When I played Faxion Online I found the game to be awful and simply ‘not my cup of tea.’ The game used a lot of humour to try and carry it’s storyline and it wasn’t doing it for me. However… their advertisements are amazing. They have released the following two videos:
Pirates vs. Ninjas:
Cake vs. Pie:
http://gamertube.com/video-1840742-Faxion
Love or hate this game, at least they have a sense of humor.
When World of Warcraft released archaeology they did so as an incentive to continue playing even after you are post level cap. The idea was to create a new profession that would keep people occupied doing these hunting objectives, everyone loves a treasure hunt right? Rift had the same idea long before WoW ever put it in, except it’s far more of a treasure hunt.
Each artifact is part of a puzzle that has to be solved. Each of them tells a story that adds to the lore or culture. Of course you ignore this part of the game.
Each zone is going to feature a number of sets of artifacts. There are also going to be those that are cross-zone. You can find artifacts as these shiny sparkles on the ground. You will generally find them under bridges, behind rocks, in caves, behind structures, or at high altitude.
Unfortunately artifacts do not seem to be grindable. Much like Pokemon you need to trade them with other people as you are likely to find doubles and triples of everything. I’ve been selling them on the auction house at 30g a piece (doubles).
Every time you turn in a completed artifact you will get a Lucky Coin. Lucky Coins are used to purchase the items below:
As you can see it’s a lot of carebear stuff, pets, non-combat weapons, and non-combat head pieces.
You can find the vendor here:
It’s all pretty much straight forward until you run into something like this:
Artifacts have set spawn points on the maps. Some of them are kind of messed up. The one above is a little bit of a puzzle. They are all reachable by a person however for most people they will feel pretty unreachable. What you have is two bars that move up in a curve that curve to lower altitudes the higher you get up. As you can see the first jump is an unmountable jump distance. So what you end up doing instead is jumping on the ballista next to it which is at a higher elevation. You then side jump up and do tow more perfectly aimed jumps forward.
Of course if you have the heroic leap racial like I do you just jump and pop that racial and move up. Heroic leap was a pretty lackluster racial until you engaged artifacts.
Artifacts are definitely something designed around people who are either interested in:
Well for the last two days I’ve been leveling professions. Getting gear in this game is insane (so is making gold). So I decided I’d do some PvP grinding while leveling up my professions. Well I’ve been at it 2 days and am half way of my first PvP rank and all done Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. Mining it seems is one of the hardest professions to level.
What ends up happening is you level up one profession by mining out the necessary mineral. You use an ability called salvage to make leveling the other one easier. Salvaging breaks down armor into some of the mineral you used to make it and a unique item of recycled metal which is used for temporary weapon/armor/shield enchants. Leveling the second one gets easier because you have all of these extra materials. I could have probably done both in one day, but I was PvPing as well.
Mining is insanely hard to cap out. You have to level it off of a green mineral that you do not need for leveling your other professions.
As it ends up crafting isn’t an instant way to get your epics. It takes days and a chance of getting these unique currencies from daily quests. These “plaques” purchase recipes and as it seems, they’re pretty darn rare.
The utility these two crafting professions offer are endless. It seems like they’re too valuable as it seems offering massive buffs that I’m presuming are raid required… since I’m selling them for such insanely high prices.
Unfortunately as it seems the best way to gear is PvP/dungeons and rep grinding.
About two months ago I put out a review for Rift while it was still in beta. I felt at the time that the game was a major point where it was probably going to be launched soon and what I saw was what I got. The review saw more resistance than any other review I had ever done. So as a valued Beta tester the folks at Trion had felt the need to give me a free copy of their game and it just so happened they were offering a free week of play. It’s hard to turn up an almost $60 value for free. So I took a second look at the game. This time around I hit level cap.
Below are my diary issues of leveling to Level 50. In them included detailed dungeon, warfront and questing information:
So I’m giving this game a pretty average review after giving more than a fair look at this game. This review to that regard will be emphasizing the negative aspects of the game. This is not to say that there are not great parts of the game. It is by no means a lost cause and with some time and hard work this can be transformed into a game with a popular following like Guild Wars and Eve Online. If you want to look for some strong points including a powerful specialization system, strong early game, and many great instanced PvP encounters.
Major Problem #1: Dungeoning and the Lack of LFD Tool
Finding groups for dungeons has and always will be a problem for a massively multiplayer environment. You have literally hundreds of thousands of people all with varying roles and you need a leadership cast to put these people together. Leadership is going to represent less than 1% of people. Think about any given company, how many people are in charge in comparison to people who are working? How many people do you think can do a good job as a leader vs those who cannot? Think of your raid. How many people in your raid are leaders? There might be 5 people in a 25-man that are strong leaders… if you’re lucky. Game designers hence stopped putting their faith in their player’s ability to lead and made a group creating tool.
