Cutting through the Treacle: AlzRAMmer's Disease

"So tell me, who are you dissing or maybe I'm missing

The reason that you're smiling or wilding

[...]

This time, this time I'm losing my mind"

 

Beastie Boys - So What'Cha Want

 

 

(working title: I Am My Own Grandpa, Redux)

 

Sometime in recent months, League of Legends began saving your role selection while queuing up for a match. Apparently after fourteen years of unjustifiably dominating the AoS market, they finally sussed out that players in class-based games tend to play their favorite classes repeatedly. You don't say. (ProTip: they also like leveling up, scoring kills and getting loot.) But, in Riot's defense, they're far from the only game designers forcing customers to repeatedly click-through pointless pre-flight checklists.

I've also been playing the squad management dungeon-crawler Iratus recently.

 

"Choose a battle squad" hmmm, let's see, well, tough choice, jinkies gang, I'm stumped! Maybe I should go with Squad 1, the same one I've been playing so far and the ONLY squad I will ever choose because in the absence of multi-squad fights you only ever shuffle units in and out of your ONE active squad. Your reserves should mostly be healing/training. Somehow, being forced to confirm the obvious for hundreds of fights in a row has never once altered my choice!

The same routine proved doubly unjustifiable among Wartile's many nuisances:

 

- for often making it literally impossible to alter your group composition (three recruitable party members and exactly three spots on the boat, etc.) yet still demanding you drag-drop the idiotic little digitized plastic toys onto the little diorama boat every. single. goddamn. time!

 

But I'm not bitter, dear game developers. I understand that in the five or fifty gigabytes of memory space your piece of shit of a product's taking up on my hard drive, complete with glossy high-resolution flashing buttons for your Twitter feed, Discord channel, forums, store pages, blooper reels, YouTube ads, holiday-themed costumes, DLC spam, director's commentary and podcast of your mother-in-law's appendectomy, there just weren't enough bits left over to dedicate to a few hundred lines of plain text preserving my own preferences in a .ini file or whatever they're calling it these days. I simply cannot express my gratitude at your open disdain for my choices. Especially when you're asking my money for the privilege of choosing.

Like all so-called "MMO"s Lord of the Rings Online gradually degraded to an outlet store for imaginary funny hats over the years, and having played on and off since its launch I've accumulated quite a few such hats. And spaulders. And boots made for walking. And capes for the crusadin'. And more cowbell. And a loaf of bread for some reason. Well, collect however many you want, but you still only get 8 outfit slots maximum to play dress-up. Any more might stress our servers and cause lag or something, and we need that server space to store three different versions of every consumable item reiterated every five character levels and ten different names and stats for every reused item visual and aaahh, by the way, please keep buying more character slots to feed your alt-itis everyone and please never look up the term "force multiplier" if you hear the fiberoptics creakin'.

I mean, The Secret World was even worse, as there the limited number of outfit slots applied not just to cosmetics but the the various gear you constantly needed to un/re-slot when swapping classes and damage types for different dungeons. The same applies to the aforementioned League of Legends' "rune" loadouts.

What are you selling?

 

Games, as media, bank on interactivity. Everything from new map settings to character and town names to group and gear loadouts to cosmetics express your customers' interests, personality and strategy. I don't care if you're motivated by microtransactions or interface timesinks to drag out those gameplay-hour totals or you're trying to build addictive anticipation of reward stimuli. This bullshit's been old for ages now. I'm not inclined to believe that the same program which records my last million mouse clicks suddenly hits a patch of senility when trying to remember my name, or whether I clicked "1" or "2" in the squad selection window last fight. I even less appreciate being nickel-and-dimed for the honor of permutating the content I already paid you for.

If you have enough memory to animate your company logo, you have enough memory to save my preferences.

The Open and Shut Secret World: "Multi"player

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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"Screaming stars, impale me with beauty!"

Dance, monkeys, dance.

 

The Machine Tyrant was the last boss of The Secret World's second group instance, Hell Raised, and on hard difficulty served as a litmus test of players' expertise. Many a group spent many an hour wiping repeatedly only to finally give up. Even more groups were sabotaged by spineless little millennial twerps who died once or twice and immediately ran away instead of trying to figure out the fight. To be sure, it could look like a stroll through Castle Heterodyne at first glance.

 

First off, he hit like a motherfucking truck full of trucks (I say that as a habitual healer who had to struggle to level off tanks' constantly rubberbanding HP bar) and could PBAoE one-shot anything in a medium radius, requiring the tank to "active dodge" out without error - while maintaining aggro... and many a group wiped five seconds into the fight because DPS didn't slow their roll while the tank dodged. MT also periodically gained a nigh-invulnerable shield and ran to the middle of the arena, after which the tank had to aggro him into the yellow light pillar up above.

That red AoE circle? It locked on to one player and chased him. They increased in frequency as the fight went on.

Those orange AoE circles? They almost filled the arena and MT cast them when running to the center, which increased in frequency as the fight went on.

That yellow AoE pillar? The one the tank needed to drag MT into? It did enough damage to kill anyone but the tank in a couple of seconds and could spawn right on top of you without warning.

If he stepped on you, you died.

If you DPSed while his (damage-reflecting) shield was up, you died.

If you stood next to the tank for even one (cleaving) basic attack, you died.

Oh, and he continually stacked a DoT at infinite range, requiring constant group-wide cleansing and healing... while you were often scattered out of range by the constant one-shot-kill AoEs.

Oh, and did I mention it's a DPS race? If he activated his enrage timer, everyone died.

Fun!

No, really. MT was a blast. Technically it was several kinds of blasts all at once, but you catch my drift.

TSW was a single-player, linear adventure game. Almost all content was solo, its skill system was an unbalanced mess largely due to the shoehorned, gratuitous, pointless PvP and PvE advancement consisted of mindlessly grinding the easiest, quickest five-man instance (usually Polaris or Darkness War depending on the patch) for hundreds upon hundreds of times. That being said, it also included some truly excellent fights, albeit overusing ground AoE. Multiple phases, twin bosses, triplet bosses, adds, exploding adds, blocking terrain, chase scenes, enrage timers, body-blocked buff beams, splitting and stacking the team, shrinking fields of play, persistent AoEs requiring careful positioning, invulnerability, what TSW lacked in terms of player abilities' interaction it made up for in its imaginative use of enemy abilities. Very few fights felt like the standard tank'n'spank of MMO infamy... despite being exactly that. Some bosses introduced in the Tokyo patches (The Manufactory) made MT look trivially simple by comparison.

