Finally off the WoW?

It's official, I think I am finally done with the great and almighty World of Warcraft. I canceled my account today. After nearly 5 years of playing including time in the closed and open beta phases, I've had enough. I tried to do one last raid, a simple 10-man Naxx run... it was so boring I pulled the plug on my router to fake-disconnect.

It's funny, even though I'm probably quitting the game and not going back, never to see the geeky denizens of Azeroth again... I still did not want to 'man up' (as much as you can in a game raid) and just say I wanted to leave. I'm not sure if this is a personal defect or not, but I don't appriciate any game that makes me feel that I'm going to be letting these anonymous people down by leaving them short a healer (I played a holy paladin). Psychoanalysis aside, MMOs need to find a way for players to be able to invest time when they want to, off a schedule.

It's really the cardinal sin of MMO's. If you want to get anything done, you need to either join a guild with strict attendance rules and a DKP system, or hope that someone with enough charisma and say in that server's community decided that they need your class that night for a PUG raid. Not to mention the pug raids really only came to the general public with the release of the far to easy WOTLK content. You want accomplishment, but at the same time you really want something that you can jump in and out of, without bothering the progression of others. The company that can figure out how to have a MMO that is large but you are able to jump in and out of, without affecting real accomplishment, will truely innovate the genre. Unfortunetly, real innovation in the MMO market is few and far between. Even WoW, for all it's splendor, copies most if not all of the standard MMO technology.

For those of us who played the original Everquest, or before it Ultima and all it's revisions, WoW was in many ways more of the same. It takes most of the same game mechanics, if better refined and polished, and reuses them to it's benefit. In small doses, I have tried the other MMO offerings of this year and the previous year. All I see is more of the same. There are small bonus' to each game, Warhammer online had a very good idea with public quests, Age of Conan's keeps were very cool. But each game, when boiled down to the technical way the game plays, is very much the same thing.

A Gaming Disease

Hello, and welcome to my new blog. Nothing new about blogging, but it's still pretty new to me. I have always liked to write, but never really put it anywhere for general consumption. For the most part I'm pretty grammatically correct and will try to keep my posts well written and therefor easy to read.

A Gaming Disease is a title that I just grabbed out of the top of my head. Don't misunderstand, I do not think that gaming is an addiction, a disease, or anything else so called shrinks and/or doctors will try to label it. I am VERY against any form of censorship and this includes games most of all. As far as updates, I will try to add a new posting every week, and stick to that schedule. If I find that a certain day always seems to be my best 'writing day' or just the most calm day where I can sit down and think about gaming issues that bug me or new game releases that I want to talk about (kind of like a quasi-review).

That's enough of an intro I think, at least for now. Time for my first post, thanks for reading.

Buggy games, but no fallout?

So, Dawn of War 2 launched recently. I was pretty excited about it, seeing that I liked the first dawn of war and the beta of dawn of war 2 they did (it was really a hype beta, but whatever, free game).

So game launch day arrives, I get it on steam (with some download issues, but probably steams fault). Start playing the game...

Crash.

Damn, I thought, I guess it's somehow incompatible with Windows 7, so I do a little forum searching, apparently not.

All Windows Vista 32-bit installations of the game have a memory allocation issue which causes FREQUENT (Read: all the time) crashes whenever the game has to load, which is every time you start a game online. Even if this was tolerable, there is another bug. If you reinforce your troop's squads during a game, the game will add that troop to the population cap, permanently. By the end of even a short 1v1 match, your pop cap is maxed and you can no longer build any new units in that map...

This pretty much ruins ranked games, and multiplayer in general. Playing the single player is a chore, as the game frequently crashes since there is so much loading. The game luckily keeps your place by saving frequently, but starting the game back up after every single mission can get irritating real fast.

The really sad thing is this game is a great game that has been seriously marred by game-breaking bugs.

This seems to be the trend with current gen games now. There is no possible way these developers do not know about these issues before launch. I don't see how any testing could have missed the major memory allocation bugs and the population cap bug, they are just too obvious and they occur EVERY time the game is launched. So I have to believe that the publisher and developer decided to launch anyways, and then fix it after the game had been released.

As I'm sure you all know, this has been a major trend now for some time, with some games not even running without 'hotfix' updates released the same day as the game hit store shelves.

The big problem, I think, is the trend of people pre-ordering games. When you pre-order a game, you are trusting that the developer and publisher of the game you pre-ordered is going to deliver a relatively bug-free game. This would be fine, if they ever delivered on that promise. Constantly games come riddled with bugs, with major DRM issues (although realistically i think most of these claims are from people who pirated it and couldn't get it to work, but whine on the public forums.), or the worst, cut down and promised as DLC later on.

That is the worst of the worst, the new DLC (downloadable content) trend. Here's the scam, take a normal game, but cut some of the more time consuming things out of the game. Instead, create a system so that the game can be 'updated' or accept 'add-ons' that we will promote as DLC. That way, we can pump out more games faster, while still getting some hype every time we release another DLC update that should have been with the game at launch.

I sound a bit cynical there, I know. DLC in it's purist form is a great idea and should be embraced, but it is far too often abused.

Myself, I think I'm pretty much done pre-ordering anything. I'm waiting for the reviews, and usually more importantly, the forum chatter for that game. I mean, even for me, an avid gamer who loves to play almost any game type, I can't enjoy a game that is broken. Would you stand for anything else that runs only sometimes? Of course not. You pay upwards of $60 for new releases, sometimes more. We should and need to demand better quality. It's like the price of the games has gone up and retroactively the quality of the game has gone down.

This will never change until gamers change our ways. Publishers know that if they hype a relatively good game up enough, they will get some pretty hefty pre-orders to brand new games that have not even been reviewed yet. From a business standpoint, pre-order sales are even better than release sales. It's basically money in the bank without giving any kind of product. The only thing they are selling at that point is hype.