Everyone has a fighting chance
With crowdfunding, it’s important that a game appeal to the potential audience, but also that the developers are able to deliver the most complete project in a reasonable fashion. Yet, with a game like Crowfall, riding a successful Kickstarter campaign as of this writing of over $1.3 million with days to go, one of my biggest pet peeves in the genre has popped up again, and is a huge disappointment: gender locked classes.
What sets Crowfall apart for me though isn’t the people. We’ve seen popular names from gaming history come back to varying levels of success on Kickstarter. It isn’t the snappy video or the disappointment I may be harboring over 2014s AAA releases… It is the look forward.
Recently I have been taking a look at Triad Wars, a new "asynchronous MMO" from Square Enix. I won’t get into every aspect of the game and how it is in no way a "real" MMO – I’ll let William Murphy cover that in his video – but I would like to use Triad Wars as an example to ask: "Can a multiplayer game survive on such a limited set of mechanics?"
As I write this on Sunday, March has already brought quite a bit of interesting news, information, rumors et al. Right off the top, we had the latest iteration of the Game Developers Conference, which overlapped with the first day of PAX East. Other notable happenings included researcher SuperData’s release of some thought-provoking new tidbits of market data, and more F2P conversions from NCsoft.
With hundreds of titles available and in development, the MMOG space is more competitive than ever. Accordingly,
most don’t gain much attention from either the player community or the media. Even for those that do, maintaining visibility, awareness and brand image over the long term can be a struggle, especially after the shiny newness wears off. Listed in order of age, here are some still-live games that retain little or none of the market mojo they once had.
If you’ve been around the world of MMOs for a while, you’ve probably heard it said: "MMOs are becoming more casual!" Sure, sometimes there’s a qualifier in there, but it’s a chestnut complaint. But is it true? Chris and Ryan sit down for another spirited debate and try to answer the question: Are MMOs Becoming Too Casual?
InnoGames is getting a jump on Easter this year by hosting in-game events in three of its games. Starting March 25, Forge of Empires is holding an egg hunt, then on April 1, Grepolis and The West follow suit (respectively) with a magic reward-laying hen and a festive bandit duel.
Indie developer CapriByte Studios began their Kickstarter campaign this week in hopes of bringing its survival-RPG/eco-simulator to life.
Every gamer has a pedigree, a background of games that "came before" the first MMO. The Quest for today is simply this: When did you come to a realization that MMOs were the next logical step in your gamer’s evolution?
A new Kickstarter program has begun in order to raise funds for a Las Vegas event to replace the now-cancelled SOE Live. With the sale of Sony Online Entertainment to a venture capital corporation, the annual event was tabled for this year. Fans hope to rekindle interest in the community event with "Project Fanfaire".