 

Machine Tyrant's worst and best feature was that it could not be taught. You had to know the limitations of your skillset and time cooldowns appropriately on a shifting battlefield. Nobody could tell you "stand here and click this button" to give you a false sense of accomplishment for obeying orders like a mindless grunt. Sadly, in most fights, three of the team's five players could do exactly that. Instructions compiled by various player groups for each dungeon were usually written separately for the tank, the healer and the three DPS.

- Tank instructions read like some twisted pages-long time travel short story where interweaving sequences of events had to either be performed with the grace of a minuet or disrupted precisely when the bomb timer flashes zero.

- Healer instructions reduced to a couple of paragraphs mostly detailing when a special ability (e.g. Cold Blood) had to be used and foreseeing aggro spikes.

- DPS instructions just read "don't stand in the flaming puddle of death, dumbass" and a second line about hiding/stacking during phase transitions.

 

Funcom obviously anticipated most of their customers would be idiots and set up a system allowing oligoi to carry polloi. However, requiring only one and a half of five participants truly understood what was happening had the predictable effect of further splitting a customer base already divided between puzzle-solving, PvP, number-crunching and immersive adventuring. Many never bothered playing any role but damage and claimed expertise based on gear levels for pressing three buttons by rote as per some wiki's cookie-cutter build. Their underlying incompetence grew painfully obvious whenever they hit a fight like MT requiring them to direct their own movements.

 

For as long as the right customers stayed and continued to carry the idiots, things looked superficially good. But whenever the lynchpins went AWOL, the various times TSW's multiplayer interest crashed, it crashed hard and fast.

The Open and Shut Secret World: The Lighter Side of Apocalypse

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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Damnit, I've got 321 unused screenshots from V:tM-Bloodlines saved up (which is how I was able to illustrate my calling out Bloodlines 2's devs so aptly) and not a single one of Arthur Kilpatrick cackling with glee at watching Santa Monica "sliiide down the tubes" from his bail bond business. Oh well.

Drama!

Zombies ate my parents!

Drama!

Daddy ripped my heart out!

Drama!

Ghouls sludged up our tree roots!

Drama!

Werewolves ate our boyfriends!

Drama!

I was suckered into joining a cult, stuffed full of evil then discorporated into the eschatological conduit for anti-being itself!

DRAMA!!!

And now, this:

A beyond-ancient spirit of bygone ages wants you to help her figure out her Commodore 64 so she can keep up with the times. (Steampunk magitek was so much more user-friendly.)

No matter how fitting, how well executed a dramatic backdrop, the lengthier it grows the more it will require comic relief, even as the main plot waxes grimmer and grimmer. The main difficulty lies in properly incorporating humor into the setting instead of piling on random nonsense and pop culture references. Unlike most game designers, TSW's writers held a firm grasp on the difference between telling a joke and being a joke. For a game which incorporated so many external references that it could easily have devolved to a TVTropes article of itself, it also serves as a master-class in keeping humorous asides in-character.

And yes, that is entirely in character for bureaucrats.

For instance, from the moment you set foot in the game as a Templar, you're introduced to your new powers "through the medium of unreliable narration" by a character who could've stepped out of the TV miniseries version of Neverwhere:

But then again, it's entirely believable for a secret society to transmit introductory visions to new recruits by an easily-dismissed, inconspicuously conspicuous public figure. A jester.

 

So it goes. Characters make bleakly humorous assessments of their usually quite desperate situations, snap and snark at each other like the overstressed conscripts they are, stammer and stutter in the face of the inexplicable.

Marianne Chen there is aware of the humor in her statement. She's making a funny. She, the character, not merely her writer poking fun at her expense. A strained, awkward, terrified, Apocalyptic funny. Maintaining that level of awareness without descending into grandstanding adolescent feigned nonchalance elevated TSW far beyond the game industry's open disdain for good writing.

The Open and Shut Secret World: Fractionalism

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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Let's talk factions.

It is by now a largely unexamined tradition for MMOs to divide players into factions as a way of ginning up some imitation of competitive spirit, regardless to what little extent these reflect the functionality of sports/game teams. The Secret World featured three playable "secret societies":

From top to bottom: the Dragons' mystical temple of abstruseness, the Templars' stately mansion of respectability (lycanthrope on zombie horse not included) and the Illuminati's subterranean techno-brutalist bunker, appropriately enough under a skylight. Get it? Illumin-nevermind.

In practical terms, the factions held absolutely zero relevance to the bulk of gameplay being mostly single-player with a small-group PvE endgame timesink. But, as TSW made a point of slavishly copycatting as many WoW-clone "features" as it could it also included the timesink of PvP instances divided by the factions into a three-way fight to out-score each other in various point hold, capture the flag and other standard team game scenarios. Now, PvP was a terrible idea from the start and was always going to be a half-assed affair. Tellingly, the Legends relaunch barely bothered pretending to include it.

1) As fundamentally a puzzle-solving, interactive fiction title, TSW was farther removed from team-play than either WoW-clones with their RPG-inspired classes or FPS series. The PvP and PvE fan bases were irrevocably split from day one, and the former rapidly realized it could find better gameplay elsewhere.

2) Its graphics and character models, while aesthetically superior, were neither fluid nor distinctive enough to ensure playability in a fast-paced, unpredictable PvP environment.

3) A game system can be designed either for PvP or PvE, but crowd control, healing, damage output and other considerations simply work differently depending on whether you're fighting adaptive, self-interested equals or an overblown monster with a specific set of abilities whose job it is to provide a fixed challenge and look impressive before taking a dive to boost customers' egos. TSW's skill system was borderline workable for PvE, but utter crap for PvP.

4) The instability ensured by a three-way divide can work well enough in games like Planetside which establish stable, large-scale objectives and rely on a few players coordinating groups of forty others. But mixed with ephemeral, ten-minute fights in randomized matches, the same instability largely guarantees one side will rapidly capitalize on the other two tripping over each other. From my recollection, the power-mad Illuminati would routinely trounce the more idealistic, adventurous Dragons and Templars.

Ah, but that little tidbit brings us to the flipside: character.

While TSW's factions were ultimately merely cosmetic, the quality of mission writing, dialogues, backstories and general atmosphere mapped more successfully onto player personae than in most games' "pretty vs. badass" or good vs. evil split. Here you're all antiheroes to some extent, powermongers staving off Ragnarok #4, split instead between different flavors of spy movie villainy. The Dragons play the long game, foregoing straightforward attrition in pursuit of ultimate cheat codes, the Illuminati relatively shortsighted and pragmatically snatching at every advantage, and the Templars ruthless, dyed-in-the-wool aristocrats tending toward reliability and draconian judgments.

