Tales of the Aggronaut

Four Job Fiesta

June 2, 2013 by Belghast

Oh Sunday… that morning in which you think to yourself… crap I have to go to work tomorrow. Today will be pretty much dominated by my wife’s mothers birthday. We are going to drive to grove later this afternoon to meet her for dinner, and are talking about potentially meandering our way there with cameras. So as a result I have no clue when we will actually leave, but there will not be much gaming at all today. Right now I am just trying to barrel through my morning blog post without losing focus.

Riftstraction

I still need to return to my Sith ways, but for whatever reason yesterday I was distracted once more by the lure of rift and my melee mage. I hit level 22 yesterday while still wandering around Silverwood. I ended up getting caught up in a buzz of completionism… something that I am not normally afflicted with. The problem is… I had left a lot of the quests involving the court of Prince Hylas unfinished. One constant for me regardless of the game… is that I love slaughtering elves. So I got caught up in the carnage, and ended up completing all the quests for the zone.

I have since moved on to Gloamwood and am busy killing Barghests and Bats. Gloamwood is the only zone that ever made me question my choice of Defiant. I just love the feel of it, so much atmosphere and if they traded the goblins for skeletons… it would have been my perfect zone. Gloamwood Pines so deserves to be the guardian capitol city, it is better in every way than Sanctum. It actually looks like a real town, with plenty of houses to actually support people living there. Whereas Sanctum is a capitol city with no housing at all. This has always been one of the problems I had with the Rift old world… it doesn’t look like people could actually live in it.

The funny thing about my recent venture into melee magery, is that it was intended to be able to play with my friend Rylacus. The only problem with that notion is he has not logged in since late night Friday. Oh well… this game has the best mentoring system I have seen, so I can always drop my level back down to hang out with him. I am purposefully not doing the dungeon finder so I can run the dungeons for the first time on this character with him and hopefully Thalen as well. I love Rift, it is a great game… but the problem has always been that it is pure hell to get other friends to play it. I really hope the free to play conversion makes that problem a bit easier.

Four Job Fiesta

For a few years now, my friend JJ has been trying to get me and some other friends to join in on the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta charity play-a-thon. While I do not fully understand the process… from what I do get the goal is for all of us to try and beat Final Fantasy V and raise money for the Childs Play charity in the process. There are multiple ways to sign up to play but the basic concept is that there are 22 jobs (26 in the Advance version), and at the start of the game… you will be assigned 4 random jobs. Then you have to complete the game using only those jobs you were assigned.

Since it has been years since I have played FFV, and I have never beaten it… I am playing with the least number of possible restrictions. I am praying I get a fairly balanced team, otherwise I will be pretty much screwed. My friend Drathis got a pretty rough combo last year from what I can remember and struggled with it. I will be relying on JJ a lot as this goes forward since he is pretty much the FFV master. I think he can play the game in his sleep, so I am sure he will be a good source of information. Right now my intent is to play the Gameboy Advance variety on my PSP.

I blasted this out over social media, and it got picked up and reshared… so hopefully this helps get the word out. Everyone is welcome to participate, to sign up all you need is a twitter account… as the sign up process involves that. I am assuming that will also be how we get assigned our four jobs on 6/17. The festivities begin the day before my birthday, so I guess I know what I will be doing for my birthday. I have a feeling it is going to take me a long time to beat the game. You guys should all sign up and join in the madness.

Six Advance

Yesterdays post spawned comments from a few friends, namely JJ and Stop that I should really be playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6. Apparently the PSP native copy is globally considered the worst possible port of the game, and has known lag issues. So I took the advice… found the latest version of gpSP I could for the PSP… and restarted the game on the Advance version. I have a Gameboy Advance SP somewhere… but I have no clue where it is right now. So my best option was to play the game on my PSP via emulator, and the game runs beautifully.

