Neverwinter Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Open Letter to Neverwinter

May 23, 2013 by Belghast

Okay today you guys are getting a bonus post, because I am at home waiting on the cable to install internet, and for furniture to be delivered. I was reading my twitter feed and came across something so absolutely ludicrous that I had to comment about it.

So this is something I had honestly not realized that apparently Neverwinter claims not to be live yet, and that any mistakes they are making are “necessary changes and improvements” before they go live. Dear Perfect World, you completely fail at the concept of what is an open beta means.

If you…

Have the servers live 24/7
Have stated that there will be no character wipes from this point out
Are actively taking money hand over fist from customers

Then you have a live game.

You can call it whatever you like, but you are running a live game. It is not open beta, it is just half launched. This whole redefinition of what Alpha and Beta means has stuck in my craw lately. They have stopped meaning anything at all and just been a way for the marketing department to presell the game and get a steady influx of money from curious gamers. However launching the game and actively taking money from customers… yet still calling it a beta passes some line that has never been crossed.

Anyways, it is still a decent game, and I still stand by my statement that it is probably the best completely free option. However Perfect World needs to be honest with its verbiage and quit calling it a beta. This is in no way an open beta, you just soft launched your game. All that said, I still have not played it again since that opening weekend. It just lacks the draw to pull me in and make me care about it. I wish them the best of luck though, I just want them to be honest.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

May 7, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is an absolute paradox. For some reason I am more exhausted than normal, even though I went to bed last night at roughly 9:30 rather than my usual midnight timeframe. I am convinced that my body has a sweet spot of 5-6 hours of sleep, and anything over or under causes me to turn into a slug. I am hoping that as I digest this coffee that its sweet sweet caffeine lifts me out of this slump.

Hazy Shade of Neverwinter

Last night I really had nothing much going on, and do not have any real grouping options in Rift until tomorrow night, so with all the recent buzz surrounding it I figured I would fire up Neverwinter. Quite honestly I had not even booted the game since the day it released to the public, and had not actually played the game since before that. The game is “fun enough”, but for me at least it has lacked whatever spark makes me want to log in and play it.

I had left the game just long enough for the control scheme to feel awkward, but after a few minutes I was back acclimatized. Unfortunately it is not the kind of game you can play with a cat draped across your chest, or at least not play it successfully. As a result I didn’t last all that long in the title, before wandering off into something else. I have been trying to figure out exactly why this game is so lackluster to me, but others are loving it and consuming it completely.

Subscription is not a Barrier

I think I finally landed upon a nugget of thought. A subscription fee for an MMO has never been a barrier, or something that honestly gave me pause. Sure it did, when I first started playing these titles back with Everquest… but now that I am used to paying to play it is just one of those things I have come to expect from online gaming. For a whole segment of the gaming world, the subscription and box fees are real barriers to getting into the game and enjoying it.

As a result I am maybe somewhat falsely comparing Neverwinter to what has now become “premium” subscription games, or even “buy the box” titles. The real competitors with Neverwinter are the completely free games like Runes of Magic, that you can sign up on a website, download the client and never actually be forced to buy anything. When you narrow the scope down to only paying attention to the “absolutely free” games… it becomes super impressive.

No Egregious Pay Walls

What Neverwinter seems to give the player for nothing, is an extremely fluid experience with well crafted storyline, relatively solid classes, and no egregious pay walls restricting your field of play. You can get in and do essentially everything there is to do right now without obstacles standing in your way. Basically the game has taken a completely different approach to the free to play genre, in that it gives you a carrot instead of a stick. Namely that all of the options seem to give you something quicker, better or shinier for your coin rather than locking you out of functionalities.

I think this is the aspect of the game I have been missing all along when I played it or attempted to review it. I still do not think free to play is the “one true payment model”, but I think what Neverwinter is doing is a more equitable model than we have seen to date. The only problem is, the game introduces large swaths of “pay to win”, which is a concept that western audiences have claimed they do not want. But this is exactly what Neverwinter seems to be delivering, the ability to purchase astral diamonds and get nice gear in the process.