You'd be hard-pressed to find these attitudes expressed during gameplay. Usually, all you'd get is snippets of flavor text at the beginning and end of each otherwise identical mission, flavored differently for each faction, plus occasionally a short cinematic. Nevertheless, the distinction came through in wording and voicing, consistently and insistently marrying a mere cosmetic difference to human tendencies whether it's nouveau-riche swagger, pointed nonsense or peremptory declamations. They did a good enough job to even lure me away from my usual Chaotic Neutral mindset to the only faction with enough integrity to own its nature. Look again at the pictures above, for instance. All three advertise opulence in some form, whether it's maintaining low-density real estate in the middle of a metropolis like Seoul (note apartment buildings in the background) or displacing New York's subterrane to hide a bunker the size of a village, but only the Templars just built. a. fucking. palace. like they mean it.

Respect.

The Open and Shut Secret World: Human Interest

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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"There was no color in the room; neither of the two sisters added any color to it.”

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

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"Contact. I read you."

 

While many video games have provided immersive atmosphere, characterization tends toward pastiche when present at all. The Secret World earned its somewhat damning reputation as "the best-written MMO" not least for concisely and incisively fitting into its apocalyptic scenario a host of characters which even players above fifteen years of age could (for once) give a shit about.

 

While many are indeed comical, like the Colonel Kilgore copycat army officer or Scrapyard Edgar the grease monkey hick and quantum physics savant, even the goofballs you'd only visit for one or two quests were often permitted some unexpected undercurrent of integrity. From the detective in the fur suit to the half-drunk layabout 'injun' brothers to the socialite turned cat hoarder and ghost-sitter to the trigger-happy explosives expert and action movie buff and the goth clubber waiting for her personalized beautiful death (("he will be taller, with eyes flashing like winter ice") oh, lord...) they all display, on some level of consciousness, a frame of reference for their behavior. They own their insanity.

As for the more central cast, well, here's one I never heard appreciated enough while the game was still active.

"Mr Noble, Mr Right, Mr 'Quote Some Ancient Knight'"

Richard Sonnac serves as your main contact for the Templar faction. His dignified erudition more or less singlehandedly convinced me to opt for Templars over Dragon despite my fundamentally chaotic leanings, but the factions deserve their own post. Suffice to say Dickie's the guy you want watching your backside. As a minority he successfully emphasizes personal qualities over identity politics (something TSW failed at about half the time.) As a personification of Lawful alignment, he successfully moves beyond blind obedience to the pragmatic or aesthetic underpinnings of his allegiance. One of his introductory lines of dialogue even reads: "You must be singleminded but I want you to arrive at that singlemindedness yourself. To a refined palate, propaganda leaves such a bad taste."

But most of those you meet in the secret world lack the benefit of Sonnac's luxurious nigh-impregnable fortress. Their attitudes tend to be defined more by struggling to keep their footing in a shifting physical/metaphysical landscape or come to terms with their conscription in the game's various conflicts. Despite their colorful quirks their writing and voicing reveal just how wrung they are of vitality in the face of doom. They shuffle about, they sulk, they sneer, they grit their teeth in anticipation of their last stand, they pluckily, timidly, desperately or fatalistically point you in the direction of some slim hope.

Harumi's lines in All Alone Together certainly gain gravitas in the post-COVID19 age of social distancing (her brother even wears a face mask) as she struggles to stay connected to her online friends from behind her apartment door and maze of Home Alone boobytraps protecting the building.

 

In fact, though it provided plety of bigger and badder and ever-biggerer and badderer monsters to pummel into submission, TSW's storytelling success depended on forcing players into an awareness of adult fears: not only is there a fanged monstrosity thundering through the corridors after you, but it already got your parents. Your enemy cannot kill you - so she will leave you crippled. You can save the world! - by being ritually sacrificed and becoming an immobile statue for millennia. You staved off the zombie apocalypse, but all the people you've struggled beside have breathed too deep, and now it's only a matter of time...

Helplessness, isolation, futility, alienation.

A siren song luring you to the abyss.

Children enrolled at the activity center to boost their confidence, for the sake of personal empowerment, regimented, shamed into obedience, inculcated, castrated, blanked slates, hollow vectors for abhuman apotheosis. Your existence has been given purpose, acceptance superfluous.

In keeping with TSW's meta-textual, alternate reality incipience, the Stephen King parody early in your adventures, a memory quickly lost amidst the gear-farming grind, even brings this existential despair home to the gamers, the lotophagi themselves.

 

Rain gathering trickle by torrent into a cistern, dragging you with it by your abandoned hopes, by the cowardice which drained the color from your life, by your own longing for a door into neverwhere.

 

You are the sum of your fears. Fear nothing.

 

"Leave, Chuck. I can make you leave."

The Open and Shut Secret World: Mystery Machine

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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I've played a few games on opening day or in open beta (when the term still held meaning) including MMOs, but I find it difficult to describe the atmosphere in The Secret World when the curtain rose back in 2012. You'd normally expect a gaggle of eager young space cadets visibly pausing every few moments to rearrage their hotkeys while they scramble for every last XP point to be first at lvl50... or 60 or 60million, whatever. Indeed there was plenty of mindless powerlevelling to be seen, especially the farther content proregressed from promising concept to stultified execution.

Yet compared to other online games and WoW-clones especially, and comparable only to the likes of City of Heroes, you'd also find a great many more participants excited not only about their status in the game but about The Game itself. This now depressingly deserted street between newbietown's church and town hall teemed with amateur detectives trying to crack The Kingsmouth Code, chasing a trail of sewer covers, an antique painting, clock hands and Bible verse via visual and verbal clues like "In the seat of power, the navigator immortalized"

 

Zone chat was full of admonitions to avoid spoilers and polite requests for minor hints in private whispers... and amazingly enough pretty much everyone held to this rule! Even TSW's various wikis hide clues beneath several layers of hints so as to maximize the player's own input. Such "investigation" missions involved little to no combat beyond simply maneuvering around your current zone, gave a relatively low pay-off for a lengthy time investment... and if I told you they often embodied TSW at its finest, you can probably guess one reason it failed as an MMO. Adventure game puzzle-solving doesn't quite mesh with farming for enchanted spaulders.

Sure, they weren't always ideal.

 

As I complained at the time, too often the designers substituted specialized knowledge for problem-solving ability. The Unburnt Bush for example led you to various altars inscribed in Arabic symbols which you needed to match to corresponding Hebrew mentions of Old Testament plagues. As many pointed out, unless you happen to be fluent in at least one of those languages you'd have a devil of a time googling any of that gobbledygook. For my own part I just winged it without looking anything up, based on length and complexity of symbols, presuming some correlation between the two languages... with mixed success. It does however show the lengths TSW's developers (and players) were willing to go to for a change of pace from the WoW-clone grind.

