Wildstar Archives - Page 15 of 16 - Tales of the Aggronaut

What About Wildstar?

December 20, 2013 by Belghast

4.4.14

It as been roughly ten days since Zenimax announced the official PC/Mac release date of Elder Scrolls Online. In doing so they either knowingly or unknowingly threw down the gauntlet to the other developers with their own tentative release dates. The success and fail of an MMO has become so much more than whether or not it is a good game, but instead how distracted the gaming populous is at any given moment. I remember a time in the not too distant past where major PC releases were truly few and far between. However it currently seems like there is always something bigger looming on the near horizon. Like it or not every single one of these releases is competing for the same relatively small pool of players, subscribers, and even money in general.

Yesterday Massively voted The Elder Scrolls Online… the MMO most likely to flop in the coming year. While I personally think this is deeply cynical and maybe even more than a tiny bit inflammatory, I think more than anything it is short sighted. Quite frankly the success and failure of Elder Scrolls Online has nothing to do with the PC gamer, and that is more than a tiny bit humbling. We will no longer be the king makers for these online games. With ESO and games like it, that torch is being passed from PC Gaming to the much larger pool of console gamers. I have to say the console market is rabidly waiting for a new Elder Scrolls Experience, and especially a multiplayer one at that . I think it might be a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the success and failure of these titles may very well be out of the hands of the “PC Gaming Master Race”.

3.25.14

Being the master tacticians that they are, yesterday Blizzard announced the release date for the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion. With this they are releasing roughly four weeks ahead of Elder Scrolls Online, and as a result giving themselves plenty of time with the sole attention of the PC Gaming market. Similarly however they are also hungrily eyeing the console market, and you can bet that they will be timing the release of the PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XBone release against the June release of Elder Scrolls Online to the next gen consoles. I feel like a four week buffer is more than safe and should play well to the gamers that may not have the ability to purchase every title they want. I know I am personally amped about this version of the game, because it fixes a lot of the loot problems I had with the initial release. Additionally I am holding out hope beyond hope that they manage to roll in the console “controller” features as well.

There is no way to look at this release date as anything other than business strategy. Elder Scrolls started this ball in motion, and now each game company will have to decide when the most opportune time is to deploy their own “forces” on the game board. While the Diablo 3 demographic is not exactly the same as the Elder Scrolls demographic… there is more than enough overlap to have caused issues for either game. As a result two major juggernauts have been placed on the “game board” and as a result the new year is less open than it was. Now the launches of so many titles will have be strategized to figure out when the most opportune time to release will be.

Warlords of Draenor

Since the title Blizzard announced was the release of Diablo 3 for the tail end of the first quarter, my assumption is that Warlord of Draenor was simply not close enough to ready to be able to launch against Elder Scrolls Online. As a result I am guessing this means that WoD will be another last quarter of 2014 release much like a few other World of Warcraft expansion launches. If this is the case that bookends the year up pretty nicely. Diablo 3 first quarter, Elder Scrolls Online second quarter and Warlords of Draenor closing out the year. You can already see the 2014 release calendar starting to tighten a bit and this will make it increasingly difficult for game companies to find a “clear window” to release against. I personally thought I had written off the WoW franchise completely, but nostalgic can be a pain sometimes.

As a result I imagine there will be a lot of players that either intentionally or un-intentionally come back for the release of Warlords. The lifespan of a WoW expansion rush seems to be roughly three months, so an end of the year release will also make the 2015 schedule some what slippery as well. The problem is there are lots more pieces to be placed on the board. Games like Titanfall and Destiny will also be chipping away at the pool of players that would h

ave normally played an MMO. Additionally we still have EQ Landmark and EQ Next that have not committed to any release schedule and will likely be just as large of a force on the Calendar as the games that have already been confirmed.

What About Wildstar?

