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On Transitioning To an Asian-Style MMO, Such As Aion
A. Harvey writes "Ten Ton Hammer has an interesting article about the transition to Asian-style MMO games, specifically Aion. 'In many ways, the West is catching up to the East in terms of gaming. Per capita gaming ... and broadband proliferation is markedly higher in Asian markets.
Gaming is much more social in the East as well; many players gather together in internet cafes to spend their game time with each other. Another surprising difference in most Asian-based games is that most functions of game control are mouse based.' I think the author hit the nail on the head that Aion will be a big success in North America and will introduce a lot of players to games with an Eastern feel."
i'm sure sweat shops are very social - all day farming gold leaves time to talk.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...who will be hungry again in an hour.
Aion will go the way of every other non-WoW MMO, because it can't compete with the dumptruckloads of development money and years of lead time that game has had. It is just a poor copy of The One MMO that yet again tries to outdo it with the graphics, while the developers continue to ignore the fact that part of WoW's mass market appeal is that it will run on any piece-of-crap computer with some sort of 3D accelerator in it.
Aion will have a couple hundred thousand subscribers if it's lucky, and those will churn out in a few months, the numbers will stabilize somewhere around 80K, and NCsoft will still be scratching their heads wondering why they can't publish a GOOD MMO.
Age of Conan had BOOBIES and awesome graphics and some new game mechanics, but it was poorly balanced and the highly polished tutorial was just a facade. Once you went to the mainland the game got dull and boring with a quickness. Plus, low-level male characters looked like gay pirates and the sexiest female clothes you'd see were the ones a character started with. And Age of Conan flopped.
Warhammer Online was accessible, with graphics comparable to WoW's; it had fun gameplay comparable to some of WoW's more recent additions, and it still flopped. Why? Because it was TOO MUCH of a WoW clone on the surface, and many of its systems were not polished or balanced and relied too much on social interactions where "alone together" is king.
For what it's worth, I think Bioware's KOTOR Online thing will have huge box sales and big initial numbers, and it will be a great Bioware RPG, but static content does not make for MMO subscriber retention. They'll have huge initial numbers and huge churn. But they at least have a little bit of a chance, if only because it's not more cookie-cutter mythical fantasy; It's STAR WARS.
The MMOs that are succeeding these days are not MMORPGs. They are MMO-strategy like lighter-fare Web/social network games. To make a new MMORPG be massively successful, it's going to take a re-invention of the genre. EVE Online has carved out a nice niche for itself and is clearly a shining star. The current MMORPG monoculture sucks and it's time for more experimental and different kinds of MMO games.
From the Article, concerning killing a PKing player (a "slayer"):
6. If you or someone else kills a slayer, 12 nearby players of the dead body will receive buffs.
Is the buff substantial? It sounds like it may be possible for players to use an alternate char to PK deliberately for the purpose of getting themselves killed, to buff their main characters. This might have the unintended consequences.
Right now someone in Japan is writing an article about how he's going to try putting on 300 pounds and importing a La-Z-Boy, just to get the full Western experience. Then he's going to see about getting one of these "basements." The idea is appealing to him; it's like an underground lair of sorts, typically accompanied by a pronounced lack of responsibility for personal development and a corresponding absence of hygiene. Sugee!
their popular culture lends itself to the cartoonish graphical descriptions of games.
Yeah, you'd definitely know this game is Asian based just on the style of all the armor and weapons past about 25. The equip for Templars/Gladiators looks straight out of RFO. Everything else looks totally unnecessary, highly colorful, and actually really cool.
What? Warhammer Onlines dead? oh dam.. and I just hit rr70! Well, there is a couple servers still cranking along with good population.. but only a couple.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I admire the bandwidth they have, but I don't believe gaming is something we need to catch up to.
Nothing against casual gaming, but you haven't lost much if you never play MMOs.
