Wintertide Brand play style and should have actually tried the proper RF build instead. This time with a new take in the form of the Marauder version, I am going to give it my all and make sure I actually follow the guide completely. I might try Cyclone later in the league if I find myself wanting to do something else. Essentially Righteous Fire gameplay reminds me of another one of my favorite classes which is the Thorns Crusader.

User Interface overloaded with Spell Gems in Path of Exile on PC

There has been discussion about setting goals for a new Path of Exile league and I think my goal will be to stop picking up every spell gem I happen to see in my journies. I spent a while yesterday trying to organize my inventory and collapse some of my remove-only tabs into something that makes sense. Granted I will probably never actually play standard, but I hated leaving it in a total mess. For those unfamiliar when you end a league in PoE it gives you a copy of every tab from that season with the suffix (Remove Only). Basically, you can leave it alone indefinitely and to the best of my knowledge, GGG has never deleted these tabs. One of the suggestions I saw for dealing with them was to create a folder named after the league that just ended, and shovel all of the new remove-only tabs into it. I’ve more or less followed this idea with Maps being held out only because I want to convert them and store them when the new league begins. Others like Spell Gems I opted to dump into my inventory and then migrate over to the proper working tab.

I think I am as ready as I am ever going to be for Forbidden Sanctum. If you are planning on doing the league start either tomorrow or in the coming days, shoot me a note. I will be updating my where to find me page once I have my new set of characters.

Queuewalker

Good morning friends! I thought this morning I would take a bit on the blog to talk about me and Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much not done with the game, but the current congestion situation that we find ourselves in has made it much harder for me to play “on a whim”. I’ve been doing my normal end of the year/beginning of the year binge of single player games. However normally when I am in this mode I am still logging in at least once a day into the MMORPGs I am playing at the same time. Generally speaking at least once per day I would log in, maybe do a roulette or deal with my retainers and then log back out. The challenge however is that I plan on the highest population data center and one of the highest population servers period.

When I was working on the Main Story Quest for Endwalker, I had a pretty rigorous routine of logging in at a specific time during the day so that I could be through the queue when I got “off work”. The queue would idle in the background and tick down as I finished out my afternoon and then could be ready to make progress in the story. The drive to do this was there because the story of Endwalker was so damned good. What has happened since then however is that I fell out of the routines I had been engaged with because I was in “vacation mode”. This means that by the time I think about logging in, it is usually early evening and the queues are already madness.

Earlier this week I tried to make my way through. I logged in as soon as I got off work, and then proceeded to go about my daily routine of fixing dinner and feeding the animals. About an hour and a half later we were sitting at the lower number. Meaning in that hour and a half I made it roughly one third of the way through the initial queue. My quick napkin math told me I had at least 2-3 more hours before I could make my way in… at which point I bailed out and gave my slot to someone else who needed it more. Finishing the MSQ took away a lot of my drive to fight through that queue because I know at some point in the future I can catch back up pretty easily. Instead I have been spending that time focused on playing games that are also bringing me joy… but can more easily be played on my schedule.

Once I burn through this current phase of single player games, if the state of the queues is still this rough I might even poke my head back into Elder Scrolls Online. I am still woefully behind the main story and sitting somewhere in Summerset at the moment. Which means I still have a mount of content in front of me before I am even vaguely ready for the new expansion that they are already teasing. So to recap…. very much not done with Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV but the queues are making it very difficult to muster the desire to fight my way through them at the moment.

Alternatives to Azeroth

Good morning friends. We find ourselves in really difficult times, more specifically for those players who had a deep connection to World of Warcraft. One of the most interesting aspects surrounding the Warcraft universe is that there are so many players that were happily plugged into Azeroth without knowing much about the larger MMORPG scene. The game had a unique way of spreading from spouse to partner or to family members or maybe even to coworkers. The end result is that it created a large number of “Blizzard Gamers” that had never really played much prior to the game nor played much in addition to it. This morning’s post is specifically for the members of the Warcraft community that now find themselves in a troubling situation. For many playing Warcraft right now feels tainted, but at the same time the game became part of their self-care routine as a way to alleviate the stresses of the world.

