The last few weeks have been a bit hard, and I have noticed I have been grumpier than usual. So I decided that I should probably channel that grump into something useful. In gaming there are a bunch of things that bug me, and that really limited to a specific game. Sure there are games that trigger these things, and I am likely going to use those as examples, but a lot of these complaints fall into larger groupings. This morning I am going to explore some of these things that I think the game world would be better off if “fixed”
Lack of Cross Saves
This one has been bothering me a lot lately, because I have been spending an awful lot of time playing Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch from bed. It bugs me to no end that my Switch account has no relation back to my Battle.Net account. However this isn’t limited to Diablo because when I was playing Minecraft Dungeons the same frustrations applied and in that case it made even less sense given that all platforms have to log in with the same Microsoft account. Right now Bungie is the shining beacon with Destiny 2 and allowing me to choose between playing a separate character on each platform or binding them all together into a single save. I want this functionality to exist across the board, because I don’t mind paying for multiple clients especially when I get to carry my same characters with me.
Lack of Cross Play
This is another big one for me, and is the beginning of what is going to be at theme. I hate artificial boundaries, and I want every game to offer cross platform play. Your gaming platform of choice should be that and I should be able to group together freely with my friends regardless if they are playing via Steam, Origin, the Epic Games Store or any of the consoles like PlayStation, Xbox or Switch. Games feel better when you have the ability to play with whoever you want to. The same goes for MMORPGs where we have made strides over the last decade but really there are still a large number of artificial boundaries… I am looking at you FFXIV and your data centers.
Regional Play Walls
Now we have one that is big for me and Blizzard products. I hate that my EU friends are walled off on an island that I can’t interact with unless I specifically switch over to a EU based Battle.net account. This should be fixed and this is a broken system. The internet is a giant melting pot and as a result has given me access to a ton of players that I probably never would have developed close ties to without it. However it is way more likely for me to want to hang out with friends from Ireland than those from Idaho. Truth be told I am not sure if I actually know anyone in Idaho, but that is not the point. Let me hang with my friends folks regardless of what Region we happen to play in. Sure I realize that it is going to be a less than optimal experience at times, but if I have friends that need to finish some achievement I should be able to pop over and help them out.
The Horrible Faction Wall
This is going to mostly be a World of Warcraft thing, but it goes true for any game that creates an artificial barrier that cleaves in half the player base. The Alliance and Horde wall needs to fall and we as player should be able to group freely with our friends on either side of the divide. Additionally the game as a whole should maybe adopt a better theme than constant racism and genocide, but that is a completely different discussion for a different day. One of the best things that Rift ever did was drop the barrier between the Guardian and Defiant players with their “Faction as Fiction” patch. This is desperately needed in World of Warcraft and maybe stop forcing the divisive Red vs Blue narrative while we are at it.
Physical Transmog Systems
Now lets switch over to a problem that is most represented by Final Fantasy XIV but goes for any game with a similar system. I hate having to keep track of physical items that I am only holding onto for cosmetic purposes. All this does is serve to bloat our banks as well as the amount of items that you are having to store for a specific character. Each one of those items has a full array of stats associated with it and is effectively a unique copy that is being stored, where you could simply give us a system that allows us to flag our account with a specific appearance storing significantly less data. It would be better even if this just happened automagically like it does in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft when we bind an item with an appearance that we didn’t already have. Please fix this Squeenix… and if you are building a similar game out there remember that cosmetics are super important to the overall enjoyment of a game.
Gender Locked Classes
This is a trope that is rife within a lot of the South Korean or Chinese MMORPGs, but it drives me up a wall. If you are going to add classes to your game, make sure that they can be played by either gender. Black Desert Online has effectively been walking this back by creating different versions for each gender, but having that line drawn in the sand is still horrible. Better yet I sorta wish that games didn’t have hard gender choices but instead a character creation system that allowed you to create your character in any way you saw fit and assign whatever attributes you wanted. That however is a battle for the future, and for now I just want games to stop releasing Male only or Female only content. This also is a problem with cosmetics in FFXIV, and it drove me nuts for years that as a Male character I couldn’t have bunny ears.
