The website is down for maintenance as is the game’s servers. As it turns out they awkwardly made their launch day the same as their maintenance day.
Oh NCSoft you so silly.
In other news Blizzard released an interview with… themselves. This one relates to questing in Cataclysm. As many of you know Blizzard re-did the entire 1-50 experience creating brand new quests for the whole 1-50 experience. This was on top of their 80-85 experience which was also really good. The experience was so good that I found myself re-doing all of the quests in the original vanilla game.
So in this interview… with themselves… they are buttering themselves up and talking about how great of a job they did.
When asking themselves the traditional dick move question “what is your greatest weakness” they dodge their own fricking question and answer this:
“We really spread ourselves thin and taxed the team. The original plan was to totally re-do a handful of high-priority zones, but to leave a lot of the zones that worked mostly alone. We categorized them into “red,” “yellow,” and “green” zones. The idea behind the green zones (for example, Loch Modan) was just to tweak the quest flow to be a little smoother, but not to make any major changes.“
Yes the answer to their own question is WE WORK TO HARD. So yeah another fluff piece from Blizzard. Not really worth the read but if you’re interested it is there.
Posted in Blog Entry, News with tags aion on December 18, 2011 by troublmaker
Joining in the ranks of Age of Conan, DC Universe Online, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Star Trek Online… Aion is now moving to the free to play model. It will be effective as of February.
No word on exactly what sort of free to play model will be picked up. All fingers are crossed for freemium server with DLCs.
When I was 8 years old I played this game called Dragon Warrior IV. It was a lot like Dragon Warrior 1-3 in a lot of ways (most ways) but this game was far grindier. Basically like most NES RPGs you move along a map with a single avatar (which represents a group of 4-5 champions). One of the big differences in this game was that you wouldn’t run into enough enemies while moving to the next area to get enough levels to actually deal with the next level. You essentially would just end up being 5-6 levels behind the enemy. So what you’d do instead is tap left and right relentlessly until you engaged an enemy, and then you killed them. You’d do this for hours on end. After you get so high a level you could advance to the next zone, get some story line and do the exact same thing. You’d get gear by grinding money and buying gear from a vendor in the town of each zone.
The whole game from start to finish was one giant grind. It’s no wonder that my thumbs used to blister.
This sort of game design was very symptomatic of games from the 90s. At some point in all of these games you would just have to do some single task over and over until you gained enough of something to continue on.
But that’s gone now.
People have a new standard in gaming, a fluidic transition from beginning to end with nonstop action. In fact a common criticism of under developed MMOs is simply that someone gets to a point and that they have nothing to do. Older MMOs had only expectations that you would grind your way up. In the old MMO model quests were designed to give a little bit of story to each area and introduce you to the various mobs you can grind.
MMOs have always been leaps and bounds behind the remainder of the gaming industry. When World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 released in 2003 so came with it Enter the Matrix, Devil May Cry 2, and Battlefield 1942. These three games were phenomenal graphically while World of Warcraft… was not. One other thing that these games had that WoW and EQ2 did not was a full experience. For whatever reason gamers became willing to trade in a 400 hour grind a thon type fame like Dragon Warrior in exchange for a 30-hour full experience that Devil May Cry 2 was.
Of course a couple of years later people complained about lacking game content which inevitably brought on the Achievement System, a way for any game developer to add more things to do in the game without having to add more content.
MMOs did this same inevitable path. At first our friends at Blizzard gave us a full leveling experience from start to finish. Then they gave us a non-grind method of obtaining gold and gear. And then they gave us a full raid dungeons in half the time that it might have taken them before. And after all that… people were consuming game content faster and faster. So just like other games Blizzard implemented an achievement system with over 1000 achievements…. that is… over 1000 things to do.
People loathe the grind and unfortunately without being able to put grind elements into games this has made the start up costs for a video game far higher and smaller game designers less room to move up. The Old Republic for example has a $200M budget. This makes it the single most expensive game ever created. It’s budget is twice the size of movie The Titanic. I will guarantee you that this 4 year project will have no elements of grind in it at all.
Compare this to a lot of the newer games that come out that release somewhat early. The reason they release early is because their studios… ran out of money. Basically if the game didn’t launch when it did they would be broke. These games build up their franchise over time. However it is something that people simply will not tolerate. Unfortunately people want something to do now and will not wait a few months to get it. This is largely in part to there being so many games out there that are offering updates.
It’s not even that there isn’t a market for people who enjoy these sort of grind games. Koreans are notorious for their love of games where you just do a single activity over and over and over, as long as the one activity requires some sort of skill or thought. Aion for example featured mobs that just never seemed to die and would relentless kiting in order to kill. Not like those of nearly every other MMO that seem to just die in one or two shots. To the Korean MMO developers this was not seen as a gap in content, this was the content.