Please note this is not a post telling people to abandon World of Warcraft. That isn’t something that I can tell anyone to do. Personally, I just can’t touch Blizzard products right now. Maybe if the systemic change goes into place and it seems like the company is on the right track again I can return, but for now, I am distancing myself. If you are feeling the same way, but also struggling to know what to do with your gaming time… this morning’s post is specifically targeted at you. As a long-time “WoW Tourist” I have played almost all of the MMORPGs that have come out throughout the years and I have great news for you. While Warcraft was consuming all of the discourse, there were a wide number of games that have quietly been gaining steam in the background. This morning I am going to talk about the games that I think specifically would be easy to move over to after coming from a World of Warcraft background.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This is one of the older games on this list and it is impossible to talk about without also talking about Lord of the Rings as a whole. This game was released on the heels of the extremely popular series of movies and had the challenge of creating a world that felt like said movies, but also had none of the licensing rights to the movie imagery. It is also very much a game of its era and if you were a huge fan of the way that Vanilla Warcraft and Burning Crusade felt, then you might possibly feel at home roaming this vast world. Enjoyment of the game however is greatly enhanced if you have a love of Tolkien because so many little details of the books are lovingly placed or recreated in this setting.

The story of Lord of the Rings Online is set as you being a contemporary of the Fellowship. This means throughout the course of its long tale you will be crossing paths with various members of the larger story. This gives the game leverage to let your character stray from the text, but still has a larger context of the events of the story we know so well. There are a number of extremely interesting character classes and rich crafting system and a functional but not phenomenal housing system. I think more than anything I fell in love with the world itself because it makes for an extremely interesting backdrop to your own character story. The game is showing its age, but especially if you were a classic player it might feel like home.

There is of course a free trial that lets you get in and start playing the game with an albeit limited set of character options and only the base content available. It has one of the more complicated pricing models in that each expansion is purchased separately, but there is a version of the game that includes the first six expansions for $59.99. If you choose to subscribe to unlock additional features it comes in at the standard $15 a month.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Did you ever want to play World of Warcraft circa Wrath of the Lich King but in a Science Fiction setting? Gratz then Star Wars the Old Republic is probably just the game for you. If you ever played through the much acclaimed Knights of the Old Republic RPG by Bioware, this game is set further down in that same timeline and as a result, references a lot of events from that KOTOR 1/2 setting. The only negative about Star Wars the Old Republic is that at this point in its lifespan it is largely a single-player MMORPG and has been retooled to support that playstyle. It features some of the deepest and most engaging storylines I have experienced in an MMO with each of the eight classes having its own completely unique character arcs that play out over the course of the base game.

It adds a lot of interesting things to the genre, like a Starfox-style arcade space combat mode and a deep companion system allowing you to customize them and augment your play. For example, if you are a squishy DPS and struggle while questing, then bring a healing companion or a tank companion to come to make that questing go a little bit more smoothly. There is a fairly rich crafting system, but it feels like it was largely abandoned once you left the base game. The game veers sharply into a completely single-player narrative once you reach the expansion content, but is still very much worth experiencing for yourself. It featured some really interesting group content at release but has been tuned in a way that most people just solo it these days.

There is a free trial that unlocks a limited subset of content and character options. One of the interesting things about Star Wars the Old Republic is that if you pay for a single month at $15, it permanently unlocks all of the expansion content and a number of the missing character options. Even more interesting about this game is it supports a $60 two-month subscription that does not renew, which tells me that Bioware fully understands that this is the type of game that folks dip their toes back into every now and then for a month or two at a time. There are ways to buy the game outright for $30 featuring all of the expansions, but really the better option is to simply pay for a single month of subscription time.

Neverwinter

Neverwinter is a bit of a mixed bag, but I feel like it is worth talking about nonetheless. The first two games in this sequence started their lives as a subscription model game and then were later converted over to free to play when the market proved that there could only be one “WoW”. Neverwinter on the other hand released as a purely free-to-play vehicle… and as a result, I would classify it as very “freemium”. You are going to be deluged with a bunch of nonsense that is associated with paid unlocks and priced-to-own features… including so many varied currencies that it is difficult to keep track of. if you can ignore all of this, the core gameplay loop is extremely enjoyable and it offers a more action roleplaying game take on what is the tried and true World of Warcraft formula.

