free to play Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

More SkyForge Thoughts

July 19, 2015 by Belghast

Controller Support

One of the questions left unanswered from yesterday was whether or not the game had controller support. On a whim I picked up my controller towards the end of one of yesterdays streams and I noticed that I could in fact control my character with it. Today I popped into game with the mission of trying to test this theory out. It seems that maybe they are working on controller support but that it does not actually work fully. I could control my character perfectly using both of my analog sticks, and if I hit the A button on my XBox 360 controller I could perform any of the normal actions that require the spacebar. However it did not actually seem to interact with the world, and pressing A when not hovering over an objective did not perform the jump action, which is normally the default action for spacebar. I went so far as to go into the keybindings section and it would not let me bind anything to controller presses.

Now of course if you wanted to go so far as to use Xpadder you could easily get this game up and running. It takes care of the toughest part which is getting the analog movement feeling right. My hope is that in subsequent patches it is going to add full controller support, and then this game is likely to increase significantly in enjoyment. Left button spammy attacks feel less spammy when done with a controller button. Since writing yesterdays post I have added another few hours worth of gameplay, and I have to say my verdict is still very mixed. I even talked about it a bit on last nights podcast. On some level I am feeling about this game much the same as I felt about Guild Wars 2 when it was in testing. There is something that compels me to keep trying to figure it out, but at the same time I find it extremely easy to stop playing after completing a single mission. The act of running a mission just wears me out, in a way that content in Elder Scrolls Online used to wear me out. Things are so ridiculously tightly packed that on normal solo missions you spend so much of your time mindlessly grinding through huge encounters.

Isola Digs

This morning however I ventured into what seems to be another large shared cooperative zone, much the same as the very first mission in the game. It involved a series of around 25 smaller objectives that were scattered throughout the map. The frustrating thing about this zone in particular is that the objectives were super linear, meaning when I tried to do my normal thing and hop off the path… I missed an objective that I then later had to double back through the entire zone to go find again. As a whole though I have to say I like this style of zone so much better than the little instanced mini dungeons I had completed more recently. The game also feels better when lots of other players are wandering around, which greatly speeds up the amount of time it takes to burn through the various health bars of the bosses. This tells me that a lot of my frustrations was simply that I was soloing content designed for groups to take down. The fact that I could fairly easily solo content as a paladin, maybe points to that class being a little overpowered for this sort of thing? Then again tanks in most games are adept at soloing bosses that were originally meant for a group to take down… I am looking at you Deathknight.

The other cool thing about this region is that it seemed to be full of boss encounters that did not seem to be tied to a specific objective. There may be a quest that I missed somewhere that opened these up, but from what I saw there was a fire, water and wind warden. Above you can see me taking on the fire one. The only thing missing elemental wise is earth, which I did not really see while wandering around. I managed to get a few greens off these bosses, so my theory is they are just there to make your experience more interesting. The boss fights with other players helping were significantly more enjoyable, but I could still shield up as a paladin and whittle them down until I succeeded. There was only one single encounter where I even came close to dying. At the last minute a wave of players rushed in and helped me finish the boss off.

Combat Still Repetitive

All of this said… my problem with the combat still exists. It just doesn’t feel like I can do anything interesting with the encounters. I did add a new combo attack to my repertoire, and while I abused the hell out of it.. each individual fight still seemed to take a little bit longer than they should for the game to feel really “fun”. The mobs still suffer from the same problem where they tend to be one trick ponies, and keep using the same attack sequence over and over. There is almost always one thing that you should dodge out of, but other than that it is grind them down with your main attack until they are gone. There are a lot of things I do like however when it comes to the interactions with other players. This seems like a game where everything is open tagging, and if you are in an area and have dealt any damage to a pack… you seem to get full credit for the entire pack. Similarly if there is an objective, it seems like everyone can click said objective, and that seems to have changed from one of the closed beta streams I happened to watch.

As a result I found myself wading into a lot of fights that I did not strictly need to just to help out the other players. Unfortunately not a single one of them did I actually communicate with. There are a lot of ifs about this game, and I am not quite certain how much I will be playing of it. In theory I kinda dig the model of purchasing classes or having a slow tedious process of unlocking them. To some extent I wish I had gotten in on the ability to play the Berserker, because I think that might be a class I would really enjoy. I have heard that you can go to the training center and test drive all of the classes, much like you can test drive champions in a moba, so that might be one of the things I do next. At this point I have played around five hours of the game, and I have enjoyed it just enough to keep me coming back to try and find the secrets that I seem to be missing as to why this game is really fun. Ultimately there will be a point where I just give up on it, but I have not quite reached that yet. After all it gives me a bit of a diversion from leveling my Dragoon and gearing in Final Fantasy XIV. If you want to check out the last two videos I have posted since yesterday I will be embedding them below.

