The PC Grief Continues!

The replacement video card arrived today. It doesn’t work either. FUCK.

UPDATE: I called EVGA and they’re willing to cross-ship me another new card. After I got off the phone I thought to myself, “what the hell am I doing? I should try to troubleshoot this thing myself.” So I did, and to the limits of my PC troubleshooting ability, I’m pretty sure it is indeed the video card. I can’t really fault EVGA for their customer support – they’ve been very responsive. But their tech support seems limited to “ship the thing back to us,” from what I’ve seen thus far. Well and good, but my PC is down for probably another week.

I think that, this being the case, I’ll stop by te local Micro Center for some bits tomorrow, and disassemble the whole thing, cleaning every piece, and then put it back together so it’s ready when replacement card #2 arrives.

 

Yet Another Title, Meet the NCSoft Axe

Dungeon Runners is shutting down. Despite the fact that the development team was sitting on a detailed, virtually ready to go package that they felt would make the game profitable, pending NCSoft management’s approval. Here today their decision was announced.

No, this game isn’t making enough money to pay the huge development staff of three people. You’ll pardon me for saying that I simply don’t believe that Dungeon Runners was doing so badly it couldn’t afford three guys and the Commodore 64 the servers were running on.

No, NCSoft would not like to put a plan into place that could make the game profitable – a plan that they sat on for months. No, NCSoft has to axe it. How many times will this happen? How many failures will this company rack up? How long before Aion gets the NCSoft Executive Treatment? City of Heroes? What the hell kind of retard business plan is it to pour development money into a project – no, sorry, make that projects – and then, when it’s not as profitable as hoped, kill it off? Not try to save it. Not sell it off to somebody who could make it successful, like, say, selling off Auto Assault to NetDevil, who’d developed it and wanted to buy it rather than see it die, and maybe recoup some of those costs. No, clearly the best idea is to bury it, where it will never make any money again. Awesome business sense, at least if making games fail is your business.

I wasn’t a particular fan of Dungeon Runners, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been a modestly profitable game. Way to go, NCSoft. Again. I’m not as much sad to see it go as sad for the people who liked it, and incredulous, yet again, that anyone would trust this company to manage the manufacture of a ham sandwich, much less a complicated enterprise like an MMO.

CLARIFICATION: No, I don’t actually think City of Heroes, Guild Wars or Aion are getting shut down anytime soon. The point, for those who missed it, is that there seems to be zero margin for errors or setbacks at NCSoft. Given the history of MMOs, how sensible does this seem?

 

Contributing to Ardwulf’s Lair

You’ll notice a new addition to Ardwulf’s Lair today: the “Donate” button atop the sidebar. Clicking the button will take you to a secure PayPal site, where you can donate as little (or as much) as you like.

I don’t make any money from blogging, I’m actually okay with that, and intend to continue doing so as long as the enterprise remains fun. What I would like is for this site to become better — and that’s going to take some cash that I can’t spare out of pocket money right now. A dedicated domain (which would enable a host of additional features and enhancements,) podcasting hosting space, and maybe some better software for doing things like editing graphics and video are where I intend to have the money go.

I don’t need a wheelbarrow full of cash, and my personal circumstances are not dire – but it would be awfully nice to see this effort be a self-sustaining enterprise. Just a few bucks here and there would be a big help, and a very small number of people making very modest donations could enhance Ardwulf’s Lair tremendously.

Meanwhile, I promise to keep blogging regardless of the success or failure of the donation effort. At this point, I figure, however small my readership, after two years and over 500 blog posts (several novels by word count — and it’s been a while since I last checked that,) everybody should know that I’ll be around for the duration.

 

The Warhammer Death Spiral

From the minute I started tracking Xfire statistics for MMOs, Warhammer Online was trending downward. I missed a few weeks and when I went to catch my numbers today I was taken aback by what I saw. Xfire users are spending a third the time in WAR that they were a mere two months ago. That’s not a slow leak of subscribers, that’s people fleeing with their hair on fire.

WAR’s numbers are still fairly decent – it’s ranked #48 today (For reference, Age of Conan is #52 and the numbers are very close.) But it won’t be if this trend continues. By the time Cataclysm comes out, we may find Warhammer at the bottom of that whirlpool between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that Warhammer is doomed or beyond saving – that would be grossly premature. But it’s increasingly looking like Mythic is going to need a major move in the next six months to halt the tsunami of departing players. I suspect that Aion is stealing, or will steal away many players for whom WAR’s PvP did not live up to its potential. Aion’s surge is inevitable at this point, but three or four months after it launches when all the shine has worn off… that will be when Mythic needs something decisive. Unless Mortal Online gets in the way.

