World of Warcraft is popular because it's already popular. There are only so many people who play MMORPGs, and those people all have played WoW already, and their friends all play WoW. It doesn't even matter if the new MMORPG that comes out is a better game than WoW, because it won't have the playerbase of WoW, and that's why people will stay with WoW. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
Absolutely true, hence the facebook of games... comment. Although there are niche communities still in a few other games, they are much harder to break into unless you already are in a group of real life friends who know each other in person. WoW is the random dude01 on the internet gets to play with randomdude02 with little barrier.
As for Skyrim, maybe they patched some things I didn't look at since I haven't been paying attention for the past couple months, but basically, out of the box, every skill besides the armor skills were utterly broken from a game balance perspective (Hey guys, look at me kill a bonus boss in one swing with my 10,000 attack power weapon!) (Hey guys, watch my stealth skills as I sit on the head of a guard in broad daylight without being seen and pickpocket him naked!) and many of the game features were placeholders at best.
Bethseda's games challenge were always in the meta gaming, all RPG's have munchkinism, even Baldur's gate the best RPG of all time had its EZ buttons.
Congratulations on getting married to a random personalityless NPC. Enjoy your three lines of totally generic spouse text repeated forever and daily pie.
I don't think it will be possible to simulate a meaningful romantic relationship in virtual space for a long time without allot of "meta-gaming". This was a sales gimmick to try and compete with the Mass Effect and Dragon age series, not a core mechanic. I completely ignored it and it didn't effect my experience what-so-ever.
Yay for the new "endless quests" I can get from the thieves guild that involves breaking into the shack of a peasant who apparently either made their furniture themselves when they were drunk or stole it from the "failures" heap of a real carpenter, and have nothing more to their name than some rags for clothing, wooden spoons, and a single loaf of bread, but somehow suddenly have golden candelabras for you to steal. They will be completely unguarded and provide absolutely zero challenge for you even if you don't bother stealthing at all.
They could have done better with these, but they are not really the main focus of the game. Those are just added extra's. In fact I only did two random side quests for the thieves guild. One was comparable, but not that bad, the other made sense. It's not much worse then some of the things even in Dwarf Fortress itself. The main quest for the thieves guild was compelling enough. The cities main quest in Markarth was very compelling too and fit in quite well the side quests around that area. I haven't played a game yet were "randomly generated quests" were any better or worse really.
But don't worry, there's the scripted quests that you will probably accidentally complete when you randomly wander into a cavern and pick up some random bauble and have no idea why you're suddenly on a new quest, only to find out you've just completely skipped all the good parts of the quest that provide any meaning or context, and just have to report in that bauble to the lost-and-found.
I hate this too, but the genre takes this for granted and foists waypoints and objectives on the player. With allot of the world randomly iterated even in production and not necessarily hand crafted, this is even necessary when cave X is almost the same as cave Y. I really hate this, but it was not unbearable. Baldur's gate, and Planescape are the only games in this genre that managed to avoid this crap.
Plus those other caves are basically linear dungeon crawls that essentially involve a set of enemies that are too weak to be even proper punching bags leading up to an arbitrary boss fight that, if those punching bags before provided any challenge, will now be basically impossible to fight "fair" against, meaning that you have a choice between being bored through 90% of most dungeons, or exploiting glitches to survive the bosses, and being bored the rest of the time.
I ran into a little of this, but once you are familiar with the game mechanics you can limit your progression without too much artificial skill grinding.
Yeah, there's room for improvement, here.
Yeah, to bad Bioware got devoured by EA, and produced the Dragon Age series =/ Dragon Age one was 'ok' though, ok enough for one play through, have not played 2 or any of the others yet.
I'd also point out that basically everything that was done between Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Skyrim was basically "just try to add as much of the fixes that modders did to Oblivion into the vanilla game as possible." In fact, remember Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul? Yeah, after that, they just plain hired Oscuro to work for Bethesda. That's not really a complaint, if they can't do anything better, that's at least something, but one would think that having at their disposal total artistic control would have led to something better than the utter placeholder that was, for example, the marriage system. But oh no, they just HAD to release on the utterly arbitrary 11-11-11 release date instead of actually shipping a finished game.
Haha, absolutely right here, its irritating, but even Lord British's early titles were polished, but once money becomes the focus instead of Art you get crap like this.
Money is not the primary motivation for great art, hence another reason why copywright is flawed today (it may not have been in the 1800's). It was all about the distribution of goods because printing presses and great works of art "were" such a great investment. Now its easy to distribute anything (3D printers, Computer Aided Design, YO!, the internet, cheep mass storage...). So I welcome the rise of indie titles and a New Age of distribution and compensation. But art itself is motivated by far more then the mentality of "making a living". Not to say that before Intellectual Property... people did not make a great living off of art... They sure as hell did producing silks, perfumes, etc... and all kinds of "physical goods" for profit. All things that "could" be easily copied at the time, but weren't because it took great skill to learn to produce them, before the industrial age... Look at Victorian age furniture, hell even peasants probably had better bedroom furniture before designs became patented and mass produced in factories (crappy Ikia shit anyone?). This also had some to do with more ready access to good materials and free time or the necessity to create ones own stuff, but it is not the case in today's 'modern' economy.
Anyway, there is plenty free-ly and legally available stuff still, everything from software to furniture, to whole entire house plans, to the software you need to make more software (Linux, SDL). And there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel.
So ya if you compare Skyrim to all that it makes your eyes bleed =P But it "was" and still is ok, and I would recommend it to anyone who can grab it for the $15 used that it is worth =)
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Topic: Why one would give their money to the toad, rather than Sony (Read 12659 times)