Geek Syndicate Issue 9 March 2014 | Page 8

Geek Syndicate So the game is free, but you have to pay to be good at it? In some cases that’s the case but in others not so much. Some, like the Guild Wars series, you just pay for the game. After that, everything is free although you can buy additional boosts if you want. Others sell you zones one at a time, or unlock character classes. There are some great implementations of the model and some bad ones, but by and large it’s about figuring out how much your market is likely to want to pay for. And of course FtP really works by tapping into worst habits of its gamers. to any actual gameplay. Then you layer in additional features like crafting, which need you to go out and collect raw materials, or collecting in-game pets, and so on. All these are about adding time to the game. way to go before it’s in any real trouble. But looking forward a next gen MMOG is long overdue, something that allows player input more freely. Why would you do those extra bits? Sure, but perhaps a little less brutally cut-throat. Planetside 2 has promised player-built and owned bases, but has yet to make much progress on that. It’s stable mate Everquest Next, a descendant of one of the earliest mainstream MMORPGs, looks more interesting. It’s promising a reactive world, one that changes based on players actions. Mainly because the game constantly rewards you with levels, abilities, items of equipment and so on. I mean, why do you play any game? For relaxation and a sense of achievement. MMOGs need to keep people playing to stay in business, its not like they sell you the game and walk away. They start a re- Like EvE? Oh, like a Dark side? Well that I need to hear about. OK, so you get the selling point of these games is the scale, right? Yup. Good. So let’s get into that. If you play a fairly linear story game like, for example Bioshock Infinite, you’ll spend maybe twelve to fifteen hours to complete it. A sprawling, single-player RPG like Fallout 3 or one of the Mass Effect series are a lot longer, but even so most players seem to complete them by about the thirty to forty hour mark. For a lot of MMORPGs, this won’t even get you to the maximum level the game offers, never mind manage all the other things you “need” to do. For some games it’s even worse, with Asian-based games like Lineage being notorious “g &