Everquest Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blame it on Lady Vox

February 9, 2014 by Belghast

This is happening a little out of the normal order. Since I wanted to devote a long post to Everquest Next Landmark for Steampowered Sunday, I decided against cluttering the bottom of the post with a factoid. So today I am doing a second really quick post as a sort of addendum. On the days when I have an already existing “thing” for that day, I might start doing this. The Friday Forum Fodder felt a little odd to have a factoid glued to the bottom. I still question if this feature is worth doing, or if folks are going to get bored of me talking about myself.

Blame it on Lady Vox

Since I posted a big long lovestory to Everquest Next for my Steampowered Sunday post, it feels only fitting to chain this factoid on the same day. My first real MMO experience was Everquest, and like I said in the other post it will always hold a special place in my heart. I love the setting of Norrath and its places, peoples and legends. That said I would have likely never gotten into the game on my own. I was one of those people that watched the game as it was being developed with great interest, only to get a bit soured at the thought of paying a monthly subscription. On my Amiga I had flirted with playing Air Warrior and EGA Battletech a bit over the GEnie service, and had already felt the sting of paying an hourly rate to play games. So the thought of doing that again really didn’t set well with me.

So it was very reluctantly that I accepted a request from a friend and co-worker of mine to come to his house one night after work and run his second account during a Everquest raid. The guild he was in had been preparing to take on the great dragon Lady Vox in Everfrost, and that night after work they were going after her. He normally dual boxed Everquest with his Iksar Monk and Halfling Druid, but since he would be pulling the mobs clearing up to Lady Vox he really needed to concentrate on doing that one thing. So I got what ended up being a few minute explaination of how to control my character, how to memorize spells… and which spells to cast… and we were off clearing our way through the ice giants and goblins on the way to the dragons lair.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had never really played an MMO at this point, and very much never been on a raid of any kind, but I thought it was amazing how everyone in the party worked together towards a common goal of clearing the lair and finally battling the dragon. I stood back and cast nukes, occasionally throwing a heal here or there when someone looked like they were getting low. The battle was absolutely insane, with so many things going on at once that I had no clue what happened. At some point things started to get really hectic when folks started dying left and right. Sooner or later it was my turn, and my friend rather hurriedly explained where i needed to go to get back tot the fight. Luckily a ranger died about the same time so I followed her back into the lair.

My friend told me to “mem a nuke” and it was a few minutes before it dawned on me what exactly he was saying. I did just that and ran back in just in time to land the killing blow. So on my first night playing any MMO… I managed to slay an internet dragon. On that night I also got to see my very first instance of loot drama…. as there was an argument that erupted over who got the “zero weight backpack”. I have to say I was hooked, and the very next day I picked up a copy and rolled my very first character… Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. Turning around upon exiting Kaladim and seeing the giant dwarven statue still is one of the most epic experiences I have had in a game. Nowadays it looks so primitive, but at the time it was just staggering that something so big could exist in a video game. While the forced grouping and frustrations that it caused ultimately lead me to quit the game after a few years, Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart, as will my very first dragon raid.

Tonberry Tactics

October 4, 2013 by Belghast

Not Enough Coffee

This is one of those mornings when I feel like there is simply not enough coffee in the world to make me out of this stupor. In part this is my own making. At 4:40 I woke up on my own accord, thanks to my very own bladder alarm going off… and then I decided it was an awesome idea to go back to bed… knowing that I would be awoken by the alarm at 5:30. Had I just gotten on up and proceeded with the day… I likely would be just fine right now. So instead I sit here staring at the screen trying to make thoughts coalesce into word form.

Today should be an interesting day for me. When I was younger I was part of my high school gifted and talented program. I feel as though maybe the entrance requirements were a little lax if they were willing to take me. The gifted and talented coordinator, that we lovingly referred to as Jaunamama fought hard to get us some truly unique experiences, many of which I suspect came out of her own pocket. One of these was the Tulsa Town Hall lecture series.

Essentially she would take two of us on the long trek to Tulsa to attend one of the lectures in the series, then make a grand day of it all. We would go to lunch someplace nice, and usually finish the afternoon with a tour of the Philbrook or something along those lines. For the last five years, I have worked across the street from the performing arts center without thinking much about it. This year however upon listening to the advertisements on NPR, something clicked and I signed up for the lecture series. Luckily I have a pretty awesome boss and he has filed this down in my PPR as “Personal Development”.