I will be the first to admit… I am actually not that excited about Wildstar at all. By all rights I should be, but for whatever reason there I have not followed it. I do however have a lot of friends who have, and as a result I want it to be a success for their sake as much as anything else. Up until this point we have heard a tentative “spring 2014” release. As I have just outlined however the “spring” timeframe is extremely packed as it is. Wildstar is in a really precarious place right now, and I do not envy them. They are launching a new MMO, with a subscription model into a world that seems to have fallen out of love with subscriptions. Additionally it is an unproven IP, and there are additional issues on selling a new player on “the vision” for this world. Finally it is releasing against some really powerful forces.

The safe bet will be to release Wildstar in the July/August timeframe. As much as I myself hate it, the players who are likely to leave a game will have done so by the time three months have passed. July would be the beginning of a window where generally the “locusts”, a group I have been a member of so many times in the past… will have consumed what there is to consume with ESO and be looking for a new target to move to. Plotting a course for this opening in the schedule seems like the safe choice for them. However all it would take to make this more treacherous, is for the other pieces that are unplaced to fall into this window. Releasing against EQ Landmark would be enough to make the fate of Wildstar uncertain, and we have yet to even discuss the potential for the upcoming and as of yet unnamed Rift expansion.

My money is still on Wildstar penciling in a July release date, and EQ Next as a game being a spring of 2015 release. I just don’t see Carbine being confident enough to release Wildstar without a good opening in the schedule. They are in a much more tentative position than Zenimax, since the entirety of their fate rests upon the shoulders of the PC Gaming market. Elder Scrolls Online could realistically release against another big game, since they will be gaining a bunch of “new to genre” players coming in from the console market. Additionally they have a well established and well loved IP… and even if folks are not completely sold on the game… they are likely to at least dip their toes in the water for awhile. I find myself caring far more about the people at the companies… than the companies and games themselves. With several friends in the “industry” I honestly hope that they can stack the schedule in a way so that all of these titles fine at least limited success. If we see another crop of relative failures, I think this year might be the last hurrah of the triple A MMO market.

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.

Wildstar Woes

August 21, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am trying to muster the “oomph” to do another days post. For whatever reason since the “flood” happened, I have not been sleeping well at all. I assume it is all the noise from the air mover fan we have had pointed at our carpet to try and dry everything out. Luckily at this point… I think the carpet is completely dry so here is hoping that turning it off tonight will render a full nights sleep.

Wildstar Woes

With all the recent strife caused by our washing machine and the subsequent damage… my morning posts have pretty much been dominated by that. However in the gaming world there was quite a little shake up… at least as far as the twitter-sphere is concerned. Monday Carbine announced the business model for Wildstar… and it was shockingly subscription based. I think most of us in the blogging circles had been expecting Wildstar to launch as a free to play or some sort of hybrid model. Instead we are getting a full subscription game with an implementation of the PLEX system from Eve.

Essentially all players will have to do one of two things to continue playing. Either they will pay a monthly subscription fee, or they will purchase and consume a C.R.E.D.D. on the open market that another player has purchased speculating that they can sell it for enough in game currency to make it worth their while. EQ2 also has a very similar system to this with the Krono, and it seems to work well enough at removing large sums of in game currency from the market. The big negative however is that mere mortals are unlikely to ever possess enough currency to buy one of these subscription tokens.

In the games I have played that have them they usually start off reasonable enough shortly after the program launches… but over time it continues to trend upwards gaining in game currency value. For example when I bought my first Krono in EQ2, they were selling for 500-600 platinum. However the last time I sold one, I was able to get almost 1000 platinum for them in a few months time. Additionally the REX token in Rift launched at around 600 platinum and now fetches roughly 1500 platinum depending on the server. Essentially it is constantly pushed out of the reach of anyone that is not an auction house baron or a habitual gold farmer.

Killing Casual Interest

Essentially in my experience there is really no way that anyone casually interested in a game like this can afford to buy the subscription tokens from the market. They are stuck with subscribing to keep their access turned on. For me my interest in Wildstar has gone from passing to pretty much dead zero. All thanks to the announcement that there will be a subscription attached to the game. Don’t get me wrong… I love subscriptions in games that I am really interested in. I will happily pay a monthly fee to support the game and gain buffet style access to all its features. But I am simply not “really” interested in Wildstar.

