“Keep in mind that there’s a fundamental difference in the way of thinking and the way you need to design games if you do take them free-to-play.

Take a free-to-play game or a social game, where the business is all about – the social games’ word for it is, ‘going whaling’. The idea is you have a paying player subsidising the play of, potentially, dozens or hundreds of other users. And so you have to be willing to create a game that has the ability to make huge sums of money from relatively small numbers of people.

Once you decide that you are going to enter the whaling business, it’s a different mindset and a different set of goals you’re designing for entirely.”

- Scott Hartsman, November 16, 2011

This morning RIFT announced that it’s going free-to-play. Trion, I am disappoint.

I’ve been a RIFT subscriber since the day it launched, back in 2011. I haven’t actually been playing the game that entire time — sometimes I am playing a lot, sometimes I am playing very little — but even when I wasn’t playing I felt comfortable giving Trion and RIFT money for being an awesome game and an awesome company.

Admittedly much of my response is an emotional one. I like games that emphasize virtual worlds and being social, that have group problem-solving, and a healthy amount of content that takes a long time to finish or requires a high degree of concentration. I know this makes me something of a dinosaur amongst players, and today’s announcement feels like another sign that my kind of game is a thing of the past. I don’t like that feeling, obviously.

I have other, more logical reasons to dislike this decision too!

1) As Scott Hartsman says in the above quotation, being free-to-play changes how a game is developed. You no longer have to worry about producing regular content updates, something RIFT was previously famous for, to justify subscriptions. Instead, the monetization goal is to tune your content to encourage cash shop purchases. I find the former to be much more in my favor as a player than the latter.

2) Trion has already said that they will be offering boosts and gear in the cash shop. (On Twitter they even implied that some of the gear will be equivalent to higher tier dungeon and PvP gear.) And herein lies my fundamental dislike of cash shops: they are all about giving people ways to not play the game, rather than making the game good. Buy gear, buy housing, buy XP boosts, buy gold — it’s like you don’t even have to play the game at all! Creating a game that people will spend money to avoid playing seems like crappy game design.

3) F2P encourages transient players. In my opinion, there is a reason why the free-to-play model and the “3 month MMO” problem started trending at the same time.

I accept that what I’m looking for in an MMO is not what most people are looking for in their game. While I’m glad that many folks are loving the current marketplace, I miss feeling like part of that. Such is the price of being old and opinionated and stubborn, I suspect.

Cash shops. Every game’s got one now, particularly MMOs. It doesn’t even matter if the game is free-to-play or subscription — cash shops may have once merely been part of a payment model, but now they’ve broken out into being a feature.

I’ve gone into my dislike of cash shops in general before. I think they can be done well, but rarely actually are. Too often a game is hobbled for non-shop players with extraordinary XP grinds or tiny inventory slots, or relies on some of the more skeevy psychological elements to lead people into buying. (Here is a hint: if we all mocked Zynga for it two years ago, don’t do it now.)

Ellyndrial was ranting in IRC last week about cash shops, as he’s wont to do, and it made me wonder how they ended up being so ubiquitous. Why did everyone suddenly decide that games need cash shops and players will love them? Was there some kind of referendum I missed?

After a little reflection I realized that there was a referendum, and I voted in favor.

This is the sparklepony, known formally as the Celestial Steed. It was released in April, 2010 by Blizzard for World of Warcraft. It was one of the first account-wide mounts in the game (if not the first?). The Steed matched your fastest riding speed, and it sparkled. It was sold for a mere $25 on the Blizzard Store.

The pony made $4 million dollars in the first week. That’s over 140,000 purchases. As I recall at the time, most players mocked themselves for buying it — $25 was more than a month of subscription, after all — but we bought one nonetheless. When I logged on after work the day it was announced, Dalaran was a sea of shiny ponies.

In retrospect, I don’t think I would have bought the Celestial Steed if I had known how much it would galvanize the industry to each create cash shops of their own. We thought we were buying a slightly overpriced horse, but instead we were buying an entirely new payment method.

I don’t much have a point, except it’s funny how little purchasing decisions can become huge industry or genre game-changers.

(Pony image from MMO Champion, natch.)

This week on Cat Context we eat a lot of virtual candy from the Candy Box and get the inside scoop on what it’s like to go from game player to indie game developer.

