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I’ve been on this journey of discovery, that largely started with the negative reaction the Diablo Immortal reaction had in the community as a whole.  Sure there was the pent up disappointment that we had waiting for Diablo 4, but it seemed to go way further than that.  There was a reaction that most of the Diablo fans had, myself included… that mobile gaming was somehow “not for them”.  Right or wrong there has been an impression among PC and Console gamers that mobile gaming was something “casuals” did, and that serious gamers were playing games on other platforms.  I am not even sure if this was ever the case, but it feels like things are changing drastically on this front, largely because mobile devices have improved greatly over when I was trying to play a Diablo clone on my Palm Pilot back in 2003.  Like I have said before when I fail to understand something, I tend to pour myself into trying to figure it out, and as such I have been playing a lot more mobile games lately.

One of them is The Walking Dead Our World, which at face value appears to be a Pokemon Go clone for The Walking Dead.  Sure I knew Pokemon Go fans were hardcore and established raids and such on a regular basis…  but that more or less is in spite of the fact that Nintendo still refuses to accept that the internet is a thing that exists.  Our World seems to be a game that takes the idea of PoGo but extends all of the things we have learned about clan/guild play and internet connectivity.  As a solo player it is largely a game about clearing infestations, picking up supply caches and rescuing survivors.  As a team however it changes drastically, and in truth were I not now part of an active clan I probably would have faded away from this game long before.

The game more or less suggests you join a group, and then suggests the ones that are active in your vicinity.  The biggest problem I had was finding one that was not outwardly racist, trumpian, sexist or anti-LGBT.  It was shocking to me to see just how many groups had something like that in their message, thankfully I found this one that seemed to be reasonable and largely focused on getting objectives done.  Now I don’t know any of these people in real life, but they apparently live in the near vicinity of me…  and a lot of the locations that get called out over chat are places in the surrounding communities.  There is a Weekly Challenge system that involves performing a bunch of objectives and then unlocking rewards as a result.  Last week I believe we made it through four maybe five of these challenge boards, each time earning really good loot and the in game “upgrade” currency.  What I find the most interesting is that everything I see in the social chat that I largely just lurk in…  mirrors the exact same behavior I have seen in MMO Guilds.  They are all working together on a shared objective and focusing on specific things that they can bring to the table.

The game has this interesting system that allows players to drop a flare at a specific location, and then other players in your clan can teleport to that location and be able to farm the objectives there.  I’ve seen this a few times when someone happened across an area with a cluster of epic missions for example.  The game tends to follow the television shows, and if a character has a major role that week… then immediately following there will be a number of seasonal missions that show up awarding the cards related to that player.  I’ve also seen my clan drop flares when they find a cluster of a specific type of walker needed for an objective…  like over the last couple of days we have been working on killing armored walkers with Darryl, which as such lead to my load out in the above screenshot.  It of course has a cash shop, and while it is pretty pushy about advertising what is for sale…  it doesn’t appear like you actually need anything from it pending you are willing to wait things out.  Similarly being in a clan tends to help make sure you are rolling in resources.

Mostly I found it shocking to see the exact same MMORPG behavior on a mobile platform.  I will admit I largely thought that Pokemon Go and the dedication of those players…  was more attributed to the source material and less something that you find on mobile devices in general.  However as I have dug into Dragalia Lost I have run across some seemingly super hardcore players there as well.  I think the tides are shifting, and maybe those of us who proclaim to be PC or Console gamers need to update our mindsets.  Sure mobile gaming might be “not for you” but the low barrier of entry… and how well all of these games run on my $300 unlocked android phone…  makes it accessible to a market that may not be able to purchase a Console or a Gaming PC…  but is damned likely to have a mobile phone that they use as their primary source of internet access.  As a developer I have watched the numbers skew over the last few years on the large site that I maintain professionally…  and previously we used to see 10-15% of our users coming in off mobile devices.  Now that has reached a point where 49% of our users are either on phones or tablets, which has created a massive shift in how we approach content.  It is not shocking that game developers have started to do exactly the same thing.  I may not be super happy with this trend, but I am now at least starting to understand it a bit more.

So one of the things you need to understand about my brain, that may or may not have been evident from this blog…  is that I go through a bit of a cycle when I hear something that conflicts with what I currently perceive as my core interests.  First I rebel against the idea, and then as that calms down…  I go on a sort of quest to understand it.  For example… I have talked about this before but I was an Alpha tester on Guild Wars 2…  and it is the only games test that I resigned from.  It was a super restrictive test that I had to get forms notarized and turn back in, so resigning seemed like the thing to do rather than simply never playing again.  However once the game released I kept throwing myself at it like a puzzle that I simply could not crack.  It took me years to fully comprehend why it was that people seemed to like it so much, and reach a place of peace with the game that allowed me to finally accept that it was just not for me.  Similarly this whole Diablo Immortal thing has caused me to push deeper into mobile gaming, because I feel like it has been this entire segment of the market that I never really understood the appeal of.