The problem is… in my large circle of gaming friends it seems very few players actually are. There are a bunch of us, that likely would have picked the game up were it a “buy the box” or free to play model. We would have given it a shot, seen what it was like in close up and maybe for some of us… it would have clicked. But the fact that I know there is both a box cost and a reoccurring subscription fee really makes the game something I don’t want to take a chance on. In a world where most of the games I have been playing… are free to play… that subscription fee seems like an awfully binding commitment.

Ultimately I will be sitting in the wings, waiting for the eventual switch over to free to play. That seems to be the thing to do these days… and what started off as a way to bail out a sinking game seems more and more like an actual business model. It feels as though there is the initial 6 month money grab of subscriptions… then a planned deployment of free to play to catch the players like me who were only casually interested in their net. If this is really in fact a business model, it seems like a very disingenuous one.

There are players who are supremely devoted to the subscription business model. One of my good friends Liore, has gone through a whole arc as a game she deeply cared about… namely Rift went free to play. While she has softened to the idea of the Rift free to play implementation… since arguably it is likely the most player friendly one on the market.. she still is not a huge fan of the “death of the subscription”. When a game company sets out to do a 6 month money grab then convert to free to play… they risk alienating all the players that are extremely pro-subscription.

Of Subscriptions

I guess at the end of the day… my problem is not that Wildstar has gone subscription at all. It is that Wildstar is not interesting enough to me to make me WANT to pay a subscription for it. Granted I have yet to play it at all… so maybe the proof is in the play style… but right now having only received the publically available information I am just not interested enough to commit to it. Additionally I seem to have a love/hate relationship with Science Fiction MMOs. I enjoy the hell out of them for a short period of time… but the scifi genre in general seems to lack the hooks to keep me there for long. Granted that would probably all change if a Mass Effect or Fallout MMO were ever to release. However I highly doubt either of those would happen, and quite frankly after SWTOR Bioware should farm out the “MMO” portion to someone more experienced.

Getting back on track… I don’t see anything fundamentally flawed with the subscription model. I pay a subscription to Rift, even though it is the best free to play model out there. I do it because they reward me in so many ways for doing so. Similarly I used to pay a subscription to EQ2, Lotro, DDO, etc… all of which are free to play games… because the subscription gave me something more than I could get otherwise. Ultimately this comes down to a case of me just not being that interested in Wildstar. The main issue with the subscription model is it turns off the revenue stream from players like me that might have bought the box if there were no strings attached.

Ultimately right now there are entirely too many good options for a player to play for no money outlay at all. It used to be that all you could play for free were a handful of subpar eastern games. Now you have games like The Secret World and Rift at your disposal… both of which are games I would happily pay a subscription fee for… but don’t have to. Essentially Carbine is asking players to take a gamble on their game… by buying the box and paying a monthly subscription and I feel as though a lot of players just are not willing to do that any longer. This is simply my point of view based on the “temperature” from both social media and blogs in response to the rather “shocking” announcement of Wildstar’s payment model.

Grain of Salt

Essentially you can take everything I just said today with a grain of salt. Just because I was shocked that Wildstar did not go free to play… does not necessarily mean I am opposed to the subscription model entirely. For example… if Elder Scrolls Online were to come out tomorrow and announce that they were going to be subscription only, it would be equally shocking. However I would care far less, because ESO is a game I am already 110% committed to playing at launch. From the moment it was announced I have been figuratively been like Fry begging them to “Take My Money!”. The difference is.. ESO is a title I deeply care about and have been wanting to play literally since the first time I played Morrowind.

I had played Daggerfall before, but with Morrowind I was already used to the MMO construct thanks to lots and lots of Everquest 1. All the while I was playing the game I kept thinking… man this setting would be so much more enjoyable if I could play it co-op. So I have been 100% sold on the concept of an online Elder Scrolls game since that moment. Each additional TES game.. has made me want the ability to play it with my friends even more. When I heard that Zenimax was working on an MMO, I hoped beyond all hope that it was the Elder Scrolls setting. At this point they could charge a $200 box fee, and $20 a month subscription… and I would likely still figure out some way to play it.

