The Gaming Den

Everywhere I turn, I seem to see an ad for some new MMO. I've tried several of them against my better judgement, and they all turned out to be shittastic.

So whats the deal? Why are there a bajillion cheapass MMOs out there, when we all could be playing something like LoL or WoW or whatever?

MMO's take a large amount of resources to make so you don't want to be too risky. They also rely more on getting your players addicted to the treadmill than offering unique gameplay experiences. You can't take too many risks and the game has to sustain dozens of players doing things in the same area.


I enjoyed FF14: Realm Reborn (they rebuilt the game after the terrible failure of its initial release), played on the beta. It's not revolutionary, more evolutionary in refining gameplay.

I put a lot of stock in how a game looks and animates though as part of the immersive experience, so if you don't care much for art then it's not as impressive.

Most MMOs are intrinsically shit because what makes a game an MMO is precisely what makes it shit. Every way that Neverwinter is like a traditional MMO is something against it, but there are enough deviations that I enjoy it. It'd be even better if it were a purchase-once single-player downloadable game that doesn't connect to a central server or use microtransactions, however.

The others I've attempted didn't even make that effort and are just "Bad because they're MMOs".

I already wasted three years on Flyff. When I got to trying Warcraft I achieved level 3 with an Orc Warrior and just gave up because it's a time sink and you can't even pause to go pee.

Fuck MMOs.

sigma: if you're a TRUE HARDCORE MMO PLAYER, you just pee in a bottle. Or on the floor.

Anyway, are Terra or Lineage any good? I obviously ask this because they seem to mostly be about boobs.

There are so many shitty MMOs because WoW made approximately all of the money and it turns out that video game publishers don't know why some games sell and others don't, so they copy random aspects of ones that do.

Also lots of people are incompetent.

Given how successful boob-based advertising is, you'd have thought that by now some publisher or another would have figured out that there is a large market for games that are actually about boobs. But no, we instead get endless piles of stuff like Evony, that advertises itself with boobs but is actually about spreadsheets, plagiarism, and botting.

Chamomile wrote:Given how successful boob-based advertising is, you'd have thought that by now some publisher or another would have figured out that there is a large market for games that are actually about boobs.

They totally have. I mean, there are actual porn games. But for the softcore crowd, I think the poster child is Scarlet Blade.

The issue is basically that AAA game studios are attempting to make as much money as possible by making the game appeal to as many players as possible. This is reasonable if all you're trying to do is make money (c.f. the success of the battlefield, call of duty, and warcraft franchises), but it requires that you make games that offend as few people as possible; any people you offend won't buy your game. Which in turn means that those games are, for the most part, bland and generic.

By contrast, many of the best video games I've ever played have been highly opinionated, and as a result appealed to specific niches rather than "everybody". Minecraft, Descent, Mechwarrior, Portal, Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, TIE Fighter, Metroid Prime, Bioshock, Morrowind, Braid, Kerbal Space Program, Cave Story, Okami... even WoW started off as a significant - highly opinionated - deviation from the EverQuest model, and it was reportedly a really good game while it held to its originality. It only turned to shit when it started linearizing things and spreading level-cap raiding stuff out to larger populations.

It should be noted that the MMO genre has a unique disadvantage in this regard: the "massive" component of an MMO almost entirely rules out indie development. With single-player or small multiplayer games, a tiny team can put together something unique that will be profitable even on minuscule sales. With an MMO, you need fifty thousand active players at an absolute minimum. You can't do Ludum Dare, you can't say "fuck it, I'll finish the game later" like Notch did, you can't shove out a piece of art like Dwarf Fortress not even caring if it makes money. You have to fund your servers and get players. And that means that you can't experiment, and if you can't experiment you're going to have a really hard time innovating, and if you can't innovate you can't do anything really cool.

TL;DR: "nobody hates it" also means "nobody likes it", "nobody hates it" is enough to make a bunch of money, and the cost of entry keeps people from experimenting with features that might result in a good game.

Koumei wrote:Anyway, are Terra or Lineage any good? I obviously ask this because they seem to mostly be about boobs.