To Infinity Steppes and Beyond

As I said earlier, I really did not spend a lot of time last night in Neverwinter. I had a cat that was trying to “aggressively snuggle” and quite honestly the game just leaves me nonplussed overall. I logged back into familiar and happy Rift to work a bit on the Steppes of Infinity. Earlier in the weekend I had unlocked the daily quest content in Ashora, which is good for at least 10 plat per day for some really easy questing. I had hoped to do the same out in the Steppes for maybe an easy 20+ plat per day.

The quest chain overall was far harder to solo than the one in Ashora, and involved a relatively difficult boss fight. I truly do mean a boss, because it uses all the same kind of tactics that the bosses do in dungeons. While this was nowhere near the difficulty of the Gatekeeper fight in The Secret World, I feel like it would definitely give a similar “right of passage” feel for Rift, based on the level 60 boss encounters I have experiences in dungeons. The quest chain as a whole sets the player up for what to expect from later game content in general.

All this while I am struggling to stay awake, because after the weekend we had I was just exhausted all day yesterday. Before I gave in to sleep however, I was able to finish out gathering the 300 plat for my 130% speed mount. I wound up getting the Grey Ursin, because of the non-armored varieties I felt that was the nicest. Above is a quick picture I snapped before finally falling asleep of me on the new mount. Unfortunately I mostly purchased the mount for the overall mount speed boost… and am likely to never ride it. I like my Hellbug, White Tiger and Flaming Horse far too much to ride the angry looking bear.

Needing to wrap up once again, as I am out of coffee and need to consider moving onwards to work. I will be in training all day which will be the opposite of fun. I hope you all have an amazing day out there. I am going to work on not falling asleep in a boring training presentation.

Wukong is super annoying

May 1, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday more than mildly sucked. While I was blogging in the morning, just after posting it… I managed to stub my toe hard enough on something sharp under my desk… that it caused a chunk of my toenail to chip off and a little bout of excessive bleeding. After that my stomach pretty much bothered me all day long, and I tagged out of work around noon. I worked remotely the rest of the day trying to catch up and prepare for big releases on Thursday and Saturday.

Escapist Thwarted

All of this, combined with trying to come up with a new way to circumvent my ninja ferret caused me to get a later than normal start on evening relaxation time. On the ferret note, our current solution seems to be working… and I am breathing at least a minor sigh of relief. We have a drop ceiling in our kitchen, circa 1980, with those massive semi-opaque sheets of plastic covering fluorescent lighting. Over the years the 1980s plastic has fallen apart, and we have had to replace them on a piecemeal basis.

We had just finished doing this, and still had the leftover bits in the kitchen when a stroke of brilliance hit. Basically Miss Bellatrix is getting out by climbing the corner with the litter box. We surmised that if she did not have a foothold, she couldn’t get out. So essentially we have taken two sheets of this plastic covering and clipped it onto the wire with binder clips from the backside, so that it presents a sheer face for her to try and climb.

Based on last night, and the fact we left her out over night as an experiment… and she is still pouncing around the playpen this morning… I would say the experiment worked. The funny thing is, I think she just tries to escape out of boredom. She sleeps far less than the other two ferrets, and when she has gotten out she tried to crawl up into bed with us.

My theory was that she was bored and looking for someone to play with… she often tries to wake the other two ferrets up to play. So the whole escape thing is kind of adorable… but something we had to nip in the bud, because our house is just too dangerous for her. We have an open living room, that spans 2 stories, and a second floor balcony that overlooks it. It is just too likely that she will wander up there and try and take a swan dive off.

Freljord Rising

Yesterday was a big day for new content releases. In Everquest 2 you had the Game Update 66 launch, and with it the launch of the Cobalt Scar area. Neverwinter Online of course launched to the public, and has been riddled with issues at least with the patcher. Early in the evening I decided to fire up the client and log in, and was greeted by a roughly 8000 player queue. So it appears that the launch is at least popular, but then again most MMO launches are.

The content launch I ended up playing last night however is League of Legends and its patch 3.6. The big event with the patch is a massive re-ordering of the champion lore in Freljord and the release of a brand new champion… Lissandra The Ice Witch. I would highly suggest watching the above video if you are interested, but the basics are that the Freljord is now divided into three warring clans: The Avarosans lead by Ashe, The Winter’s Claw lead by Sejuani and the Frostguard lead by Lissandra.