Recently occasional special guest Mangle from gamer to full-time indie developer, and now people all over the world are playing his first mobile title, Flower Pot. We sit down with him to talk about “life on the other side”. Does making games change how you play them? Is the app store over-saturated with indie titles? Can developers use their powers for good and make money?

Mangle tells it like it is, gives some tips on designing your first game, and makes the rest of us feel just the tiniest bit bad for our “entitled gamer” moments. (Just a bit. Not much.)

Also under discussion this week is viral sensation Candy Box! We try to figure out why it caught on so quickly with many players, and what lessons it might have for MMOs.

As always Liore is joined by the most excellent Arolaide and Ellyndrial.

Send your questions or comments to podcast@lioreblog.com, tweet @Liores, or call our voice mail at (347) 565-4673 and be entered to win a copy of the Humble Bundle – Blendo Games edition on the next podcast! (That includes Atom Zombie Smashers, 30 Flights of Loving, and more!)

It would be downright awesome if you gave us a vote on iTunes. :)

* The website for Flower Pot and the Flower Pot iTunes Store link
* Candy Box, the addictive viral browser game
* Free Music Archive page for our theme, in THE crowd by The Years

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Listeners of the podcast will already know that I tried out Neverwinter in one of the closed betas, and along with Arolaide and Ellyndrial I tore it apart on the show. While the animations were truly terrible at the time, my real problem with the game was it didn’t add anything new to the MMO genre. Why does this game exist? Why would I play it over anything else currently available?

Neverwinter launched last week — okay look they’re calling it an open beta but there’s no character resets and we all know what’s really going on here — and I was surprised to see a very positive response to the game on social media and blogs. (Ardwulf called it a potential surprise MMO hit of 2013, which seems appropriate.)

Perhaps I had been too hasty in my judgement? The client was still on my computer, so I patched it up and gave Neverwinter another shot. After a few hours of playing, I.. remain unconvinced, but I suspect now that the problem is me and not the game.

But let’s start with a disclaimer — I have only put 5 or so hours into this launch version of Neverwinter, which admittedly is not a lot. However, for three days in a row whenever I sat down to play the game the servers were down, including a “scheduled” 4 hour maintenance window during prime time on Saturday night. I mean hey, launches are tough and Cryptic is hardly the only company to see their servers go up in flames during a launch, so while I don’t see this as some permanent black mark on their record it certainly meant I had less exposure to the game before writing this.

I rolled a Devout Cleric because I cannot stop creating healers. The intro experience has been vastly improved from the beta. The interface seems on par with other “action MMOs”, although I don’t think any game yet has figured out a smooth way to toggle from aim mode to UI mode (it’s the ALT key in Neverwinter, which feels awkward to my hands).

Launch changes aside, the game still doesn’t feel fresh to me. I realize that the D&D/Forgotten Realms lore  has been around well before many modern MMOs were just a gleam in a dev’s eye, but nonetheless Neverwinter has been released after them and comparisons are inevitable. In fact, playing the game made me realize that I am so tired of many MMO and Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes. I have come to twitch at the sight of yet another quest giver with punctuation over their head. I am no longer charmed by Dwarves calling out for ale in Scottish accents. I am over transparently grinding boars to gain skill points to kill more boars.

While playing the game I kept thinking that it was essentially Lord of the Rings Online, only with no ring.

As I said before, judging by my peers’ reaction to the game this is more a reflection of me than of it. I think that I’m finally burnt out on standard fantasy MMOs with standard MMO mechanics and standard F2P cash shops.

All that being said, there are a few elements of Neverwinter that deserve special recognition. The first is The Foundry, which lets players create their own dungeons and encounters for others. I’ve heard some complaints that the tools are limited, but at least it’s a new idea and I think people are enjoying it. For me the most unique part of the game is the Neverwinter Gateway, its associated website. From there players can look at their character’s armory, use the auction house, send and recieve mail, even craft. And it’s all available for free! The Gateway is honestly the best set of web tools that I’ve seen with a non-browser MMO, and I’m hoping that other developers steal the idea.

All in all, Neverwinter is a serviceable game that I wish I was enjoying as much as most others seem to be. However, I think at this point in my “MMO career” I need something more than serviceable – I want new ideas, new lands, to be amazed. We’ll see if burnout has caused me to set my expectations too high.