 

A Renaissance For D&D Online

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think D&D Online is an under-appreciated game. It’s also true, though, that DDO’s mode of play isn’t all that well-suited to the traditional subscription model, and that $15 a month was an anchor around the game’s neck. Now that the fancy and free iteration of DDO is live, the question is: how much will it help the game? And by “help the game,” I of course mean helping increase the number of people playing – a total that’s always been lackluster at best.

Obviously it’s too early to say, although if things work out well I’m sure we’ll see some deserved chest-thumping out of Turbine. I am seeing quite a few flash ads for DDO right now, so Turbine is spending at least a little bit of that mountain of money on promoting the game, which has to help.

However, I can also look at Xfire numbers, which should imply something (figuring out what being the tricky part, of course.) And the implication right now is very, very positive. As of today, DDO is #28 in Xfire’s rankings. That’s well above Warhammer Online and Age of Conan – and people are logging almost twice as many hours in DDO as they are in WAR. You can read that as really bad news for WAR if you like, but I’d prefer to see it as good news for DDO.

Of course, the game’s free, so logged hours don’t translate directly into dollars, and it’s really early in DDO’s new life to say what the lasting impact will be – and it’d certainly be unreasonable to expect that the game’s numbers will stay anywhere near where they are now. At least at the moment, however, things are looking up – very up – for D&D Online.

 

The Dope on Aion

So the World’s Shortest Aion Review caused a little bit of a stir. I was asked by Anjin to elaborate after cooling off, and here we are, a post that will doubtless be even more controversial.

This will actually be my fourth response to Aion, the first two being profanity-laced rants (one text, the other audio,) and the third was the aforementioned World’s Shortest Review, which I admit was pretty cavalier. I have always tried, at least, to keep the tone here at Ardwulf’s Lair positive, to find things to like about the MMO hobby instead of things to bitch about. I have not always succeeded, but I’ve generally done pretty well. It was this instinct that led to the earlier “review” (a term used ironically,) getting posted rather than the rants.

So here I go again to try to describe my reaction, which is one of dismay, even disbelief, followed by outrage. Because Aion is terrible. Not merely lackluster, but comically, outrageously, insultingly awful. My expectations were very modest – I didn’t really expect to like it, but from the buzz I anticipated a slick and polished product, because lots of people I like and whose opinions I respect had said it was so.

They’re all wrong. I love you people, really I do, but I don’t know what you’re thinking.

The thing to remember is that Aion is not the typical western MMO a couple of weeks from release; it’s a fully launched title several months past release, one that presumably all the major problems had been shaken out of. Instead, here’s what we have.

The controls are imprecise and clumsy and the interface is awkward. You can move with the mouse… forward. You can’t steer with the mouse alone, nor could I figure out how to get mouse movement to work in a sensible way without enabling Asian-style click-to-move – which I despise, and this isn’t any better. It’s all very clumsy. WoW, EQ2, Champions Online, LotRO and Vanguard all have better “touch” for lack of a better term.

The localization is bad enough that race descriptions – the very first pieces of text you see when coming into the game – are broken English of the “all your base are belong to us” variety.

Questing is totally undistinguished. All the enhancements that a game like Warhammer laid on top of the standard model are missing. Quests send you to find somebody, with no description of where the guy is, and no map pointers unless you go through a popup box to put one on screen – for some quests – and all the old ones stay as well unless you remove them. The symbols over questgivers’ heads are hard to spot and harder to distinguish at a glance.

Character customization is good, but in a bad way. What I mean is that there are lots of sliders that let you modify your appearance, to the point that you can create freaks that are two feet tall with two-foot diameter heads. This falls into the “bug, not feature” category in a game like this, as far as I’m concerned; one bobblehead doll of a character ruins the immersion of everyone around them.

The game doesn’t even look very good, in my judgement. The character models are quite decent if you like the anime-type art, as long as there happen to be no freaks onscreen. The landscape graphics are extremely weak, with none of the sprawling vistas we’d see in a Vanguard, or even a WoW. Zones are bordered by plain impassable cliffs. Clipping errors are rampant, even in the character creator.

It felt like a punishment to play. I stopped midway though my half hour, and had to force myself to continue. Another fifteen minutes was enough to get me logged out and working on cleansing my hard drive of this blight I’d unwittingly afflicted on it. Say what you want about Warhammer, but at least it’s fun and engaging at first – you know, when it’s most important to be. Aion may be sunshine and rainbows midway through the game, but I’ll never know, because the first few levels suck mightily.

NCSoft has some good games in its lineup; City of Heroes and Guild Wars, most notably. But neither of those was designed by NCSoft, coming out of Cryptic and ArenaNet respectively. NCSoft’s former offerings Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault, which I think we can all agree at least had potential, were developed by Destination Games and NetDevil. NCSoft developed Lineage and Lineage II, to the latter of which I had a similar but much less vehement reaction.