The game releases content at pretty regular intervals and the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable. Trying to sort out what it actually costs for anything from the store is completely incomprehensible. If you are looking for a fun game to get in and play for a while but don’t plan on it turning into anything more serious then Neverwinter might just be the ideal fit for you. It requires setting up an ArcGames account, which means that you are going to have to deal with Perfect World nonsense, but pending again that you can overlook that I’ve personally had a lot of fun with it. This is a game that I don’t see recommended as very awesome because you need to be willing to overlook a lot of those free-to-play flaws to find the diamond among the trash heap.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is without a doubt the best deal in MMORPGs. I can say that statement without irony or subterfuge because the game legitimately is a “buy the box” and play the game type experience. The only caveats that I need to include with it, is that the game itself is vastly different from any other MMORPG on the market in the way it feels and the types of content that is available to the player. If you were a loremaster in World of Warcraft and got joy in ticking things off a list, then this might be the perfect game for you. If you loved World Quest content, then again this might be the ideal experience because pretty much the entire game is the equivalent of a World Quest. Guild Wars 2 presents you huge maps with lots of activities on them and reoccurring group events that you get credit for as you move your way towards “map completion”.

The game also does an excellent job of making sure there is always some objective that you could be working towards, presenting you with a menu of different achievements and collections to go out into the world and complete. It has an extremely rich crafting system and instanced nodes so you are never actually competing with players for resources. The gameplay itself however is a bit of an acquired taste with a character being made up of not only the class you choose but also the specific weapon combination you choose to go with it. I have to admit I have played a lot of Guild Wars 2 in spite of the fact that I still don’t really get the core draw of the experience. It has rich and acclaimed story content, that I have largely bounced off of, but those who love this game they are extremely devoted to it.

If you were a big PVP player in World of Warcraft this game is known for its rich Realm vs Realm vs Realm gameplay. Essentially think Alterac Valley, but something that people actually queue for and participate in as you have a big epic battle with other players over resources. Never really been my cup of tea but I know there are a good number of players that play Guild Wars 2 almost exclusively for this content.

Essentially as it stands right now there are two ways to buy into the experience. The first is an edition that includes the base game and the first two expansions for $29.99. If you are willing to spend a bit more you can buy a new multi-pack that includes the upcoming End of Dragons expansion releasing in February for $49.99. In addition to this, there is of course a cash shop with a large amount of account unlocks and cosmetics, that are in truth purely optional content. Some of the things like unbreakable harvesting tools are the awesome quality of life improvements but provide no real benefit over the base breakable tools in the game. Well worth giving a shot if you have never played before because it might just be the game you have been looking for.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Now we are getting into the games that I assume anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time knows I will be recommending. Something you need to understand about this game is that I love Elder Scrolls Online. I was a friend and family alpha tester, have two characters named after me, and have played it off and on since it was released. I am more than a little biased about this game, so you need to understand that going into this discussion. ESO was a critically panned game that managed to gain traction and absolutely mail a regular cadence of content releases. Essentially each year there is one large expansion and three smaller content drops, essentially meaning that every 3 months or so there is something new and exciting to engage within the game.

Classes in Elder Scrolls Online are more suggestions than actually locking you down to playing a specific role and if enough time is spent in the game you can earn more than enough points to buy your way into multiple functional specs. I personally main a Dragon Knight, and I can play that as DPS, Healer, or my role of choice Tank. The crafting system is probably my favorite from any MMORPG and the content is laid out in such a way that effectively all of it remains evergreen. Each zone drops specific gear sets and you can take a blue item and upgrade it all the way to the highest tier. This means players are always out in the world participating in content regardless of the zone, making the entire world feel vibrant and alive.

If you were a PVPer in World of Warcraft, this also might be a landing place for you given that it has an entire game mode centering around huge battles to seize control of Cyrodil. Three factions vie for control over Forts and Keeps, all while trying to earn the right to conquer the Imperial City in the center of the map. These campaigns come in seven days and thirty-day flavors and involve players needing to not only take territory but organize the holding of territory during off-hours. For those who are not into the big campaign, Cyrodil still serves as an interesting but dangerous land to explore and well worth doing so for all of the sky shards and little mini-dungeons found there.

Pricing for Elder Scrolls Online gets a little bit contorted. Essentially things are divided into two categories, Expansions which add large new areas to the world along with a new starter experience, and DLC which adds dungeons, raids, and smaller areas. There is an expansion every year and it comes with a standard new game price tag associated with it. DLC is purchased through the crown shop and is somewhere in the $15-$20 price tag depending on how elaborate it is. Alternately you can pay a $15 a month price tag which unlocks all DLC for the game along with your “ESO Plus” subscription. I keep this active if I am playing because it also gives you an unlimited crafting inventory allowing you to harvest until your heart is content without ever worrying about bag space. There is a multi-pack that includes Morrowind, Summerset, Elseweyr, Greymoor, and Blackwood for $59.99 which is the ideal way to buy-in.