I travel over the Canada-US border a lot — at least once a month — and because of that I’ve developed a healthy fear of border guards. In most cases they’re somber yet polite, but occasionally a guard is cranky and there are few worse feelings than realizing that you just became their unlucky target.

(As as aside, I do have a good border guard story. One time a few years ago the guard asked why I was travelling to Seattle, and I told him I was going to hang out with people I met in World of Warcraft. He jovially responded, “World of Warcraft?! That game is for babies. Real gamers play Everquest II.”)

It was because of all my border experiences that Papers, Please by Lucas Pope caught my eye. Described as a “Dystopian Document Thriller”, the game is still in beta and just yesterday was accepted to Steam through the Greenlight program.

In Papers, Please you play the border guard at a checkpoint in some imaginary Eastern European-esque country. Your job is, quite simply, to not let the wrong people into your country. In practice this is much more difficult than it sounds.

There are a myriad of things to check with each person, including matching up their documented height and weight, work visa details, interviews about the purpose of their visit, and much more. You’re aided by a system to check discrepencies (for example, clicking on the passport photo and then on the person in front of you will confirm or deny that they are the same person) and a resource book that lists things like the various valid passport issuers in this imaginary region.

As if that wasn’t stressful enough, you have 9 in-game hours at your post each day and you’re only paid for how many people you process during that time. The result is a careful balancing act of accuracy and speed. Go too fast and you’ll let in the wrong people and be fined. Go too slow and you can’t pay your heating bill and your family slowly freezes to death. (I’m not even joking — you get family status updates at the end of each day.) Sometimes your office hours will be cut short by a rogue protester rushing the gates, or you lose precious time conducting long strip searches for contraband.

There were moments when I wanted to let someone in I shouldn’t, rules be damned, like when I had to split up a husband and wife. This game isn’t as realistically bleak as something like Cart Life, but it also revels in its stern Cold War atmosphere.

I really enjoy puzzle games, particularly logic and observation puzzles, and this is a fun one. Although the graphics are pretty basic, it has solid atmosphere and gameplay, and yes, actually gave me a little sympathy for my real life border guards. I can’t say that this game would keep me occupied for more than an hour or two in it’s current state, although more content has been promised in the final version, but considering it’s free right now that’s a fine deal.

Yesterday I rewatched the totally wackadoo trailer for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in anticipation of its release tomorrow, and it got me thinking about some of my favorite trailers of the recent past.

Game trailers can come in many forms — cinematic trailers are often the most striking, but also lack the information I want to know before I buy a game. On the other hand, gameplay trailers can better show off the actual features but it’s not easy to make playing a game a spectator sport.

The best trailers, I think, manage to be memorable while doing a great job of representing the aesthetics of the full game. Below are a few of my recent favorites.

Mass Effect 3: launch trailer

This trailer makes me want to play Mass Effect 3 again, which really says something. The combination of Clint Mansell’s haunting score with quick shots of familiar faces and epic battles still gives me goosebumps. This trailer is really most effective for fans of the series — I’m not sure a total newbie will get as much out of it — but for the final battle of a story-driven trilogy, that seems like a great marketing decision. Also I’m irritated by the lack of FemShep, but I realize that’s a personal problem.

 

Dead Island: the “reverse trailer”

This trailer is infamous. It’s gory, it’s gripping, it’s heartbreaking — it’s everything you would expect from a zombie apocalypse. This trailer also demonstrated Deep Silver’s willingness to push boundaries (in this case by showing the death of a child), which in retrospect possibly helped encourage the nonsense that is Torso-gate. Unfortunately, this trailer is much, much, much better than the actual game, and so while it’s a pretty fine example of “cinema in a minute” it’s arguably not a great way to advertise Dead Island.

 

Portal 2: teaser trailer

This is another sequel trailer that was made for fans of the franchise more than new players, but honestly who wasn’t familiar with GlaDOS by 2010? I love this trailer because it’s a great example of Valve’s amazing marketing: in less than a minute they set the scene (a ruined Aperature Science), set the tone (with eerie robotic music), showed a bit of gameplay, and established that GlaDOS is back and still sassy. You monster.