To facilitate such research, Funcom implemented a web browser in-game, which seems a laughable waste of development time in retrospect given the industry-wide shift to borderless windowed modes for carefree alt-tabbing just a couple years later. They even set up fake websites for various in-game characters and organizations letting you look up imaginary payrolls, ISBN codes, street addresses, etc. continuing the tradition in which they'd launched TSW as an alternate reality game, playing up the urban fantasy feel of slipping into Neverwhere. While I still think it a fundamentally shallow gimmick detracting from the game proper, there's no denying that finishing one of these escapades gave most of us a much greater feeling of accomplishment than killing ten thousand zombies.

Ah, but wait, there's more!

TSW had not one but two kinds of non-combat missions: where investigation focused on adventure game clue-cobbling, sabotage was more about spatial orientation and survival mode sneaking / dodging various hazards.

When it worked, it worked great, like In the Dusty Dark's chasms to be crossed via invisible walkways or sequences of jump pads. When it didn't work...

 

You'll likely hear The Cost of Magic blasphemed by anyone who's tried it, though for my money a later moonwalking mission in Tokyo was even worse. Yes, I said "moonwalking" - don't get me started. While TSW's adventure game roots made investigation missions a good fit and its atmosphere played well toward sneaking past security cameras or skulking demons, Super Mario platform-jumping levels were too much of a genre-bending stretch by far. Not only could TSW's physics and lag not support such fine motor sk!llz, but in order to get your achievement you had to finish the sequence without a single mistake. For all four mission stages.

 

Though often hit-or-miss, these alternate mission modes in TSW demonstrated there was a market for sneaking and clue-cobbling even within MMO demographics. No matter how much we hated some of them, we didn't stop playing because of these challenges. We stopped when they stopped making them.

Better to be frustrated than bored.

The Open and Shut Secret World: Proportion

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere.

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"And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners. 

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early."

 

Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

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"Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness."

H.P. Lovecraft - Nyarlathotep

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Welcome to my comfort zone.

 

The Secret World's version of Transylvania's middle-difficulty zone The Shadowy Forest was also a prime grinding spot. To minimize travel times I'd often split the difference between daily quests and log out in the quest location itself, in this case a ruined village haunted by the ghosts of traitors, but I quickly grew to favor this logout spot for aesthetic purposes much as I did Nar's Peak in LotRO. The abandoned church houses no glowing, vibrating holy relics, no chanting cabals shooting magic finger lasers to keep monsters at bay. Dead faith and chill air. It's simply avoided. Outside roams death. Inside, blanketed by persistent impermanence, a weary immortal can find momentary peace. It's drafty, and quiet, and lonely, and forgotten... and safe.

 

Fans trying to advertise the game would often tout TSW's Lovecraftian themes, and in all fairness the Cthulhu clones are pretty hard to miss, as a screenshot below will demonstrate. But if kaiju from beyond the moon were its only aesthetic inspiration it would fall flat. Contrast is key.

It drew heavily from urban fantasy (comparisons to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere are unavoidable given their shared location) and in fact concept art from TSW now features among Google's designated reference images for that subgenre. The starting "social" hubs of New York, Seoul and London were perfectly mundane cityscapes where the masquerade is (mostly) upheld, where unassuming civillians grab a cup of coffee and chat about the weather... and where, just around the corner and down some steps, you can find a necrophage operating a produce stand.

 

It also drew, to the same effect, from Ray Bradbury:

The first third of the original release takes place in New England and banks on the same contrast between quaint, parochial Americana and lurking cosmic mysteries you find in Bradbury's horror stories: hick-descended tradesmen with worn shoes arguing above disaffected picket fences about itinerant witches or how they're getting along with their local ghosts, distracting each other from encroaching inevitability.

All in all, despite some concessions to the medium like higher ceilings to accomodate camera angles (that cathedral above's at least twice as big in every dimension as a simple village church from the 15th century would've been) TSW maintained human proportions throughout, complete with human furnishings and human paraphernalia. While the supernatural is pervasive, it is also consistently intrusive, more alien for appearing next to a coffee pot or a mail van or inside a waiting room with magazines strewn on a glass table. The same juxtaposition extends to NPCs, as many of those you meet lack supernatural powers or training yet are shown foiling Hammer Horror escapees by hook and crook.

What this amounts to is a delightful low-key setup for truly impressive monsters and events to retain their impact, say by bursting out of the ground at Times Square:

Even more importantly, transportation to otherworldly locales is all the more disorienting for shearing away from ever-present normalcy.

 

By maintaining a sense of proportion and allowing simplicity to offset exoticism, TSW kept its magic magical.

The Open and Shut Secret World: On Its Last Whale

"the children of the night are calling"

Juno Reactor / Ed Wood

 

I've been putting off my farewell to The Secret World long enough. A bittersweet topic for me, not merely because despite myself I found much to enjoy in TSW's mangled mix of brilliance, tedium and ineptitude, but because it's been a staple here at the den since its inception and fed me more references than any other game. Even my MMManifesto, half the motivation for starting a blog in the first place, began as a Dark Days Are Coming forum post. In late 2011 I was still playing City of Heroes and dreaming still that I might find a single virtual world into which I could finally lose myself, a worthy matrix to Case, a cure for meatspace. I'd been keeping an eye on TSW's development ever since 2007, pre-ordered it with a lifetime subscription and dove in with uncharacteristic glee.

I've ranted more than enough about its failings. Rumor has it that albeit pretty at face value, its underlying code was a mess and every new patch brought new bugs. Perhaps that explains the snail's pace of post-launch content, and unfortunately instead of investing in a much-needed overhaul, Funcom decided just to let it hobble along and try to milk it for however long it lasted, saddling players with timesink after timesink in place of actual development. From the start, TSW was, even more obviously than other such cases, a single-player game with a multiplayer pretext for forcing digital rights management.

 

It went far beyond the usual MMO grind of farming ten thousand zombies a thousand times over, or the terrible, tacked-on PvP minigames meant to keep players invested by keeping them at each others' throats to no synergistic effect. The Tokyo expansion, while good in many ways, also introduced a secondary leveled-loot grind akin to LotRO's "legendary" gear. Development time sank more and more into funny hats and other cash shop adventures. Players were given an irrelevant "museum" to build up purely by grinding. Even when so-called content was released, it consisted more and more of text adventures or dull walls of text (bestiary lore) unlocked by combing old zones. Open world locations were recycled into grindable "virtual reality" instances. The Legends relaunch forced players back down to zero, gutted instance variety, dumbed down gameplay and lengthened the grind, and at the same time diminished lifer benefits. An entirely new minigame consisted of shuffling static portraits around. A new daily grind pitted each player solo against series of damage sponge minibosses each taking minutes to put down. To add insult to injury, Funcom started releasing separate spin-off games (The Park, Moons of Madness) to bleed its few remaining adherents with "new" products instead of delivering their much-awaited further chapters.