"Asia grinder"? ;)
Aion = Asia-glindel is only (fol) noobs. :P
And you know, noobs can't marry their loved ones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06zjrdjVQgo
'In many ways, the West is catching up to the East in terms of gaming."
Catching up? Haven't we passed them?
Can someone explain to those of us "stuck in the west" exactly what an "Asian Style" MMO is? Is it a game where the men look like women and the women are hot? Mouse-driven gaming sounds scary, kind of like using Macs before the switch to OSX and multi-button mice.
Lineage II seems to have nowhere near WoW's popularity in the US. Given that Aion is done by the same company and is viewed by many as a LA2's "more/bigger/better", would it see the same fate?
I think there just isn't a lot of room on the market for subscription-based games. I suspect most people will have a budget for one or so, and they will have invested quite a bit of time in it - so there's very little incentive to switch.
I think the Guild Wars model is much better: you pay for the game, you play for free. If you decide to stop for a few months, and pick it up later - no problem. If you decide you like the game and want access to more content, you buy the expansion packs.
A few years ago there was a Korean operation in my town that was basically a big LAN farm (ok, they had a couple DDR machines too). It didn't seem to catch on (and we were fish out of water as we weren't Korean), though a new one has opened up.
North of the border they have a number of Asian arcades that are both full of those sit-down arcade boxes (all of which seem to play a Mechwarrior sort of game), and desktop gaming farms.
Despite the (young, childless) American geek's love of LAN parties, and the popularity of the PAX PC Gaming room, the commercial, always-on LAN Party business just doesn't seem to work down here.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Why all these games have pictures of half naked women running around in the snow like it's no big deal. They look really, really cold.
BadAnalogyGuy, you've never been funny to me but this trolling, intentional or not, is some of the best I've ever seen. Great work.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
One thing that I think the article is absolutely wrong about is that Western RPG's or MMO's are in any way behind Eastern ones. From Baldur's Gate to Planescape: Torment to the KOTOR series, single player western RPG's have really pushed the boundaries and given us compelling and unique experiences. While the West churns out fewer RPG's than the East, they tend to be much more varied and innovative, especially in terms of characterization and plot. When a good Western RPG comes out I can look forward to a fresh experience, while most Eastern RPG's feel annoyingly familiar. Playing them, I always experience deluges of deja vu and have to carefully switch off parts of my brain. (e.g. The part that doesn't want to play a bitchy adolescent male prodigy saving the universe... again.) The things that appeal to Eastern audiences, like those fucking chocobo's, aren't what float my boat. Likewise, to say that the West is behind in the MMO department, with WoW absolutely stomping Eastern MMO's in their own bloody markets...
Aion looks like a solid eastern MMORPG, but nothing compelling enough to dethrone WoW. It's artwork also feels distinctly Eastern, which means it will flop in the West. Lots of people in the West love anime, love Kurosawa, love Chan-wook Park, but they're still a very small minority. The majority of people will not go for something that feels too Eastern, just as Eastern audiences flocked to Lineage but not to western MMOs. Cultural barriers definitely do exist between the East and the West and Aion doesn't look like a MMO that transcends them. It really is extraordinary that WoW has somehow managed to appeal to both the East and West, and I'm not sure even Blizzard knows how they managed it.
So, what's going to dethrone WoW? Slap me silly with a mackerel if I have a clue. Probably WoW2. It's not really a terribly interesting question. What is an interesting question is when we're going to see hugely popular MMO's on the scale of WoW in genres other than fantasy. There are a lot of people out there who love sci-fi and not fantasy, or who love historical settings and not sci-fi or fantasy. These are largely untapped markets. There is probably room for several big MMO's to do well at the same time, provided they target different genres. (another reason why Aion is probably doomed.)