FATE Crack

A few days ago I complained about the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan, but to be truthful… once you reach about 45 the zone as a whole tends to be the best place to level. So as a result I have been spending quite a bit of time out there doing the various fates. There are a number of 25k-40k experience boss fates, one of which that drops a pet if you manage to get gold. So as a whole the zone is really worth while even if it did not have everyone’s favorite… Dark Devices. I guess to some extent… I understood why the fate was so popular but I never really understood its full potential until yesterday.

Over lunch I was working on leveling my Bard like I have been the last several days, and when I did the ubiquitous “BRD LF FATES” shout in zone, I got invited to be a part of a custom built dark devices group. Essentially the eight man group consisted of 3 White Mages, 3 Black Mages, 1 Bard for mana song, and 1 Paladin for flash. How the group works is a thing of terrifying brilliance… and totally relies on poor game mechanics. Essentially the mission at hand is for the black mages to spam attacks, the paladin to spam flash… and the white mages to cast regen on opposing players.

Regeneration Tagging

While this does not seem too heinous at face value… it gets there quickly. Apparently one of the ways that healing works is that when regeneration is ticking on a player, it causes aggro to be generated on the pull for the healer that cast it. So far that seems to be working as intended… it has worked that way in most MMO games. Where things go off the rails is the fact that apparently it also TAGS the mob to the healers party. This means by keeping regen up on opposing parties, you can essentially siphon off their kills and give your group credit. This is the king of all “dirty pool” maneuvers, and I do not condone it in the least… however this is so prevalent that if you have a white mage in your party… they are more than likely doing it.

When it works… it works insanely well. In Final Fantasy XIV there is the ability to chain kill mobs and each additional mob you kill adds a multiplier to the process. I believe you are initially given 60 seconds once the chain begins, and if the counter is low enough, each additional kill resets the counter back to 10 seconds. As a result a big AOE group can get some extremely high chains, but I believe eventually the multiplier caps out around 200%. During the lunchtime group… we managed to get a 354 uninterrupted chain… meaning after the first 20 or so of those… every single mob killed was worth +200% of its face experience value. As a result I made literally over 75% of a level on one single phase of a fate.

Regressive Gameplay

Dark Devices is a serious gimmick, and still one that I hope they break… because quite frankly it is a bit of an unfair advantage to those players that can get access to a good AOE group. That said… since it is not considered an exploit I am certainly going to benefit from it as much as I can. Yesterday at lunch I was level 45 and after a few more hours out in Northern Thanalan I am over halfway through level 49. Granted I have the insane post 50 xp bonus going on for my bard, but that is some seriously fast leveling. No wonder you see the same people out in the zone every single day farming the fate, over the course of a few weeks you could push almost every single class you had to 50. I did not start out there until around 44, and as a bard you really don’t have all the tools you need to be successful until 46. However I am seeing fresh 40s out there trying to make the fate work for them. The method if nothing else… is brutally efficient.

The thing that strikes me the oddest about this entire process is how much it reminds me of the original Everquest. Essentially I have leveled my Bard almost entirely through FATE grinding, and as a result that means sitting in a zone shouting for a group. This is essentially the same sort of thing I can remember doing so many times in the Dreadlands. Throughout the course of the night I would end up in multiple groups that would hunt mobs outside Karnor’s Castle, or various other key farm spots around the zone. If you by miracle ended up with an extremely well balanced group, you might even brave the railroad that was Karnor’s Castle itself. As much as you can solo in FFXIV, you can never beat the type of experience you can get with a party… especially while running FATEs.

I think to some extent it is this throwback to an earlier time… this regressive gameplay that has made the game so damned sticky for me. It is like going back and playing Everquest, but taking with me all the bells and whistles and perks of a modern MMO. Essentially the game is almost completely solo-able if you so choose to… but the group content is extremely good when it happens. My huge problem with EQ2 is that while the soloing is amazing, any time you get more than two players together in the same place it feels like a facerolling mess. Granted I have not actually played a lot of the Velious dungeon content, but even the big dungeons like Mistmoore have felt this way to me. FFXIV does an amazing job with the dungeon content in making it feel like it requires effort and planning to get through it.

