I'd like to debunk the current myth and trend that games need to get more and more casual and have less and less barriers.

A game is a challenge within a subset of rules.

Challenge doesn't necessarily mean hard, because it could be anything, even pure luck. Roll the dice and win, or in the best example: A slot machine is still a game. Of course, even a slot machine has rules, you can't just smash it open.

I think most people would define pure luck as poor gameplay, regardless of how compelled they may be to play.

I also think most people would define something that they cannot 'beat' as poor gameplay, but that's more personal, because something extraordinarily difficult for one person could be relatively easy for another. Variety is the best solution.

The problem, I feel, is that the entire games industry is focusing on making things more casual / easy / accessible. It's a natural turn, why wouldn't they want to have a wider base of customers to sell to? So the 'hardcore gamer' as it were, is being vilified, even by people who probably fit the description (key note: If you've ever written a word about games on your blog). The bandwagon is currently praising elements that aren't really gameplay.

The easiest way to become more accessible is to reduce gameplay. Reduce the challenge. It's the biggest barrier, right?

The easiest way to reduce barriers is to lax and widen the ruleset. Rules are barriers.

After reducing challenge and rules, the next step to more inclusion is to increase the rewards. Dangle the carrot, maybe even drop it more often. Human beings have complex and numerous subtle incentives that they'll react to.

In the hunt for reaching a wider, more casual market, developers have to be careful they aren't gutting their games in the process.

Let's just please not end up playing nothing but slot machines.

How do you want your PvP?

There's this perception, it may be correct: PvP'ers don't want obstacles between them and the action.

Are all PvP players like that? I don't think so. If I'm in the mood for deathmatch, I want to jump right in. For something strategic I'd prefer to take some time laying down foundations before the blood spills. And for tactical, I want good scenarios and tools / planning to coordinate inside my team.

Keen has highlighted his thoughts on the downsides of Darkfall and the summation seems to be that players aren't taking the time to build before the blood. So the PvP / gameplay is more shallow than it should be, players are skipping anything that looks like an obstacle.

Two things come to mind:

1. Darkfall isn't guiding players in the right directions. Maybe the balance is off and the grind is too much for things like battle ships. Sieges are too big, the world doesn't have enough sand or maybe it's too sandy? I haven't played the game so I won't pretend to go over the finer points, but it's not the PvP utopia we've all been waiting for. Just throwing players at each other and enabling PvP isn't automatically fun and fulfilling. As Jeremy T commented: "Good PvP doesn’t simply happen in a vacuum - the developers have to make it happen."
2. Many PvP players want all of their progression via PvP. They're not builders. This lends credence to Lum the Mad's persistent musings that you cannot go back to Ultima Online. A game where PvE worker bees ran around doing all of the grinding and PvP players farmed the honey from them. Can that be replicated? Should it? Maybe there's another formula that provides the honey, the deeply fulfilling and tasty honey of satisfaction that comes from taking someone else's stuff.

Number #2 is the bigger picture I think. Whatever you wish to call it, whether it be Hardcore PvP, Impact PvP, or Risk / Reward PvP, no matter how you want your PvP, if it's within an MMORPG it should be part of a bigger game. That includes *gasp* non-PvP activities and players too. Otherwise, why not just go play other non-MMO games? I can get instant action from Team Fortress 2 that's more entertaining to me than what I found in WAR or what I've seen from Darkfall, because Valve chose to concentrate on PvP directly rather than bullshit us with the pretense of creating a world.

Do you want all-PvP instant action? MMORPGs are probably the wrong place to get that. Especially if you want equal balancing.

Do you want territory claiming & defending, ala sieges? MMORPGs are still struggling to do this and frankly sliding backwards in the process. Probably because it doesn't work in a vacuum. There's not much incentive to defend something pre-built, that doesn't hold much relevance to anything else.