Bioware's KOTOR MMO looks promising. It's sci-fi, which hasn't really been done well in a MMO sense except possibly for Eve Online, but the space-sim market is arguably a different genre from what KOTOR targets. Bioware has a long track record of excellent single player RPG's, but it remains to be seen if they have what it takes to put out a MMO, especially now that they have their own sort of "imperial entanglement" predicament now that they're under EA's umbrella. (You can bet there will be pressure to release early coming from EA, no matter how much Bioware claims they are the master of their own domain!) A lot of single player RPG fans are up in arms over KOTOR being turned into a MMO, since KOTOR's strength was it's compelling stories, which are remarkably hard to do in a MMO that is more about player dynamics. Bioware claims they've found the holy grail of MMO's though, a way to bring single player plots to massive online environments. That's a bold claim, if ever there was one. I wish them luck.
"Transitioning"??? Hogwash. This is just another attempt at creative writing. The only reason Aion will do well, IF it does, is that it's new and might not suck. Period. Comparatively there's no way it will come close to WoW from a quality of design perspective, or Everquest 2.
Asian MMO's do well in Asia... because they are written to conform more to the console style of play and are localized immediately in those languages. They are also homegrown, so have that appeal as well.
But us transitioning, jeese, I wish these writers would not make up their own reality and pass it off as having some basis in fact.
Just wait until Star Wars: The Old Republic launches and tell me we are "transitioning" to an asian MMO.
If you mean that by people banging away at the engine to find the "unfixable" engine bugs and 80% Chinese goldfarmers, yes.
If you mean that they'll create another region for a market test(that ends up being the most anti-bot region outside Korea), and dump it a couple of years later, yes.
If you mean that the only way to get a truly permanent ban is to royally piss off NCKR, yes.
It certainly will meet the same fate as L2.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Most Americans (at least judging by American MMO bloggers' postings) don't really like the concept of MMOs running on RMTs, but if you want a preview of the Asian style of MMO, try Runes of Magic. You'll notice that most Asian games come with a lot more convenience features than you'd find in e.g. WoW, where basic things turn into a chore. In RoM you have auto-walk, auto-find-NPC, your quest journal's important words are linked directly to an auto-walk path to the monster/person you need to find, there are many methods of instant or fast transport, free player housing from level 1, permanent mount available for purchase from level 1 etc.
If you can for one second swallow your hate of mouse-based walking (there's WASD too, for chrissakes) and RMTs, you'll see that a game doesn't become stupidly easy just because it is convenient to play.
You can find some of that in Perfect World and Jade Dynasty or any of the Aeria games as well, but I wouldn't recommend those. Runes of Magic is very well-adapted to the Western audience. Many other Asian MMOs are endless grindfests, because it seems that people there don't mind grinding to achieve things in a game. Radiant Arcana (as the original Runes of Magic is called in China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea) is a much more grindy game than Runes, since Frogster figured that Western players don't have the patience for a grindfest. I think they may be right.
So before someone writes an article about Eastern vs. Western-style MMOs, they should perhaps look at deeper game design elements rather than just imply "oh wow, mouse control is so you can smoke with your other hand". Also, I think the author of TFA didn't even notice that Aion's Western version had a lot of grind removed and is faster to play than the original. If he thinks the leveling curve is bad here, he should play the Korean one.
Someone get a Taiwanese, a Korean, a Japanese, a British and an American game journalist to work on an article, that way they'd talk to each other and debunk some of the myths :P
A) I'd rather pay a monthly subscription to a game than enter a game that has micro transactions for items. The potential for impulse buying is way too high. Yes, players should be more responsible with their money blah blah blah......but you tell me that impulse buying isn't going to be a significant problem for the players (obviously not for the company).
B) I don't like grinding--period. The only time I ever grind in wow is on the very rare chance I am bored and have nothing better to do. My grinding lasts no more than 30-45 minutes at a time. Grinding being: killing the same group of mobs repeatedly, flying around a zone mining, etc.
If the game requires any of these two elements, I just am not going to play it. If anything, I'd rather WoW become more difficult and skill-based to play. I'd rather the higher end content require more effort, coordination, and dedication than it takes now. Grinding for hours on end is not my kind of fun.