 

Hotline Miami: live action trailer

I love this trailer. First, doing a “live action” game trailer is really unique, but it gives the trailer a visceral tone that it would probably lack from just 90 seconds of retro pixel action. It highlights the awesome Hotline Miami soundtrack, the review snippets are really artfully designed, and the whole thing just leaves you feeling unsettled.

 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: cinematic trailer

Cinematic trailers can encourage terrible marketing practices, but the lengthy one for DE:HR is an example of it done right. This trailer does a great job of establishing the setting and tone of the game world, and introducing us to Adam Jensen, an ex-cop with robot arms and the feeling that things are not as they seem. Like all good trailers, this makes me want to go home and boot up DE:HR, like, right now.

 

Wrath of the Lich King: cinematic trailer

Did you really think I’d make this list without a single Blizzard title? It was tough to settle on just one trailer, since Blizzard arguably makes better cinematic trailers than any other developer of the last 10 years. Wrath was not my favorite expansion (that would be TBC, obvs — OLD SCHOOL RULES), but this trailer is a perfect mix of lore and action, and actually made me tear up a bit the first time I saw it. Poor Arthas and his haunted hat.

 

Special Mention!

Borderlands 2: doomsday trailer

This isn’t a great trailer exactly, and people generally seem to like the Wimoweh one more, but there is a lot about this trailer that I admire. 2k Games / Gearbox / whomever is really really really really good at branding. Seriously. This trailer has lots of action and a lot of guns, it has catchy music, it introduces us to Handsome Jack, and it does a rock solid job of demonstrating the joyous, irreverent violence that Borderlands fans love.

We’re recording the spoiler episode for Bioshock Infinite on Sunday! Tell us what you thought of the ending at (347) 565-4673, @liores on Twitter, or podcast@lioreblog.com

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When I’m not playing games I’m watching scary movies. Occasionally I’m going to post about them too.

 

In retrospect Hemlock Grove was doomed in my eyes from the start.

The 13-episode miniseries is the first Netflix Original production to be released after the stunning House of Cards, and although not every production can star Kevin Spacey as a political sociopath (much to my dismay) I was expecting something of a similar calibre. To be fair, that’s an incredibly hard act to follow.

The other reason I was expecting more than Hemlock Grove delivers is not the show’s fault, per se. Last weekend I was in Las Vegas, and across the street from my hotel room window was a gigantic screen that advertised the show every 15 minutes or so. After a weekend of three-story-tall letters shouting at me about the Terrifying! Chilling! Exciting! Hemlock Grove! by Eli Roth! I figured I should at least check it out.

Hemlock Grove has been misleadingly labelled as a horror series, when in fact it’s more of a murder mystery with 3-4 moments of extreme gore.

The show quite obviously wants to be Twin Peaks for the Twilight set, but it has none of David Lynch’s menacing style and characters come off as inconsistent rather than quirky. The acting is awkward, to say the least. There are many scenes where Famke Janssen (as mysterious matriarch Olivia Godfrey) poorly affects a British accent in conversation with Bill Skarsgård (as her son Roman Godfrey) while he poorly affects an American accent. I was left more fascinated by the fate of their vowels than anything the characters were saying.

All this would be excusable if the writing wasn’t utter shit. It’s bad, you guys. Really, really bad. At least twice I noticed sentences with the wrong verb tense, and it wasn’t on purpose. The AV Club review lists some of the worst bits of dialogue, which include “People see Peter as just a flying piece of paper they can put everything they’re afraid of on.”, and the painfully phrased “I believe I’ve accepted I’ve fallen victim to collective hysteria.”. (What?)

Weirdly enough, early on the show does have one of the best human-to-wolf transformation scenes I’ve ever seen. So, um, props to the special effects folks, I guess.

Popular media is already filled to the brim with werewolf/vampire hijinks, and I’m not really sure what Hemlock Grove thought it was bringing to the table. It’s too “kinky” for the teen girl crowd, but falls well short of the over-the-top exploitation of True Blood. At least True Blood is gleeful! Hemlock Grove is painfully unfun, and the actors are stuck gloomily plodding through ludicrous scenes. (At one point Roman Godfrey has to cook a lot of bacon for reasons that were really never properly explained. Moodily. MOODY BACON.)

I’d love to see Netflix invest in some good genre/horror material but despite the 3-story tall advertising campaign Hemlock Grove is not it.