Which leads me to another point of outrage; this is going to be the next big MMO? Aion is like World of Warcraft in its level of polish? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s okay to offer nothing notably new, but to offer an amateurish and unpolished experience on top of that? Pardon me for asking, in the immortal words of Mr. Hand, “What are you people? On dope?”

Maybe I just hate Korean games… but I don’t think my tastes are so atypical of the western MMO player that I’ll be alone. And you know, something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned here is that I’ve written a lot of reviews of movies and games; some professionally. I’ve studied the work of critics as they break down and analyze a work. I don’t do reviews here (except in a tongue-in-cheek way, as yesterday,) because I’m shooting for a conversational tone. I think I can detach myself enough to tell the difference between something I dislike and something that’s actually bad. I dislike Guild Wars, for example, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s an extremely high-quality game. Conversely, I like Warhammer but I think it fails on several important levels.

Aion sins in both regards; I disliked it and I think it’s a sloppy, unimaginative mess, and thus the vigor of my disdain for it.

I think – and I now believe that Aion amply demonstrates – that NCSoft’s in-house development team is simply unable to design an MMO for the European and North American audiences. Aion is much more a Korean MMO in style, tone and level of polish than it is a western game, and thus while it may be a big hit in China and Korea, I think it’s going to land face-first over here. The launch will make a nice splash and it’ll be downhill from there.

And that’s all I have to say about Aion. Here, have some kittens.

 

The Great MMO Purge of 2009

That time has come again, to free my overloaded hard drive of games (MMO and otherwise) and software that I’m not playing, and won’t be, for the foreseeable future. Here’s the rundown, of what I’m ditching, what I’m keeping, and one new (re)addition:

Age of Conan: Uninstalled. I love the gameplay of AoC, but Champions, for me, has a similar appeal, despite the different genre. I may get back to this one eventually, but in the meantime, out the door it goes in the name of saving space.

Champions Online: Stays. Obviously, it being my main title right now.

City of Heroes: Uninstalled. I have a 30-day timecard for CoH siting around, and I intend to use it, although not right away. It’ll be interesting, I think, to give it a run in six months or a year and see how it compares to a Champions Online that has some seasoning.

D&D Online: Stays. It’s now free, and I plan to play it. It’s my hope that as a free-to-play title it’ll earn some of the attention I think it deserves.

EVE Online: RE-installed. I’m getting the itch again, and if I can’t drop a subscription fee right now, I may do a trial in the near future to get it scratched.

EverQuest: Uninstalled. My interest in EQ was more a lark than anything else, and didn’t last long. I don’t see myself re-installing it.

EverQuest II: Uninstalled. Probably the best game I will not be playing. I may come back to it, but not soon; I think it lacks the same spark that the lack of is felt in LotRO and WAR, despite being a very full-featured game in most other respects. I do not foresee reinstalling it at this time… but if any of the decisions I’m making here are going to get reversed, it’ll be this one.

Guild Wars: Uninstalled. I’m not sure why I re-installed it in the first place, to be honest. Guild Wars is a good game for what it is, but it doesn’t really tickle any itches of mine. A probably permanent deletion. On the other hand, I’m very interested in seeing what Guild Wars 2 amounts to.

Lord of the Rings Online: Uninstalled. I think LotRO is a decent game, although it took me several cracks at it to form that opinion. At some point, I would like to actually buy the new expansion, subscribe and give it a solid shakedown for a couple of months, but I’m waiting for the Mirkwood expansion, if not for the Riders of Rohan expansion that it should have been. Besides, uninstalling it freed up a titanic 21.6 GB on by hard drive; it was the bulkiest MMO I had.

Star Wars Galaxies: Uninstalled. Like EQ, my interest in it was something of a lark, and I never got into it. Fallen Earth (which I might eventually try) seems to approximate the old, pre-NGE SWG mechanically, and SWTOR should replace it thematically. Can’t see ever reinstalling it.

Vanguard: Uninstalled. This one pained me the most, as I saw myself, for a long while, as a champion of Vanguard. I was one of the people who spoke out in favor of the game when it wasn’t popular to do so. Nevertheless, my last crack at Vanguard didn’t leave me with a warm fuzzy, and I suspect I may have played my last of it.

Warhammer Online: Uninstalled. The Disappointment of 2008 really didn’t get much better in 2009. The populations issues were addressed, too little too late, and even then, it’s still about half of an MMO. My contempt for it is so complete that I still have about 3 weeks left on my subscription.

World of Warcraft: Stays. I will get back to WoW sooner rather than later. Besides, it’s a big headache to re-install and patch, to the extent that it’s worth keeping around for that alone.

So that’s it. Four MMOs remain: WoW, EVE, DDO and Champions. That’ll be it for a while, I think.

 

Appeal

One of the things about playing a lot is less time to blog. And I’ve been playing a lot of Champions Online.