The first Group creating tool was developed by first person shooter. Blizzard was probably the first MMORPG to adapt it for the MMORPG environment. Hence it has become standard for games with instanced content of all varieties. Not having one of these is a pretty epic failure as it has become a basic element of any online game.
DC Universe has one.
Global Agenda has one.
Even Star Trek Online had one.
Why couldn’t the developers of Rift design a basic dungeon finding tool? They said they were delaying the release of this game because they wanted to release a finished and polished game. So why then does it miss a basic feature that is now required for any online game?
Finding a group at low levels is easy because everyone wants to heal and everyone can tank. Finding groups at higher levels is a mess. The game was presented with four ways of leveling, questing, rifts, pvp and DUNGEONS. Dungeons is simply not a viable way to level unless you’re a healer. Even when you’re a healer you can only level through dungeons during prime time hours.
At Level 50 this problem just compounds. Unlike the enlarged sense of community you get while leveling at level cap no one wants to PUG due to the extreme hassle. I can say I’ve been Level 50 for 48 hours and am yet to see a single Level 50 looking for anyone to fill a group in the global Level 50 channel.
Major Problem #2: Broken Questing Path
When WoW first launched it did so with 41 zones. Even with so many zones there was a gap at the level 55-60 range where you’re basically stuck on grinding. Over the years WoW learned to improve these zones so that you can’t actually finish all of the quests before advancing to the next zone of levels. In every expansion it was made that you end up having too many quests and cannot finish them all before hitting level cap.
Rift doesn’t have this problem, not even close. If you sit down and play the game all night long what you end up with is about 56 hours of content…. with 20 hours of that being you just running around killing mobs and praying for Warfront queues. There is a gap between Level 40-50 where you will advance so far and be forced to sit back and grind so you can move on to the next set.
Basically for 40-50 there are four questing zones, Iron Pine Peaks, Droughtlands, Shimmersand, and Stillmoor. Each zone will have quests that range from 40-47, Shimmersand has some up to 48, and Stillmoor is the only area covering 48-50. If you do this perfectly you might not run out of quests at level 50. That is, doing dailies every single day for every single zone and appropriately moving to each zone as soon as you get orange quests (super hard ones). However Iron Pine Peaks and Stillmoor are on one side of the world and Droughtlands and Shimmersand are on another.
On top of that there’s no breadcrumb quest leading you into Droughtlands. You are offered a breadcrumb quest for Stillmoor from Iron Pine Peaks and Meridian. If they added in another quest zone or added in more quests per zone the questing process would go smoother. Basically in order for this to feel right you should either need to do Droughtlands and Shimmersand OR Iron Pine Peaks and Stillmoor… not all of them.
Major Problem #3: Repeatable Exploits
The terrain in this game is wonky. In most games the vertical cap for moving is pretty low. That is once you hit some minor slump in the ground suddenly you’re unable to run up it. Hills in WoW were so poorly designed that it was decided it’d be easier to implement flying mounts rather than try and fix it. Rift did a pretty good job of creating unrealistic terrain where you can climb up some insane verticals.
Unfortunately having odd terrain like this can lead to massive exploiting. I’m not going to say any of them simply because it just leads to abuse… but I’ll say that certain specs of rogue have found a way of going underground in a certain warfront and attacking you without you being able to attack them back.
Repeatable exploits are called “working as intended.” When it gets nerfed or buffed they call it a balancing issue. When you see 9 rogues in the same war front using the exact same exploit you get a little bit angry. And that’s not to say I haven’t found my fair share of warrior exploits. But this is stuff that was brought up in beta that was not fixed. Nobody likes being man handled by flying warriors.
Major Problem #4: Rifts
So I went AFK next to a rift and a person added me to their party and went about killing the rift off. I came back to the computer to find that the rift was gone, I had a loot option and was not 2k XP richer. Rifts are a perfect expression of the “free rider problem.”
In the free rider problem you have some option that is free. It is free because the mass is providing the means for it to be free. For example children who do not add anything to society benefit from policing without actually contributing. They are “free riders.” The problem being that you have people who do not contribute who benefit.
Rifts are the biggest free riders in the world. You can just sit around doing nothing and get the same benefit as everyone else.
Warfronts are not so bad as you need to heal a person killing a player or kill a player to get any benefit.
Rifts are something different. They’re in such a small area and there’s no real way to track contribution since taking damage, is as merited worthy of a reward as doing it.