With the focus on Freljord and its lore, this week all of the free rotation champions are somehow connected to this effort. With it, there is a much more sweeping sale going on in the store, with ALL Freljord champions costing both reduced RP and IP. Additionally there are some nifty new skins available, my personal favorite is Runeguard Volibear. I already really liked playing Voli, but this skin just makes him look even more badass.

Sucking Less

It was pretty late by the time I had gotten around to actually doing much of anything, and since I had not played League for roughly a week… I decided to join in the festivities there. While waiting on our group to filter into mumble, we decided to do a little 2 v 2 “Murder Bridge” aka Howling Abyss. To be extra griefy… Tam decided to set us up for a random champions match. By the artwork above you can see that I got stuck with NuNu. What essentially happened is two players got champions they were familiar and decent with, and two completely random picks they had never played.

Making it even more hilarious was the fact that we ended up with four melee champions. The teams broke down like this: Myself playing Nunu and Drathis playing Tryndamere against Tam playing Warwick and Ashgar playing Udyr. My big takeaway from playing Nunu is that his frostbolt is without a doubt one of the most griefy pokes I have seen in the game, especially on a map that includes nothing but melee that have no solid ways of closing the gap.

We lost rather spectacularly in part because Drathis ended up spending most of the map pretty underfed, which as a carry caused him never quite to reach his potential. Also… Ashgar is really really good at Udyr, a champion he was super familiar with and rather skilled. It was hilarious for Tam and I however, because really Nunu and Warwick are much much not our kind of champions… much laughing ensued.

Wukong is super annoying

After our quick murder bridge, we somehow jumped from four players online to eight and decided to do a 4v4 Summoners Rift. After the ickyness of playing Nunu, a champion that I absolutely hate when playing against him… I decided to climb back into the warmth of what has become my favorite champion… Wukong. When playing against each other, it is always interesting. Some of us, Rae especially, seem to have a problem killing friends, and you can almost hear her audibly cringe each time she does it. Others like Ashgar and I seem to set up and develop a friendly rivalry, which unfortunately causes us to deathmatch more than we should.

Another thing I am learning, is that apparently I am super annoying playing Wukong. Ashgar and I both ended up as solo tops, which pitted Wukong against Fizz… both of which are super bursty and super pouncy champions. For the most part we traded blows back and forth, but once I had gotten fed I seemed to start winning these little battles. Apparently my Ultimate ability is super overpowered, and after a few interludes where I went through the jungle to help out in another lane… it seemed my dear friends started hunting for me.

At one point they boxed me in, as two came down from base and the other two came from the river and completely wrecked me. It is funny to listen to your friends reacting to the decoy ability, and finding out that it is not the real you they just killed. I have to say if I were up against Wukong I would probably focus fire him as well. The game felt like a tale of two games, the first when I was super fed and able to pick off players with impunity, and the second when said players realized what was going on and started gunning for me.

Champion Testing

After the mega 4v4 battle, we had a few more players filter off and we fired up a Summoner’s Rift vs bots to test out various champions folks had wanted to play. I got to play Olaf, which I played extremely differently than I expected… but was really enjoyable nonetheless. In addition, I finally got to play Mordekaiser, which is NOT as fun as he looks… and most definitely not a “Belghast” champion. I think I could get used to him, but I feel like I need to do a lot of reading first.

Was a fun evening all around, and I got to play several characters that I had never played before. I am of mixed opinions on my Nunu experience, I was told by my friends that I played him pretty effectively, but overall it just felt so odd to me. He also feels like one of the most griefy champions I have seen, with the frost ball and his ultimate… so many ways to slow the player and do large amounts of damage to them in the process. I could see maybe picking him up and trying him again.

If you aren’t regularly playing, I highly suggest you hop in during the Freljord launch event. There is a much better assortment of killer champions in the free rotation this week than normal. Or at least, there are more champions I was wanting to play, and most of them on a significant sale. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you guys continue having an awesome week. Today is a super stressful day for me, delivering my mobile web roadmap, so hopefully that will go well. More than anything, I think the document is designed to be big, and sit on a table during the meeting saying “look we thought about this shit”.