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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."
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.
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.
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.
To better answer your question - online games are "gamed" for in-game currency, which is converted into real life currency, by one means or another. There are companies in poor countries that employ dozens or hundreds of people to farm MMO's for ingame currency, to be sold on the black market to wealthy gamers. It is a lucrative business for them, considering that most come from poor countries, and they can pay people a bowl of rice of two for a day's work in front of the computer.
The same guy might be logged into 4, 6, or more online games, and he has a quota of gold, or whatever, to harvest before his shift is over. He never gets to adventure, or explore - he performs rote actions, with the purpose of increasing his bank.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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
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."
he performs rote actions, with the purpose of increasing his bank.
Boy that was just like my year of playing WoW. You mean I could get paid for that?
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:
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visit randi.org
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
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.