A Second Pathfinder Kickstarter??

Regular readers of this blog, (all 7.3 of you), will know that I was pretty excited about the announcement of the Pathfinder Sandbox MMO. How excited? Well, I wasn’t wearing the brown underwear for nothing. I was so convinced of the awesomeness of the idea that I pledged in their initial kickstarter drive, which was designed to raise money to complete a tech video, all with the ultimate aim of securing funding for the game. That kickstarter was a huge success, raising almost $300,000 in secured pledges, much more than their initial target.

All seemed to be going nicely. I am a regular reader and occasional contributor on their forums, so I consider myself up to date on what’s going on with the game. Then out of the blue yesterday we got side-swiped with a wham, bam, thank you Maam. A brand new kickstarter pledge drive, with the goal being securing early development of the game. The target? A cool million bucks.

It’s sad to have your dreams crash down around you, but straight away my bullshit detector went into overdrive. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, the initial fund-raising effort was to help secure firm investment for the game by way of the tech demo video. Now they’re suddenly saying that this all went well but a million bucks is needed to not only get it to us early but:

“… The purpose of this second Kickstarter is to get the money we need to make Pathfinder Online bigger, faster and better than we can with our current level of funding. It will let us hire more people and dedicate more resources to Pathfinder Online, potentially cutting the time to launch in half, and massively expanding the content and features available on release…”

Potentially cutting the launch time in half? Does that mean they secured backing to make an MMO of 1 million bucks only? I’m having a hard time understanding their budget if they think that another million is all that is needed to get this off the ground. But wait, there’s more:

“… Could we have gone out and got investment capital to do this? Sure, but with that investment comes costs and entanglements that could very well derail the vision that we have for Pathfinder Online. Investors don’t like to push boundaries, color outside the lines, or think outside the box. Instead, they want you to do things only in ways already proven successful for other companies. It is their money, after all.

Our vision for Pathfinder Online doesn’t fit those boundaries. It doesn’t color within the lines. It doesn’t want to exist inside of a box. You already get that–you have believed in us from the beginning and backed us on our first Kickstarter. We would rather report to you than to a group of investors who are only interested in making the biggest pile of money and having an early exit strategy. You are with us for the long haul. You believe in our vision for a fantasy sandbox MMO. We would prefer never to sacrifice this vision in pursuit of bigger profits…”

If investors wouldn’t get your vision, why the hell would you start up the first kickstarter in order to secure funding from investors? This makes exactly zero sense, and already on the forums a very healthy dose of posters are questioning what the hell is going on, while the fanboiys ridicule anyone for daring to question the great creative vision at work here. Not only that, but what made Pathfinder intriguing was the fact that they are going to restrict early access to the game to 4500 players. Obviously everyone funded the first kickstarter with the hope that being an early backer would secure them that early access. Not a chance. Early access can only be guaranteed through the second kickstarter. It’s a massive kick in the guts for what was a devoted fan base.

But I saved the best for last. This second kickstarter is being launched before they’ve even sent out the pledges from the first one. This all stinks to high heaven, and if people think that this is the end of the fund raising then I think they could be very much mistaken.

 

Don’t Delete Your blogs, (you morons).

It has been an interesting week in the blogging kingdom. First of all Gankalicious posted that he was finishing his blog because he had nothing else to say. I thought that this was sad, because although he is a very silly man with dubious eating habits, I enjoy his whimsical blogging style and pathetic attempts to come to terms with the fact that he is a father. So I commented that it would be better for him to leave his blog up. I mean, why go to all the trouble of spending years building your blog up to the point where you have a ready-made audience who will listen to you rant and complain about the going thing that is pissing you off, only to delete it in a moment of angst? Leave the thing up! Because without a doubt there will come a morning when you will turn on the internets and a subject will catch your eye that will so infuriate you that you will reload up your old blog and dive right in. And your ready-made audience will lap it up.

And we have an immediate case in point in Nils. After almost a year of the amount of activity that would make one of those young Christian “I’m keeping my virginity for God” people look positively sluttish, out of nowhere the Nils parachutes back to the blogosphere with a post in which he complains about Guild Wars 2, (fair enough), Diablo 3, (can’t fault him there), and informs us that he tried WoW again with his girlfriend who thought that it sucked big fat donkey balls, (and she didn’t even play a panda.) And lo and behold the blogging world rejoiced and his post was covered with grovelling comments. A classic example of leaving your blog up for when you felt like dipping your toe in the water. Great to have him back.