All of the issues I had that I thought I just misremembered… were really issues with the PSP/PSOne native version. The Advance copy plays super fast, and is actually scaled to fit a modern aspect ratio beautifully. The only problem I encountered was a pretty massive bug when Kefka first visits Figaro. I could talk to everyone BUT Kefka… then zoned out to see if it would fix the bug… and now Kefka is no longer there. I am going to have to reload from a previous safe and see if I can fix the bug. I would hate to think it is going to be game breaking.

The one awesome thing about this, is that basically it proves out the theory that I can play Advance games just fine on my PSP, so this will likely be how I end up playing FFV during the Four Job Fiesta event. The PSP battery life is always an annoyance, but I have a spare battery for this reason. I just want something I can play it on that is portable so I can play over lunch etc. I will be trying to dig up actual copies of the GBA carts, so that I don’t feel too dirty emulating them.

Wrapping Up

Okay time to start getting ready to confront the day. Time to leave will be coming sooner than I want it to, and I still need to shower etc. I hope you all have a great Sunday, and a great start of the week. I have no clue what I will be doing today other than the visiting my mom-in-law part. I might try and fix the bug on the FF6 play through so I can keep going, or I might dive back into Rift. In any case I hope you all enjoy your day.

Kyclops Kombat

June 1, 2013 by Belghast

I am getting a later than normal start this Saturday morning. Quite honestly I am pretty groggy because it was another “watch the skies” night. I really did not sleep well at all, for the most part I kept getting woken up by a new round of tornado warnings from about 11pm onwards. At some point during the night the danger passed and it shifted to infomercials. I know this because I dreamt about some magical drug that can cook food in only minutes… I feel as though I maybe got a few things mixed up.

Tornado Alley

For the most part last night was one big near miss. The storms hit all around the Tulsa area where I live, and instead gave the areas where both of our parents live pure havoc. Most of the night was watching concerned while texting back and forth with my dad about what was coming towards them. At one point there were two tornados, on either side of highway 169 roughly 10 miles from my parents house. But other than a bunch of rain both all three of our sets of parents made it through the night safe.

I feel as though I have to explain something to folks who are not from “Tornado Alley” and even more so not from Oklahoma. From the time I got home around 4pm until after the time I went to bed around 11:30pm no normal programming was shown at all. All of that time we have literally the best meteorologists in the country tracking the storms and some of the best storm chasers in the country following them. The station we watch for example has not one but two helicopters at their disposal, and they are also chasing the storms by the air.

So when storms are a brewing, it becomes this surreal showplace of watching as these giant green, red and yellow blobs inch towards your home and family. All the while we are seeing live in car video, and tower cam video showing just how bad the storms are. There were several points during the night when a normally calm broadcast would be interrupted by an excited storm chaser yelling over the weatherman that a tornado was on the ground and this place or that place. At which point all focus would shift to whatever that crisis was, and putting the other crisii that had not quite happened on the back burner.

Oklahomans have a pervese sense of attraction to Tornados… it is that whole moth too the flame thing. Anything that destructive has to be respected and almost admired with a certain kind of majesty. You can hear this in the storm chasers voice and choice of wording… you know they are out there for a totally different purpose than you the viewer is. While we are huddled in our homes scared shitless about what might be barreling down on us… they are excited as they see the “best activity all night” while describing a wall cloud. You can’t take offense to these adrenaline junkies reveling in the fact that they are chasing a storm that spawned a massive tornado. It is a symbiotic relationship… without them we would not have nearly the warning that we do.

The biggest take away for the rest of the country is that you should fear and respect tornados. We Oklahomans have literally grown up with this our entire lives, we have the best possible weather and storm chasers on our side… yet still as evidenced by last night… people die because they were either caught unaware, or did not respect the fury of the storm. All of the deaths that happened last night along I-40 were in essence preventable… it is drilled in from our first days in school, that the worst place to be in the case of a tornado is your car on the road. Yet when the sirens went off, for whatever reason people took to the highways to avoid it… and instead placing themselves right in the path. The most tragic of these deaths is the mother and child that were… according to the highway patrol… sucked out of their car by the storm.