I dunno what it means, but it sounds unpleasant. And possibly messy. Hmm, better watch where I step... :P
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Asian women look like little girls--with the flat nose bridge.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
So I wanted to correct a few assumptions people are making with this post, I'm biased but will try to stick to facts =p 1. Aion is a grindfest ~ Untrue, aions leveling is a little bit easier than WoWs. I can't comment on raiding and crafting but early crafting is easier than WoW also. 2. Aions graphics are too good to beat WoW in the casual segment with older computers ~ Also untrue, Aion runs much more smoothly than WoW for me on my rig. I have a nice rig but I get 70-100 fps in Aion, I'm lucky to hit 30 in WoW. 3. WoW has been out for many years and is very polished, New mmos are buggy and will fail like age of Conan and warhammer did. ~ Aion has been out for a year in asia, and is very effecient. I haven't noticed any bugs in the game. I played age of conan and the comparison is apples and oranges. Aion may not be the runaway success people are making it out to be, it may not beat WoW either. There's no question in my mind that the game is better than WoW, but Asian mmo's seem to carry a large stigma and its hard to get people to switch mmo's either way. Also there remains the question of the dev team and how they deal with hackers//bots//exploits that can't be answered yet for obvious reasons but from its history in asia they have pushed out huge content patches relatively fast and bug free.
When UO first came out (almost 11 years ago now) there was really very little grinding. Things got harder as the in game mechanics were adjusted, but macroing took a lot of the monotony out of the repetitive tasks required to raise skills.
Of course when UO came out, it was raw, untamed, and breaking new ground in gaming. There was a lot more risk involved and a lot less rules enforcing any kind of social behavior; looking back, I miss watching the enforcement of social order by the players and not the game. It was an exciting if sometimes frustrating time in gaming. As "hardcore" as games like EQ and WoW turned out to be, they don't even compare to UO in a lot of ways.
In the end, it was crushed by its own popularity - things have a way of inevitably declining into mediocrity as their popularity explodes, only to die a slow death as they breath life into new stars around them.
But if there's one phrase I would never use to describe UO, it would be "monotonous grindfest."
I started playing WoW in march 2009. I kept hearing stuff like I am "faking being a newb" that I am a "fucktard" for not knowing what to do or not to do during boss fights, I was disbelieved when saying I had no alt (shortly after they laughed at me because I did not know what an alt was or an "owl" or a "dudu"). When i reached the burning crusade floating island this went even worst so I decided to stop, and I will only flock to new MMO now. So I am pretty sure everybody is about as newb as I am.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Then you'd be happy to hear that Runes of Magic requires neither purchase nor grinding :)
Also, the items for sale there are convenience items. They are both truly useful and not required to complete the game. You should really try out the game before forming an opinion, chances are you'd even like it.
If you want a more difficult WoW, you probably need to go back to old-school games like Shards of Dalaya. It needs good coordination, strategy, planning and all that, but the downside is that you are forced to find a group (as early as level 6) because you simply won't survive without a balanced group of roles. It all has advantages and disadvantages, I don't think they'll ever succeed at making a game design that is easy but challenging, group-friendly but solo-friendly etc. There are many opposites that players want to have BOTH of, and that won't work.
I don't see the potential for impulse buying as a problem at all. You play the game for a week, you think "bah, I'd like to travel faster", so you buy a few transport runes or rent a horse. Horses are cheap to rent with pure in-game currency too, by the way. After a week you find out that you won't have time to play much in the next three weeks, so you won't be spending any money on the game either. With a subscription-based game, you'd still be paying money.
For people like me with our three hours a week game time, free RMT-based games are perfect and subscription-based games would be a waste of money, since I'm paying for time I can't use anyhow.
But seriously, download RoM, play it for a month. Then form an opinion. I see many people who are so opposed to the idea of trying an RMT game that they keep repeating mantras they've heard from some people who tried some OTHER RMT-based game -- every game is different, and you have to try them first-hand to really have an opinion that counts.