Port Naori – Instanced Dungeon-like Mission

Isola Digs – Open World-ish Shared Zone Mission

(was still encoding at the time of posting this… so might have to check back later)

Last Best Hope

May 29, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff #7 – Late Night with Jaedia

I have been pretty horrible about keeping any semblance of a schedule with the Bel Folks Stuff podcast. Some months I release early in the month, and others I barely squeak out an episode before the month finishes. This month is definitely the later as with other events going on I struggled to find a good time for me to record this bonus podcast. I am extremely thankful that when I found a time my good friend Jaedia was gracious enough to make it work. What makes it even more special is the fact that Jae is recording rather late in the evening. It seems she doesn’t actually sleep, and might be some kind of new fangled android or something? Joking aside we had a lovely conversation about all sorts of random things.

Since both of us have suffered with depression and anxiety for years, we touch a bit on that. We also of course talk about gaming and what we have been up to lately. We also get into the rules of how long you have to live in Wales before you have to start calling yourself “Welsh”. Jae is recently married so we talk a bit about the transition from living together to being “married” that we both went through. Jae at one point had five different blogs so we talk about the depths of her insanity and ability to compartmentalize. We also talk about the happy medium we have found with being a general interest blogger. It was a fun show to record and I hope a fun show to listen to as a result.

[Download Episode Here]

Last Best Hope

Almost since launch folks have been foretelling the Doom of Wildstar, and not for lack of good reason. The game had extremely anemic launch numbers, and as was announced during the latest NC Soft earnings report its box sales had trickled to a slow drip. The current rumor mill of Wildstar going free to play was really spurred on by the announcement of their Mystery Box promotion. So yesterday when they announced that the game would be shifting to a free to play model, this should have surprised no one… not even the most die hard of pro-subscription Wildstar fans. While some Wildstar players are tending to wallow in the doom and gloom that comes with these sort of statements, I tend to view this as a potential new lease on life. For whatever reason gamers appetite for a monthly subscription is next to non-existent. Even World of Warcraft recently introduced the Token system allowing players to convert in game gold for subscription time much in a similar way to Eve Online does. This leaves the last pure bastion of the subscription game being Final Fantasy XIV… and I would not be shocked if we see them implementing some sort of gil to token system eventually.

I am not saying the age of the subscription is over, but I think the age of subscription being the only option just might be. I personally prefer to pay a single monthly fee for “all you can eat” buffet access to the game. Some players prefer to try and play the game for free regardless of the restrictions. Others prefer to purchase features “À la carte” and quite frankly I think in the current gaming economy a game needs to support all three models in order for it to gain permanent traction. Wildstar I feel suffered from the same issues that Elder Scrolls Online did… namely that it launched during an exceptionally tight window of viability. Too many things were being released during too short of a window and it caused the players to flit gleefully between everything that was coming out. I know I personally left Elder Scrolls Online to play Wildstar and left Wildstar to play Warlords of Draenor. Sure I set down permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV during that time as well… but most players do not do a great job of juggling more than one game at a time.

Free to Play is Not Doom

More games have converted to the Free to Play model than I care to keep track of, and in no case has it really signaled a lasting doom for the community. If anything the opposite is true as a flood of new players come rushing into the community over a few months. When a game releases as free to play it becomes the shiny new thing in the view finder of the player base, and for a period of time everything old is new again. This is likely the phase of doom that most players are dreading, because it means that there will be more than a few “how I mine for fish” folks flooding into your gated community. The thing is… this too shall pass. Not all of these new people will stick around and find footing in the game, and often times the most heinous of players tend to be the most fickle as well. Within six months you will have a more stable population filled with the people who really do intend to set down roots in your community and stick around awhile. Many of those players will probably even convert to subscriptions, but simply didn’t want feeling like that was their only option.

The free to play model is ultimately a good thing for many games because if nothing else it lowers the barrier of entry for new players. This makes it that much easier for you to be able to recruit people into the game to join you. I know with Final Fantasy XIV once they opened the fourteen day trial accounts, it became all that much easier to get my friends to give the game a “second glance”. This also means that probably every player that played at launch is going to fire the game back up and revisit their characters. I personally found the game greatly improved when coming back recently and rerolling as an Exile. I don’t regret my decision to come back, nor do I regret snapping up cheap boxed copies of the game for months of gametime and bonus items. The game is really rather good, and my hope is that with me stepping out of World of Warcraft for awhile I can devote more time to playing it. If you find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by “doom and gloom” folks, my suggestion is that maybe you find a more friendly place to hang out. Over the long haul this will be a good thing for a game that was so desperately trying to avoid falling into a death spiral.

Reaping What We Sow

January 22, 2015January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Pax Packing

Tonight is my last night at home before heading towards PAX. As such our world pretty much revolves around packing up the things that need packing and cleaning the house some more to make it nice for the house sitter. I think at this point I have everything that I am going to need to both enjoy and “work” pax. This is going to be an odd experience for me, because in theory I am the eyes and ears of MMOGames.com during the course of this trip. In addition to that I am going to try my best not to let my streak of daily postings slip either. As such I am writing this and planning on posting it in the morning… which while cheating is something I have accepted in the past. In truth most of my posts during this trip will be along these lines as I intend to write up what I saw during that day from my hotel room.

