We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

Every game should have a quest entitled "Enter Leoric's Passage".

Like a lot of people I’m currently engrossed in Diablo 3, shunning my MMO activities for the past week in favour of battling the demons of hell throughout the realm of Sanctuary. It’s a good game and I’m having a lot of fun although I daresay it’s not quite as tremendously incredible as I somehow expected. To be fair though, that’s probably more due to the fact that nothing could have possibly lived up the excessive amount of hype that Diablo 3 had heaped upon its shoulders, a grand accumulation of 12 years of nostalgia, impatience and seductive teasing.

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"Sorry honey, but I just spent this month's mortgage gearing up my Wizard"

I have to say that I’m quite looking forward to Diablo 3’s Real-Money Auction House (RMAH), not because I intend to buy or sell anything through it (although I can’t say that I won’t) but because I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how its introduction affects players and online gaming in general. See, I reckon Diablo 3 is going to sell by the bucket load and make Blizzard a mountain of cash, a mountain that will turn into Everest itself one they start raking in revenue through the RMAH, so much so that I’d bet real money (see what I did there?) that the feature becomes a staple in every online game to come from now on.

Of course, I don’t think we’ll be seeing real-money auctions springing up in every online FPS or MMO or what not overnight but I have little doubt that it will happen slowly and surely. Just like 10 years ago the idea of a cash shop in a MMO or a free-2-play subscription model would’ve sounded inconceivable, I honestly believe in five years time almost every game with online capabilities, and most certainly all MMORPGS, will have some sort of real-money trading system. There’s just too much cash to be made out of it.

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I have no idea what's going on in this screenshot

I’ve never been a big fan of raiding in MMOs and it’s certainly something that I talk about fairly regularly. For me, raiding offers a pretty disjointed experience, counter intuiative to the whole leveling game in itself. Indeed, just like we now have games like League of Legends that offer what equates to essentially full-time PvP battlegrounds, maybe we should have completely separate games for raiding instead of trying to tack them onto a leveling game?

Perhaps I’m a ‘traditionalist’ in the way that I like my MMOs to be about leveling up and questing or fighting through static content. Not to say that I don’t appreciate the appeal of raiding, I do, and if it’s something you like then who I am to disagree. In fact, although it’s not for me, I can fully understand the thrill and enjoyment people get from activities such as competitive raiding and the like.

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Pre-Victoria's Secret concept art from Diablo 3

Update: A lot of this article has been misconstrued either through confusion or in the name of melodrama. To be 100% clear, I’m not condoning sexism or oversexualisation in video games in any way at all. Indeed, if anything, the purpose of the article is to highlight the history of inequality that has existed between the genders and try to answer why it not only happened but still continues today.

For the sake of consistency, I’ve left the article unmodified even though I’ve been sorely tempted to correct areas where I’ve perhaps been unintentionally flippant or insensitive. Still, the post is merely a theory based on some interesting and plausible conjecture and I’d encourage everyone to read it carefully and thoroughly before passing judgement.

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Didn't you know? WoW will turn you into a sociopath

Or so some of the press would have us believe. I don’t know how much it’s being reported in the US but in Europe the media are having a field day reporting that Anders Brievik, currently on trial for the murder for 77 people in Norway last year, played World of Warcraft 16 hours a day for one year solid. It’s the old “video games are evil” debate all over again except this time the Internet is being thrown into the mix too.

Now I can’t say for certain that computer games don’t impact our mental state but I do find it rather depressing how the press leap all over them at every available opportunity, usually representing them with ill-informed facts. Case in point, the article by The Telegraph linked to above describes WoW as a “a virtual world where 10.3 million players attempt to achieve the position of ‘Justicar’”. Justiwah? Since when did a PvP Achievement title the main focus of the game?

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Behold, pet battles! The future of all MMORPGs.

There’s little doubting that the long-term financial success of MMOs is in player retention. Box sales alone don’t count for much and I could easily run off plenty of examples of games that sold well on release then took a nose dive after a month or two and now languish in low popularity limbo. However, when it comes to what matters most, few developers actually seem to have been able to unlock the secret player retention.

BioWare for one looks like it’s suffering and if their latest awful promotion is anything to go by, they seem to be having trouble holding on to players that have hit the level cap. Personally, I’m not surprised. SW:TOR is a lot of fun and the story mode stuff is interesting but ultimately it doesn’t have the long-term hook that other MMOs have (at least for me anyway). The similarity between classes, the limited storylines, the overall lack of things to do… eventually people are going to get bored.

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I hope World of Darkness vampires sparkle in the sunlight, just like in Twilight.

I don’t know much about World of Darkness other than it involves vampires, politics, political vampires and a very loyal, slightly scary fanbase. It’s also, as far as I can gather, nothing like Twilight .

Far too many years ago, when I still a teenager, I remember being quite intrigued by the whole World of Darkness setting even though I understood little of it. All I knew was that it made vampires cool (in a dark and Machiavellian way) and was often enjoyed by Ann Rice fans and Goths alike. In fact, I had the pleasure of meeting some Vampire The Masquerade roleplayers when I was about 17 and they left quite an impression on me. Even to this day I still have a fuzzy memory of pale bosoms, fake blood and some melodramatic banter.

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