 

And now?

It's been a couple of years since I bothered even logging in for my daily rewards but for nostalgia's sake had always intended to write up some kind or another of post-mortem, and now's as good a time as any. For one thing, given TSW's emphasis on dark fantasy slews of mythical monsters, Halloween has always been its magic time. For another, I logged in a couple of months ago and realized its profitability has likely dipped far enough into the red to be scuttled entirely.

There's only one account selling amusement park currency in the cash shop, implying they're either down to their last whale or even sadder, forced to seed the market themselves for lack of interest.

While I've done plenty of bitchin', I've rarely mentioned the high points which kept me and others coming back. So join me, if you will, over the next month, as I shed a lycanthropic tear for one of the most engaging piles of wasted potential in video game history.

Mall Rats Overboard

"Jesus is filling out paperwork now
At the facility on East 12th st."

Green Day - Homecoming



Welcome, bees* to the splentacfluous Agartha Mall!

Agartha, the Hollow Earth, was in The Secret World's initial 2012 interpretation a transit hub. Players would bounce between America, Egypt and Romania by zooming to portals growing like fruit along the branches of the world-tree. A rather captivating sight, just otherworldly enough to be memorable, even if said zooming did grow a bit tedious by repetition.

As part of the game's desperate (and unsuccessful) rebranding as Secret World Legends in 2017, Agartha's branches were severely truncated and its trunk re-imagined as a social hub, after the game's repeated failures to make players congregate in fight clubs, theatres or the city of London. Thus the oncogenesis of the Agartha Mall at the world's very heart, a large enclosure lined with shops, bankers and auctioneers, opening into a portal to seasonal content, a restaurant and a dance club on its terraces, complete with a centerpiece chandelier beneath which a Christmas tree or other seasonal nonsense can be inserted.

Note the lack of congregating players.
Turns out it takes more than being given a place to stand to keep customers' interest.

Now, first I have to remark on the sheer idiocy of taking a grandiose, mysterious notion like the Hollow Earth and paving it over into yet another painfully mundane mall. But more amusingly by the time TSW launched, Amazon and eBay were almost two decades old. By 2017 when TSW became SWL and Agartha was mallified, real-world malls at least in the United States had been gradually pushed out of business throughout the previous decade by online shopping. In its effort toward cozy mundane familiarity, Funcom copied an architectural motif that's been moribund since before their product's original launch.

There's something just so... special... about jumping on a bandwagon while it's diving off a cliff.



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* It makes sense in context.

Piano / Forte! (A Dimension of Sound)

"One thousand cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We found a place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there"

Judas Priest - Ram It Down
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"And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And Rrroht inside a corpsy shell"

Vincent Price, in Michael Jackson's Thriller *
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Though its most memorable moments tended to come from its more tech-driven episodes, The Twilight Zone only rarely qualified as SciFi. I'd speculate that, as Paramount would with ST:TNG forty years later, CBS just found it cheaper to reuse the copiously superfluous cowboy hats and fedoras it had lying around its studios than to pay to build the more unique cardboard rockets and fishbowl helmets by which to ennoble a SciFi production. Looking at it now, the whole series seems anything but a lavish affair (at one point they were even denied the cash for film) and it shows. We might praise the stark realism or the poignancy of one episode after another in which a lone protagonist wanders about an empty town (or an even emptier alien planet) but let's remember it precluded paying extras. And the deserted alien planets were quite depopulated of props and decor as well.

What it did have was sound, from Serling's narrated bookends to details like the sharp pinprick noise of eyeglasses shattering on concrete, to immortalized one-liners like "there was time now" or "it's a cookbook!" More than one episode centered on ventriloquism, of all things, but then it's rare for the real world to provide such sinister props pre-made for a televised thriller. In fact, the show had at times more in common with old-school radio dramas than with the more lavish visuals of its successors, with much of the plot expressed through dialogue instead of action. I had the fortune earlier this year to catch a marathon running through not only the big hits but some of the less popular episodes, including Sounds and Silences, in which a big fat loudmouth is sentenced, in standard Serling style, first to one aural extreme, then the other.

It hit closer to home for me than for most, since I happen to be just a tad sensitive to incoherent noise. When I was young and my ears even sharper, I was even annoyed by those supposedly ultrasonic vermin-repellent devices. (Please try not to draw the obvious conclusion.) I've occasionally gotten up in the middle of the night to close my bedroom door against such noises as... my refrigerator... from six meters and two corners away. Advertisements, with their deliberately intrusive, attention-grabbing flood of white noise, still drive me into a frothing rage. I'm the type to stop dead while walking and track the wind as it hits the trees or the side of a building. Though active noise control has remained slightly too expensive for my tastes, I've come to view a good solid pair of ear-covering headphones as essential to sitting at my computer. My stance on voice chat noise pollution in games is well documented, and it's not too far from my stance on voice chat noise pollution in the physical world.

So in context it's no surprise that so many things remind me of a song I once heard, or that I keep returning here on the blog to the topic of audio in computer games. Watching and listening to Sounds and Silences made me more attentive to how sound was used back in the days of radio and the first grainy, barely discernible flashes of the cathode ray. To some extent we can still hear the same quality these days in a well-narrated audio book, because regardless of technological improvements the main problem still lies in conveying intent. Good narration will relate apprehension and tension by halting, ponderous sentences, will rush awkwardly through relating shameful events, will threaten in a stony monotone, letting the microphone do the work of amplification. Where televisuals fall short, well-placed sound effects will not only color an event but will mark different phases of the action or provide new information. (You -know- the glasses have broken before you ever see the shards.) And, perhaps most importantly, good music is more than filler. It sets the mood and provides nuance.

As far as games go, I more or less started off this blog by complaining about the non-massive nature of MMOs, microtransactions as legitimized cheating, and the decay in game music quality. And I never let up on them. For a long time after Y2K, sound degenerated, as far as I can see for three main reasons:

1) Video cards continued to rule the tech specs while sound cards plateaued fairly quickly. It might shock younger gamers now to see old game boxes from the '90s advertising the number of sound channels a particular title was capable of occupying, right alongside its polygon count. Or Diablo 2 advertising itself for having hired an orchestra. As everyone started getting the same quality sound cards and sound stopped being a mode of conspicuous consumption, companies also invested less and less in what was no longer a selling point.