Lineage 2 used to be pay-to-win shit way back when they were subscription-based without a realbux store (they made money banning bots). The gameplay is as follows:
0: Create a damage dealer and a healer/mana battery.
1: Reach an economically viable level.
2: Choose the best monster to farm in the current market.
3: Optimize your attack routine for lowest bar use.
4: If an organized group of people shoos you from "their" spot and kills you a couple times to make sure you learned your lesson, find another monster and farm it instead.
5: Repeat for 2-3 weeks.
6: Sell your rare drop.
.......
1170: Eventually, buy a recipe to craft an item for yourself and resources to get it made.
1171: Fail at crafting it, start over.
.......
3582: Succeed at crafting it.
3583: Enchant it to +3.
3584: Realize that the movers and shakers are playing with weapons enchanted to +20.
3585: Try to enchant yours to +4, fail, start over.
.......
?: Get bored, quit.

Alternatively: join a powerful clan as a grunt. Pay taxes in return for occasional protection.

Alternatively: suck someone's cock, become an officer, get yourself leveled and dressed, enjoy the gravy train.

There was nothing to do BUT farm monsters. The quests were of the "bring 150 wolf tails" variety. Yes, 150 is a real number, and about 1 in 10 wolves has a tail. I couldn't even play dress-up because the gear was ricockulously expensive. No jumping. No going places that look vaguely nice because teleports cost an arm and a leg, monsters are deadly, and you risk losing your gear when you die.

It was a truly bad game, and it couldn't possibly be improved by being officially pay to win. Avoid like the plague. Bouncy dark elf boobs aren't worth it.

I keep seeing this ad for some game called Wartune, which has lots of boobs, and proudly proclaims, and I am not kidding, that it is banned in twelve countries. I'm sorely tempted to click on 'em just to see what happens.

Shrapnel wrote:I keep seeing this ad for some game called Wartune, which has lots of boobs, and proudly proclaims, and I am not kidding, that it is banned in twelve countries. I'm sorely tempted to click on 'em just to see what happens.

It's just one of several Evony reskins. 'Come for the promised-but-not-actually-present boobs, stay for the dry-as-dust resource management. (And also spyware.)'

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Chamomile wrote:Given how successful boob-based advertising is, you'd have thought that by now some publisher or another would have figured out that there is a large market for games that are actually about boobs.

They totally have. I mean, there are actual porn games. But for the softcore crowd, I think the poster child is Scarlet Blade.

I played Scarlet Blade for a while. And yes it's hot. Although once BOOBS!!!1! wears off it gets dull just like the rest. At least the backstory is moderately interesting.

Ahaha, Scarlet Blade looks hilarious. I mean, it looks like it'd be an awful game, but hilarious. And the art on the website looks really good, shame the gameplay videos don't hold up to that standard.

Koumei wrote:Ahaha, Scarlet Blade looks hilarious. I mean, it looks like it'd be an awful game, but hilarious. And the art on the website looks really good, shame the gameplay videos don't hold up to that standard.

Yeah, the fanservice is the only good point of the game. Past that, it's just another "click and watch your character try to kill something" game.

LOTRO is honestly one of the best WoW clones out there, and EVE of course has its own unique appeal; having played eve for a couple years and getting involved with a couple big 0.0 alliances i can firmly say that it's a terrible game for terrible people, but in spite of that can be absolutely amazing.

Chamomile wrote:Given how successful boob-based advertising is, you'd have thought that by now some publisher or another would have figured out that there is a large market for games that are actually about boobs. But no, we instead get endless piles of stuff like Evony, that advertises itself with boobs but is actually about spreadsheets, plagiarism, and botting.

I worked on a Bubble Shooter game about boobs, it's called Bubble Bikini:

https://apps.facebook.com/bubblebikini/ ... &ref=br_tf


I forgot if I wrote that dialog, but I think I did

We wanted to capture the male audience with this game because "Guys LOVE TITS!", but to our surprise it was still 60% women playing. The team that worked on the game was nearly all women, and the artwork was done by a girl who likes dressing like a man and has a very short haircut.

This game is best played with headphones, or in a dark room by yourself.