I feel however that this level of buy in from an MMO player is extremely rare right now. We are literally deluged with really good options that cost us next to nothing to play. The MMO climate is nothing like when WoW launched or even when Warhammer Online launched. Players are not looking to ditch their current game for something new… they want to dip their toes in the water first to make sure they like it better. Having both a box fee and a subscription fee sufficiently raises that barrier just high enough that a good number of players, myself included will not commit to the game unless we are completely sold on it. For an unproven brand, from a publisher that is notorious for selling their games short (NCSoft)… it just seems like a massive hurdle to cross.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. We are taking delivery of the new washing machine today… so I am only working a half day. Essentially I need to get to work and do a full days work in 4 hours. I hope you all have a great day and I hope everything goes smoothly with the delivery and install of the new washer. Last night was a bit of a mad dash around the house to try and clear room for the folks to move it into place. I think I am as ready as I will ever be.

Abolish Faction Walls

July 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out there. I joked yesterday about opening a real life air rift, but in reality I guess it felt a bit like that. We managed to get through the storm relatively unscathed, but not everyone did. Yesterday the report was that roughly 100,000 customers were without power, and in on the drive in there were numerous intersections that were reduced to four way stops. The neighbor across the street lost the entire fence on the front part of his yard, and the shopping center my favorite game store is in was pretty much demolished by the winds. It is so odd to have tornadic style damage without the Tornado.

Race and Class Restrictions

Yesterday Rowan posted a thought provoking pieces on whether or not there should be class and race restrictions in games. Namely this was spawned by Wildstar, but the question carries over to every game. Why does it make sense that fanatical characters should be limited by some sort of pseudo real world logic? In an example he gives… why CAN’T a robot do magic… isn’t that just imposing some kind of logic on fantasy gaming that doesn’t really exist? Is it not just as fantastical that humans can perform magic?

Ultimately I am against class and race restrictions… but even more so I am against faction based restrictions. My general theory is… that in every situation… ideology never breaks down solely along racial boundaries. There will always be people that play across the lines and are branded as either Sell-swords at the best, or Traitors at the worst by their own faction. One of the worst experiences you can have is when a new game comes out… and you are super pumped about one specific race… only to find out that every single friend you have wants to play the OTHER faction.

My mantra has been anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad. Faction based race restrictions get in the way of you playing what you want to play… and also playing with your friends that might have different tastes. I will go one step further and say that Factions in general… are generally bad, but more so games that try and set up an artificial “red versus blue” faction wall. That essentially feels like imposing artificial limitations on your players just to solve poor design problems. If have to rely on polarized faction based combat to keep your game moving, you made some bad decisions somewhere along the process.

Abolish Faction Walls

Some of the most liberating gaming experiences I have had come from games with much more flexible factional boundaries. The Everquest series probably takes the cake for its ability to give the player malleable faction alignments. Essentially you start out as either aligned as an Evil race or a Good race… and that sets up certain default racial relations that you have with other factions in the world. Given the time and the inclination… you can perform tasks that will alter these boundaries through lots and lots of player faction work.

Iksar for example started off hated by everything and could do business nowhere but the neutral Nexus and Cabilis their home city. However I had a friend who through lots of work managed to become maximum reputation with the Halflings… and he was treated as a favored guest in their territory. I myself took my Half Elf ranger which is natively a good aligned race… and managed to get him the same reputation with the Evil Erudite city of Paineel. This experience of letting the player dictate their alliances through their interactions with the world is the best possible scenario I have seen. Sadly… no one since has adopted this model.

In Everquest 2 you had something similar… defacto good vs evil racial set up… but over the course of the game you could decide to betray your home faction and begin gaining rep with the other. While this was not as rich and robust as the Everquest system… it was still a far better choice than the archaic “red versus blue” mentality. Additionally no where in the Everquest realm are you ever limited in who you can group with, communicate with, and trade with. All players can interact regardless of their personal choices.

Faction as Fiction

Singlehandedly one of the best choices Trion has ever made with Rift is to release the fabled “Faction as Fiction” patch abolishing strict faction walls in that game. While not as open as a game like Everquest that was designed NOT to have firm factions, it was a great way to “hack” that functionality into an existing game. Essentially in one pass they allowed Guardian and Defiant characters to group and guild freely, and set up a new neutral three faction based PVP system called Conquest. Players essentially act as mercenaries for three different political factions and wage proxy battles for them.