Last but not the least, Kleps decided to call it a day, apparently. I give him a couple of weeks. The poor lad just won’t be able to contain himself. He says he has another blog, but really I don’t think his heart is in it. He’s not like Larissa who has an actual other hobby, (blue movies apparently), and thus a decent motivation to blog about an interest. But like a good lad, Klep has left his blog up. This is good news due to the fact that I primarily use his and Nil’s blogging list to work out who has posted each day, (WordPress, your blogroll system sucks arse. And what the hell is your own spellchecker as I write this telling me that any word with ‘blog’ in it is not a word?? On a blogging site???)

So there you have it – don’t delete your blogs. Gankalicious learned his lesson. He woke up, realised what a twit he had been, and promptly deleted the offending post where he threatened to quit and take all of his toys home. However, I knew this would happen and I copied and saved it. I’m sure I’ll drag it out some time in the future when it suits me …

 

The Future is Sandbox

The future is sandbox, and I can’t wait. The announcement that Everquest Next will be a sandbox confirms what many of us in the blogging game have been thinking for some time; the era of the theme-park is over, let the time of the sandbox begin. I have been following the Pathfinder Online game development closely, and this announcement from Everquest just confirms that Pathfinder were correct to get their foot in the door early. As Ryan Dancey the CEO of Pathfinder Online said on their forum today;

“… From what Smed says, it sounds like they’re at least two years out, minimum. He’s promising that next year they’ll show work in progress but they don’t have anything to show this year.

That’s about what I expected when I first pitched Pathfinder Online to Lisa last year; that there’s a window open right now for a great fantasy sandbox MMO but it won’t stay open forever.

I think the net effect of more companies coming into the space is more awareness getting raised about why sandboxes are a fundamentally better way to play an MMO than the Theme parks were. And that does nothing but help us, so that makes me pretty happy …”

I’m quite certain that other companies will jump on the bandwagon as well. While I couldn’t possibly tell you which game I’ll end up playing, what I am hopeful of is at least one company getting it right. Whether that turns out to be WoW huge or niche game market, either way it’s good for me.

 

Gods & Kings God Help Me.

It’s been a few weeks between drinks on the blog, and that’s due to the fact that I haven’t been playing games much at all, apart from the fortnightly get together with my nerdy chums for our Pathfinder gaming session. The break is mostly due to the fact that I’ve been working rather diligently on getting the first draft of my book finished. That was done last week, and now I’m having a little break before I must face the horrible proposition of revising 120,000 words.

However, and much to my great shame, I have been spending a little bit of time on the Civ V expansion, Gods & Kings. Yes, this is after my total bombastic broadside on the sheer awfulness of the latest incarnation of the Civilization series. What can I say? Firaxis know that us old Civ fans will buy anything in the franchise. I mean, they could wrap up a giant dog turd and we’d probably download that …

I was hoping that Gods & Kings would be what Beyond the Sword was to Civ IV. This was a misguided delusion however, as Beyond the Sword merely improved an already great game. Gods & Kings would need to move mountains to save us from the awfulness that is Civ V. The good news is that it comes close, it really does. And in my first few games I was actually succumbing to the good old “just one more turn” disease. Gods & Kings reintroduces some earlier Civ features that should have never been taken away in the first place, namely religion and espionage.

The religious aspect is a little more well thought out than its earlier incarnation in Civ IV, and gives the player the power to shift direction from science and gold to faith, a new measurement of advancement in the game. This lets you construct religious buildings as well as generate missionaries to spread the word of your religion, as well as inquisitors to undermine your rivals and get you back on track if they undermine you. I found this out the hard way when those sneaky Ethiopians sent a great prophet to my capitol and converted it.
Espionage is less interesting. It basically amounts to you putting a spy in a rival city to steal technology. That is unless you’re leading the science race, in which case you’re far better off leaving your spies at home to protect your secrets. It does have a small effect on diplomacy, but not enough to save that lemon.

