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Through Wolfy's Eyes

~ One gamer's view of the forest and the trees

Through Wolfy's Eyes

Tag Archives: crowdfunding

The Sunday Bundle – February 12 2017

12 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things, Uncategorized

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Tags

crowdfunding, crowfall, e3, final fantasy xiv, game news, gaming news, MMO, mmo news, mmorpg, news, overwatch, the sunday bundle, week in review

It’s a snowy day here where I live. Not the oppressive sort of snow, but the idyllic kind that you see on myriad Christmas cards, where the flakes have been steadily and gently falling. It’s a good day to be dressed down with a mug of freshly brewed chai and just be generally pleased with the simplicity of things.

Why the mise en scène? Because I wanted a reason to use the phrase “mise en scène”. Let’s recap the news!

open-mic

Man, I am so funny. I should do an open mic night next.

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Blaugust Day 13 – Room Enough for Two

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

aaa development, crowdfunding, indie, investors, kickstarter, large company, MMO

I’ve rambled on quite a bit about crowdfunding and how it has had a very appreciable affect on videogame development in particular, and MMO game development in specific.  I have been beating this thing in to the ground a lot, I know…but the only reason I bring up crowdfunding once again in a blog post is because it’s such a rich topic, with a variety of facets for one to disseminate and discuss.

So it goes with this whole thing once more…but this time I wanna jam about how crowdfunding and “AAA” development should both be allowed to continue on, and to maybe discuss why I feel like one should not overpower the other.

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Blaugust Day 9 – We All Wanna Be Scooby-Doo

09 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by wolfyseyes in Human Things

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

chris roberts, comments, crowdfunding, deception, derek smart, kickstarter, mmos, opinion, scam, star citizen

I’ve been in a LOT of online comment sections over the course of my digital life, and I don’t really know why I make this blog post simply for the fact that I don’t think it will accomplish more than either preaching to the choir or yelling at the deaf.  That said, there’s been something about online behavior on my mind recently, and it is relevant to my gaming interests.

The show Scooby-Doo always had the same formula…a bunch of precocious adult-children arrive in a world that apparently is made of Halloween to solve a mystery, finding a person who has put together a scheme that involves a ridiculous amount of makeup and set-piece arrangement.  And in the end, the bad guy is literally unmasked.

With the advent of crowdfunding and early access games, there seems to be a very strong need nowadays for everyone to wanna be the guy or girl who pulls the mask off of the devious villain causing trouble for their own selfish ends.  Everyone wants that Scooby-Doo moment.

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Yes, Virginia, There Is a Genre

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

competition, crowdfunding, developers, launch, MMO, worry

The places I frequent for my online reading material (the soon-to-be-launched Massively Overpowered and the fabulously talented and likely incredibly handsome or beautiful writers of the blogs I follow) all appear to have something of a rolling theme going for them: the fact that the MMO genre is on the bubble or is in danger of some imminent collapse or things are about to explode in some righteous fireball summoned by Peter Molyneux for his crappy interview that was written by the idiots at RPS.

“Woopsie!….bitches.”

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Floating in a Tin Can

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

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Tags

crowdfunding, internet spaceships, MMO, sci-fi, spaceship, star citizen

Sci-fi MMOs are, in my opinion, nowhere near the level of tapped out that fantasy MMOs are…probably because the whole spaceship things is hard to design around.  Making a spaceship a character as much as your character is a character is likely a challenging thing to make work.  Some of the best sci-fi stories involve interesting characters and equipment that were characters on their own.

…and since that’s the most times I’ve used the word, here are some more characters.

So I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that most sci-fi MMOs seem to do one well and not the other.  EVE has ships only and they are wholly unique characters, but your avatar looks pretty damn stiff and weird.  TOR has stories around you class but a dogfighting PvP mode that appears to be thrown away by its devs now.  STO has both, but neither really feel terribly fleshed out.

To the subject of EVE, though, the character inside the ship isn’t really up to the developers, but up to the player.  I’m not sure how many social locations there are in EVE as I haven’t logged in to the game in years, but I have a hard time thinking that there’s a memorable capsuleer that can be identified by his or her face.  It’s still all about the spacecraft

As memorable as this face is, it still pales in comparison to the ship’s actions.

This all leads up to explaining why I’m a supporter of Star Citizen.  This game has been the poster boy of Kickstarter success and failure both–the example that people use to show how the new guard is taking over…or how the MMO genre is suffering another slow death at the hands of shifty business practices.  Chris Roberts has become a new Jesus, with about as many fervent followers and vitriolic disbelievers.

But shoving all of that static to the side…I support Star Citizen for the reason that it has plans in place to make the character matter as much as the craft.  The FPS gameplay mode will mean personal skirmishes will matter.  The fact that players can fly medical transports and pick up wounded players will matter.  Multi-crewed spacecraft will mean that helmsmen, gunners, and any number of other skill positions will matter.

This is the stuff that makes these internet spaceship games more compelling to me.  The people inside the stylish, blinking tin can.

Things will be going on in there. SEXY things.

Who’s to say this won’t end up like almost every ship piloting experience in a co-op shooter, though?  How many people reading this have played in a game of PlanetSide 2 or Battlefield or even Unreal Tournament 2K-whatever and been the victim of a crappy pilot?  Well, I think we’re probably going to be seeing significantly less of that, since piloting is the thing that everyone has to do in this game.

While the FPS and other out-of-ship activities are still things, the cockpit is where  most players will live and die.  So since this is part of standard gameplay, there’s less likelihood of people derping it up at the stick.  If anything, we’re gonna have most arguments likely directed at the turret gunners.  Star Citizen’s version of bitching out the DPS.