The game is not without issues, of course; as noted in the comments of the last post, among other things, there’s something wonky with respec costs right now, such that it’s hard to actually have the money (‘Resources’ in CO,) to do them around levels 5-8, which is, I think, when you’d be most likely to want to. And there’s a 10-level overall cap on respecs; you can’t respec stuff that you got more than 10 levels ago at all. The costs I expect to get fixed fairly soon – it’s been acknowledged by the devs. And the 10-level cap I think may go away in the long run… but maybe not. I think the reasoning behind it is likely to be to encourage people to play alts.

City of Heroes is considered an alt-friendly game, and I think Champions is even more so because of the greater latitide in choosing your character’s powers. Alt-itis is an admitted weakness of mine, and I’m sitting on eight characters right now; thank godness for the extra 8 character slots I got with the lifetime subscription!

The appeal of an MMO isn’t about features. If it was, EQ2 would be the biggest MMO, contested only by LotRO, and WoW would be a second-stringer. It’s about the overall package, of which the features list is one element, feel and atmosphere is another, and the overall sense of fun is the third. The last of these is the hardest to define or capture, of course, but it’s the most important; and it’s what WoW has in spades and EQ2 and LotRO lag behind on, in my opinion. EQ2 and LotRO are fun but not as much fun as World of Warcraft.

And the same formula applies here: City of Heroes is fun but Champions Online is more fun. Even if I think it’s the better game overall, however, that doesn’t mean I think people will be departing CoH in droves to come here. Our hobby is ruled by, above all else, inertia. People don’t tend to want to abandon all their progress and time invested and start over in a new game. People hungry for something new try out WAR or Aion or Darkfall or whatever, but because it doesn’t immediately overwhelm them they end up back in the World of Warcraft where they’ve spent all that time and built so much; another aspect, and I suspect another area where a lot of the appeal of an MMO lies, is the progress, the sense of building.

Champions Online is not as deep a game in some respects as City of Heroes, and lacks many of the features of its older sibling. And yet, in the greater versatility of power customization, it may prove to be deeper right down in the game engine where it counts, a depth which tends to be set in the design phase and which very few MMO really alter as they game ages, improve though they might.

I think that this game is going to be the MMO sleeper hit of the year; right now, it’s pulling in bigger numbers than Warhammer Online, and it doesn’t even formally launch until Tuesday. Which is no proof of anything, and probably won’t persist, but supports the sense I have. Fed and watered correctly (which Cryptic should have the ability to do, having done it on City of Heroes,) it should be able to pull in really solid second-tier numbers for a long time to come.

Bearing in mind that the launch is actually on Tuesday, it’s totally possible that Champions will have serious issues at that point, meaning a wave of lag or server face-plants. But it might not, and the game has been pretty unproblematic as MMOs about to be launched go. Not issue-free, as noted, but in the same ballpark as LotRO at the same point, and that’s something.

 

Champions Online Headstart

Something like 12 hours of Champions Online play occurred yesterday. In lieu of a point-by-point discussion of it right this minute, I’m working on a lengthy post and a video, but I will say that I’m still having fun.

There have been a few launch-day type problems; the server went down, briefly, a couple of times, and client performance seemed a bit more sluggish than it did in the open beta. Tweaking settings down fixed this, but I’d rather not – I like the way it looks at the reccomended settings. All in all, though, things seem pretty smooth so far.

 

Champions Online Lifetime Subs Sold Out

As well as the 6 months for $59.99 deal. You will still be able to get 6-month plans at a discount, of course, but the discount won’t be as good.

The forum reaction is predictable, and predictably extreme. While I feel slightly bad for folks who may have wanted a lifetime sub but didn’t get in on time (after all, I got mine,) Cryptic is under no obligation to offer a limitless supply of lifetime subscriptions, and is entirely within their rights to cut off the supply at any time, with or without notice. It would have been nice of them to provide more notice than they did (it seemed like it was less than 24 hours between the announcement that the remaining subs were limited and the time they sold out,) but they were under no legal or ethical obligation to provide any notice at all. A manufacturer is allowed to determine the number of units they will sell, even if demand is higher, and even if they have a stockpile of the product in the warehouse.

Think about it for a minute; about the kind of person who’ll pay for a lifetime sub: a person who likes the game a lot and sees that he or she will be in it for the long haul, who is already dedicated to the title in some measure. This type of person is apt to keep paying a monthly fee if no lifetime option is available. Twelve or thirteen months after launch, the provider starts losing revenue from the lifetime subscriber. As the game continues to age the amount of lost revenue continues to climb. After three or four years the amount of money lost from people who would mostly have been paying monthly fees anyway would be staggering.

So no, it’s not at all surprising to me that Cryptic cut the lifetime subs off. They’re a loss leader. I also wouldn’t be shocked to see them come back again as a limited-time offer at some point down the road, likely tied into some other promotion, but I’d expect them to be at a higher price point.