Kyclops Kombat

Before all hell broke loose, early in the evening… I was looking forward to being able to play some Rift. One of my good friends, Rylacus was planning on playing last night, and as a result I decided to break out my one remaining lowbie while waiting on him to show up. I have made several attempts at rolling a mage in Rift, and none of them make it terribly far. The long and short is… that I just do not enjoy “finger wigglers” as I call them. I need to be smashing into things with a weapon to get that visceral feedback I crave in a combat system. If forced to, I can usually play a Necromancer type because pet class caster is kind of that hazy middle ground that I can find some enjoyment in… but I had never actually made one past level 20.

When Storm Legion was announced, and they mentioned having a Melee mage… I knew I was all about that. The Harbinger really is a fun class to play, and for the most part it is essentially the battlemage archetype from other games. You have a series of spells that essentially summon armor or weapons to suit whatever situation you are in. Right now I have a sword that procs a dot, axe that procs a heal, physical resist armor and magic resist armor… all of which are useful in certain situations. Right now I am mostly playing with the 2 handed healing axe and the physical resist armor, because against quest mobs that seems to be the power combo.

I had only been on playing my mage about thirty minutes or so when another good friend of mine shows up in mumble. Thalen has been working on his cleric and managed to get him up to level 48. One of the things you have to know about Thalen, is that he is a rabid completionist. As a result when he logged in, he was wandering around the droughtlands looking for 5 quests he had missed, that would count towards the droughtland completion achievement. He mentioned that there were a series of elite quests that he could not quite solo… so I quickly found myself logging over to Belghast and heading that way.

One of the subplots in the zone is that there is a group of Cyclops that you can earn the respect of by proving your strength. Thalen had apparently made it all the way to the end of this series and had two quests unfinished. The first of which was to engage the cyclops in a massive 4 way brawl, and the other was to track down and kill several named cyclops. I mentored down to 48 and we headed out to the arena. We started up the battle and I was shocked at just how much damage I was taking. Moments later I realized that yet again I had rushed off into combat… without throwing any buffs up.

After buffing the combat was pretty easy overall. While tracking down the various named cyclops my Raredar plugin threw this big green alert over the top of my screen that I have not entirely familiar with seeing. It seems that it had found a rare named spider, so I tried to keep it busy until Thalen could get back to me. It dropped a piece of epic currency and a piece of blue armor, which would have been good… were we actually doing this content on level. We wrapped up the quests and I bowed out of the group, as things were starting to get crazy weather wise.

The sad part is… Rylacus never showed up during the couple of hours I was playing. Later on I ended up getting a text about 11 pm from him… just when the shit was hitting the fan here… saying he was able to log in now. I texted back saying that unfortunately we were under the gun weather wise, and answered a few of his questions. I am sure the third text came off extra grumpy, as he seemed to have a way of texting just as I was trying to fall back asleep. Hopefully we can get meet up another night and run around together. Would be nice if we could some how engineer both myself, Ry and Thalen being on at the same time. If that ever happens… we will have to find something epic to do.

Enter the Returners

As things got more dicey outside with the weather, I decided it was time for me to disconnect from anything online involving other people… and switch back to something I could pause. I picked up my psp and continued on my adventure through Final Fantasy VI. I have to say I still have a solid dose of nostalgia about this game, but there are little things that annoy me. For example it feels like it takes far longer between rounds of combat than I remember. Granted this could just be my impatient self, used to non-turnbased combat… but it feels like those action bars take for freaking ever to fill.

There will probably be spoilers in the lines ahead… so if you have not played this game you should probably stop reading. Essentially last night I finally completed the Mog minigame… and escaped Narshe. The combat there is far rougher than I remember it being before. It might be that I just suck at final fantasy games nowadays, but it felt like the final guard battle did way more damage than he should have. It took me a few tries to get past him, one of them involving loading an earlier save… since when you rez back you have 1 hp… and I had next to no potions at that point.

After that I ventured forward to to Figaro, had my first real renin with Kefka… and still thought it was cool to watch Figaro castle submerge. I remember back in the 90s, I was not at all expecting that turn of events. Because of the engine room… and mecha look… I thought maybe it would turn into a robot or an airship… but submerge was not one of the things I was thinking. So after thumbing our noses at Kefka we wandered across the desert and went through the cave to South Figaro.

