A game blog for grown ups (sorta).

Monday, February 28, 2011

Many have tried, none have succeeded


If you actually follow my blog (and you should by clicking the button to the right) you may have read that I was a part of the last Rift open beta. I spent probably close to 10 hours in the game over that week (which is more like 10 minutes to MMO players) and, despite their being hundreds if not thousand of hours of content created, I am pretty confident I got a great sense of what the game is all about.

Rift, like so many other expensive and relatively unsuccessful fantasy RPG MMO's, is a World of Warcraft clone. Let me elaborate before you start writing about how I am a jerk and I need to experience the endgame, or how the graphics are different, or how you have rift's open up and everyone goes and fights creatures that spawn (see what they did there?). The mechanics of Rift are exactly, and I mean exactly like WoW. You attack the same way, the hot keys are the same, the combat flows the same, and even the interface is almost exactly the same as WoW.

The thing that really gets me too is their big marketing tag line has been,
"You're not in Azeroth anymore....."


So you, like many others before you, create a game clearly designed to siphon off as much of WoW's business as you can, and that is your big pitch? In a world where it takes around $50 million dollars to create an MMO, a business needs to make sure they can actually make a profit on that investment. What boggles my mind is that someone would think they can steal Blizzard's golden eggs? If you were or are a WoW player ask yourself; what about that ad would compel you to leave your guild, your loot, and countless hours you put into rolling your characters? Especially seeing as though the game play is the same, even down to the "kill 10 of x to save the world."

That leads me to our my next company that worries me. As a Massachusetts guy ad a huge baseball fan I absolutely adore the Redsox. In 2004 there was a epic pwner who helped my team win the World Series for the first time in several generations and his name is Curt Schilling. Since retiring from baseball Curt, who is very likely hall of fame bound, decided to start his own nerdy RPG/MMO company called 38 Studios. He has spent a lot of money, bought up another studio, and hired some top notch talent and for what? Another game that looks completely and utterly generic.

Curt should know from playing against the Yankees that throwing money at a team doesn't guarantee victory. Did you learn nothing from your own sock in 2004? Heart is what makes a good game, not throwing millions of dollars at something because a behemoth like Blizzard did it. Now of course Kingdoms of Amalur isn't released yet, so it's not very fair of me to say that, but so far I am not hopeful.

Not that it's particularly relevant but I thought this quote from a conversation I had the other night was funny:
"Calling a WoW player a gamer is like calling a heroine addict a rock star. It may be true in some cases, but they are certainly not mutually exclusive labels."

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