What a bunch of nonsense. The "West" is not exactly lagging in broadband, however the US is. The West is not synonymous with the US. Europe is doing quite well in the broadband ratings, especially Western Europe [or Northern Europe].
Furthermore Asia as a whole is not exactly leading the broadband race either. While Japan and Korea are of course very well developed, try making the same comparison with India or other large nations such as Indonesia.
I've played in a couple of these beta events. Far as I've seen, no transition is required. It's the same game.
- Combat: You stand there pushing buttons to activate abilities, same as every other MMO on the planet. Some skills can chain into other skills, but the UI puts the next skill in the chain on the same button as the first skill, so you can really just mash that button and make it work. If you're playing the healing class (Cleric), the number of offensive skills you get is pretty small and they're boring as shit (primary nuke with a 2 second cooldown, yay autoattack?).
- Flight: Flying around is neat. But for some reason, you can't use it in Sanctum (one of the capital cities). You can't use it in the zone immediately after the one where you are first allowed to use it. Flying as a part of combat is mostly... floating stationary so you can cast spells. It probably becomes more important in the Abyss, but from as far as I got it was a gimmick.
- Quests: Kill 10 of these, go collect this, go talk to this guy and report back. Nothing you haven't done in every other game. In the beta there's no particular etiquette regarding gathering, people will run up and try to take nodes that you're already working on. Gathering itself actually uses some weird random system with two bars (pass/fail) dueling that takes far too long and is like watching paint dry. They could have added something interactive here to improve it considerably over WoW, but they didn't.
- Grouping: Remember "LF1M, need healer"? It's back. Only two classes can heal, and only one of those is "the primary healer". That class is incredibly boring if you're not healing, which is great since you can't heal mobs to death in the soloable areas. Is it some kind of design law that healing classes in MMOs must be designed to be mind numbing to play when grinding? There's no option for dual spec like WoW has to turn yourself into a DPSer and make the suck stop.
- Graphics: It looks really nice, if you have the hardware. High end performance is better then WoW, considerably. Low end performance is non existant on a lot of hardware that will play WoW. Which isn't surprising since WoW is optimized at the low end and totally CPU bound at the high end.
I cancelled my pre-order this week. May pick it up in a few months if I'm bored, but right now I'm not bored of WoW, and Aion pretty much plays like the same game.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What, so you prefer women with big bumpy noses? I suppose women all shave their legs to look like little girls too, and men shave to look like little boys? Oh noes, we're ALL pedophiles!!
which is totally what she said
Every market is slightly different. America likes it action packed and colourful - big epxlosions, tropical islands, big hairy men in super-advanced armour running around and killing baddies. Crysis is a great example, even though it was created by an european studio. Europe likes it serious, complicated and gritty. A good storyline is one that has a thirty xanathos pileup. Good graphics are those that look like they were bathed in acid and rust. Guns jam, the world is morally gray and ultimately you get the impression that the game really hates you. Example: Fallout or Stalker. Eastern markets love it.. uh.. for the lack of a better word kooky. Emos with swords that look like support beams, people who can fly and casually jog up walls (yet you don't see vertical catwalks anywhere), cute antropomorphic animals, big eyes and plots that make you go "Who the hell wrote this shit and what was he taking?" - example: Final Fantasy MXMCVIVMCI those games also love to break the western standards, like metal gear solid, where the fourth wall was blown up with C4, rebuilt, blown away with a WMD, rebuilt again and painted red with a neon sign "THIS IS THE FOURTH WALL" mounted on it. European tastes are basically the direct opposite of eastern ones.