At this point I had enough money to pretty much optimize everyone’s gear… since this is the very first occasion that you have to actually purchase anything. While I don’t remember thinking this at the time… that is a really really long time to go surviving only on drops and chests. Nowadays it feels extremely cruel, but at the time I guess it was just par for the course. After spending some time in town… I couldn’t really remember exactly what I was supposed to do next… and there was not a clear call to action. This Final Fantasy game seems to do a far worse job at messaging what you are supposed to do than I remember.

Essentially I fell back on my “wander aimlessly” skill and found Sabin’s cabin… at which point we get the “Edgar realizes his brother is still alive and nearby” cut scene. So now it jogs my memory… that we have to go up Mount Kolts to get to Banon at the returners base. Bingo! We have a plan now. So I ascend Mount Kolts, see the spooky shadowy figure following me… remember that it leads in a boss fight. Sure enough it is Vargas the son of Duncan… who killed his father because he thought Sabin was the chosen one. We fight Vargas, Sabin jumps in… the game teaches us how to use his freaky Blitz ability… and boom we win the day because pummel apparently is just THAT good.

After that I find my way to the Returners base… Terra gets all emo because she doesn’t know which path to choose. You walk around the base talking to people, and finally meet Banon outside. Does anyone NOT choose to join the Returners? I mean what happens if you say no… do you just stay there and the game is over? Far as I know there is not an entire second side of the game where you rejoin the empire and kick returner ass… so if you say no it essentially has to be a non-choice. Based on a google search, apparently if you say no… she still agrees to follow them to talk to the Esper in Narshe. So yeah… sounds like pretty much a non choice… but you have the opportunity to be a dick about it.

Basically I reached the point where my eyes could no longer stay open when we had run away from the Returner base and the game forks. I figured that was a good time to stop playing, so I had Mog save in the split decision room. I feel like I will probably pick up and play Locke’s story, as he is probably my favorite character in FFVI. He is kind of the rogue I judge all other rogues by. Did I mention that FFVI had a massive impact on me growing up?

Happy Birthday Mom

So I need to wrap up, because well it is 10:30 and I need to call my Mom to figure out what we are doing today. Today is her Birthday, and while she doesn’t actually read my blog… I figured the sub section title was fitting. It sounds like we are basically free of Tornados until at least next Tuesday. I am exhausted from the previous night, so not sure how much oomph I am going to have as the day goes on. I hope you all have a super enjoyable day, and one that is likely to be more productive than mine. I may end up having to take a nap before the day is over.

Best Fantasy Ever

May 31, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I just said “fuck it” and hit the snooze button. This is not a practice I normally do, since I usually end up feeling far more tired after doing so… but today is Friday… and last night was another one of our Oklahoma “watch the skies” nights. I feel like as a whole today may just be a “fuck it” day in general. I feel like I don’t have much of anything to really talk about, but by god I am going to do it anyway.

Chaos Reigns

Last night I started the evening attempting to play some Star Wars the Old Republic. However ultimately the constant distraction of the tornado cells coming through our area lead to nothing but me getting killed over and over by afking in the wrong place. Basically I needed to play something with a pause button last night, and that ruled out all of my MMOs. Last week a discussion with Syl about Jesters ended up bringing up one of my favorite video game villains of all time… Kefka. She mentioned that her favorite rendition was in the game Dissidia… and I thought to myself… man I wonder why I never played that?

Sometimes you see a game so often, that you develop this picture in your head of what the game will be like to play. For the case of Dissidia, I had built up this image in my head of a this massive fan service JRPG that comes up with a loose excuse to involve all your favorite characters from vastly different final fantasy games. So while the fan service part was definitely correct, the rest of the game resembles almost nothing of a traditional Japanese RPG game.

