This article at WebPro laments that even though "Social Games" or the New Hotness, there's not much socializing happening with gamers. The fact is, "Social Games" are largely single-player web games with "viral" hooks, you can't get the shiney unless you let the game spam your friends. Which has led to all kinds of fallout as people find new ways to keep from annoying their friends and the "Social" game developers fight back.
Online poker is more social than Candy Crush.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Friday, July 5, 2013
Where did we go wrong?
So, I've been re-reading a lot of my old archives, trying to recapture the sense of what I was thinking, way back in the day. One thing that comes through over and over, not just from myself but from other writers, was the sense that boundless possibilities existed, that MMO's would expand in possibility and become ever more varied....
It didn't work out that way. Oh, there have been variations, but mostly in the realm of adapting designs to the F2P business model. Most of the games these days are only nominally MMO's, they're really small-M multiplayer games with (optionally) really big and pretty matchmaking lobbies. World of Tanks and the whole genre of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas have only a thin veneer of persistence and generally no over-world at all. Instanced raids have become so much the norm that in many of the "Online RPG" old-school games the overall world is little more than a topographical mnemonic for the instance portals, a place to park the vendor NPC's and quest hooks.
The "Big World" MMO is virtually dead, persistence of change in the world is generally nothing and even of the characters it is remarkably shallow. Most games offer extreme levels of "Respec", allowing a fully developed character to reverse at least most of the "development" choices, and in extreme cases they are completely protean, a character is just a length of development time that can be reeled back in and relaid down any of the possible character development paths, the character classes are just forks on that road. Rather than becoming more varied, the games have become ever more the same.
It's disappointing, to say the least. I am the "sleeper" who hibernated away a generation and woke up expecting shiny jumpsuits and flying cars, and instead....
What have you people been doing for the last 8 years?
It didn't work out that way. Oh, there have been variations, but mostly in the realm of adapting designs to the F2P business model. Most of the games these days are only nominally MMO's, they're really small-M multiplayer games with (optionally) really big and pretty matchmaking lobbies. World of Tanks and the whole genre of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas have only a thin veneer of persistence and generally no over-world at all. Instanced raids have become so much the norm that in many of the "Online RPG" old-school games the overall world is little more than a topographical mnemonic for the instance portals, a place to park the vendor NPC's and quest hooks.
The "Big World" MMO is virtually dead, persistence of change in the world is generally nothing and even of the characters it is remarkably shallow. Most games offer extreme levels of "Respec", allowing a fully developed character to reverse at least most of the "development" choices, and in extreme cases they are completely protean, a character is just a length of development time that can be reeled back in and relaid down any of the possible character development paths, the character classes are just forks on that road. Rather than becoming more varied, the games have become ever more the same.
It's disappointing, to say the least. I am the "sleeper" who hibernated away a generation and woke up expecting shiny jumpsuits and flying cars, and instead....
What have you people been doing for the last 8 years?
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