Tonberry Tactics

A few days ago we took a group into Wanderers Palace and had some mixed results. Over the course of the dungeon run we figured out how a lot of the tactics worked, but simply ran out of time before we could formulate a winning strategy for the final encounter. We like to go into these dungeons completely cold, and figure out the boss mechanics on the fly rather than trying to rely on some guide to tell us how to do it. So since we failed to finish the dungeon, there were several of us who had been plotting revenge. Yesterday during the day, over IM we conspired to build a team to take on the challenge that night.

Overall I have to say the run went tons smoother, but primarily because we understood how the mechanics worked. We went through the dungeon essentially wipe free and that left us with worlds of time to distill just how to defeat the final encounter. After a few failed tries, we figured out the rhythm of the fight and managed to find a way to juggle the constant stream of adds, and the insane amount of damage the Tonberry King deals from his Grudge attack… that scales based on the number of adds you kill. As a whole the entire encounter felt like a giant tug-of-war match, trying to keep me alive as the tank, but keep the adds off the healer.

I didn’t get much from the dungeon other than the experience of running it, but I believe both our Bard and Dragoon walked away with some really nice upgrades. From the second boss a really nice chest piece dropped… but it was statistically identical to the one I received from my level 50 class quest. So I passed and let someone else pick it up as a greed item… though honestly if it is the same stat wise, it won’t be of much use to anyone. This is not the type of dungeon I want to run more than once a night, because it takes a lot out of you… however I enjoyed myself. Quite honestly there are not ANY dungeons that I really want to chain run, because even with the smoothest group these dungeons require more of you than previous games.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again and I need to finish this up. I have not really posted much for the Newbie Blogger Initiative this week, but I have plans to do so this weekend. During my Saturday and Sunday posting time I have much more time to work through a topic, so I figured I would use both days to post advice articles. There is so much good stuff out there this year, and I need to get on with updating my blogroll to include the rest of the blogs that have signed up during the Class of 2013. I hope you all have a great day and that it continues on into a great weekend.

Once upon a Cleric

September 5, 2013 by Belghast

Morning all you people out in internet land. For the second day in a row I feel absolutely miserable. I think overall it is just a massive overload of allergies, but it has managed to go and piss off my asthma. As a result I ended up at home about halfway through the day yesterday and have been juggling breathing treatments ever since. I have yet to decide if I am going to attempt going in today, but right now it doesn’t seem likely. I feel worse than I have felt in a long time.

Once upon a Cleric

Today’s post has been spurred on by a comment on twitter to yesterdays post. Essentially a friend of mine said that they would make a healer out of me yet. To which I replied… that few would believe but I actually started out my MMO gaming “career” as a healer. The friend of course could not believe that… so I figured today I would regale you all with the tale of how I ended up being so damned tank centric. We are going to have to step into the way back machine and go backwards through the years quite a bit to around 1982.

My mother was a high school teacher, and as a result I spent large amounts of time milling around the high school after hours as she finished up with her lessons. There was a traditional at the end of school each year… that essentially anything left in the lockers by the end of the day was thrown away. As a result the janitorial staff and by proxy us teacher kids got to rummage through whatever was left in the lockers. Stuffed in the bottom of the locker I found the thing that would begin my descent into madness… an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook.

From that point onwards I was obsessed with all things D&D and roleplaying, and I was especially hung up on the cleric class. I loved the concept of a battle priest, fighting undead and wielding both weapon and holy spells. This obsession was only further cemented when I read the novel “Pools of Radiance” and was introduced to the Tarl the Cleric of Tyr. I loved the fact that he was just as good with a weapon as it was with turning undead. I thought it was a cool concept and the idea was only furthered with the awesome images of battle priests in the Warhammer games.

Tiny Elvis

Scan forward a decade and in 2000 I got hooked on Everquest by a friend of mine. He introduced me to the whole mythos by having me play his second character on a Vox raid. Pretty much the most epic way possible to get introduced into MMOs. I pretty much went out the next day and picked up Everquest, the Kunark expansion and the newly released Scars of Velious. When it came time to choose a class, there really was no option but a Dwarven Cleric of Brell. I was completely enamored with the concept of battle priest fighting undead. That concept lasted pretty well into my late 30s… when I began to realize that my life as a cleric was that of a heal bot.