This of course is kind of a little irony because people thought when an existing Korean title was translating to English with improved graphics that this simply meant they would get a ‘finished product.’ After launch people realized this was not the case. The game despite having great mechanics and graphics had many leveling gaps that could only be filled through profession grind, PvP grind, or mob grind.
The rejection of the grind MMO is just a simple sign that a grind RPG has no place in North America anymore. As a people we have become too used to close-ended RPGs that tell us what to do and where to go instead of inventing our own stories and inventing our own adventures. No game could ever facilitate the World PvP seen as Tarren Mill in World of Warcraft not because the circumstances do not exist but simply because those sorts of people do not exist.
A player who can grind an RPG out is someone who will do something redundantly without really asking why they’re doing it. We’re in a sort of world that demands people ask why and cannot facilitate the person who will sit idley buy and continue that daily grind.
Well next in my series on why MMOs fail is why Aion failed. Aion is a sad story. Aion was a major success in Korea. In Korea gaming popularity went: Starcraft, Aion, then World of Warcraft. Because of Aion’s popularity over World of Warcraft in Korea it was felt it could be a potential WoW killer if expanded beyond Korea’s borders. It was first launched in China and then a month later in North America. I should note that Aion had 400,000 pre-orders and an additional 300,000 sales after the first week. This made it a massive commercial success. However after the first month their subscribers dropped below 200,000 and steadily lower than that over time.
So what went wrong?
1. Leveling Model Was Korean, not American
Any MMO that is released in North America is always going to be compared with World of Warcraft. It’s sort of odd that all games regardless of their type (even first person shooters, trading games, and RTS MMOs) will get compared to WoW.
In Korea leveling is done via hard grinding. A person is expected to do their dungeon content over and over, or PvP, or in the extreme cases… run around killing mobs.
Compare that to say, World of Warcraft model, where the game is expected to give a smooth leveling path entirely from quests from start to finish.
When you compare World of Warcraft to Aion with that WoW framework Aion is going to lose 100% of the time. It’s not a fair comparison. A better comparison might be Ragnorak Online to Aion.
Aion’s grind was particularly brutal. I remember hitting Level 20 and saying “fuck this game” (mind my French). At around level 20 you 100% run out of quests and are running around kiting mobs around in hopes that they don’t kill you. You are taking drinks every single mob and pushing your way up. If you are on a server that is balanced you have PvP as an option. However if you play a weaker more imbalanced class you’ll just end up getting camped.
Basically the grind came down to numbers… and you not having them. If the last level of World of Warcraft is 2M XP and you are getting 10,000 XP per mob kill… imagine Aion being 20M and gaining 2,000 XP per mob kill. It’s such an insanely brutal amount that once you reach the XP plateau point (Level 20) you just feel like it’s going to be too much.
I do have friends that have level capped at what they told me was because so few other people level capped and since they took months to level cap all they could do (content wise) was run around low level areas ganking people. The challenge of that dies out so what you end up with is a lot of idling.
2. Dinah and the Need For Botting
In a Korean market grinding out a currency makes sense. If you are in a game where you will be constantly grinding all the time then an economic incentive (or enforcement I should say) for doing so needs to be implemented. Aion was very heavy on the need for currency and the ability to generate it. Everything in the game costs dinah… and lots of it. Despite having the ability to fly you need to be shipped off to other places via a teleport.
What this ended up doing was making Aion bots insanely popular, available and effective. People used bots for leveling, grinding gold, ganking people, PvPing, and gathering professions. It was very easy to get an Aion bot and because of that almost half the gaming population that remained ended up getting one to the end of leveling or gaining dinah.
The problem is once the bot is done getting your level cap or getting your tones of gold…. what’s really left to do that a bot can’t do?
World of Warcraft doesn’t have so many bots because quests gave a giant incentive to not just grind out mobs and dungeons offered enough complexity that a bot simply could not do it. In fact the only part of WoW that has bots are battlegrounds specifically because of low responsibility. But are there bots in arenas? Nope.
Aion simply did not have content that was hard enough that a robot programmed to spam 4-5 buttons could not handle. Even the PvPvE was so simple that a bot could be programmed to immediately change target to non-player mobs.
3. Wings Are Not Enough
The game was so well designed (graphically) and players were offered the ability to fly instead of having flying mounts. The wings ended up just being this massive worthless gimmick that didn’t do anything at all. The wings had restrictions in so many zones that they might as well just shouldn’t have had the wings. Even when you have the wings it feels insanely lackluster as you end up only getting to fly for a few seconds and then landing again. So if my only attraction to Aion is the fact that I get wings… then what’s my reason to stay post level 10?
