I woke up one night feeling the jitters… it was… addiction. I had this immediately need to play a game that I had felt was awful. It was as if I was drawn to play the old Uncharted Waters for the SNES. It was a weird sensation I had not felt in a while. When I went off to work I came home and the first thing I wanted to do was play this game. It was such an odd feeling, why was such a terrible game… so addicting.
On a second look on this game I’m finding that it is a very great game for a very small niche of players… myself included. It also has, I feel, drawing power if it can ‘do it right.’ I think the biggest setback on this game is that I know this game won’t be getting too much attention and will be very slow to develop. On the other side the interactive world will keep me entertained for quite some time. The draws for this game are it’s a 16th century European trader game. This draws in the Pirates of the Carribean child crowd, business simulation people (like myself), and your Elizabethan era people. As I said, not a big crowd… but a niche crowd.
This game also has at least some limited ability to spread. After about a week of playing this game I immediately got one of my closest friends to start playing it and my girlfriend. The fact that it’s free means that you can continuously refer this game to everyone and anyone.
In some ways I always hope that gaming companies use Google and search out criticism of their game. In this way I always make sure to include criticisms even in the most favorable reviews. This one is no exception.
If this game is going to reach a wider audience the first thing it needs is… a shorter school. The tutorial for this game takes about 20+ hours to do. This is because the tutorial is very thorough and covers all tasks. Each task gives you a quest you have to carry out related to that lesson. Unfortunately this thoroughness takes away from the gaming experience and you end up feeling like you should skip out on the school for some time.
Instead what needs to happen is just leave it at the basic school and then indicate levels of fame required to unlock new sections of the map. The remaining school quests should be converted simply into quests that will grant fame and money over time. This time can also be used to create some international characters that can be used in future quest updates.
There is also a lot of thin
gs in the game that people will not need to know. I, for example, had to learn about hand to hand combat in a ground invasion as a trader. I mean I’m sure that’s great for your maritime pirates but my calling will direct me away from combat wherever it is possible. I would not have been so bothered by it if I could choose between three quests and choose to skip out on the ones not related to my calling.
On top of that the rewards for school never seemed like they were anything over the top. You spend all this time doing it and you get less than what you could have gotten if you had just traded your way around. If you finish this whole series there should be some pretty massive reward at the end. What I ended up getting was a chest piece that had roughly the same stats as my school uniform.
Another thing missing from this game is an achievement system. No matter what people say, achievements are fun. Achievements give you a sense of success in your task and encourage you to do other things you may normally not do. Especially in games that have grinding having an achievement system in place can give you a goal to head to…. even if the goals seem farfetched and extreme.
Achievements also give the game some structure. Korean games are notorious for lacking structure and emphasizing too much on game play. It is no surprise that Korean games have been hesitant to adopt any system that gives structure, not to mention an achievement one. Achievements let you know that what you are doing is in the intended purpose of the game. It’s designed thinking about people who sit around all day running in circles wasting their time.
One thing this game does insanely well is professions. This of course is because the game is all about professions. In your typical game you will adopt a profession and level it up slowly over time. The benefits of the profession will be seen eventually… but slowly. In Uncharted Waters Online the effects of your profession are seen immediately. Your trade skills are those that level based on your activity. I for example have the trade skill Livestock Trading. This means every time I go to trade livestock I will be able to purchase more at a time.
Once you level up your trade skills so far it will give you access to a profession. A profession will offer you a title and after leveling them so far you will gain access to mor
e trade skills. You can find a copy of the table for trade skills progression here.
After a while you will gain access to a crafting profession. The crafting profession will allow you to produce products you can sell to market or sell amongst players. My big money maker is to buy Pigs or Pork, transform Pigs into Pork, and then make the Pork into Ham or Pork Sausage depending on the market rates for both. The trade box gives you the ability to chain make these and after every single you have the chance to make an extra 1-2 more of the good. As you can see, this multiplies your product increasing your needed carrying capacity but also giving you insane profits.
Unfortunately with all of these nice things I have to say about this game I always have to give it a thumbs down to the general public.
The game unfortunately is a gem that will ever only appeal to a smaller crowd. If you love sailing games or business simulators than you’ll love this game. If you love playing a fluffy man rodent against some massive dragon than… probably not the game for you.
There is currently only a single North American server so if you do end up trying this game out add me, Troublmaker. Don’t be confused with Troublemaker the leader of a very small uninfluential trading company.
A lot of anger, confusion, and terror has struck the DCUO Community as SOE has announced the creation of the “super server.” An attempt to sell this idea to the general public has sent people screaming about what it implies.
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.
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