The end game reality for a cleric was the Complete Heal rotation. For those of you who are not familiar with this concept… essentially each cleric establishes an order and it is agreed upon before the fight. Each of us then set up a macro that shouted “Casting CH – Ready Cleric #X” whereas the X was replaced by the correct priest in sequence. When that cleric saw their number scroll by they were to count to 12 and then press their own macro. Then return to a watching for their number to scroll by state. The end result is that the tank received a complete heal every 3 seconds… instead of the normal 12 second cast time of the spell.

I have to say this made combat in the dungeons and raids and extremely boring and binary system. Watch chat for your number, cast your heal, return to not paying attention until your cool down was up. It was not until I dabbled with EQ1 a bit recently that I realized just how much downtime that game had. You were still chained to the screen of sorts, but I can remember healers knitting, reading books, all just waiting on their complete heal rotation. The thing that soured me on the experience however was not having any control over my own destiny. I essentially followed someone else into a dungeon and was there until they determined it time to leave. This experience has forever soured me towards healing in general.

The Celt

The game we played after we fell out of love with EQ and the hours spent standing around doing nothing… was Dark Age of Camelot. The above image is the very first incarnation of Belghast Sternblade. The Celt Champion was a really amazing class, in that it had ranged spells to pull with, loads of debuffs and was equally proficient in the tank, off-tank and dps roles depending upon how it was specced. Most of the time I tended to favor two handed weapons and served in a dps and offtank in a pinch role for the various excursions. My friend juggled the roles of both main tank and main healer by dual boxing a Dwarven Warrior and a Celt Bard together.

This is the point at which I should note that the bulk of my time playing DAoC was spent on Gaheris… the carebear server… largely because it gave us three whole realms worth of zones and dungeons to explore instead of the rather claustrophobic single realm setup. Adding to this trio we had a Lurikeen enchanter that served as our primary dps. It was amazing the amount of things we could pull off with the small group we had. There were many times I had to offtank a mob just to spread out the damage enough to get through the fights.

When I started doing Keep and Dragon raids… I got drafted into the full tank role a few times and really enjoyed it. This is essentially the game in which I got my first tastes of tanking. I liked the taste… and ultimately ended up doing quite a bit more with our alliance. As we moved on to other games I started favoring the hybrid/offtank role because it gave me soloing versatility and a key group dynamic that I could fill. When we played City of Heroes, I was a blades/regen scrapper which in many ways was one of the more tanky classes in the game. Once again a friend played the full bore earth tank, and I alternated between dps and off tanking as needed.

Bait and Switch

This is Exeter, a tankadin… and my intended main when World of Warcraft released. In beta the Paladin had been the ultimate synthesis of Battle Priest and Tank. I had so much fun running around with my friend who was playing a nuking priest at the time. My attacks would debuff the target against holy damage, and he would come in for the kill and demolish it. It was like the perfect symbiotic match… then Blizzard completely destroyed it at the 11th hour right before release by introducing the “Seal” system to replace the “Strike” system. Over night Paladin went from being the most amazing thing I had played so far… to feeling absolutely awful and confused.

With release… I stuck to my guns and tried to make a Paladin work… and so long as I had friends to level with I was doing awesome. Then tragedy struck… we had a death in the family, and I simply was not around for a few weeks. When I came back all of my friends had long since leveled past me, and I found trying to solo on the paladin a thoroughly frustrating mess. Since the one thing above all else Hunters were renown for was their soloing ability… I started playing Lodin. I was able to catch up to my friends with surprising speed and I played a hunter just effective enough to not be a horrible strain on my party.

Hunter Happened

I never really intended on playing Lodin as a main character… I just intended on using him as something to catch up to my friends… then later leveling Exeter on my own and returning to the intended role of Tankadin. However one thing lead to another… and a good friend of mine ended up starting a raid, that needed hunters… and before I really realized what I was committing to, I was a half GiantStalker decked out raiding hunter. The funniest and most ironic part is… that I ended up on the one class that had a cast rotation similar to the complete heal. Once we entered Molten Core I got indoctrinated into the Tranquilize rotation. Just like complete heal… hunters would set an order and we would then “tranq” the next enrage effect.