Aion was banking on a concept called PvPvE. This video from Korea is what they were expecting you to do:
So what’s happening here is you have tanks tanking the boss while the two sides are doing what any other game would call griefing. The goal here is to try and control or kill the enemy forces while maintaining ownership (tagging) of the boss so you can get credit for killing it. When you look at this it’s actually, kinda cool.
But that’s not what happened when the game came to North America. No in fact North American players saw this kind of attitude as griefing so as soon as any boss emerged or landed both sides would stop fighting and kill it together. Of course this is nothing new. When Rift was released both sides would always come together to kill off zone wide bosses. The benefits of killing it outweighed the benefits of killing each other.
Trying to make PvPvE work isn’t exactly a bad idea, Aion just didn’t have a design that leant itself to making people fight each other and raid bosses simultaneously. DC Universe came up with an idea that might have worked (had they not abandoned it so they could quickly launch the game). The idea DC Universe had was instanced 6-man PvP dungeons with trash mobs and raid bosses. You would independently fight through a dungeon each with an NPC ally (Lex Luther or Superman for example). You would each kill 1-2 bosses and get some loots from the dungeon. However the really great loot would always drop off of the last boss which required you to race the other side or defeat the other side. There would be a respawn timer so after killing off all of their people you were left with a few minutes to kill/finish off the boss.
Aion just didn’t have a good enough benefits/rewards model to actually do the content.
4. The Game was too Fricking Hard
There is a unique and small gaming market that enjoys playing insanely hard games. When I was in college I bought a game called Ninja Gaiden Black. It was of course an Xbox sequel of an old Nintendo game I had loved. I spent maybe 900 hours on that game before my inevitable decision to quit the game. The game was simply, too hard. One mistake and suddenly you are dead.
Aion in a similar way was probably too hard of a game for a community that is supposed to be “massive.” Elitists might say that for MMO veterans this game was easy, while for people newer to the genre it was not.
As an example in most games when you die you have to pay some sort of durability fee. This is a method of the game controlling inflation of currency. If they feel there is too much currency in the game and it’s valueless they can just increase the cost of durability for the next tier of content. In Aion you got your normal durability loss but as well you lost a percentage of your XP. XP loss showed up in grey after each loss and I can firmly say I didn’t even notice it until after my 8th griefing camping. When I looked it up I found out I was expected to pay ridiculous fees to ‘reclaim’ my lost XP. Of course I could not afford it and so half a level was lost.
On top of that when you rez you do so at the nearest graveyard instead of being able to run back to where you were. This means that when you die you literally are starting over.
If you’re in the ‘first wave’ of levelers in this game it’s not as significant because you can level through PvP and not experience the XP loss in the same way you did from flat out griefing.
But after the first wave is done you are left with a game that has some max rank players and a lot of lowbies who cannot move on.
WoW had a similar problem when it first launched. People who were PvP drawn would camp Tarren Mill because lowbies were there. As a response the other sides guild mates would show up to defend. Hence massive Tarren Mill PvP. However it left people having troubles leveling. A fix for this was to make it so that only people within 5 levels of you counted for honor, guards gave dishonor and the addition of Warsong Gulch so that people would not be in the world killing off lowbies.
Aion simply could not find a reliable fix for this. The game had already been out for a year in Korea. There was tones of time to iron out the these things for the North American market. Instead they just improved the graphics and released it as is.
5. Developers Ignore Gamers
In the first month of a game it’s kind of expected that the developers ignore most gamers. This is because there are going to be new people to the genre who really have no idea what’s going on. It’s much like people who complain about autoaiming hacks their first time playing an FPS because all they can do is take body shots. However when seasoned gamers are giving you criticism and advice, developers… listen.
Aion had probably one of the smallest open beta’s to date. People were specifically chosen from a hyper elitist community. They looked for people with the best computer specs or the highest level of raid experience. So obviously when you get results back from these sort of over-engrossing types you will get a positive result. If you create a game for elitists who enjoy grinds and spending massive amounts of time in a game, of course they’ll say good things. That is to say if you hand pick a niche crowd specifically for a game you designed for them, they should like it.
In truth it was stated very early on that the game was too grindy. NCSoft just chose not to listen. They saw their success in Korea as an example that the game was fine.
It wasn’t until Aion released an expansion that they got the game ‘right.” By this time it was too late. Like many games that chose to ignore their gaming community creating an expansion with another massive fee attached to it was merely a slap in the face to gamers. It just felt like they were trying to pass their failure off to gamers.