What really sucks is when you’re soloing a rift and one of these leaches shows up and just sits there. You presume he’ll help so you take more risks and.. they don’t pay off. He just sits there and waits for you to die.
Major Problem #5: No Addons?
When game developers fail to create some feature that people want, people usually make it themselves. A lot of the killer features you find in a polished game like World of Warcraft were invented by addon authors. Addons are usually pretty poor and crappy. Take for example AVR which was a raid assist addon developed to direct raid members into complicated staged areas. This was done by creating circles on the ground. Today Blizzard has implemented something like this by giving new raid markers the ability to create circles with symbols floating over them. The Deadly Boss Mod addon has been so successful that Blizzard has been working hard on creating a comprehensive raid guide tool.
Addon developers give temporary fixes to customization problems in your game. It also gives a good way of seeing whether you need to add that feature to your game. If everyone uses an addon then it’s a good idea to add it to your game. The best part is most of the work is already done, you just have to find a way of incorporating the addon’s code into existing code.
Not having addon authoring available is a taste of arrogance from any game developer. It’s to say that they don’t need input.
Conclusion
And that I feel are the major problems which keep this game down. Maybe there are far more stretching problems I’ll encounter at level cap. But realistically this game doesn’t have that many more problems than most MMOs do. Whether this game will succeed or not will depend on the developers continuing to pump out content and a reasonable rate and increase the accessibility of that content to new members. As of right now content feels insanely inaccessible. In upcoming patches they’ll be fixing that. Whether or not this game ends up in my “fail” series will be seen.
Well it’s part three in series of failed MMOs. Today I’ll be covering Allods Online
Allods Online was a free to play Russian franchise that featured powerful graphics and strong story archs. Allods Online on release had slightly better graphics than World of Warcraft, two factions, multiple races, multiple starting zones, and multiple classes. It represented the most dynamic and expensive free to play MMORPG on the market. To show an idea of cost the average MMO costs about $2M to make. Rift cost $50M to make. Allods with no box sales and no subscription cost $12M to make.
The game was a finished product and an amazing game to boot. The gameplay was enjoyable, the dungeon content was challenging and the PvP was balanced.
So what went wrong? Allods inevitable downfall as a competitor for DDO can be summed up in three points: (1) Greed, (2) Funding, (3) Market Data, (4) PvP.
(1) The Story of Greed
When Allods Online made its North American launch it did so without any flaws, a finished product, and a fairly large gamer base that was ever so increasingly growing. Rift sold 100,000 boxes on its launch which was considered a massive commercial success. Allods on the other hand had attracted over 500,000 gamers to their free to play model. Allods was a huge success amongst the casual gamer market that was in love with free to play games.
But the gamers were duped into what seemed like the perfect free to play game. On launch the store was fair. If you wanted a mount you purchased mount feed. Other things were included like pets, healing potions, mana potions, These items were not unpopular either and were sold at a reasonable rate. A person would buy credits with a minimum purchase value of $10. That’s about half as much as the cost of a subscription for any other game.
But the developers of Allods Online had sunk a lot of money into this game and wanted a lot more money back. After a month of being online Allods reworked their store to increase prices by almost 4x. People were upset about these ridiculous prices, but the worst was yet to come.
A fun game transformed into one that was almost unplayable without money. People’s leveling stats were reduced so that a new product, a temporary stat boost, would look more appealing to their gaming community. The people who continued to play the game bought the stat boost obviously upset while many people just quit the game completely.
Allods had lost a giant chunk of their gaming community in what felt like a vie for subscription money. My favorite part about the temporary buff is that they give it to you for about two hours and then strip it from you. That way you know the difference between what it’s like to have and not to have the buff.
Take for example if you died you received this massive 10minute curse that stacked in power. You either have to wait for it to wear off (in PvP as well). Of you could purchase a Holy Charm that would remove it. It is only recently that they removed Holy Charms.
In the end the store prices were fixed, but it was probably too late. The game had already alienated it’s game base by showing how it’s design can be driven by profits.
(2) Funding
Releasing an MMO is a hard thing. Blizzard is the only game that was able to keep their funding and design in one company. In the end they “sold out” to Activision. This allowed it so that they could design without having to ever worry about money. However the downside to this is that as their distributor and financier they will start requesting things of them. People have already remarked after only a year of the Activision/Blizzard merger of how this has changed the game and it’s marketing.
Allods entered a similar arrangement except instead of just working with a single distributor for their game like Blizzard is they operated through four different distributors, all with different demands for the game. In the end their changes to the game that effected the inevitable move of their free to play player base revolved around decisions not even pertaining to them.