I feel like this decision point more than anything has allowed House Stalwart to grow so much recently. Many of the players that we were pulling in, tried it shortly after the release of Rift, but felt limited by the race and faction based choices. We were a Defiant guild, but many players just feel more comfortable with the kinder, gentler, greener… Guardian starter experience. Being able to tell them that “faction no longer matters” has almost become a rallying call as I get new folks invested in the game again.

I cannot help but think that games like World of Warcraft and Wildstar would not be far better served if they threw off the mantle of “red versus blue” and embraced letting players choose their own alignments. While we have extremely rabid Horde and Alliance players… I was one of those players that had friends on both sides of the pond. When Stalwart originally launched with the release of WoW, we had an Alliance Guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde Guild on Silverhand. The intent was to play in both places, so that we could stay together… but over time the majority greatly favored Alliance… leaving a skeleton crew manning the Horde bulwarks.

So instead of having like Fifty players all happy and acting together… we had 35 happy alliance players, and 15 unhappy horde players that felt abandoned. Any design choice that forces potentially pits players against their friends… is ultimately a bad one for the sake of building long lasting communities. Had we been able to BE an Alliance guild, but also had a number of “Horde” race sell-swords… I feel as though this would not have been a problem. The players didn’t care about the faction… they cared about the available races to play… and ultimately went to the side that they could play what they wanted to.

Looking Forward

One of the biggest detractors for me in everything I have heard about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that once again there will be three distinct and insular faction groups. While choosing which faction to align to was easy for me… since I always play a Nord, Argonian or a Dunmer… it will not be quite so easy for my friends. I have a few friends that prefer Altmer for example… and I tend to go out of my way to kill them when playing Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls is a setting where there have NEVER been absolute race based factional boundaries. There are always Nords that are willing to sell their blade to the highest bidder, as well as Altmer that throw off their heritage and adventure freely in the world.

My biggest hope is that there will be a way for my friends to be in Ebonheart Pact where I plan on building the House Stalwart guild… but be able to play whatever they want to play. This will ultimately determine whether or not a Stalwart guild succeeds in this game. I realize that this is probably just a pipe dream, because everything that we have seen to this point seems to enforce the strict racial boundaries. But I guess I can hope… I realize factional boundaries are easy for companies to enforce, that they greatly simplify many aspects of the game. However this does not stop me from feeling like they are bad for the players.

ESO is still a long ways off, so I have the smallest glimmer of hope that they might rethink the firm racial limits, however Wildstar feels as though it is right around the corner and has set up the same tired walls. We are going through the same problems with that game as we have every other faction based title. Granted I am only really mildly interested in the game… but various Stalwarts are EXTREMELY interested. The problem is… each of us seems to natively align ideologically with one faction or the other… and currently it the sentiments seem to split down the middle. All of this is generally because we prefer to play one type of race over another. They could really serve to take a book from Trion and make guilds transcend factional boundaries.

While we are on pipedreams… one of the biggest flaws in The Secret World is the fact that Cabals are faction locked. This game is so liberating in certain fashions… you can group with any player on any faction or shard. However the fact that their guild system is limited based on a specific faction really throws a monkey wrench in this whole openness scenario. It has essentially forced guilds to manage three separate factional units… and then try and communicate between them using server channels. Everything would have been far simpler had they just said that cabals were free floating. I really hope this is a decision they revisit in the near future.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I have wasted another perfectly good morning rambling on. I had intended to talk about all the awesomeness that we did last night as a guild, but that yarn can wait for another day. On a related note however.. I totally suggest you check out Fynralyl’s blog post about her entry into the guild and reentry into Rift in general. Warms my heart to see that folks are enjoying themselves in an environment I have pulled together. Any questions I had as to whether or not forming a House Stalwart in Rift was a good idea… have long since gone out the window. I hope you guys have a great day, and that the weekend comes quickly.