Final Fantasy XIV

We have reached the point in this post where we finally get to the game that you all expected me to talk about before you clicked on the link. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best games on the market and also one of the most endearing comeback stories the games industry has ever had. I say this with no hyperbole intended, this is probably the best MMORPG on the market and it is for a lot of reasons. This game is still a passion project of the team responsible for turning this game around from abject failure to overwhelming success, and for the most part, all of the key players are still actively engaged in creating new content. This team also sets the bar for transparency in information and honesty with its player base about what is going to work and what is not going to work. Players don’t always get what they want, but we often get a better understanding of why exactly we are not getting it.

The challenge with Final Fantasy XIV however is that it feels very much like playing an alternate universe version of World of Warcraft. There is no denying the influence that Warcraft had on Yoshi P while working on this game, but also at the same time there are just a lot of things that work completely differently coming from the Everquest derived lineage of Final Fantasy XI. Additionally, this is a game that was designed with the limitations of the PlayStation 3 in mind, so a number of the systems just don’t work quite in the same ways that a PC-focused MMORPG gamer would expect them to. Then there is the story gating of content that I talked about yesterday, and even though the said story is phenomenal… you cannot progress through good chunks of the game without making your way up to a specific point in the Main Story Quest or MSQ.

The reason why I love this game and keep coming back to it though is the community. There has been a careful focus by the team working on the game to lay the groundwork of shared struggle and kindness throughout the game. There is subtle social pressure to do good and be friendly, in the hopes that maybe just maybe at the end of a group activity you get a commendation from your players. Like it sounds silly, but in practice ends up curbing a lot of the animosity and toxicity that I have seen in other games. The content is also structured in a way so that doing older content is both enjoyable and rewarding and when you have a brand new player those rewards are increased. This has created an effect where running with a brand new player is actually sought after, rather than something you fear. Sure you need to spend a bit more time explaining mechanics, but you are going to get more of the end game currency you are chasing as a result to make it worth your while.

That is not to say that the game does not have its low points as well. Casual PVP is great and I find it very enjoyable, but I am not the traditional PVP player. From what I understand it is nowhere near as highly tuned as other games and as a result those who are more focused on that gameplay get frustrated by it. Housing in the game is one of the coolest systems, but because of the way that it is structure it is prohibitively expensive and just plain unavailable due to demand for most players. Apartments and Free Company rooms exist, but they feature a limited subset of the options that a traditional house would include. One of the huge benefits of the game is the ability to play every single job on a single character, but this is also somewhat of a double edged sword. Leveling your first job comes extremely quickly as you follow the MSQ, but alternative jobs are left hanging forcing players to significantly slower ways of leveling them.

All of that is pretty manageable, but without a doubt the most frustrating part about the game is the account system. Square created a system that would have felt needlessly arcane during the Web 1.0 days and now feels just painful to interact with. Those of us who have been around awhile understand the ins and outs of it… but account creation is the first real hurdle any new player might encounter. It also has a weird pricing model with subscriptions having a good number of asterisks out beside it. The game is $13 a month if you only one one character per server with a maximum of 8 characters in total. $15 a month gets you up to 8 characters per server (which honestly alting is a trap) and a maximum of 40 in total. Then you can pay an additional $2 per month to gain additional retainers or an addition fee to gain use of the mobile app that lets you play the market boards aka auction house remotely.

Right now the game is being deeply discounted due to a sale that is taking place. You can pick up the Complete edition that includes the base game, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers expansions for $23.99 or the non-sale price of $59.99. Then come November if you are at that point in the game you will need to purchase the Endwalker expansion for $39.99. The Free Trial gives players access to the base game and the Heavensward expansion or the first 60 levels of the game, but comes with a bunch of restrictions limiting the player to 300,000 gil and cannot join Free Companies or send public messages like Shout, Yell or Tell. They are also now restricted with a longer queue time than paying customers. That said it is well worth trying the game for free in order to determine if it really is for you.