The worst aspect by far of Civ V was the woeful AI opponent. The game designers made the game strategic with their awful one hex per unit idea and then gave the AI the mental abilities of a four year old with ADD and a bad case of the stupids. The good news is that the AI has been beefed up in Gods & Kings. The bad news is that its now eight years old instead of four. There is no challenge here at all. I could never beat the old Civ incarnations on the hardest difficulty. On Civ V I regularly kill it on Diety without even trying. Well, I don’t actually kill it as I get bored of waiting five minutes at end game for the AI to finish its turn. Yes, the game engine is still unbelievably slow. And this all goes back to one unit per hex. I laugh when I read interviews with the game designers where they justify their decision to make the player pay gold per turn for road and rail upkeep with the justification that the maps were getting ugly with them being covered with transport hubs. Oh yeah? Have they seen what a map looks like when you need to cover every square inch of it with military units? And try playing on islands. Most of the time I have my military sitting in the ocean as there’s no other place to put them.

I’m embarrassed that I succumbed and paid $50, (fuck me that’s an expensive expansion), for this. Oh sure, there are new civs and units and stuff. The Dutch finally get a mention after all this time which is nice, though I’m fucked if I can understand what the Celts are doing in there. But all this expansion really does is underline the god-awful mistakes that were made with Civ V. Hopefully on the next release they will go back to what worked before. Just keep the hexes, that’s about all that is good with this piece of nothingness.

 

In MMO land, we live in a Completely Different World.

I dare you to think of any commercial product in the world where if you purchase the product, and then the company producing that product makes a mistake that benefits the consumer then any consumer seen to be taking advantage of said mistake has their purchased product confiscated with no financial restitution, and the consumer is banned from buying any further products.

I dare you to think of just one, except for online videogames. Because in the online gaming world not only can you do this, but other customers who missed out on the opportunity will sing the company’s praises at doing such a wonderful job of catching nasty evil-doers, apparently blissfully unaware that they too could one day find themselves thrown out for a similar reason.

The story is that in Guild Wars 2 a valuable item was listed in a NPC vendor shop at a very small fraction of its actual price. Players naturally purchased the item, until Arenanet found out about their own mistake and reacted by banning 3000 accounts and temporarily suspending another 1000. They recently backed down a little and said that players that wished to have their ban overturned could begin the process by publicly begging for forgiveness on Arenanet’s own forum. In other news at Guild Wars 2, people caught botting receive a 72 hour ban.

There are a few points here. Number one, this was not an exploit. An exploit would be discovering that if you danced seven times counter-clockwise around the vendor while singing “Ave Maria” then the NPC would sell you the item at 1/1000th of its value. In other words, the software is not performing as intended. But purchasing an item from a vendor at the listed price? Software operating perfectly well. In the real world, if I walk into a store and purchase an item at 1/1000th of its value because the store made a mistake and listed it at the wrong price, well guess what … tough fucking luck for them, and you can bet someone in the store is going to get their butt kicked. Not only that, but in some jurisdictions if that store even advertises a product at the incorrect price then they are legally obliged to sell it to me even after discovering their own mistake.
But in MMO land the consumer gets their product confiscated and banned for life for a developer’s own mistake.

Number 2, this is all about Arenanet’s cash shop and protecting it from their own stupid mistakes. This goes back to my post earlier this week on why cash shops and free to play models are just plain bizarre. Bizarre in the sense that once again, no other commercial industry in the world uses this model that I am aware of. Defenders of Arenanet’s actions have been talking this up by way of Arenanet defending the in-game economy. There is no in-game economy at the moment; there isn’t even a working auction house. But the cash shop is working.

All of this mess goes back to the fact that the online videogaming industry has no standards to adhere to in a commercial sense. As a consumer of Steam products I dread the day when the owners decide that they’ve made enough money and the operating costs to keep all our games accessible online aren’t worth the investment any more. As a blogger though … well, it will be sweet mana from another world.

 

But I Want to Pay …

Free to play. It has many connotations, and already after a short time in the popular gaming world, a number of prejudices. I say popular, because in actual fact the service has been around in some form or another for quite a while. Runescape has been going since 2001 and has 10 million active accounts per month. But the concept was thrown into the mainstream when titles such as DDO and LOTRO went with it.

Typical associations with Free to Play are the fact that the game might be Pay to Win. Spend enough money in the in-game store and you can get around any player attempting to grind their way to victory. World of Tanks has had to weather these types of problems, and there have been some pretty devastating analysis done by various bloggers that have shown how rigged the system can be. Another problem with these games is the fact that a number of poor quality games were rushed out in an attempt to capitalise on the idea, and their general shoddiness have permeated the entire genre. And then we have Free to Play games that are ruthlessly targeted at the more vulnerable members of society who might be susceptible to subliminal messaging and manipulation in order to become hooked and spend more money than they ordinarily would.