“FUCK learn to AIM, Gary!”

Right now, though, all Star Citizen is is a lobby game with a couple of spaceflight modes and a hangar where one can walk around and crawl about inside their purchased ships.  I have, right now, an Aurora ES–the game’s verion of a school bus.  That said, what it lacks in style…and substance…and armament…it more than makes up for in the fact that it has a working engine.  Basically, that means its provided a good learning tool to get used to piloting in this game, and I’ve found some enjoyment out of just tooling about in the open free flight mode.

Like many crowdfunded games that are in the cooker right now, this game is about funding the hopes and dreams and looking towards the potential…and what’s here now screams that.  Flight feels spectacular and direct, even to someone who isn’t playing with a flight stick right now.  The differences between ships is not only cosmetic, but palpable, too.  During the weekend when they gave all backers a free little dogfighter to take out for a spin, the sensation of power and movement was immediately apparent after having flown my Derpy Tube.

These ships have character.

“I’m the Nerdy One.”

So the fact that Star citizen’s ships are full of character leads me to think that the personal stuff will carry just as much weight and difference.  Mercifully, it won’t take too long to find out if my hunch is correct–the FPS Module of the game is due to release in 2015.  I’m not really going to hold my breath, because these roadmaps are always nebulous…but at the same time I can hope that the in-head stuff will be released and will be just as good as the in-cockpit stuff.

These games deserve to be more than just The Adventures of Tin Can With Blinky Lights.  We all deserve to be our own Captain Kirk.  Or Han Solo.  Or even an R2-D2.

The Shifting Paradigm

05 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by wolfyseyes in MMO Things

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

angry ferrets, crowdfunding, MMO, pvp, sandbox, themepark

As I stated before in my prior post, choices are wonderful, and what’s out now are wonderful choices.  That said, I have to take a small bit of agreement with those who believe that MMOs are stagnating, design-wise.  At least the current crop of releases.  I enjoy looking out the same window when it has pretty enough drapes hanging in front of it, but there is something to be said for replacing that window or changing up the actual view outside.

ffxiv_09282013_223637

The only way this isn’t a trope is my screaming yellow armor.

So as much as I enjoy themeparks, their rides and even the stories they tell…it’s nice to see the winds of change beginning to blow across the MMO landscape.  And it’s not just sandboxes either.  We’re seeing sandbox and game designs that focus on a playstyle, a dynamic, or building a captivating world that you can live in.

I’ll admit that my expectations were tempered with cynicism.  The only other sandbox experience I’ve had is EVE Online, and that was just a level of horror and pain on a psychological front that was so jarring and so damaging that it has continued to steer my view of sandbox games and their designs to the realm of worst case scenario.  The interest of self-preservation has taken over my instincts to the point where it’s irrational.  I hated EVE.  I hate the way it made me feel.  I hate that the simple act of flying my chunky metal lunchbox from point A to point B carried the risk of someone blowing me to smithereens and the only protection against it was a money sink when I barely had any money.  It’s why I dislike any PvP-related game, be it an MMO or most modern shooters or a MOBA.  The idea of being wrecked and ridiculed isn’t my concept of a good time.  It’s akin to entering a small box full of angry ferrets.

“Manage your f**king lane, noob!”

So what is it that made me change my mind?  A personal New Year’s resolution, actually.

I realize how completely stupid that sounds, but allow me to explain.  By the time New Year’s came around I was up to my neck in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.  I was having a great time.  But I also felt that switching things up would be a good idea…so I promised myself that I would try to get in to one of these sandbox games that I’d read about coming down the pipe and find out what all the huge fuss was genuinely about. I would work to battle against my prior prejudices in the interest of getting my feet wet.  I usually say “You can’t hate it without knowing it”, so it was time to put my money where my mouth was.

The first of these games I backed was The Repopulation. My reasoning was that it was the closest to the game that a lot of people cite as “sandbox done right”: Star Wars Galaxies.  I completely missed the boat on SWG, but to hear some people opine for it you’d think that it actually issued a cloud of endorphins from your computer right into your nasal passages.  Reading about it has enticed me, too–here was an open world game that didn’t demand you PvP in order to play the way you wanted.  Sure, there were some mechanics that pretty much shoehorned one into that playstyle, and of course some managed to twist the game mechanics to their advantage…but by and large, this was a game that, apparently, was a progenitor for sandbox MMO design and did it far more correctly than the ones out currently.

So I tossed the project $25 in January during its second round of crowdfunding via Kickstarter.  Initially, it was a knee-jerk maneuver: the game was similar enough to SWG that it suited my resolution fulfillment needs, and I had the money to burn.  But as I read more and more about the game, and heard more and more about how this little project kept updating at such a steady and even pace, I found myself genuinely getting intrigued.

That got the ball rolling.

Repopulation bled in to Landmark.  Landmark in to Camelot Unchained.  Then Pumpkin Online.  MMOs that were once things I never would have dreamed of entering in to have now become places I desperately want to visit.  It hasn’t exactly cooled my love of the themepark model, but having read up about–and in some cases, explored actively–these titles has me slowly understanding what some of the genre doomsayers were on about.

“Freakin’ told you, jackass.”

Is my mind completely changed?  No, not really.  There’s a risk inherent in all of these titles: Repopulation could still end up with me entering the FFA PvP areas in order to get the best materials to craft with.  Pumpkin Online might not even make it.  But the point is, we’re seeing attempts.  We’re seeing things shuffle around and away from what’s safe or comfortable and now getting some genuine pushes against the envelope.  No matter what some of those angry ferrets above this sentence may say….this is an exciting time for the MMO genre, and I’m glad to have maybe helped usher some of that in.

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