Free To Play Budget

The Arrival

Well yesterday was the day that The Elder Scrolls online officially announced its pricing and opened up the preorders.  This honestly has been a day I have waiting for anxiously for some time.  I realize that lately there has been a lot of hostility towards the Elder Scrolls because it is trying to be a traditional subscription model game in a market gone completely gaga over the “free” in free to play.  I personally do not mind paying for a box and then later paying a subscription fee for a game, especially not this one.  Unfortunately my NDA is firmly in place so there is not a whole lot more I can say about the reasons why I am so into this game.  I am anxious for it to fall so I can properly gush over it.  Honestly at this point I am shocked that it is still in place, considering the April launch date.  Hopefully the coming weeks will see that change.

I love the preorder launch trailer above, because it takes place seconds after the original cinematic launch trailer.  Whereas the first trailer focused on the player versus player conflicts being set up in the world, this one is more focused on the other conflict.  You know the one where a giant Daedric Prince is trying to take over Tamriel.  Since I am not PVP centric, this is the conflict I am most interested in and the cinematic like always does not miss a detail of showing this tension.  If you have not already seen the original cinematic… you should really watch it first to get the full effect.  I would love to see them release one that edits the two together into one seamless sequence.

The Pricing

The above image is the shot across the bow that started the madness.  It seems that ahead of time Amazon staged the image and it got leaked.  From that point it was off to the races with speculation and complaint about the benefits or lack thereof.  Honestly when I look for a Collector’s Edition all I care about is access to in-game goodies, a soundtrack and the traditional head start weekend.  As far as in game stuff, I generally expect some form of an in game boost item that becomes meaningless by about level 10, and some sort of an in-game mount…  since having a mount becomes so insanely important in these games.  So by those criteria this CE is lacking the soundtrack, but instead making up with an additional playable race… The Imperial.  More than likely Belghast will be an Imperial, because that is fitting his character.

The real benefit however is not even mentioned here in the image that started it all.  Apparently if you preorder before launch you get an additional set of bonuses called the “Explorers Pack”, that will allow you to create a character of any race in any faction.  That right there is pretty huge.  Imagine if you could have an Alliance Tauren, or a Horde Dwarf?  I would have totally done that many times in my time playing various faction centric games.  So far only Rift has really allowed me to create faction bending characters, and even then it is only through the use of race swaps.  You also get an additional pet, but next to the rest of that pack it seems meaningless.  All of this comes for the relatively reasonable prices of $50 for digital, $60 for physical, $70 for digital CE, and $100 for physical CE with the statue and book and all the miscellany that you see above.

Yesterday we were absolutely shocked at how reasonable the box was to be truthful.  Based on recent examples a collectors edition I was honestly expecting this to be another one of those $150 Star Wars: The Old Republic style boxed sets.  So while I find it pretty reasonable… there are a lot of folks who are chafing under the pricing.  To be truthful were I outside of the United States I would too.  For starters it seems like Zenimax simply changed the currency symbol rather than setting a realistic price point.  That means for all my British friends, these prices end up being $80, $96, $112, and $160 respectively.  Eighty bucks is a bit too much to ask someone to pay for a brand new non-super happy magical edition of a game.  Granted by the time I post this, those prices will likely change as I just did them based on a quick google of converting dollars to pounds…  but still they are more than a little out of whack.  The end result is a lot of my euro friends simply saying “nope”, and quite honestly if I had to pay those prices… even as much as I love the game I might also be in that boat.

Free to Play Budget

  Remember the other day me talking about how our perspective matters.  This is yet another case of this happening.  Had the free to play explosion not degraded what we are willing to pay for an MMO… then this is another launch that would have gone off without a question as to the price to value.  At this point however so many MMOs are either outright free, or some sort of a “buy the box” model.  Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and World of Warcraft remain the last bastions of the “pay for the software and pay for the game” era.  So we can quickly rush to bashing them for this decision… but the problem is they were built for a era that may or may not be over.  These games were started in a time when the reality was that players would happily plunk down their $60 for the client software and just as happily plunk down $15 a month for the maintenance fee.  I mean this model works in the IT world, since damned near every big money software package comes chained to a maintenance agreement.

What has changed is that players now have an option.  Similar to the open source movement, folks can now say “Nope” and opt to avoid playing the new and shiny games and instead retrench in games like Rift that have a much lower barrier of entry.  As much as I want to play Elder Scrolls, I can’t necessarily say that they are wrong.  I am pretty intimately connected to the success of this title, so I was going to play it long before they announced the pricing.  I knew from the moment it was announced that I would be leading a branch of House Stalwart in this game, and having a lot of fun along the way.  For me buying Elder Scrolls Online was a foregone conclusion, but I can completely see especially with the really poor currency conversion skills… why folks would opt not to buy into this franchise.  Granted this games success really doesn’t lay within the MMO community…  frankly I don’t think they “need” us.  This game will be a test of whether or not the console player has an appetite for a large scale multiplayer version of a game they have bought tens of millions of copies already.