I had a lot of good times raiding with the Late Night Raiders, and I met a ton of people that have become permanent fixtures in my gaming life… but quite honestly I was never a good hunter. I could pass as one, and I could sit around 3rd in damage when compared to our other hunters if I really pushed it… but I just did not care about the class the same way the others did. My instinct was always to get up in the face of the mob and beat on it with something… and I hated pet management above all things. I managed to get Exeter to max level… but it ended up feeling just horrible. At that point Paladins tanked with Seal of Rage… which was a glorious mess that never really worked at all for holding aggro.

Priest Enabler

Around about this time a good friend of mine mentioned that she would like to level a healing priest, but didn’t really want to go through the grind that was leveling a healing priest. I had been kicking around the notion of leveling a tank, but again leveling as a tank was a painful experience. So as a result we decided to level my human warrior Belghast and her dwarven priest Finni together to make the process easier. This was probably a bad thing… because it was the first moment that I realized how amazing priests are. They enable me to make really bad decisions… like pulling ALL THE THINGS in an area and then living to tell the tale.

I loved this new play style of making everything hate me… then getting bailed out of my bad lifestyle choices by someone else. The two characters shot up extremely quickly, and before I knew it I was tanking the unofficial raid nights for Late Night Raiders. The problem is… the more I got into tanking… the more I hated playing Lodin. The only problem… Lodin was geared… and there was no way to get as geared as the LNR tanks. So I bided my time, continued getting tanking experience and “apprenticed” of sorts under the various really good warriors that we had in our raid.

One of the best things about an expansion… is it is a complete gear reset. As a result I used the Burning Crusade expansion to be my springboard to ditch the hunter and move forward as a “real” tank. From that point onwards I have essentially played nothing but tanks as main characters. Be it my Warrior in Rift, or my Marauder/Warrior in Final Fantasy… I always gravitate towards tanking. It took some time… but I finally found that one role that really suits me. Which I guess in a way is why I am so passionate about tanks being a thing going forward. It is a role I feel that I play fairly well.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… the tale of how I went from being the most healery of healers to playing absolutely nothing but tanks. I figured it was a tale worth telling, especially since there are folks that still have trouble thinking of me as ever playing anything but a tank. The ironic thing is… there are a group of folks I raided with at the time that still think of me as Lodin the Hunter. I was a really horrible hunter. At this point… I am going to go crash on the sofa as I feel absolutely terrible. I sincerely hope you are having a much better day than mine.

Defense of Subscriptions

August 23, 2013 by Belghast

So it is neither morning nor Saturday when I sit down to write this. I am about to cheat massively at my one post per day thing… primarily because tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I have to get up and around early because I have a wedding to photograph for a friend. I am completely terrified at this prospect but I figure I will make it through one way or another. However with all the mess going on tomorrow I simply will not have time to do my leisurely two hour jaunt through blog post land that I normally do. As a result I am writing up my post on Friday… and since I am impatient I am going ahead and publishing it today as well.

Defense of Subscriptions

Over the last few days since the joint announcements that Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online will be subscription based, I have seen a lot of negativity floating around the blogosphere. You have one camp claiming this is the revival of subscriptions, and a diametrically opposed camp claiming this is a fluke and long live the free to play revolution. Personally I can see a place for both in the game industry and I feel like we will see lots of both in the future. Subscriptions are not going anywhere… because quite simply put high quality games have high dollar amounts associated with them.

Most of the games we now think of today as heralds of the free to play “revolutions” started their lifespan as a full functioning subscription based game with a $60 box cost and a $15 a month subscription fee. This is the case for the Turbine games (Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online), the Cryptic games (Star Trek Online, Champions Online), the Sony Online Entertainment games (Everquest, Everquest 2, Vanguard, etc) and the new darling of the free to play market… Rift. Each and every one of them experienced a decently long period of selling boxes and racking up monthly service fees before ultimately converting over to some sort of a freemium model.

Purely Free to Play

I was brainstorming with my friends, and quite honestly we had a hard time listing off significant MMOs that have launched as free to play. There is a whole string of poor quality Asian market games that are too long to ever mention. The only game I can really think of that does not have a subscription fee or box cost associated with it is Neverwinter. Dragon’s Prophet to some extent is in the same boat, but it is still technically in open beta… and was also an Asian market transplant with a good deal of the costs simply being regionalization. Neverwinter is most definitely a sub par gaming experience, with a good deal of incident costs hidden into the system and at least for me… overall forgettable gameplay.