I know theres allot of people that like and play MMOs but i am one of millions who just likes to play theses games in single player mode. I don't want to pay a fee to play on line but would love to buy theses games if they had a single player mode like the FF series. I don't want to have to depend on anyone in order to play any games. :)And i love RPGs,yet not many good ones have single player mode for computer play.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Broken modding here. The parent is a well written, thoughtful post. I don't have any expertise with which to judge the ideas themselves, but they are at least interesting, and original within this thread. I didn't find anything remotely similar to flamebait... Maybe debate-bate, but isn't that what we're striving for here? Someone mod parent up pls.
Ohhh.... trolls have evolved! This troll uses whole sentences, attempts to establish cause and effect, has an introduction, main point, and a summary... and yet is as much a troll as "Asians are fags, kekeke". Just to demonstrate the scope of trolling, solipsism a philosophical concept that argues that only the mind can be proven to exist. It has nothing to do with remote kills being easier to perform than a personal stabbing.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm hoping they develop more strategy-based multiplayer online games (massive is optional, but you do need a strong online presence to bring a threshold of players together, a la battle.net).
I've been into strategy board games lately, and fantastic new games have come to market the past few years, such as Agricola, Race for the Galaxy, Power Grid, Steam (I could go on). They give me what I like most about gaming: strategic thought to outsmart human opponents with little aspect of luck. There's also a great online community for reviewing and discussing these games at boardgamegeek.com (shameless plug).
The problem with board games is time. With a family and work responsibilities, it's difficult to get together a regular gaming group and play (my wife has limited interest). This is where online computer gaming comes in.
Now I'm not talking about a direct translation of these board games into computer games (there's already a program called VASSAL that does this). Computers handle things like rules and setup (some board games take a long time to put all the chits/counters in place) to make games much more complex than board games can achieve due to these time and space constraints.
I'm really tired of repetitive, click and twitch-fest games of the past. I'm a devoted Blizzard fan boy, but if SC2 plays like SC1 I won't be buying. I'm looking for the next game that really pushes the multi-player strategic boundary.
Granted; a very good post by BAG standards. But if you RTFC, he's still trolling. Mods got it right.
I'd love to play aion.. it seems like an artistically stunning and immersive title.
Their lack of support for mac, despite statistics indicating 50% of college level sales are mac notebooks, means I will not be purchasing any time soon.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
>So, what's going to dethrone WoW?
Blizzard, et al has created a market of gamers who are used to paying a subscription to play games. World of Warcraft will become a victim of its own success.
Many new publishers are going to be using this business model because it's proven to be profitable, and eliminates pirating. Xbox marketplace, WiiWare, Steam, Stardock and others are the tip of the iceberg. Eventually WoW will screw something up while trying to make it better (it's human nature) and alienate the subscriber base.
There are still newbs at level 60-70 that leveled up themselves. And when they ask questions or make mistakes there are often those that will ridicule them. But there's a line as well.
I am happy to answer a simple question. I'm happy to show someone where something is. I'm happy to explain a process in a dungeon so that the fight goes smoothly. What I'm not willing to do is spend a night answering every freakin question from someone who isn't willing to go investigate on their own.
Perfect example was someone just the other night who wanted to know what armor blacksmiths could make. I sent a link of my 450skill smithing recipes. Then he asked me how much the most expensive weapon I could make was. I gave him a link to the item and a quote. He (a warrior) said "I can't use 2h maces". I said yes you can, you just have to train. He asks where he trains. I say in 1 of the cap cities. He asks, which city. I say, I can't remember off-hand which one has 2h mace training, but that he could look it up on wowhead.com. So an hour later he says he trained and wants me to make the weapon. I tell him I don't have the components. He asks where he can get them. I suggest he look that up on wowhead.com as well. At this point he gets all pissed about the fact that I'm not willing to help someone pretty new to the game...
Now a lot of people would have suggested he go get the information for himself after the 1st question or 2. But I tried. At some point if you really want to succeed in anything you have to take the responsibilty for figuring it out yourself. If you expect people to hold your hand through it all, you're going to get ridiculed eventually by even the most patient of people.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
And how do you match them?