The game as a whole is about Chaos over throwing Order… and that is precisely what playing it felt like to me. It works absolutely nothing like I expected. Essentially you pick one of the cast of characters, the engage in a series of game boards… that you have to move across by clearing obstacles in your way. When you encounter an obstacle… you have to fight them in this truly bizarre behind the back view fighting game. All of the fights so far have been repetitive and essentially a time waster, but I have this feeling that when I actually encounter a boss fight it will be like the floor dropping out from under me.

Essentially it feels like an extremely flimsy excuse to pack a game with a bunch of cinematic of characters you know and love interacting together. Each time you clear one of these game board, you are treated to a 3D cut scene of your character doing whatever they do best… usually brooding. Along the way you pick up gear that slightly improves your ability to knock down these straw men villains that get put in your path. I am sure on the boss fights you will have to have the best of all possible gear to make it through them.

There is some kind of weird mini-game involving a chocobo and carrots that I have not quite figured out what is going on with it. I am sure it is important, but I have yet to notice anything happening other than every so often a pixelated chocobo shows up on screen and eats a carrot. Additionally there is an absolutely insane unlock system that allows you to play as other characters, unlock other costumes and even character voices. The most confusing of these is what looks almost like a cash shop… but I don’t see any RMT hooks in the game at all.

Basically after playing Dissidia for 2 hours… I am still not really sure if I like the game or not. There is so much of it that is the epitome of repetitive gameplay, however I found myself continuing to play it in spite of this. I made it through the tutorial… that didn’t really teach me anything… and a few game boards into the Cloud storyline before I decided to give up. This is definitely going to be a game I return to, because it is like this super confusing puzzle that is going to annoy me until I solve it. There is so much going on in this game, and it has such a devoted following that I feel like I have to figure out why.

Best Fantasy Ever

Another title I had dug up for the PSP was the Super Nintendo turned Gameboy Advance turned Playstation turned PSP remake of my favorite of all JRPGs… Final Fantasy VI… or as I played it originally Final Fantasy III. I was really late getting turned onto this game, it was not until Christmas break that I ended up giving this game a spin. I rented it from the local video store… and then when it came time to turn it in… tried valiantly to purchase the cart from them so I could maintain my game saves. I gathered up all the cash I had gotten over Christmas, and picked up the game at Toys R Us… then spent what felt like the next 4 months playing it.

There was just so much going on in this game. It had a great cast of characters, awesome steampunk meets magic theme… and for the time the graphics were truly amazing. This to me is the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy experience, and everything since has been a downhill ride for me. Much like me being able to replay Symphony of the Night over and over… this is on the same list… but I have never really done so. I’ve never been that big into the various mobile gaming systems post green and black gameboy. So I have essentially be relegated to playing this title on emulators for the last decade.

Now that I have it on the PSP, I am really looking forward to a proper play through again. I started it back up last night, but only really made it towards the end of Narshe before sleep claimed me. Previously I had been taking my laptop into work, and going upstairs and gaming over my lunch hour. Right now my plan is to just bring my psp in with me, and play it while everyone else is on their laptops. I just wish I had a proper way to take screenshots from my psp… because I would love to be able to chronicle my journey through the game. I might have to research that… since I have custom firmware… wondering if something like that exists.

Wrapping Up

A friend of mine finally got around to using the free game and expansion codes I gave him over in Rift. I told him that he needed to do so soon, because anyone with Storm Legion would get grandfathered into a bunch of stuff when the F2P conversion hits. He said he might be around tonight, so I will be breaking out of of my lowbie characters and hanging out with him. Looking forward to listening to him discover that game as we play together over mumble. Already there have been a bunch of excited IMs traded back and forth… and he has only played the game for about 20 minutes.

This weekend we have a double whammy of my mothers birthday on Saturday, and my wife’s mothers birthday on Sunday. I am sure that will ultimately dictate what our weekend is like. Additionally tonight is supposed to be another bad tornado night… and potentially worse than last. So we will be watching the skies and hoping for the best. I hope you all have much better days than what mine sounds like it is going to be.

Crash of the Titan

May 30, 2013 by Belghast

I am going to try and move quickly through my post this morning, just not sure how successful I will be. I have a super busy day ahead of me. At 8 am I am supposed to be at a development conference here in town, and after the first section… I need to head back to work to try and work out the kinks in a program that has to go live on June 1st. Needless to say I am stressing more than a little bit at the rushed schedule.