2) Graphics really did improve. Tremendously. Thus, much like TV shows stopped conveying information via sound in favor of displaying it visually on ever-larger, ever higher definition TV sets, video game sound became more vague, relegated to the background.

3) For ten to fifteen years companies were tripping over each other to widen their market base from obsessive wer-nerds to the mass market. This meant providing more instant gratification, simplifying and dumbing down everything from controls (there were no noteworthy 3D strategy games after Homeworld) to cultural references to level design, to shrinking party / match sizes in multiplayer and eliminating secondary roles in class-based games.... to, as a matter of course, music. It was especially noticeable in online games where you could at times still hear the more recognizable, launch-quality music even as newer patches added more generic white noise. But it was not unheard of for companies to actually go back and vandalize their own previous work, scrapping more interesting original tracks to replace them with blander, more generic, more forgettable, lowest-common-denominator fare.

And sure, it hasn't all been bad. The Secret World, a game from 2011 which failed miserably as a game but dressed up its failure via surprising artistic panache, recently held its yearly Samhain event, part of which treats players to a collection of radio dramas from the days before video killed such stars. While it's unforgivable of Funcom to charge its customers subscription fees for public domain radio as a timesink, I do have to thank them at the very least for their selection, which includes not only the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast but The Thing on the Fourble Board (**) Give it a listen. It's twenty minutes of sane, didactic, low-key narration punctuated by a few precision strikes of otherworldly presence. And you will know it when you hear it, trust me. In turn, TSW was one of the few games which managed to emulate that old-timey radio drama attention to sound. Its colorful yet still nuanced NPCs set a delightfully mundane backdrop against which its various boogey men can boogety-boo!

In fact, horror games and horror themed segments in general have invested more in sound. Shrieks, groans, creaks and ominous footsteps add a great deal to their suspense, especially since they so often need to hide their boogeymen until the last second and can't bank entirely on graphics as other genres do. But, banking on a contrast with eerie silences unfortunately leaves no room for a real soundtrack. While voice acting has always oscillated in quality between titles and sound effects have had their high points, music consistently diminished. My recent jaunt through System Shock's introduction reminded me how much more expressive that '80s/'90s synthesized backdrop was. While some series (Heroes of Might and Magic, Divinity) were lucky enough to latch onto a good composer from the start and clung to them as selling points through many reiterations, most did not, and they really should've paid more attention to how effective a well-integrated, memorable soundtrack can be in other media. Don't believe me? O.K., three, two, one, let's jam. And it's not like animation was new by that point.


But I am happy to note some signs that music might once again be considered a distinctive element of game design and not simply white noise to fill the background silences. Justin Bell's sound direction wasn't bad in Pillars of Eternity but still largely generic, unintrusive medievalism. It wasn't until he really cut loose two years later (2016) in Tyranny that he put out something worthy of having his name mentioned. What's more, I've been seeing some amusing signs of companies reversing the old trend of downplaying music after release. Stellaris' more noticeable tracks seem to come from its later DLCs like Synthetic Dawn (2017). Warframe, launched in 2013, has some surprisingly engaging tracks... most attached to content added since 2015-2018.

MAKE SOME NOISE !

Yes, music can sometimes intrude on other gameplay elements (those thunderous old '90s tracks were partly meant to cover up the lack of other sound effects or ambience) but intruding can also be a good thing. The Tristram theme did as much for the original Diablo's popularity as any other of its high points, and many a mediocre game has remained fixed in gamers' memories for its soundtrack. And there are endless ways to mitigate the potential nuisance factor. Set it in-character or in an appropriate locale. The sea shanties in PoE2: Deadfire were more immersive than half its chauvinistic abortions of storytelling put together, the Sleepless Lullaby along with Lilith's monologue or the Siren Song rendered their little corners of TSW unforgettable, no-one who's played STALKER can forget the NPCs randomly breaking out their guitars and We All Lift Together defined Fortuna better than any other location in Warframe. V:tM-Bloodlines made its night spots come alive with Isolated, A Smaller God, Lecher Bitch... and appropriately enough, Come Alive... and nobody and I mean nobody was complaining about Bloodlines' music being too intrusive!

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE !

Even completely out of character, let music symbolize your setting instead of just underscoring it. Even a twenty-second flute solo can stick in your customers' minds years afterwards for marking their call to adventure. I sure as hell have never met that wailing banshee in Tyranny's soundtrack in all my replays of the game, but she fits her imaginary world every bit as perfectly as The Thing on the Fourble Board's inhuman meowling.

It's not unreasonable to assume that people still remember that often painfully jarring 8-bit tootling from 1980s computer games for its sheer nostalgia factor... but let's not exclude the possibility that they memor it for being memor-able. Yeah, that's a quality we really should get back around to recapturing.

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* You know, on one hand I'm disappointed that after three decades that's still one of our most satisfying portrayals of lycanthropy. On the other hand... might as well enjoy it!
Aaroooooo... AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA !

** Shockingly enough, that is, officially, a word.

World Legendarily Secret; Skies Manned Up

I've been talking about the not-really-multiplayer game The Secret World on this blog since before it came out. For all its aesthetic charm, it also serves as a prime object lesson for misdirected design priorities. By 2015-16, three or four years after its launch, it was pretty much dead. Around this time in 2017, Funcom surprised me by not scrapping the project but instead relaunching it as "Secret World Legends" with even more dumbed-down gameplay, half its group content excised, wall-to-wall bugs and its original emphasis on immersive puzzle solving ignored.

I mistakenly assumed that if they relaunched it they must intend to actually do something with it... which proceeded to not happen. Instead they re-hashed their old seasonal content and lengthened the loot grinding treadmill. In April 2018 they at last rolled out their first new content in three years (since MFB) an unambitious new South Africa zone with a couple of decent single-player boss fights but half its supposed content marked "coming soon."

"Soon" is apparently four months later and amounts to even more faction reputation grinding plus a grand total of one new actual mission. Knowing TSW's storied past of pervasive bugginess I gave it a few days since the new patch launched on Aug 01, to let them hotfix whatever would inevitably turn out unplayable about it. Today I tried that new mission.
And it bugged out.
I'd love to claim prescience but even a bat with earplugs could've seen that one coming. But hey, hey, in all fairness, relogging did fix the bugged item, triggering the next cutscene...
...
... can you tell what's coming?
...
Why, yes, yes it did, the mission did bug out yet again, immediately, and this time irreparably.
Three fucking years.