But the biggest problem I have with Free to Play is that I like to pay for a game upfront. If the game is worth playing then I think that it is worth paying for. And a fixed price or a fixed subscription takes any financial pressure off me; I know what I am getting into. But with an in-game shop I am forced to support the game publisher in other ways, ways that I find uncomfortable or even distasteful. For example, I don’t want to walk around in-game with an item that can only be purchased. Not only do I feel stupid doing it, but the item has no real meaning for me. I play games to discover. The joy for me is in the luck of finding, or the revelation of working out how exactly to obtain an item in-game from my own efforts. Even purchasing an item from a normal auction house is preferable as it requires the effort of researching what I need and then scoping out the AH until I’m lucky enough to see one in there.

The other downside for me is that without a fixed price I am left with the unrewarding task of attempting to work out if I am giving the game developers a suitable payment for their game or if I am in fact being ripped off. I don’t want this hassle. I play games to escape this sort of mundane life shit. Just tell me how much the game is up front, let me decide if I want to pay that, and then let me in to have my little escape from reality. This works for me. I am happy. The game developer has money so they are happy. The little elves in the corner are happy

But let me make up my own mind what I want to pay? Well, that only works if I feel that I can trust the game publisher to be good intentioned and not put little inducements to get money out of me every step of the way, and not to change the rules six months into the game, and … did we say trust a game publisher? Really? I mean, I’m a nice guy and all that, (okay maybe not in some of my dear reader’s opinions), but I can count the people I trust in this world on one hand.

It’s all just a big fucking mess. Look, I like your game. So let me pay you some money and then we can all be happy. Just tell me how much.

 

City of Steam – Top Dumb Questions to ask a Game Designer

Last week I was the recipient of a personalised tour around the new browser based MMO, City of Steam courtesy of Gabriel and Andrew. I met them on Skype and immediately asked how soon we could get into the game, seeing as I hadn’t downloaded the game-client yet.
“Yeah, it’s a browser-based game, Adam,” Gabriel offered in the politest of tones.

Oh, sheesh, yeah … I knew that. I was checking to see if you knew that. And now that you do I know that you’re legit and not some scum-sucking nasty people pretending to be staff members on a new MMO just so you can steal all my photos of my dog.

I opened a window in Firefox and after a few minutes setting up an account which required an email address and a password, I was in, the game screen was loading, and there I was in City of Steam. Quite impressive really. I mean a huge barrier to MMO entry for me is the trouble in downloading and setting up a game client. There is almost no download here, and I was getting 60FPS from a server which was on the other side of the world. Admittedly the three of us were the only ones in there at the time, but when I popped in for the Alpha test on the weekend I was getting close to the same frame rate and no lag time. Impressive stuff.

After almost two hours of gallivanting around the city with my hosts, we got onto the subject of the common dumbest questions they receive about the game. My one was of course top of the list, so here they are, the top questions that make a game designer do an invisible facepalm:

Still no client download! When can I install the game?
You have already installed the web browser. There is no other download, client, or installation. The browser is all you need. Just click Play Now.

How do I quit this game? There’s no exit button!
I assume you meant to ask: “How do I close the web browser?” and “Does the web browser have an exit button?” The answers to which are: click the “X” button, and “YES”, respectively. (By the way, this is going to make this game very dangerous at people’s workplaces …)

Click to move? God I hate these games.
You can use WASD, click to move, click and hold or mouse steering.

WASD to move? God I hate these games.
…There’s click to move, too …

Why is the camera locked down in isometric view?
It isn’t. Camera movement is covered in the first 5 seconds of game play, in the tutorial, remember?

This is just another clone!
In your browser window, at only 2mb download, and you’re playing it in the airport on a laggy connection between flights, with impressive frame-rate and response time… Oh, we weren’t aware had that functionality. Actually, is there any other Steampunk MMO like this in a browser, or client?

Where can I buy a horse?
Umm … in another game. Not ours. We have steambikes and jetpacks coming in beta.

Is this game going to be like WoW or Diablo?
Considering we have less than 1% of their development budget, and ten less years to waste, I think it will play a little bit more like… umm… City of Steam. Even being compared to a AAA title is an honor for us, so on behalf of Mechanist Games, thank you!…
(EDIT: Pssst, more like Diablo)

I’ll have more thoughts on the game over the next couple of weeks. I have purposely left out my own dumb questions on the crafting system.