In the end the game shrunk from an audience of roughly 600,000 gamers to a mere 100,000 gamers who are mostly based in Korea. The North American servers reduced down to merging into 8 servers total all of which were low pop. Having 100,000 gamers is still quite a bit however it isn’t an MMO that is on the rise, nor can it grow. It’s massive failure on launch has left the game with no direction.
I picked up this game because two of my MMO playing friends told me it was going to be awesome. Aion’s release in America is a lot like World of Warcraft’s launch in China. Aion is one of the most popular MMOs in South Korea. When they set the release for America they had to translate all of the speech in the game and had to make sure the storyline made sense for Americans. The game’s redevelopment and launch on American servers was a 2-year development that came with insane amounts of hype.
The game was largely remade and a lot of content was cut out to bring it to production faster.
Korean MMOs are nothing new to the North American market. Korean culture focuses around work and doing the same tasks over and over. It is the country that spent years solving rubix cubes and making a sport out of stacking objects. So it comes as no shcok that Koreans develop MMOs that focus largely around non-objective based PvP and NPC farming PvE. Aion is no exception to that.
Aion became obscenely popular because of it’s combat system. Most MMOs have promised flying combat for years but could never make it work. It always ended up being stupidly complicated and completely unfun. In some games you ride a mount, in Aion you are the mount. You are just a regular every day joe who gets recruited into the military service. You are sent on a pretty weak sauce mission to find someone’s daughter. Along the way you and everyone else who is leveling. You meet a Daeva who is like an advanced form of human who looks like an angel. The Daeva tells you that you have a destiny and once you hit a certain level you arise to become a Daeva the ruling class of the world.
You ascend to Daeva hood and forever become a slave to the peasant
The continent world is split in half and between the halves is outer space (with some asteroids) where most battles take place. The people are split into two different kinds of humans, ones that look kinda light and colorful and those that are kinda dark and bland. From here you go through the Daeva storylines here you are sent on missions to help develop the land and make an impact.
The game from the get-go is ultra challenging. There are three classes in the game each with limited roles and each with two sub-classes that you work. If you play the tanking class you are forced into the role of mitigating damage while you are leveling and killing multiple mobs at once. If you play the healing class you are tossing out damage and try and throw some damage. If you play a DPS class you are truly boned as you will take so much damage and have no way to regenerate it other than eating or potting. This means a lot of kiting mobs for hours until they die.
I never actually got to the PvP part of the game so I cannot comment on it. The PvE however was tremendously unfun. I made it all the way to level 20 and if there was a dungeon for me to do they made no attempt in telling me where it was or what it was called. The quests were all stupid. In WoW the quests are all pretty stupid but they all end up adding to something. In this game you are the ruling class of the land. Why is the ruling class helping all these peasants with such minor tasks? In WoW it makes sense because you’re never really a big shot. In Aion there’s this huge ceremony just to prove how big you are. Like why aren’t you leading a legion of people against evil things. I mean if there is this huge infestation of furry things that’s causing such a problem you should just take an army with you… I mean you are their leader not the other way around. Instead of meager humans are ruling you around like you’re nobody.
The quests were insanely unfun. The only fun part about it was getting to use your abilities and timing things so you don’t get 2-shot by all these insanely tough mobs with stupid game mechanics that read off more like WoW boss fights. It’s weird how the class makeups of the mobs you meet ends up being more complicated than your own Daeva creation. A lot of the fun quests to do end up being repeatable ones that force you to kill off like 20 moose or 20 turtles. The least fun ones end up being the mission uest lin enders which are super hard and feel like they need a full group to do, despite the quest never telling you this. You get there and you feel like a dick because you can’t kill a single mob and they kill you in two hits.
You have to kill 1000 of these furry things for the quest, make sure to take 3 people with you though
This is the first MMO I’ve quit playing before I got to max level. Being able to fly around was cool. All of the game mechanics were awesome, just there was no fun PvE content. It felt boring and overly repetitive. It ended up being exactly what I was told it wouldn’t be, a Korean MMO. I was fighting myself to keep playing the game but I just couldn’t do it.
I cancelled my subscription, cracked the CDs and burned the books. I’d suggest no one pick up this game… ever. It looks very pretty has a great creator and is very graphically stunning… but just completely unfun. A friend of mine played it to level cap and said that the PvP was fun but then people stopped doing that and started doing the lame PvPvE The only cool part about it was the crafting system. You would buy crafting reagent and complete work order quests using them… but once again you had to grind out these quests to hit max profession. A good crafting system is not worth your investment stay away from this game… far far away.