One of the things I realize upon making this post, is that I am going to have folks asking “What about X game”. The truth is there are literal hundreds of MMORPGs currently available, each with their positives and negatives. This is my personal take on the games that I think a World of Warcraft exclusive player would fit into most easily. If you have your own opinions for what you feel like are a better fit, as always feel free to leave a comment below. Once again this is not me trying to tell players that they need to leave World of Warcraft, but if you too are struggling with engaging with Blizzard right now… here are some alternative places you could find shelter in for the time being.

The Battle for Azeroth’s Soul

Growing up did you ever have a friend that you got along with swimmingly and had some amazing times and then something changed.  You aren’t exactly sure what changed but there was a shift where they moved from being this loveable goofball that you cherished time with, to being something that just could not ever seem to get their shit together.  You would try and go hang out with them again, but you always felt worse about everything after spending a significant amount of time in their aura.  You would try and offer advice or attempt to help them get their shit together, but it always ended up backfiring somewhere along the way.  Eventually, you found yourself distancing from them just to keep your own hopes and dreams from coming crashing down around you as they pulled you into their void.

I’ve had that friend, actually more than one of them over the years.  I’ve also had a very similar relationship with Blizzard and more specifically World of Warcraft.  When you are in this situation you want the world for this person that you love, but also know that it is actively harmful to have them in your life.  The thing is I have learned to cut myself off from those influences in the real world, or at least significantly distance myself from them to where they are no longer impacting me.  I’ve never really managed to do the same with World of Warcraft because even though I know it is bad for me…  I still care.

So as a result it hurts a bit when news comes out that they are flailing and are not so great condition right now.  In part, I am talking about the supposed leak that was circulating or the long-winded rant thread by Grummz the other day adding to it.  Side note…  that is not a leak friend.  That is not something that came from official company emails or documents that were then circulated without the permission of Blizzard.  That is someone having a rant and while I don’t know the circumstances of that rant, it was purposeful and very much not something that leaked out.  I am not sure if it is real and someone thought they were venting in a safe place…  and someone copypasta’d it onto Imgur or if it is corporate cosplay.  Whatever the case it is still a bad look at a bad time when World of Warcraft is seemingly already reeling.

I’ve been following this drastic turn from the zeitgeist on their opinion and general sentiment about World of Warcraft.  The thing is it isn’t like we have not been collectively “mad” at the game before.  This always seems to be a cyclical happening and there is always something in every single expansion cycle that pisses someone off enough to start sharpening that axe.  However this time it feels a little different.  For years on the podcast, we have raised the question of what happens to Warcraft when they release two poorly received expansions in a row.  Blizzard had been on this cycle of a good expansion and a bad expansion and the goods are always high enough points to pull up the public sentiment creating a mindset of “just wait for the next expansion and everything will be alright again”.

Battle for Azeroth was not well received and for me personally, it was the doubling and tripling down on the big dumb Red versus Blue narrative of factional conflict.  I enjoyed the storyline Horde side quite a bit but never could seem to get into the Alliance narrative in spite of on paper it seeming to have a bunch of elements I would care about.  Shadowlands had moments of brilliance like the Maldraxxus but zones I had to force my way through like Bastion…  which unfortunately was the very first zone of the expansion.  Normally I manage to level my main and an alt before bouncing from World of Warcraft but I only actually made it to the new level cap on a single character before tossing the game aside.

I am not a proponent of Classic World of Warcraft because it creates this revisionist narrative of the past.  Coming back and playing that game made me realize that so many of the elements that I deeply cared about and remembered fondly…  specifically involved the people that I remembered them fondly with.  There is no going back to a better time in World of Warcraft because you will never actually capture that lightning in a bottle that was gaming at that exact time in history.  However, I do look fondly upon the first trilogy of World of Warcraft like a magical time and I have been trying to understand why it felt so much better back then at least compared to the more modern incarnation that really started with Cataclysm.

The thing is if you follow the arc from World of Warcraft to The Burning Crusade and into Wrath of the Lich King not only did you have a strong narrative path that connected directly to Warcraft 3, but also a game that was built on constant and iterative improvements to the existing formula.  Sure there were some wild changes here and there, but for the most part, each expansion added to the things that were available to the player base and offered not only quality of life improvements but also changes that enrich the existing systems rather than radically changed them.  An example of this is Gem Sockets, which is a system that layered on top of the existing gearing systems and enriched them adding another layer of customization to something that already seemed to be working.

