Earth Eternal’s Sylvan have to put up with this every day….
First off, responding to parental concerns that their children would be gambling away their RMT currency for minimal rewards, KingsIsle has announced that the “wishing well” cash slot machine will NOT be making it out of test. Thanks to Fallon of Diary of a Wizard for the scoop!
Kaozz of EC Tunnel has compiled a list of a lot of Octember All Hallow’s Eve events for all the major MMOs — including Maple Story, big props for including even the MMOs that are way more popular than WoW — so there’s your to-do list for fall fun.
Gordon of We Fly Spitfires is so excited by Quake Live that he wonders — why can’t “EverQuest Next” be more like “Quake Live” — fully in the browser, zero downloading, etc? And also, more pewpewpew…
Well, maybe, but if you read between the lines, it’s almost certain that EverQuest Next will be a PS3/PSP release. A browser-based EQ would compete with Free Realms, and they’ve learned the lesson about competing with themselves….
Dalayan Diary’s Ramon writes about using the Shards of Dalaya web-based item marketplace to buy some new swords for his happy haffer. Web-based marketplace? Yes, please! Talk about bringing some pretty meaty gameplay to the web.
Scopique has an epiphany and realizes that most recent high-profile MMO releases are essentially identical. I commented on his post and will repeat it here — DON’T support MMO clones. If you want WoW’s gameplay, PLAY WOW. If you want something different, PLAY A GAME THAT DOES SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
Is fighting other players too scary? That’s okay, Darkfall is adding boars, wolves, bears, lynxes and annoying little birds that follow you around adding into fights and just wasting your time to make quest grinding even more tedious. Oops, sorry. LotRO flashback.
Budding stalkerazzi have a friend in Luna Online — now you can choose from a list of matches randomly chosen by the game based on your player profile and go to a special, two-person instance for the purposes of LURV. And you can have some hot coffee afterward!
And finally, Syp really, really wants you to stay away from hit-indie MMO, Fallen Earth. Seriously. Your 80 Night Elf Hunter misses you. Nothing in Fallen Earth for you.
Every game needs moar boar! I can’t believe someone released a game without boars, or few boars. What were they thinking?
That’s why in LOTRO everyone’s favorite zone is the Lone Lands. 50 different quests to kill boar! Done killing red boars? Now kill brown boars! After all the Forasken Inn has a lot of customers to serve. Pity the poor vegetarian:
“You mean you won’t eat ham? You won’t eat pork chops? You won’t eat bacon?”
“Dad those are all the same animal!”
“Yeah right Lisa, a wonderfull, magical animal.”
Completely disagree about a browser based EQNext directly competed with Free Realms. If anything, the faster development time by reusing an engine is worth the competition. Also, I’m interested to hear exactly what you think they have learned by “competing with themselves”. Competing with themselves means they keep the revenue in-house rather than people playing another game. SOE doesn’t care if you pick Free Realms, EQNext, or SWG as long as you pay them money for one of their games and not Blizzard or Turbine, etc. Having multiple MMOs with congruencies means the ability to put in systems that work across world, such as Station Cash and LoN. This is all GOOD for a company looking to increase revenue without drastic overhead.
In other words, SOE putting out more browser based MMOs is only a good thing.
What if you enjoy Wow a great deal, love questing, but have done all the quests WoW has to offer several times over? Wouldn’t you be excited to play a game that really feels like WoW but is new, where you can do more quests, like the ones in WoW that you enjoyed so much all those other times, only with slightly different text and scenery? I know I would.
/Irony off for a second, though. One circus is very much like another. A car chase is a car chase. Even in High Culture, a ballet is a ballet and an opera is an opera. There’s a certain set of tropes that represent “MMO” and when eating a banana you don’t want to taste orange.
In the end it doesn’t come down to originality, or novelty. It comes down to quality. We aren’t suffering from a dearth of MMOs that are different to WoW, we’re suffering from a dearth of MMOs that are better than WoW. The very best quest dialog and storyline in MMOs scarcely reaches the level of an average fantasy novel, and the standard of average fantasy novels is, even by the standards of genre fiction, mediocre.
It’s not the format of quest-based MMOs that’s the problem, it’s the quality. The genre just is not attracting the level of creative talent that novels or movies do. I don’t think that’s inevitable; I believe that games, as an entertainment genre, have the capacity to tell stories and stimulate emotions to the same degree as other entertainment and artistic forms. So far, though, it’s an unproved thesis.
Thanks for the link Tipa! I just got a new domain and moved the site, here is the updated link for the fall fun.
http://www.ectmmo.com/2009/10/fun-events-in-october-mmo-halloween.html
-kaozz
Thanks!