Do you want to be the Wasp that snatches honey from Worker Bees and other Wasps? We'd need an MMORPG with a great big outdoors of more than just bee hives and nests. It's got to have some flowers and fields, but preferably far more than that too. And there has to be some mechanics to keep both the Wasps and the Worker Bees happy and buzzing around, because if it's brutal on the Bees they'll just go elsewhere. Maybe my insectoid example is wrong here, but what I'm saying is I'd love to see some great PvP that matters within a full gameworld, complete with economy, exploration, mobs with decent AI, all of the trappings found in the glorious holy grail of MMOs.

It would be best to combine all three above. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other PvP possibilities. How do you want your PvP?

We've got a competitive culture of money. Oddly as I complain about nickel and dime schemes, someone else comes out to defend the peddlers. Because taking people's money is so damn respected.

Pay-to-Pee.

Now here's an airline proposing that they charge patrons to use the toilet. It's funny at first, but then someone is bound to realize that if they're there, on that plane, they'll pay it. And then they'll say it wasn't so bad, the airline has to make money after all.

What's so fun about spending in small increments for things that should be included? Especially when the increments add up to large numbers quickly. Maybe that's even more respected: Stealthily taking as much money as possible. That's clever right? They're great for being so clever and taking our money so much. Love the con man for the artistry of his con.

Why do we put up with this? Isn't it theft to be charged again for part of something you've already purchased? And shouldn't we expect maintenance, updates and improvements on services we're paying subscription fees for? We're already paying.

What's next, paying for the barf bag, or the lifejacket or oxygen mask? They'll call it insurance of course. Hell, isn't there already insurance for losing your luggage? Shouldn't that be a responsible part of the service in the first place? A little disclaimer takes that out, so you don't have much recourse when they lose something valuable. It was your fault, even though they lost it, you should have known better than to trust people you paid to transport you and your things. So get the insurance. More nickels. More dimes.

Pay for a Service twice?

Services within other services are treated like the new revenue stream. Is this really the future, whether we like it or not?

Why am I charged a system access fee for my cell phone? I already paid a startup fee, a connection fee and I pay for each and every individual feature my phone uses. What the hell is the system access fee for exactly? That's not a real actual thing, it's mumbo jumbo for let's charge you something extra so your $40 plan comes as a $50 billing.

Have we just gotten used to being double-dipped?

Why should MMOs start micro-charging for individual in-game features and items? Because it's the quickest way to bigger profits? Seriously, are they struggling? We pay a monthly fee for a game that's updated and maintained, including features and content that we patiently wait for that should have been in the release. Charging more should be a breach of trust, so why does it seem like players are ready to take that in stride? Taking more of our money is respected. Too damn respected.

Except I don't.

I don't respect it.

It pisses me off. I end up using the same product, paying more, but looking for a competitor that doesn't piss me off. If all of the competitors do it, I get pissed at that entire industry, for being corrupt. I'm not the only one.

The carrot and the bait-and-switch. The handling fees but no guarantees for how it's handled. The micro-you-won't-notice-if-its-in-small-payments-transactions on top of a subscription I'm already paying.

Charge me up front or charge me per service, but don't recurse and reiterate those charges.

Game Payment Models.

Microtransactions? Maybe if that's the only revenue you're tapping, but I'm probably not your market because I expect I'd get overcharged that way. Even the name for it: 'Free 2 Play' is a bit of a marketing scam. You pay as you go, it's not really free. You may start with a small trial at first, but should we label every game that has a corresponding demo as 'Free'?

Boxed? Great. I almost referred to it as the old-fashioned way. Pay for a game, there you go.

Boxed + Subscription? Fine, I'll even gladly pay for expansions if they're significant. I'm happy to pay fair prices for good services. I'm even thrilled by ongoing content updates (if they actually include content, after all, I'm paying). But I loathe being tricked into paying more (or getting less) than I expected. Don't bullshit me that my subscription pays for playing online, I can do that without paying monthly. My subscription pays for you to update your game to a reasonable degree. In exchange, you get to launch while still missing a feature or two. I accept that, even though I almost shouldn't.