With Cataclysm we started what I will refer to as the “Wild Moodswing” era of World of Warcraft.  This is marshaled by what seemed to be a desire to erase the past and create something completely new.  They were not going to actually create a Warcraft 2.0, but with each expansion, it felt like they were making radical enough changes that they might as well have called it that.  Cataclysm started this off by quite literally nuking the world and replacing almost every single old-world zone with a slightly different version.  It was ambitious as hell, and while it didn’t work for me I think the concept was cool.  For me, it was oversteering while you are already hydroplaning and I think the game ended up in the ditch as a result.

The problem with radical change is it ends up creating a vastly unpredictable user experience.  We all have a love for World of Warcraft and all of this nostalgia…  but end up having them try and apply those feelings to a game that no longer feels like we want it to feel.  The end result is you wind up with great vacillations between moments of unexpected brilliance like Legion and extreme low points like Warlords of Draenor.  So the thing with WoD is that on paper it seemed like everything going into that expansion was going to be awesome.  I actually greatly enjoyed the leveling process, but the huge gaps between content after the initial burst left a bad taste in so many mouths.  I will always remember it fondly because it gave me the one-player fantasy I have always wanted…  DPS Warrior with Sword and Shield.

After years of gnashing my teeth about what makes an MMORPG great, and I think I have ended up with a basic template.  Here are the bullet points I have boiled it down to:

  • Small iterative changes over time that feel like they improve not only the quality of life for the player but enrich the existing systems and build upon them.
  • A predictable release cadence that allows your player base to know when then the next content drop is going to happen so that they can play their schedule around it.  Additionally, the content quality needs to be consistent and meet most of the player’s expectations.
  • Support multiple styles of play so that your raider, pvper, crafter, and your extreme cosplay aficionado all have a home and feel like they have equal footing in your game.  The content drop should give each of the groups of players something they feel is theirs and can be excited about.
  • Make additive content not subtractive content.  The world should feel like it is getting bigger and there should be systems that make the older content evergreen and still relevant in spite of times changing.  The alternative makes you feel like the world shrinks each time content drops as this new thing is the only part of the world that now matters.
  • Catchup mechanics that allow new players to easily slide into content if they have walked away for a while.  Games need to support the ability to fade in and out of a game as your life changes and not feel like the player has sacrificed too much in the process.

The thing is there are a number of games more or less following these bullet points.  You have games like Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV that have slowly been building momentum for years.  There is also Guild Wars 2 that is doing its own thing but should probably be mentioned even though the thing that it is doing is not really in my wheelhouse.  The problem is there are two games that I love that are absolutely NOT doing these things…  namely Destiny 2 and World of Warcraft.  I struggle in both cases because the world seems to shrink each time a content drop happens as the players are funneled towards this new thing that just got added in, with no real reason to keep doing the older things that were still enjoyable.  That is something that Final Fantasy XIV has excelled at is bribing players to keep doing the back catalog of content because it is good for the health of the game to make sure everything stays active.

I think another important note we should talk about is console support for games.  World of Warcraft does not have console support, nor does it appear like they are heading in that direction.  Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online both jumped early on the console bandwagon, and while at least in the case of FFXIV system design being initially limited because of the PlayStation 3 I think that flexibility has paid off in other ways.  Folks might have been PC gamers in their High School or College years but found as an adult that sequestering to a dedicated room of the house to play games no longer fits their way of life.  Having the flexibility of still playing the MMORPGs that you loved in your younger years, on the console that is more practical in your older years is a big boost in the total pool of players that you can draw on.

So I have said a lot of words today and unburdened myself with a lot of concepts I have been thinking about.  I want to close things out, but I feel like I need to draw back a specific point that I feel is extremely important to underline.  I do not want World of Warcraft to fail.  I do love and want Final Fantasy XIV to be successful, but I do not want it to be entirely due to the failure of what was a long-time friend of mine.  World of Warcraft is that friend that cannot get their shit together, but even though you have been distancing yourself…  you still really want to see them succeed.  I would love for us to tell in a decade’s time the riveting tale of the revival of World of Warcraft and how it is the second greatest comeback tale of all time…  because let’s be honest no one is going to outdo the FFXIV 1.0 to FFXIV 2.0 story.  As much as I want this success for an old friend, I am just resigned to the fact that we are going to get more of the same with an added focus on mobile game mechanics and alternate streams of monetization.  I want World of Warcraft to be a better game than it is today, but I have lost my faith that it can be.