On launch Allods was distributing in Russia and North America. After launch financing was cut to the game developers as they were asked to prove profitability before they received any more financing. This of course is an awfully high standard for any business at all. A business is likely to be in the red (deficit) for the first year of operation. With funding cut off for future developments Allods was forced to act fast to save money.
They set out a directive to limit the development of new content that pretty much still exists today. As an example their latest event for St. Patrick’s Day was to have GMs stand in the main cities and give out free potions to people who dressed up their characters and danced with them for St. Patrick’s Day. Any other game is going to produce content releases.
Allods can’t keep people playing their game specifically because there ends up being nothing to do. Once you level up fully and do some of their dungeons you find very quickly that there isn’t much else to do. A game without anything fresh is something that might get replayed for nostalgia purposes… but not something you will occupy your time with.
(3) Market Data
When they did end up getting funding the question came to pass, who are they making this game for. Market data was not looking so good towards a North American market. In truth the free to play craze hasn’t caught on. This is largely because anything with free associated with it is going to be given the obvious signs of some sort of trap.
Allods Online in the end represents to the average American an affirmation of that. In a time when Allods Online was in deep troubles they immediately shifted the costs to their customers. With a subscription basis the subscription fee is more likely to go down than up when profits are dwindling.
It’s, I suppose, one of the ironies of business that you need a hook to increase revenues. Decreasing price is a way of encouraging people to choose your product over one that has a stronger image. Unfortunately increasing price without offering new services just reduces customers.
Market data suggested that their main focus should be South America and Asia. A general westerner perspective on these regions is that you are more likely to con these people. In truth this is a market of poorer people who take things in turn. That is they’ll take free entertainment and pay for other things when they can afford. People in North America prefer annual rates. Why else would the highest complaints in North America be about the price of gasoline which changes on a weekly basis.
Allods fails specifically because it could not create anything that a westerner would want to pay for. If the game had provided a normal leveling experience and sold quest packs, access to zones, PvP content, or special perks for quality of life then maybe it might have been successful. If you read my review of it from almost a year ago you’d see I actually enjoyed the game. Other free to play models modified content access, this one made the non-modified version of the game very unplayable.
(4) PvP = Player vs Payment
Generally speaking when a game has two factions it should have powerful PvP. This game just doesn’t have it at all. what it offered was a limited free for all arena system where basically everyone sort of just gangs up on non-guildmates. The other part of this is random encounters with your guild’s astral ship. This of course requires you to actually build an astral ship. The concept could have been cool. Firing guns off at each other and than teleporting to the enemy’s ship.
But this kind of mass PvP needs a lot of help from developers to work and requires some facilitation. I mean the world they developed is huge. Trying to randomly find enemy air ships just did not happen. If they had created an instanced battleground featuring sinking the other person’s air ship than it might have been more acceptable. In fact that’s a great Battleground idea for Blizzard to steal.
The game itself would have been better if there was a single faction. You could still have some PvP. The game already has PvP flags turned off and on as options. Once you hit a certain level the game teaches you to turn on PvP flags and you can have an open free for all situation, this arena PvP system and this battle ships type thing.
All of this of course could be done and would have made the game better. Having one faction means there’s a higher player base to do content with. If there’s no benefit game wise for separating factions than you shouldn’t. A lot of people hated the fact that LOTRO didn’t have a playable evil faction. Of course LOTRO has probably invested more into their lore than anyone else. Had LOTRO built a PvP system their story would have sucked.
And I should say that the storyline in Allods is actually quite amazing. If you are a fan of Russian literature then you would definitely enjoy this one. However it just doesn’t seem to make so much sense as a player vs player environment.
So here’s how the story goes.
You wake at the heat of a massive battle with the enemy faction. Your commander suits you up and you lead a group of adventurer’s to defeat the enemy when something evil shows up and kills everyone. You teleport to the low level area where you as a hero of said faction will go around helping people out with smaller tasks as you get leads from these people towards some larger encounter.
How hard would it be to re-iterate this story arch as a one-faction story? There is a growing habit by developers who are trying to emulate World of Warcraft’s success to make it
But did Allods actually fail?
Usually when I do this series I’m covering a game that either has its server’s shut up, is in a constant spiraling degression of players, or has been abandoned by it’s developers. Allods is really none of these. Allods is actually still quite successful, it’s still growing and it’s developers are still actively working on balancing the game and making the game funner to play. The game may be shrinking in North America which generally frowns on the free to play model, but it is growing in Asia, South America and Russia.
The game is in fact insanely popular outside of North America which contributes to it’s questionable status as whether it actually failed or not. One thing that can be said though is that the game is most definitely dead in North America.
TheGameGuru.Me 