And yeah, I'm pissed because back in 2011 I preordered myself a lifetime subscription to a slow-motion train wreck. In contrast, I later also preordered No Man's Sky which turned out to be a very fast-motion train wreck. Even two years later, NMS' overhyped, disastrous launch has remained the stuff of legend. Ignoring that few of its buyers could get their purchase running in the first place, its gameplay was limited to highly repetitive, aimless resource acquisition and arcade-style whack-a-mole FPS combat with no tactical or strategic elements whatsoever.

People were rightly angry. Hell, I was one of them. Nevertheless, I warned against completely dismissing NMS. Its core planet-generating algorithms, environment interaction and resource management mechanics provide a very solid basis for further development. I said all that while not really expecting that further development. After a fiasco of such caliber, it's traditional for a game development studio to simply pocket the remainder of their customers' money and skulk off into the sunset having gained some work experience for their resumes. Or string their subscribers along with timesinks, as MMO developers like Funcom are wont to.

Hello Games chose not to.
They patched most video card issues, and though the game loads slowly it now runs reliably enough.
Amusingly, the compass I demanded in my first post got implemented soon thereafter and comes in handy enough on occasional long foraging trips. It's not much but it's something, and something is more than I expected.
Over the past year and a half they've continually added base-building features, fleshed out the campaign storyline, added more resource storage functionality, toned down the constant pirate attacks and made it easier to avoid them, added more terrain sculpting, and their latest patch overhauled the resource system, presumably in preparation for further developing the crafting tree. They've even been toying with a multiplayer function.

I can't in all honesty give NMS a very hearty recommendation, even as it stands now. It's still quite flat and repetitive for its purported galactic scope. When I said it needed an overarching framework I didn't mean putting the player on the rails of some strict, linear plot, but giving the player the means to build one's own trading / piracy empire, to make one's own sandy-boxy plot. Some satisfying home-making aside, I doubt it's going in the right direction... but then it's still a pleasant surprise to see it going in any direction at all.

Hello Games took their lumps, ate their well-deserved heap of humble pie, then buckled down and have steadily been improving their product at no extra cost since release. Whatever you've heard about NMS, it's now at the very least worth a second look, and after that FUBAR launch it's been treating its customers a lot better than we've learned to expect from the customarily predatory game industry.

Secret Farmville Legends

Before I abandon The Secret World until their next patch, I'd like to address what I like to call the Tamagotchi Brigade.

TSW is quite a pretty game. It features immersive locales and character models both realistic and theatrical. Unfortunately, this may not make it the easiest program to work within, if its release schedule is any indication. Content updates are few and far between. Even by four years ago, I had remarked that Funcom was swindling its customers with simple text updates instead of working within the game engine for which they'd been charged.

This would be less of an issue if TSW had any replay value, but like any WoW-clone it's a painfully linear slog through a single-player gear farming grindfest. Creativity and unpredictability scare idiots. Content provides no incentive to log in for day after day after day of the same exact run through the same exact scripted instance. Companies need log-in incentives to just get their customers to fire up their game client... just for five minutes... so their addiction to the loot grind can kick in.

So, among other daily log-in rewards, TSW has implemented the "agent network" a minigame mixing trading card random drop collectability with Farmville babysitting. Like previously mentioned texted ventures it features no voice actors and takes place entirely outside the main game environment. Find mooks, equip them with gear and send them on missions. They bring back resources used to run higher-level missions.

That's the interesting part. High-level missions use up a lot of resources. The only way to get these is by having your agents run low-level missions, whose other rewards are utter trash loot, not even vendorable. Missions come in durations of eight, four, one hour or fifteen minutes. With enough agents, by far the most efficient way to gather resources is to constantly run fifteen minute missions... all day long, non stop.

So when your customers run off because your product's a mind-numbingly repetitive grind, your solution is a minigame which is... even more of a grind.
Hhmmm.
Yes.
Yes, this will work out well.

Undead in Joburg

Slight spoilers follow as to Secret World Legends' new playable zone, New Dawn.

Once upon a time, Penelope had a problem: her husband had gone off to war. (Some might consider that a bigger problem for the husband himself, but let's not be accused of mansplaining here.) In any case brave Odysseus, wise king of Ithaca, refused to chop his baby boy in two with a plow, so was deemed much too sane for politics and got drafted. Penelope was left home holding the baby, and had to wait a while before Ulysses sailed back. Then she had to wait another while, and a few more whiles after that. Now, when a king goes m.i.a. for two decades it inevitably prompts a few understudies to step up and claim the title, so Penelope had to keep beating suitors off with a stick (the poor dear) and stall 'til her bull came home. Her favorite trick was refusing to re-mary until she finished weaving a shroud for a relative's death. Every day she'd weave a bit more of the shroud to show the suitors her progress. Every night, she'd unravel it.
Heheh. Suckers.

Anyway, on a completely different topic:
Welcome to South Africa!

The Secret World put out its first real content update in three years yesterday. For those not in the know, this is a game which launched about seven years ago, promising to be a "different" kind of MMO (no classes, no levels, that sort of spiel) and proved to be pretty much just another WoW-clone in every practical aspect. It did earn an uncontested reputation as the best-written MMO (sort of like Neil DeGrasse Tyson being voted the sexiest astrophysicist; mu) and I would add also the best-acted and often most atmospheric. It easily outclasses most of the game industry in aesthetic flair.

Unfortunately, TSW had no replay value: invariable scripted mission grinding, a game engine woefully maladaptive for PvP, a skill system filled with redundancy and lacking satisfying customization. Like any other WoW-clone it also imposes massive amounts of replay on its customers though gear-farming timesinks. It's an old-school puzzle-solving, linear single-player adventure game with a multiplayer mode tacked on at the end to justify DRMing its customers to death and funneling them into a cash shop.
I happen to be a lifetime subscriber, so I'm in this thing to the bitter end.

Said bitter end should probably have come back in 2015 or 2016 by which time TSW had already become a ghost town fleetingly repopulated for a weekend at a time whenever the company announced some kind of event or promotion. Surprisingly, Funcom decided to reinvest in the project instead of dumping it. Last July it was relaunched as Secret World Legends, with an even more dumbed down combat system and much of its content actually removed, but at least it was in a more playable form, less of a chore. (Except for the chores.) The Legends relaunch eclosed in a hilariously, stunningly buggy form, filled with blatant cash traps and emptied of at least half its multiplayer elements while at the same time forcing players through a massive dozen-tier gear-farming slog as a timesink in lieu of content. Now, the bugs have largely been squashed and new content has finally arrived. How does it measure up?