As far as buy the box we have Defiance and Guild Wars 2… both of which appear to either be struggling or at least having a good deal of growing pains. Trion has recently set about a massive restructuring of the company that involved dissolving the offices that supported Defiance and pulling that staff into the main offices in Redwood. Guild Wars 2 has also going through a series of changes trying to deliver content at a more frenetic pace to try and keep paying customers glued to the screens. Additionally with each update comes a slew of items that can only be acquired by unlocking the in game loot boxes.

My main issue to date with the Defiance and GW2 experiences is that while they are rolling out regular episodic updates… they are essentially throw away experiences and are only available for a limited time. Defiance is really too young to fully judge, but they are about to release their first real DLC pack. It will be interesting to see just how much content that adds to the game. Guild Wars 2 on the other hand, seems completely tied to the concept of an expiring series of “living story” events. In neither case are they really expanding the game on a regular and permanent basis to add value to that initial box purchase.

Paying Initial Cost

Rich game worlds with hundreds of hours of content cost an extremely large amount of money to develop, produce, market and ultimately distribute. While I was disappointed when Wildstar announced its model, because ultimately it meant the cost of entry was just too high for someone like me… that only casually had interest in the game in the first place… I fully understood the decision to have a subscription. Box costs and subscription costs help pay off the excessive costs of game development. It has been said multiple times that the average blockbuster game costs far more than the average blockbuster movie. Additionally the development of the game is a much longer drawn out process that someone has to bankroll until it finally sees a profit.

Lets take Elder Scrolls Online for example and try and work through some hard numbers. Please understand that I am creating a pure guesstimate based on what I was able to pull together from Google. Zenimax Online studios is in the Baltimore Maryland area, so there are certain broad assumptions we can make based on average costs in that region. According to Wikipedia they moved into their current offices in 2008, and based on the E3 PS4 presentation, Elder Scrolls Online is slotted for a first quarter of 2014 launch. That means that Elder Scrolls Online will have in essence been in development for roughly six years at the time of launch. Please understand I am trying to just pull together some rough figures, it might have entered development before that and potentially after that.

The Hard Costs

Over the course of those six years, if you figure an average of 100 employees made an average of $45,000 a year… you get $27,000,000 in salaries alone. Some employees will make more, likely some employees will make less.. and over the course of those six years you would have had significantly fewer than 100 and likely now in pre-launch mode significantly more. From google we can see that the average price of office space in the Baltimore Maryland area is around $17 a sqft. For sake of coming up with a figure we are going to say their offices are likely around 30,000 sqft, so taking that over the course of the six years you have $3,060,000 in rent. Factor in a leased digital internet line ($300/mo), water ($400/mo), electric ($1000/mo), and gas ($400/mo) you have a vague guesstimate of $151,200 in utilities over those six years. Finally if you figure roughly $3000 in computer equipment for each employee, you are at roughly $300,000 not factoring in ANY servers at all.

So far in things I can quantify you are talking about a guesstimate of over 30 million dollars on only a very few factors. There are so many factors that we just cannot come up with a number for. For example it was said that Star Wars the Old Republic took roughly 200 million dollars to develop… and that a majority of that was voice acting time. This is something I simply cannot come up with anything sort of an estimate on. All the voice acting rates I found online were so widely varied that they were meaningless especially when you consider the names that folks are getting are the Steve Blum’s of the world that are sought after for damned near every gaming project on the planet. I don’t really know how detailed the voice acting is for ESO, but every demo I have seen to date gives me the impression that the game is fully voiced… which would lead me to guess bare minimum 100 million on the hundreds of hours of voice talent.

I’ve heard before that it costs roughly 1/3 of the total cost to develop a game… the rest of the costs go into marketing and distribution. So at this point we are already sitting at around 130 million not factoring any tool licensing costs, or server infrastructure and network costs. If that represents only a third of the total costs of the project… no wonder games NEED to sell boxes and charge a subscription to break even… let along fund future development efforts. Essentially a AAA game experience is really damned expensive. If you figure a company receives at most half of the $60 box cost… it would take selling over 3.5 million boxes just to make up for 100 million of the cost. The reason why that $15 a month is so important is they are getting the entire portion of it.