Pokemon Go really was the first mobile game that I actually cared about.  It was this specific combination of “everyone was doing it”, mixed with a familiar IP in the form of Pokemon, and also doing some really interesting things with location aware services and augmented reality (even though I largely left that shit turned off all the time).  While I still technically pop it open when I am bored… I am nowhere near as active as I once was.  There are a few PokeStops on the way into the building at work, but I am not going out and actively seeking things to capture like I did when the game first was released.  Admittedly the instability back at launch probably kept this from moving from a thing I casually use…  to a thing I am actively playing…  given that at one point I was going out pretty much every night to catch stuff.

The core problem with Pokemon Go is that it is not an equitable experience for all players.  When I am at work in the core of downtown Tulsa, there is a constant stream of activity…  however once I retreat back to my sleepy suburb there is nothing at all.  I can walk a lap of my neighborhood and maybe encounter two Pokemon, both of which from what I term the trash variety that you commonly find everywhere.  Additionally the focus on face to face interaction made trading just not something that I would ever care about… because most of my friends who play Pokemon are not near me.  So it feels like  game I dabble in but is very much not for me.

Another game that I have recently started playing is The Walking Dead Our World, which takes the general concept of Pokemon Go but applies it to zombie survival.  I’m a fan of the show even though it has figuratively jumped the shark a handful of times at this point.  They have been advertising this game for a few seasons and it finally got me curious enough to download and install it.  The biggest positive I have to talk about it is that it does not shred your battery in the way that Pokemon Go does, nor does it seem to only care about urban hubs.  Out in the burbs there is a constant flow of zombie infestations for me to clear out.  The only negative however is it doesn’t really reward moving around anywhere near as much as it probably should.  I can sit in bed and clear out a half dozen objectives without actually getting out into the community and finding other objectives.  I’ve recently joined a clan or whatever the hell they call them, and it adds another dimension to the game because it feels like I am contributing to larger objectives in the form of a weekly challenge card of sorts that rewards a ton of resources each time you finish one out.  Definitely an interesting game, but also one that I only play because fiddling around on my phone has become my before I go to sleep activity.

I have talked at length about Dragalia Lost being the game that largely convinced me that an ARPG would work on a mobile phone.  While I still enjoy it, I have very much ended up in maintenance mode with it.  I log in each night and work through the daily objectives, then make sure a bunch of stuff is building in my castle before logging out and on to the next thing.  I am not really spending much time actually doing content in the game apart from if there is an event going on.  Once again this game has not really elevated to the realm of “I would rather play it over more traditional games”.  For my friend Grace however, it has and she is spending a good deal more time playing it than playing other titles at the moment.  The truth is the only real reason why I have been playing so many mobile games is…  my phone hurts way less than the switch when I inevitably drop it on my face.

With the Diablo Immortal announcement, there were a lot of folks talking about how it looked like a “reskin” of another game they released called Crusaders of Light.  I decided to check this out for myself, and I guess if you are just looking at the user interface they do look really similar.  Then again most mobile MMOs that I have seen have a very similar interface, and if you think about it most first person shooters these days use exactly the same control scheme.  Games tend to land on a thing that works and then keep doing that thing over and over.  As far as play however it feels more like a mobile World of Warcraft, if I am being completely honest about it.  There really isn’t much about it that feels Action RPG.  As far as play… the controls are not great and the game highly suggests that you auto navigate to your objectives…  which I completely agree with.  However while doing this it feels sorta like the game is playing you more than you playing the game.

For reference I also started piddling around in Lineage II Revolution, which quite honestly does a lot of the same things.  In fact it is probably more so with an auto questing mode that not only navigates you to the target but also starts attacking it.  Weirdly however I find myself liking this title way more than Crusaders of Light, even though it actually asks way less of me to play it.  You can of course go offroad at any point, and I have found myself killing three or four times the number of mobs that a given quest has asked me to.  Again I am largely doing the auto nav thing to make up for the fact that mobile navigation feels so horrible in the first place.  Were I playing any of these games with a controller, then life would be completely different.  Mostly this is all part of my brain trying to grok what trends there are and what is popular apart from the obvious Gacha mechanics that seem to exist in all of them.

The biggest problem I have with mobile games is that I find I burn out of them way faster than traditional PC games.  I tend to cycle through them like a bored toddler, so I do my maintenance gaming in one…  then move on to the next one.  At some point my brain realizes that I am only ever doing maintenance tasks and start checking out of it completely.  I don’t even have Fire Emblem Heroes installed on my phone anymore, nor did I actually make it all of the way through that quest.  Similarly I no longer have Final Fantasy Record Keeper installed, in spite of previously devoting a bunch of time of this “boredom time” to it.  While I am on this mission, I am definitely open to suggestions.  Is there anything you are playing on a mobile device that is more along the lines of a traditional game?  I am not looking for puzzle games like Alphabear, because I already play a handful of those as well.