Brand Loyalty

To make matters worse I have decided to pick a topic that I have been wanting to write about for a few days, but not really found the time to sit down and put pen to paper… or in my case keyboard to words? On 5/28 it was revealed in a Venture Beat article, that the infamous Project Titan would be delayed until at least 2016. This announcement of course has caused various ripples in the blogosphere and twitterland, most of which relatively negative. This is going to be my attempt to wrap my head around the issue.

WoW is back in a state of decline based on an early May report that they were down another 1.3 million players. I myself have done the resub and cancel dance a few times since the release of Pandaria. Ultimately people play wow not out of a sense of loyalty to the content anymore… people play wow because people play wow. The best thing about wow is also likely the most fleeting. It is the only MMO that has been able to accumulate that many subscribers in one place at one time.

Players need cycling back to WoW in most part as a way to hang out with their WoW friends. For those who are relatively new to the blog I will give a quick bio. In 2004 on launch day I founded a little guild called House Stalwart. At that point we had roughly 50-60 players and over the course of the ebb and flow of expansions, we reached our pinnacle at the launch of Cataclysm… with roughly 800 characters in the guild, divided up by a completely indeterminate number of accounts. At this time we had 4 active raid teams, and more than enough players to do anything with at any time. We have never reached the Alea Iacta Est levels of having 13+ guilds melded together through the use of an addon… but we were fairly large.

The Shedding

Since that time I have seen two things happen over and over. Firstly players got tired of the gameplay and when something they liked better came along… they moved over to that. There were pretty massive exodus points with the launch of Rift and Star Wars the Old Republic… but there have been smaller little conversions going on as well. Secondly I have seen a good number of players simply leaving because of life. They no longer wished to devote the amount of time they were spending on wow to the game, and instead chose to divert that effort into family, careers or other hobbies.

The end result is that we have lost roughly half of the active members that we once had. Instead of four raid teams, they now barely have two… one of which struggles constantly trying to fill any given raid night. On a good night there are around 20 people on at any given time, but there are also large stretches where that number is in the 3-5 range. Essentially our guild has dropped significantly, and this is the tale I have heard over and over from other guild leaders from the early days of WoW.

This is not to say that there have not been an influx of new players coming in to fill the gaps, but in our case and the case of many vanilla guilds… they are shells of what they once were. Remember my statement about “people play wow, because people play wow”… ultimately this attrition will reach a point where there is no longer enough of a critical mass of players people remember… or want to play with… to act as a magnetic core to keep pulling people back. I know in my own case, the number of players that I really want to see dwindles each time I return to the game on one of my “wow whims”.

Crash of the Titan

One of the things that has universally been held off in the distance as a beacon of hope by the true believers, is that Blizzard was working on a new MMO… that this would be the one to cure all the ills. The problem is right now they have been given the knowledge that this promised land will not be coming for at least another three years. That means three more years of the status quo. Sure there will be another expansion in there, that will raise the level cap and provide another dose of very similar raid encounters… but ultimately there will be nothing truly new for three long years.

As a former dedicated warrior blogger, I still have a ton of friends and online acquaintances that actively play World of Warcraft. The problem is, on any given day… I can watch my twitter feed for thirty minutes and see several posts of subtle frustration about the game. Maybe I just notice these more than most people, since I am been in a not so subtle state of disappointment with the game for a long time. I still find it extremely fun at times, so long as I “don’t think about it”. It has become the ultimate junk food gaming experience, that I can really enjoy so long as I don’t think about what I just consumed.

Ultimately I know that sooner or later WoW will suffer the same fate that all aging MMOs have to this point. Players will abandon it for the new shiny on the horizon. Warcraft has had a longer than normal shelf life, but when I have had my little whims, the game play experience and client already feel extremely dated. Essentially there will be a point, and I am not sure what that number is… where there is just not enough of a critical mass of players to glue the other players together. Because a large chunk of the players still actively playing wow, are the ones that derive their gaming enjoyment from playing with other players.

