MMO News Reactions 3

_A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately.

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Sea of Thieves was in closed beta. This is a game on my radar, but the more I see, the less I’m interested. For starters, I’m one of the rare people in the world who has never had a “thing” for pirates, so the gameplay loop itself must attract me. But a) it’s clearly not an MMORPG and b) it’s clearly designed to be played by a group of real-life friends manning a ship, a la Guns of Icarus, with their interpersonal socializing being the biggest part of the game’s fun. Dragonchaser bravely tried to play solo, which is how I would have played it, but it’s fairly obvious from his narrative that the developers don’t want you to play like that. $60 saved.

Blah blah Sentator investigating lockboxes blah blah. Controversy time! I have a long post about lockboxes, gambling, and regulation in draft form but I can’t seem to chisel it down to a publishable form. The short version of my outrageous pragmatism is that I don’t see regulation happening anytime soon, unless it is regulation to maintain today’s status quo. Casual observations suggest lockboxes are very popular with both studios and consumers. The only people who don’t like lockboxes are old-school purists who grew up without them, and we are a minority now, as far as I can tell. On this particular story, regulating Internet games at the state level sounds ludicrous, and trying to force parents to monitor their kids’ gaming habits by adding a disclaimer sounds even more ludicrous.

H1Z1 nerfs ENAS. I had never heard of “ENAS” (East North American Strafe) but I am almost positive that some variation of the “move mouse, strafe, jump, run” exploit existed in (at least) Quake 2, 3, and the original Tribes. It is not surprising to hear about an exploit like this surfacing in H1Z1, the game whose entire reputation is built on how buggy it is. :)

Final Fantasy XIV Patch 4.2, Rise of a New Sun is out. I tried the Glamour Dresser. It’s not that great. :) I mean, compared to how glamours used to work in FFXIV, it’s fantastic. But compared to wardrobe systems in other games, it’s not that easy to use. It’s a bit like WoW’s “improved” transmog system a while back: Great for WoW, but not so great compared to other games.

Something Something Crowfall Crafting. No comment, except that I recently won a 2017 Crowfall Backer package thingy in a voiceover contest. Unfortunately I have no idea whether I can play this game or not. It says I get Beta 1 and Beta 2 access but I think it’s still in Pre-Alpha? I can’t make any sense of it. I get the impression you have to immerse yourself completely in that community to really understand what’s going on. The point is that eventually I will be giving a full report on Crowfall, something I didn’t expect I would ever do.

Something Something Mortal Online Weather. No comment, except a reminder that Mortal Online is one of the best old school-style virtual world MMORPGs that nobody plays, because of the full loot PvP. Sadly I don’t have the time to dedicate to this kind of game (it’s the kind where you have to be able to drop everything in real life to spend hours dealing with things in the game).

Truthfully I haven’t read much news this week because I’ve been too busy playing Fallout 4. It’s entirely possible I’ve missed a huge story that everyone else is talking about.