Like a dwarf in the NBA. But, y'know, still, a sexy dwarf.
For a face-saving, job-securing band-aid on a chest-wound having long bled out, for a product several years in production, the South Africa expansion's laughably small. In fact you can see around half of it in that one screenshot. Aside from being entirely single-player, I suppose it doesn't help that half the list of new content reads "coming soon":

Jesus, who's paying these people?
Oh, right, me.
Well, I mean, you can't blame them. They only had a few years to slap twenty missions together.
However...
I have yet to get bugged. This may sound like a not-so-great expectation, but compared to TSW's history heretofore, it's outright miraculous. It took them five years to even get their rosters to display dates properly. Legends hit in 2017 with bugs still unresolved since 2011. A bug-free TSW expansion's almost like a bug-free Troika game. History balks at the very concept.

Also, while there's relatively little there, what's there is actually solid work. Nothing brilliant, mind you. A couple of interesting boss fights, a new gameplay mechanic for sabotage (read: stealth) missions which complements existing mechanics nicely, some good voice acting, some mediocre. The bidonville's scenic enough. I'll get into the writing some other time, but overall New Dawn looks promising.

Alas, TSW is still a mindless chore of a grind, overall. Amusingly though, a few of the missions seem meta-commentary on this very fact. You alternate your time infiltrating the cultist commune of New Dawn between day and night, between undermining them and earning their trust, with different quests available during each. Under cover of darkness, you sabotage some trucks and spray graffiti all over their tin shacks. Come morning, you're tasked with... repairing the trucks and cleaning up the graffiti which mysteriously appeared overnight. Wax on; wax off. If Funcom didn't consciously mean this as self-parody, they've just been at it for too long.

Of course, when Penelope kept unraveling her weaving, she knew the last cause of her temporizing. She had an Odysseus on the horizon.
Do we?
Or are we the poor deluded suitors?

Fitted hat day

"- whose custom it was
To take a daily stroll dressed
In silk gowns like a fashionable lady.
In this he failed. Miserably."

Rasputina - Utopian Society


Once upon a time I sold a funny hat to another player in Team Fortress 2 for fifty dollars. Not that I'd recommend it as an income opportunity (and I dumped the money back into Steam soon enough... think it's what paid for my copy of Skyrim) but when I saw the prices people were paying for such status symbols I was compelled to verify their marketability. And we are talking about pure status symbols, make no mistake. It's not like it was Oddjob's bowler hat from Goldfinger or shot laser-beams or summoned chupacabras or anything. It was a purely cosmetic item. Inasmuch as TF2 lacks environmental hazards, it didn't even keep your head warm.

And someone paid fifty bucks for that piece of shit. Piece of  -imaginary- shit! Skyrim goes for what, about $40? How many pieces of headgear does Skyrim include? How many hours of entertainment can $50 buy you during a GoG sale? Entire series of classic games go for less. Sir, You Are Being Hunted rates $20 and look! Funny hats!

Nor am I immune to such stupidity by any means. My LotRO character owns a cloak of the mountain wolves, plus a dwarf property guard and I forget what other cosmetic doodad bought in a moment of weakness. About ten dollars all told for a stumpy axeholder and a... a... ok, I can't say anything bad about the cloak, I love the cloak

Look, it's got wolves!

... but if you asked me now, I wouldn't pay $3 for it or however much it cost in amusement park money. Heap big buyer's remorse. In other games it's alternate character skins or a novelty horn sounding the "ride of the valkyries" for my airship in Planetside 2. I don't even have a peer group over which to lord this pixelated junk, and I'm still falling for it. Our idiotic species is so dependent on social domination that even sour old misanthropes like me will, in fits of madness, pay through the nose for sumptuary lawfulness.

So I won't waste any more time trying to demonstrate that microtransactions have completely taken over online games. Assume the scam works.

Developers (and their ass-kissing clientele) will often self-justify by claiming to restrict themselves to cosmetics, and not selling competitive edges. Most of the time you'll find they're still selling "quality of life" automation for in-game chores, which still amounts to a paid advantage. Nonetheless, that talk must be talked. Legitimized cheating has got to go. However, regardless of whether it's filled with weapons or funny hats, the cash store still hurts games.

Last year I voiced some reticence vis-a-vis Shroud of the Avatar and its on/off-line gameplay compromise. A couple of days ago I tried giving it a second look and was immediately put off instead by faceplanting right in its cash shop. Hundreds upon hundreds of items ranging up in price to hundreds upon hundreds of dollars attempt to tempt intemperate empty heads. And this, mind you, is for a game that's not even officially "out" yet but in "early access" whatever that means in the age of years-long open beta tests. What exactly am I supposed to be buying here? The right to buy more in-game items? When you don't even have a game yet?

The Secret World was revamped this summer in hopes of dragging players back into the endless mindless grindfest... by resetting the dials on the treadmill and making them run the grind all over again. In fact, the new version has even less content than the old. Plus, TSW Legends was hilariously bugged and managed somehow to dumb down an already broken skill system.
About the only thing that increased was the number of cosmetic items in TSW's cash shop.

Sure there's nothing to do but farm the same precisely scripted mission hundreds of times over, but at least you'll be doing that nothing while wearing a fitted hat in the color of your choice. About 30 U.S. cents a piece by my estimate. Oh, there's one for every occasion, collect them all!

TSW has more (gameplay) issues than it has (storyline) issues, from half-assed PvP and raid systems to a tortured skill system uninteresting for either PvP or PvE, to balance and la-a-ag and more bugs than an ant farm - some of which have gone unaddressed since its 2011 launch. Yet instead of improving or even fixing their product, Funcom has sunk year after year of their customers' subscription money into lengthening timesinks and adding more items to the cash shop. And of course the more you're invested in that racket, the less and less of actual product you create or have to offer. When you give any money to an online game developer these days, this is what you're funding: funny hats. And at a hundred dollars per toy house on the internets prairie, them's some freakin' macro microtransactions.

I mean, Shroud of the Avatar's system might be even funnier if I'm reading it correctly, as it seems cash shop purchases are only necessary for the online half of the game. So you're not even paying to see that item on your character. You're paying for the explicit privilege of showing off that item in public? How much of a diva can you possibly be?

Either way, the financial incentive for companies to continue churning out meaningless status symbols as "content" completely undermines the necessary focus on the game underneath that fluff. Not that it's entirely surprising. As I remarked a couple of years ago, most developers are not in the business of creating products but of engineering sinecures for themselves. Those Joneses won't keep up with themselves. You always need new status symbols to one-up the old ones, new stages on which to buy a center spot.

Thus, online games have degenerated from contests of wits and wills and been paved over with sickly, garish fashion runways on which preening and prancing imbeciles attempt to shame each other with their latest designer blue slaad jeans.


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P.S.:
In case you didn't get the title, it's from Seinfeld.