... that's essentially what exists now. If you are very casual, you're most likely to be using the LFG tool (which could be more widely advertised as an option for those who are unaware). If you're a bit toward the more intense playstyle on the scale, you probably already have the social networking to do the things you're interested in doing. And like any classifications of people, nothing is concrete. There's overlap. And in that overlap are the oppurtunities to learn about others and what is required to find your niche. The overlap, the lack of clarity in classifying people and who they should or should not group with, is the gaurantee in eventually finding your best-suited groupmates.
Level: Fails because two characters at equal level can have vastly different goals, gear, experience, and motivations.
Gear: Fails because even if the gear two characters are in roughly equal gear, one player can be vastly more skilled, and is just at a lower end of the progression curve for his playstyle. Again, goals, experience and motivations can vastly differ.
Player-defined: You rarely have 2 people agree on definitions of 'Casual', or 'Raider', or 'Hard-Core', or 'Core'. And even if you did, you're still looking at different games. Not just different groups of people playing. A server composed entirely of 'Casual' players is not likely to often have organized 40 person raids that can cohesively overcome the most challenging of encounters. It would be counterproductive to scale those encounters according to the populace because doing so would encourage the instant gratification raiders to just sign up for the casual servers instead. If you mean to group people under the above definitions and not actually seperate them among gameworlds
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Indeed. I once saw a video of a lecture by a professor of Women and Gender Studies that absolutely floored me where she insisted essentially this. Her argument was that, if the trend towards shaved pubic hair for women continued to catch on, then men would find all females without pubic hair attractive, so they would gravitate towards prepubescent girls. By the end of the presentation she'd painted such a lurid picture of the adult male that I was frankly disturbed that anyone could have sat in the same room without protesting. It was as though she thought misandry could undo misogyny.
Had I been there, I could have pointed out that this aesthetic preference goes back far in Western culture and prefers men with shaved pubes too (just see any classical statue of an adult male). I could point out that there are practical erotic advantages to the practice: It makes oral sex significantly more pleasant for the giver, and so is at the very least polite and considerate. I could have even given personal anecdotes if I were feeling particularly open. But I'm sure it wouldn't have changed her opinion in the slightest.
Returning finally to GP's comment that motivated this whole thing to begin with,
Asian women look like little girls--with the flat nose bridge.
I won't say much besides: I disagree; I think that adult women of essentially all races, after the age of about 20, all look decidedly adult.
Why should the west "Catch up" to the East in terms of gaming? "Per-capita gaming"? If people don't want to sit in front of a screen for hours on end in their free time, what's wrong with that? The summary almost reads like a government report on illiteracy.
I say their is no better or worse per capita gaming percentage. Do whatever the heck you want with your free time.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameGuard
nProtect GameGuard (sometimes called GG) is an anti-cheating software
Because of the way that GameGuard hooks into core system DLLs and interrupts[6], it is impossible (without hacking GameGuard and violating the TOS) to run games protected by GameGuard under Windows API Emulators, such as Wine under Unix-based operating systems[7]. The key issue being that GameGuard bypasses the OS safeguards in order to:
* Hide the game application process.
* Monitor the entire memory range.
* Terminate specific applications without the user consent (sometimes tries to disable Kernel hooks).
* Block specific calls to DirectX or the Windows API.
Don't try and compare this to Blizzard's Warden, which no longer scans out of game memory, doesn't kill process as it wishes, doesn't actively block API calls, nor does it imbed its self into your OS only to be removed via a reformat and reinstall.
Just so you know:
1. Auto-walk is in WoW/EQ/DAoC/and just about every other MMO made in the west
2. Auto-find-NPC was in Dark Age of Camelot which was released just a bit before Runes of Magic
3. Eastern MMOs are not characterized by more convenience. Generally they are characterized by ganking and grinding.
Aion looks good, but it does not provide enough original design to interest me.
Also, not being able to fully customize a UI is a horrible way to go. So far, the only games I'm aware of with customizeable UIs are Western (WoW and EQ being the ones that initially come to mind).