The oddest experience for me is that I am going to have some actual media appointments, as in sit on the couch and talk to devs about their games. I have a ton of questions, but at the same time I am feeling extremely self conscious. Its like I am expecting them to immediately realize that I am not really a professional writer, and get kicked off the couch or something. Sure I blog each and every day, and that has been one hell of a marathon, but for whatever reason this suddenly seems that much more real. I would love to be doing stuff like this for a living, but I learned long ago that writing simply does not pay enough to even come close to offsetting the salary of a programmer. So instead I will just pretend to be a “legitimate writer”, and simply be thankful that someone is letting me indulge that fantasy.

Buy To Play

For the several quarters it has seemed to me that Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar were like two kids sitting waiting on the bottom of a pool. Each of them trying to hold their breath as long as humanly possible before admitting defeat and swimming to the surface. Today Elder Scrolls Online swam to the surface and admitted defeat, announcing that they would be abandoning the subscription model in favor of a new “buy to play” strategy with an optional premium subscription. That said I absolutely expect Wildstar to swim to the surface themselves rather quickly confident that they won this game of chicken… but no less battered for the challenge. This was the year that the subscription model gave its last hurrah, and ultimately proved that the buying public simply was not willing to pay on a month my month basis.

I say this but it is not entirely true, given that World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Final Fantasy XIV are each doing better than they have in years. The subscription model is still very much alive and kicking, but unfortunately the folks willing to pay a monthly fee… seem to already be committed leaving only the game hoppers and nomads shifting from title to title. Awhile back I wrote an article calling Elder Scrolls Online my disappointment of the year… and in many ways it still very much is. That said I hate to see them having to shift payment models like this. I still like the idea of a subscription, but a game has to earn the right to see my monthly payment. Final Fantasy XIV does this by providing a constant stream of new content. World of Warcraft earns my dollar by simply being the first breakout hit to claim the market share and thus addict swarms of my friends who refuse to leave it. Elder Scrolls Online just lacked the glue to keep me playing, and after my initial six months worth of subscription time I let my account go dormant expecting to play again when it hit the consoles.

Reaping What We Sow

Don't like pay to win air drops, or overpriced early access schemes? We got games we deserve for not being willing to pay subscriptoins.

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) January 21, 2015

Today I made a tweet, and as luck would have it my fingers got faster than my brain… and it of course has a typo. That said I pretty much stand by the statement… once corrected for spelling of course. Game Companies are after all companies. Developers, Designers, Artists and Writers all have to get paid for their work, and at the end of the day no one can afford to work for free. Hell I couldn’t do half of the stuff I did with my blog, podcasts and the sort without a really nice paying job to back me up and fund my hobbies. At the end of the day these companies have to make money, so they can turn around and invest in those resources that support their games., and that’s not even taking into account the serious costs associated with keeping up a server farm. Sure single servers are relatively simple and cheap to operate… but when you are talking an online game you are literally talking about thousands of servers working together to maintain the structure that we demand be not only up 24/7 but also be relatively lag free.

So if we complain about blatant money grabs like the air drop scandal in H1Z1, or the constant limited edition loot box bonanzas in Star Wars the Old Republic and Rift. We have to realize that all of it is entirely our faults. The subscription model was nice and honestly and for the most part was a contract between the players and a company. We pay them to keep rolling out new content, and keep the lights on… and we would get to play their games. However at some point during the line that contract was broken, and we the players started wanting more for free. I have gotten so tired of seeing comments like “I like the game, but I will play it when it goes free to play”. If you like the game, and want to play it… you should be willing to support it. I’ve subscribed to games for months after I stopped playing them, just because I believed in the mission of the company or the game. If we don’t help the companies… they are going to keep taking progressively more desperate measures to try and stay afloat and keep making salary.

Players Are Now Investors

I will be the first to admit that steam early access or paid alpha and beta programs are frustrating riddled with problems. Ultimately I feel like that extra transparency bogs down the process and ultimately produces a confused product designed by committee. The problem is… we are quickly becoming the investors in the games we are playing. Why are we now investors you might ask yourself? Essentially the repeat failure of AAA MMOs means that a lot of the institutional funding is simply not available. Would you want to fund an MMO after the state of Rhode Island was stuck holding a multi-million dollar bill for the failure of Copernicus? Kickstarter has been an interesting catalyst for games development. It has placed a power in our hands that we have never had before… and it is not entirely a good thing. As investors… we feel entitled to have our say in the way the process works.

I honestly miss the days when I could look at the games industry like it was some magical engine of creation. When I could view it as being something that simply turned out the games I wanted to play without any real consequences attached to it. The problem is… I know the consequences in the faces of friends that have been effected by the closure of studios, and the “cutbacks” in staffing as subscriptions faltered. How do you build a family when you aren’t sure where you will be living in six months? Maybe I shouldn’t care about the human costs behind these things, but unfortunately that isn’t really a luxury I have. I write my blog and I make my quips, but at the end of the day I have nothing but the utmost respect for the folks that make the games I care about. I can be petulant just as much as the next person, but sometimes I lose sight on the truth behind it all. They make the games that we are supposed to have fun playing… and in doing so it is up to us the players to uphold our end of that bargain. I am not addressing the people that didn’t enjoy a game, because that is the way it works…. I am talking about the folks that loved a game… but were unwilling to subscribe.