Someone Has to Pay

Ultimately if we want nice games… someone has to pay for it. Either these huge gambles can be paid off in box costs and monthly subscriptions… or they can be financed on the backs of a handful of “whale” players. But ultimately there is no such thing as a free ride. Game development and game infrastructure have large fixed costs that simply cannot be justified away by a players desire to not spend a dime. We have nice free to play experiences in essence because players that came before you… paid for the cost of going there first. They helped to pay off the loans that these companies I am sure have to take out to bankroll this kind of protracted effort.

AAA game studios simply cannot afford to build games out of the goodness of their hearts. They have to pay ultimately hundreds of people just like you and me to build and support the games. These are not nameless faceless corporations… they are businesses just like the one you likely work for… with a human resources department, and social security tax deductions and payrolls to make. This is a real job for someone, and we can’t expect them to get some beer and pizza and knock out a game in their free time. Overall the game industry pays some pretty shitty wages as compared to the IT industry as a whole. I know for a fact that I make well more than any of my friends that currently work in the industry… and have pretty much since my first job out of college.

It is almost expected that part of the benefits package for these folks is the fact that they “get” to make games for a living. Thing is though… they had to gain their skills the same way all of us did, with lots of hard work and sweat equity and now they work in an industry with next to no job security… because it all hinges upon the whims of whether or not gamers like us ultimately purchase their product. So ultimately… all of these things factored in… I have ZERO problem with the concept of buying a box and paying a monthly fee when it is something I am committed to. My friends in the industry need to eat, and pay rent, and survive on a day to day basis just like I do.

Free to Play

The free to play model seems to work extremely well at financing the daily upkeep and expansion of an existing game. I think it has been the savior of a lot of games that have filtered their way out of the popular consciousness and were no longer drawing in active subscribers. It is awesome being able to fire up an account you haven’t played in years, and revisit old characters. While you are there more than likely you will spend at least a little money on the game. Essentially it is the model of “some money is better than no money”. The thing is, like I said above each and every one of these games that we vaunt so highly as free to play successes all had their time of box sales, expansion sales, and monthly subscription fees to pay back the excessively expensive development costs.

Do I get frustrated when a game that I have purchased the box for… and paid multiple months worth of subscription fees goes to free to play? Hell no… because while I might bitch and moan on a regular basis about various aspects of gaming… I LOVE the games I play. Whatever helps a game I have cared about succeed is ultimately going to be good for me personally in the long run. The games that reward me in some way for being there in the early days and helping pay off the huge debt a company brings with them after a game release… I love those even more. But I go into their free to play conversion knowing that ultimately they will be better off in the long run with incremental sales.

Additionally players who start at the beginning of an MMO will always have a tangible lead on players that start later, especially if the game converts to free to play. You have a head start in the economy before it stratifies, likewise you understand the lay of the land and where to acquire the best stuff. When Rift went free to play my account had so much stuff unlocked thanks to longevity of play that a starting player would not have had. For the explorers you get the feeling of actually discovering things before they are common place and on every website. So while you might have had to pay for the box and subscriptions, you are getting something for your trouble that no one will be able to take away from you.

The games that did not have a box fee and a subscription however have to claw their money out of you somehow. So while I get annoyed at loot boxes and item purchases and artificial gates to my gameplay… they are just trying to survive however they can, because ultimately at launch they were millions and millions of dollars in the hole at day one. I feel like launching as free to play is going to forever doom a game to jumping through coin slotted hoops as you play the game. Rift right now is the best player experience but I feel like it is only that way because they had two years and an expansion of relative success to pay off and fund a fully functional staff during all that time.

Wrapping Up

So if in a few years time… The Elder Scrolls online… that I have used as an example all the way through this post… decides it is beneficial to it to go free to play. I will greet the change with open arms, knowing that ultimately this is going to be the thing that keeps a game I hopefully will love healthy and open to the public. Going to go ahead and wrap this up, and likely get it posted. I hope you guys have a great weekend and that I can survive tomorrow. Sorry for breaking my own rules and cheating a bit by double posting on a Friday… but expect that I will have a normal post on Sunday.