What's weird to me is that people insist on comparing MMOs and RPGs east-west at the same time. Their only overlap is when both have a fantasy setting, and they're otherwise completely different beasts.
I mention this because while there are many worthy eastern RPGs - and by eastern or asian we mostly have to say "japanese" here, since we're really talking about game console history - there's very little of note from the east in some other genres. They've had a bunch of MMOs, a bunch of which have seen success local to individual eastern countries, but where are the groundbreaking improvements to gameplay, genre, UI? I can't claim to have played every eastern MMO (or every western MMO, for that matter), but it seems the only thing we're hearing about from the east is the different pricing model. Other than that - it's a lot of churning through the same game mechanics of grinding and ganking. Where's the "Ultima Online of the East"? Where's the "EVE of the East"? That's the sort of thing I'd be looking for - genuinely different gameplay of the sort that'll shape future games worldwide.
I can't yet turn that kind of question around and throw it at the teeth of the west. I can't go "where's the Lineage 2 of the West?" or "where's the FF XI of the West?" or even "where's the Ragnarok Online of the West?" because those didn't add much in particular to the genre that the West can or should be absorbing and adapting and improving on. And that's kinda sad, because MMOs everywhere *should* be striving to do new things. It's not the general "asian-looking artwork" that is going to make a difference, any more than Lineage 2's big elven boobies or WoW's art style made the difference in their success or failure.
So....this amazing charecter customization is a shitty copy of Rappelz where you get to customize your charecter twice to specialize. And 26 faces? In Perfect World International you can manipulate the face almost as well as you can in Fallout 3. Nothing here that hasn't been done before and done to a larger extend.
Tried that one too.
The world seemed a bit too small for a MMO, especially after getting used to EvE ;-)
The flying was fun, but in PvP I promptly got spanked. Partly due to lag, me in Europe and the server in the USA does not mix with twitch based gaming (for the same reason, I don't join overseas Day Of Defeat servers anymore).
But with a European server, it would still be worth a second try.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The potential for impulse buying is way too high. Yes, players should be more responsible with their money blah blah blah......but you tell me that impulse buying isn't going to be a significant problem for the players
I neve met a person that has impulse buying problems. But lots peaople I meet are game adicts. I don't really get your point.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
YES, YES I agree about the RPG differences.
Eastern RPG's can get away with shit that's been done away with in Western RPG's for over a decade if not longer.
Take Final Fantasy 12 -- when you enter a zone, there are monsters. Kill all the monsters, exit the zone, then immediately come back... the monsters are back. Diablo ONE -- from '96 -- this wasn't exactly the most technically amazing game when it came out, but even this 13 year old game could "remember" which monsters you killed.
Or take Final Fantasy 11, FF Tactics, all versions of Pokemon, etc. You wander around a lifeless, barren world, and every step you take is some 1% chance of encountering an invisible monster of some kind. Christ, even Ultima II (or III, I forget) from the friggin' EIGHTIES didn't rely on such crappy game mechanics.
But I respectfully disagree with you about the style not appealing to the West. These games are exceedingly popular in the West, so I don't see Aion succeeding (or failing) based on the art style alone.
"The transistion too ..." Yeah right. You could have used introduction, but you are trying subtly induce you audience into believing there is some shift to eastern style gaming because western style gamin is obviously inferior. Why wouldn't you just move to East Asia and save us the subtle, innuendo laiden crap you opened the introduction to the article with. I'm all for all kinds of gaming paradigms, want I don't need to hear is how inferior everything in the west is to everything in the east.
Some of you unfortunates might not be aware of what a "thirty Xanatos pileup" is. To remedy that, visit this site.
Block out a couple of hours; you'll use them regardless.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Define grinding better--
I find running "Find an NPC" or "Kill 20 x and 10 y's" or "Collect 10 x's and 7 y's, then return to me" style quests to be grinding, too.