LOTRO: April’s Producer’s Letter

Lord of the Rings Online can be an incredibly beautiful game and it always seems to suck me in when my subscription runs out.  We resub (and bought two new expansions) and once again LOTRO goes and does something foolish and I regret the “investment” we made not to be nickel and dimed to death.  Look, $200 a year isn’t going to kill us but it is more a sign of faith in the future.  This year however, LOTRO has finally managed to kill my interest in the game completely.

They just released the Producer’s Letter for April and in it, they once again break yet another promise to the player base.  There will be no update to housing this year despite it’s repeated promises that the update was coming.  However, there will be a new class which I am sure will be heavily monetized and poorly implemented.

The competition is too good for a seven year old game to be fooling around with crap like a new class and broken promises to an already frustrated and fleeing population.  Realms are empty, trying to play on a new realm means losing real world money tied to the old realm, housing is a joke, the game play can be incredibly boring, and gorgeous screenshots aren’t enough to keep players logging in.  If you want to retain a player base, don’t nickel and dime them (ESPECIALLY players that subscribe to your game), don’t break promises, don’t have secret player councils, and don’t have you corporate heads buried so far in the sand you don’t even realize you have serious competition.

My twitter feed alone shows long time players leaving LOTRO for games like Landmark and Elder Scrolls Online.  The team at LOTRO seems oblivious to the fact that players are finding new games to play and sink real world money into, I’m being kind.  I actually believe that the LOTRO team is intentionally burying it’s head in the sand and break promises and ignoring the flight of customers so that they feel “justified” in closing the game down in the next six to eighteen months.  I know that we won’t be buying any more expansions and that we definitely will not be paying for two yearly subscriptions this year.

Rant over, opinion spoken and now I’m off to write for my ESO character blog and get in some ESO playtime before exploring the awesome changes to Wildstar in the upcoming beta weekend.

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Is WOW the old and dying dinosaur on the block?

World of Warcraft announced its technical Alpha for the Warlords of Draenor late last week, hours before The Elder Scrolls Online officially launched. Anyways, Hubby and I got around to talking about WOW yesterday afternoon. Neither of us is even remotely interested in WOW for different reasons. But what we were discussing was whether or not WOW was even relevant to gaming any more. We are both of the opinion that the answer is no and below is why we’ve come to that conclusion.

First, WOW is flat out an old game that is being left behind by the competition. It isn’t fully voice acted, the quests are simple and repetitive, and game play mechanics are bloated and aged. Combat is basically pressing the same combination of buttons over and over again. There is no active dodging for instance. You can just stand there and whack on a creature while doing your nails and watching a movie. The game doesn’t actively require player engagement to avoid death.

 

Second, WOW doesn’t seem to understand that the gaming audience is no longer just young men. It is now a much broader audience of both sexes of all ages. BlizzCon 2013 was the nail in the coffin for me, comments like “It’s a boy’s trip” from Chris Metzen was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If I’m going to play a subscription game, then it isn’t going to a company that devalues women and refuses to include women in their games as anything more than objects of sexual fantasy.

Third, the competition is just so much better in every way. TESO has strong women characters everywhere, active dodging mechanics, and it requires players to think and manage how they play. Wildstar is just flat out funny, once again active dodging mechanics, and unique systems like Path. Landmark, while we haven’t played it nor have any interest in doing so, has a strong legion of fans that enjoy building and creating in the Everquest environment. And those are just three games off the top of my head that are better.

Fourth, WOW just takes too damn long between updates or expansions. Subscribers and fans play the same content over and over and over again for months on end. The endless gear grind progression style is boring. Why stay on the treadmill of the same content when the competition has a large variety of end game content and not just raids. Adventure zones, two-person content, and group content immediately spring to mind. Why would you run the same raid content week after week for months on end with no new content on the horizon when the competition releases content patches ranging from every two weeks to once a month.

WOW has its die-hard fans that want nothing more than to see the competition fail. I get that, I get that I won’t be changing any of their minds. No one single game will be the proverbial “WOW killer” but the competition taken together will kill WOW. Well, the competition and the “boy’s club” that is the team of WOW management. I don’t begrudge those players their fun and enjoyment. The hubby and I won’t be going back ever again.

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Beta: Wildstar–Revised Opinion

I played some more Wildstar today and even got a beta key for Hubby.  My opinion has changed.  Ok, I’m still not a fan of the wildly disproportionate female characters but some things never change.

I played a Medic and an Esper, Settler and Scientist paths respectively.  I am finding the classes a ton of fun to play.  Medic and Esper have no trouble killing anything they come across.  I died twice and both times it was completely my fault because I was distracted by the hubby across the room.  But hey, that’s ok it happens.  Haven’t healed anyone or anything on my Medic but I usually play a dps healer class anyone, healing as an offspec or off-healer.

Hubby had a blast bouncing around and shooting stuff on his Spellslinger, Explorer character.  He was laughing and pointing out all of the NPC’s he wished he could play.

The bouncing and floaty feel doesn’t bother me nearly as much as earlier today.  I can see how it will come in handy later in the game.  I must admit for the several hours we played this afternoon, I never got bored.  It appears there will be sufficient quest for a quester and explorer like myself.

There are still issues that I think need to be addressed.  The UI needs as ability to change the size of quest text and coloring without scaling the entire UI up.  It is incredibly hard to read 10 point font that is light gray in color.  Also, the frame rate being in the dead center of the screen has got to go.  There will be addons but I’m definitely one of those who favor minimal UIs and having to run a ton of addons to handle developer mistakes is irritating.

So, I was wrong.  I committed the ultimate sin I hate in other game reviewers and I apologize.  I should have played more than an hour or two before churning out a published review.  I don’t know if we will pre-order it but we had fun.

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Beta: Wildstar

I finally scrounged up a beta key to Wildstar, even though I’ve been in the beta waiting pool since they opened beta sign-ups.  I’m not impressed.  It certainly isn’t going to be an investment I’ll be making, I’ll wait until the game goes free-to-play.

Basically, it is a space Western WOW clone.  The cell coloration is overly saturated and graphics are flat.  It looks like exactly what it’s creators wanted, a WOW clone. 

Character creation is uninspired, too similar between races and nothing truly unique.  Jewelry is excessively large and gaudy, personal opinion obviously.  After you wake up from stasis you take a step and immediately notice how incredibly floaty walking is, and jumping?  Jumping is like being a living, breathing rubber ball.  It is disconcerting, you just float and bounce alone.  Landing on the planet didn’t change that feeling either.

Classes and paths are unique, I will grant the team at Wildstar that but otherwise it is completely forgettable.  The game isn’t fully voiced, which dates it and sets it apart from it’s competition, which is a good thing because dialogue and text never match up.  As for quests themselves, they could have been written by a third grader.  Language and concepts are overly simplistic and dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator.

If you are looking for a game were you can fully customize your character, this is not the game.  The females are all young and skinny.  Boobs have decreased in size from previous pictures I have seen from the game, but seriously look at the size of my characters waist compared to her boobs.  No thanks, I’m not that unrealistically proportioned in real life and I don’t need to perpetuate adolescent male fantasies in a role playing game.

Happily, passing on Wildstar.  If I want a space opera MMO, I’ll stick with Star Wars: The Old Republic it is much more my type of game.

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