Any MMO that is released in North America is always going to be compared with World of Warcraft. It’s sort of odd that all games regardless of their type (even first person shooters, trading games, and RTS MMOs) will get compared to WoW.
In a Korean market grinding out a currency makes sense. If you are in a game where you will be constantly grinding all the time then an economic incentive (or enforcement I should say) for doing so needs to be implemented. Aion was very heavy on the need for currency and the ability to generate it. Everything in the game costs dinah… and lots of it. Despite having the ability to fly you need to be shipped off to other places via a teleport.
There is a unique and small gaming market that enjoys playing insanely hard games. When I was in college I bought a game called Ninja Gaiden Black. It was of course an Xbox sequel of an old Nintendo game I had loved. I spent maybe 900 hours on that game before my inevitable decision to quit the game. The game was simply, too hard. One mistake and suddenly you are dead.
The Death of the Grind RPG
Posted in Blog Entry, Commentary with tags aion, everquest 2, grinding, mmog, mmorpg, world of warcraft on May 17, 2011 by troublmakerThe whole game from start to finish was one giant grind. It’s no wonder that my thumbs used to blister.
This sort of game design was very symptomatic of games from the 90s. At some point in all of these games you would just have to do some single task over and over until you gained enough of something to continue on.
But that’s gone now.
People have a new standard in gaming, a fluidic transition from beginning to end with nonstop action. In fact a common criticism of under developed MMOs is simply that someone gets to a point and that they have nothing to do. Older MMOs had only expectations that you would grind your way up. In the old MMO model quests were designed to give a little bit of story to each area and introduce you to the various mobs you can grind.
MMOs have always been leaps and bounds behind the remainder of the gaming industry. When World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 released in 2003 so came with it Enter the Matrix, Devil May Cry 2, and Battlefield 1942. These three games were phenomenal graphically while World of Warcraft… was not. One other thing that these games had that WoW and EQ2 did not was a full experience. For whatever reason gamers became willing to trade in a 400 hour grind a thon type fame like Dragon Warrior in exchange for a 30-hour full experience that Devil May Cry 2 was.
Of course a couple of years later people complained about lacking game content which inevitably brought on the Achievement System, a way for any game developer to add more things to do in the game without having to add more content.
MMOs did this same inevitable path. At first our friends at Blizzard gave us a full leveling experience from start to finish. Then they gave us a non-grind method of obtaining gold and gear. And then they gave us a full raid dungeons in half the time that it might have taken them before. And after all that… people were consuming game content faster and faster. So just like other games Blizzard implemented an achievement system with over 1000 achievements…. that is… over 1000 things to do.
People loathe the grind and unfortunately without being able to put grind elements into games this has made the start up costs for a video game far higher and smaller game designers less room to move up. The Old Republic for example has a $200M budget. This makes it the single most expensive game ever created. It’s budget is twice the size of movie The Titanic. I will guarantee you that this 4 year project will have no elements of grind in it at all.
Compare this to a lot of the newer games that come out that release somewhat early. The reason they release early is because their studios… ran out of money. Basically if the game didn’t launch when it did they would be broke. These games build up their franchise over time. However it is something that people simply will not tolerate. Unfortunately people want something to do now and will not wait a few months to get it. This is largely in part to there being so many games out there that are offering updates.
It’s not even that there isn’t a market for people who enjoy these sort of grind games. Koreans are notorious for their love of games where you just do a single activity over and over and over, as long as the one activity requires some sort of skill or thought. Aion for example featured mobs that just never seemed to die and would relentless kiting in order to kill. Not like those of nearly every other MMO that seem to just die in one or two shots. To the Korean MMO developers this was not seen as a gap in content, this was the content.
This of course is kind of a little irony because people thought when an existing Korean title was translating to English with improved graphics that this simply meant they would get a ‘finished product.’ After launch people realized this was not the case. The game despite having great mechanics and graphics had many leveling gaps that could only be filled through profession grind, PvP grind, or mob grind.
The rejection of the grind MMO is just a simple sign that a grind RPG has no place in North America anymore. As a people we have become too used to close-ended RPGs that tell us what to do and where to go instead of inventing our own stories and inventing our own adventures. No game could ever facilitate the World PvP seen as Tarren Mill in World of Warcraft not because the circumstances do not exist but simply because those sorts of people do not exist.
A player who can grind an RPG out is someone who will do something redundantly without really asking why they’re doing it. We’re in a sort of world that demands people ask why and cannot facilitate the person who will sit idley buy and continue that daily grind.
3 Comments »