Boxed + Subscription + Expansions + Microtransactions / DLC + Promotional Extras? C'mon, seriously?

I'm a self-confessed consumer whore. I am happy when you're making an honest buck, but stop ripping me off with all this extra dinging. Pick one revenue model, don't try to sneak all of them in.

I don't want to order a Steak and get charged when the waiter uses the pepper mill, but sadly I expect that'll probably happen eventually too. And someone will happily explain that pepper costs money too. Maybe we'll even get charged for every ingredient in our meal, after paying for the meal itself of course. That's all perfectly reasonable to someone, just so long as it's a clever way to make money.

*sigh*

Games are not Movies.
Games are not Movies.
Games are not Movies.

It's been said thousands of times before, but now it's been said three times again. Perhaps more might be needed.

Games are games.

Even though a variety of developer <-> publisher relationships have been tried, and will continue to evolve, you cannot drop in a production model from another industry. For starters, game development itself isn't broken, many great games have been made. This isn't a small infant industry anymore. Game development isn't even strictly the same as software development, although it's often mistaken as such.

Waaaay too many bad comparisons lately. Games are not Cars, TV Shows, Sports or Comic Books either.

I think it's too convenient to chalk the recent games industry layoffs as simply part of an economic downturn. It certainly doesn't seem like business as usual, that would be bleak if it were. Although as one friend said to me "they'll still need to make games".

A lot of people who've recently lost their jobs will stay quiet on the topic, finding new employ is a bigger priority than dwelling on what's gone. Meanwhile, others are calling this normal, which does get a reaction from me.

All of the layoffs are unfortunate. Some seem like honest cuts, while others smell of corporate politics and market maneuvering.

What we're seeing doesn't jive as a fair representation of game sales and /or profit. It's far more about current expectations of shareholders: That every public company should downsize and prove that they're 'agile'. I've repeated this same sentiment in comments on other blogs, but I'm burning out on the rationalizing press releases and the people who readily buy into them because it supports their 'free market' religion.

What's sad is it will trickle down. Publishing will decline for awhile, at least until the next quarterly results are in. Shipping successful product won't guarantee contracts for the next game. This will affect the smaller, privately-owned studios too. And there are a lot of resumes floating around right now.

=(

I admire Keen's persistence and passion, he so badly wants WAR to be the game he imagined it would be. He's created a map and an outline for what he hopes the Land of the Dead update will be.

The past few months WAR has seen a lot of changes, big and small. Some of it goes with the territory for any MMO release. The more game-changing stuff has been accoladed while my mouth is agape. If the game didn't need the changes so much, the playerbase might have revolted, but like Keen they're a persistent lot: They want their RvR that bad. And it still has a long ways to go.

WAR is so obviously broken to me. It can be fixed and it probably will be fixed, possibly over and over again. I'm not predicting any sort of gloom and doom, but there are frustrations and those will continue. Let's face it, this game hasn't just been beta-tested while we play, it's still being designed. Or redesigned, depending on how you'd like to look at it.

There's a school of thought prevalent in the community, that DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) was closer to the mark in RvR goodness. In that case, this community is even more stubbornly sticking with Mythic, because that taste is still with them and they want it again.

It does beg the question though, why didn't Mythic just upgrade DAoC? Aside from the updated graphics engine (with many of its own problems), is WAR a downgrade from their previous game? DAoC v0.9?

I burned out waiting for the outcome, but I find myself ever curious where this game is going to end up.

(Related: I Has PC has an article up regarding incomplete MMOs and the possibilities of commercial betas.)

Moorgard adds his take to the Tabula Rasa reflections. It's a good read and I'll pull out a specific part that caught my eye:

Pretty much sums up my opinion whenever someone says the Fantasy genre has already been cooked in the MMO space. In particular, saying we've got WoW so we don't need more is like saying more Vampire movies are pointless because Near Dark did it so well.