Tomorrrow-morrow-land

The big thing that the Titan announcement has done is said to those players that there is no real future in this game. When Everquest was declining in numbers, leading to the launch of World of Warcraft… they had a new and shiny game in Everquest 2 waiting in the wings and currently fairly publicly beta testing. Blizzard has come out and said that they essentially has nothing up their sleeves. Once that has happened, there is no “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”… we all know the wizard doesn’t actually exist.

Granted I get the reboot, and I get the reluctance to announce anything at all. Essentially Blizzard hit one out of the park on a fluke swing, and based on the way they have mismanaged World of Warcraft over the years… I know for certain they have no clue what magic they cast to get the initial success. They know that whatever they come out with has to be bigger and better than WoW… or it will likely be not just the end of the franchise… but also potentially the end of their company. They have also seen that anyone who has come up against their own monster creation has fallen grossly short of all possible sales and subscribership goals.

I sincerely think they have no clue at all right now of how to create a new IP that players will love as much as their very fabled Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo product families. All of which were allowed to start with extremely humble roots… and were allowed to be grown up through the very supportive and nurturing PC gaming cocoon of the 90s. They basically have to birth a fully formed and ready to run adult franchise, with all the characters and branding that we the consumer will immediately latch onto and love like no other.

Screwed

In a word, they are screwed. Building new IP is not the strong point of the juggernaut that is Blizzard. I remember when they were talking about World of Warcraft… being completely shocked. Up until Warcraft 3… the games basically had just enough storyline to keep the gameplay from absolutely falling on their face. I had no clue how they would build a fully fleshed out and three dimensional world out of that type of writing. But they managed to do so, but did it by drawing upon characters and settings that had already been created.

I have no idea how they are going to create this fully fleshed out reality that is deep enough for us to care about it immediately. Especially when it has to be amazing enough to keep players from getting drawn into other truly epic IP that it will be competing with. Namely I am talking about Elder Scrolls Online, and the mouth watering prospect of being able to play through all of Tamriel in the same game. You have to realize we have never seen more than a small corner of that world in any of the modern games, and each of them is just mind numbingly huge.

How can Blizzard come up with anything that will trump a world that has been built over the course of almost 20 years and 5 blockbuster games set in the same world. While I have friends that work for Blizzard, and I wish them the absolute best… I question as to whether or not they can roll out this new IP and hit the ground running with enough momentum to trump a setting like that. I feel like ESO is the first game to come along that really has a chance in hell of toppling the WoW Juggernaut, only because of the landmark success of its previous incarnations. Skyrim for example sold seven million units in the very first week and in my Raptr users group, a large number of those players have put in 300-500 hours playing this “single player” game.

The Paradox

Ultimately… people play wow because people play wow. The only thing that will pull players away from wow permanently, is enough of a mass of players playing something else. I feel that both Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online have the potential to do this over the coming year. Combine this with the fact that there is nothing coming down the pipe from Blizzard to compete with this… and you have a recipe for change. This is going to happen sooner or later, this is a certainty… WoW will wither… all MMO titles wither given time. It is exceedingly hard to actually kill an MMO, as evidenced by the fact that both Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot are themselves going relatively strong… just in a greatly diminished capacity.

I realize that players have predicted the doom of Warcraft, over and over… and each of them… myself included have been wrong. It feels like this announcement about Titan is the beginning of something… what that something is quite honestly is undetermined yet. Blizzard may retreat into its juggernaut and produce a golden age of content… or they may devote seasoned resources away from it to build their new planned kingdom. But in either case, I think Titan being pushed back and rebooted entirely has been a massive blow to player confidence. I think it is this blow that will ultimately have major repercussions.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up, I could rattle on at length about this for a few more pages… but I feel like I have essentially said what I set out to say. I need to print off my ticket for the dev conference… go get some breakfast and get on my way. I hope you all have a great day… and this little doom and gloom treatise has not diminished that. I still like World of Warcraft as a concept, I have just been very disappointed in the overall experience for several years now.