Lack of Beard Options
This is really a personal thing for me, and I am not sure how many players are impacted by it… but I cannot get into a character that doesn’t have reasonable beard options. This has been a big barrier for me and a lot of the Korean, Chinese or some Japanese MMORPGs because in many cases I have to deal with the meager offerings that are given to me. The best game of all time is probably Warhammer Online because it is the only one that offered wonderful ladybeards on the Dwarves, and you are darn tootin I took advantage of this on one of my characters. The reason why I play an Exo in Destiny 2 is because I could not create a Human with a beard, and for my Warlock and Hunter I just gave up and made female characters.
Lack of Account Wide Storage
I believe that you bank space should be plentiful, expandable and at least some of it should be account wide. This exists in some games but it absolutely should be a thing in more of them. I should be able to swap and materials freely between my characters, and better yet there should be a separate material storage available to them all. More games need to approach things from an account level giving players deep and meaningful reason to have multiple characters without creating the feeling that they are always on the wrong character at the wrong time.
Lack of Account Based Skills and Currencies
Once again adding to the whole discussion of feeling like you are on the wrong character at the wrong time… I wish any sort of currencies that are accrued for doing “things” were done so an an account wide level. So if your friends need you to be raiding on your main, but you really want to be gearing your alt… you could earn the currency on one character and spend it on another. In a similar note I wish things that are long grinds were attached at an account level as well. Tradeskills for example, I wish tradeskills were a thing that just existed and once unlocked and fully leveled could be used by any character on your account. There are plenty of ways to make this work from a lore perspective, but the convenience added of never not being on your gemcrafter or your enchanter would be phenomenal… or always being able to pick that herb or mine that node.
So now that I have aired my grievances with you… what are some of the things that drive you up a wall about games in general or that you would change? Drop me a note below, or feel free to wreck my opinions listed above.
I suspect that Blizzard will never tear down the faction wall as the benefits, from their perspective, would be small while the cost would be huge. They would lose effectively having two versions of each expansion for people to play. Horde and Alliance campaigns are not 100% different, but they are different enough for some players to play both sides before they get bored and unsub. Meanwhile, to effectively tear down the wall, Blizz would have to unify the campaigns in some way. If you can play with your cross-faction friends, but have none of the same quests, something of a barrier would remain. I think the closest we’ll get to that is another “Alliance and Horde work together for a bit” expansion, where they are not actively at war with each other.
Some account-wide storage would be good. EQ and EQII have this and it has always surprised me that it hasn’t become a thing elsewhere. On the other hand, being able to mail things to alts means you are not totally stuck trying to move things if you play just a single account. I remember back in early EQ actually going to a secluded spot, dropping an item, logging out that character, logging in an alt, and picking the item up. We don’t need that anxiety any more.
Gender locked classes are horrible, and I tend to just avoid games that make that a thing.
So funny… I never even thought about questing because I detest questing with other players, but you are right that would potentially be a problem. Questing with others always feels needlessly messy because either I am behind the curve on getting drops or waiting on others to catch up and it just feels bad. I was largely thinking in terms of group content like dungeons/raids seamlessly slotting in the other faction without issue.
I’m not at all convinced by the moves towards making everything account based. I would definitely put some of my decreased emotional engagement with some of the games I play down to the way those games put the account at the center.
I don’t see my characters primarily as extensions of myself. I see them more as actors in a movie I’m directing. I have the final say in what they do but they each have their own motivations and attitudes. Less metaphysically, I don’t usually imagine them as a team or even that they know each other. Or I didn’t. With the prevalence of account-based systems it’s become very difficult to see the characters on an account as total strangers. They’re at very least work colleagues or room-mates and in some games I definitely do now picture them as teams.
That dilutes the whole experience for me, quite considerably. It’s not as much fun as it is in games where there’s more separation. The problem is, it’s incredibly convenient. Once you get used to it it’s hard to resist. I’m not a huge fan of convenience in general. I think quite often it’s the inconvenience of things that makes them meaningful. Or if not meaningful then at least noticeable. The more convenient things become, the blander they are, just as a general rule.
Unfortunately, I feel most of the damage has already been done. Once these barriers have been broken down, re-building them feels artificial. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle very convincingly. That said, quite a few developers have been pushing back against convenience of late, possibly because they’re worried that too much convenience is damaging engagement. I wonder if they can see it in the metrics?
Also not a take I would have thought about, because to me I am the person playing the game and each character is largely just a series of cosmetic choices. I always view the disconnection between my characters as needlessly obtuse. Even if I view them as being unique characters, I tend to view them as all being on the same team.