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On Nintendo (but briefly, as I keep going off-topic on this every time I write this post): The information that they've made public about their online plans for the DS suggests that their strategy is questionable, at best, and downright stupid at worst. No unique gamertags being the daftest of their proposals, for a whole range of reasons.
They've an awful lot to prove with their next console and I find it worrying that so many people are so prepared to pin their hopes on what are, at the moment, a few bland and empty promises. Their understanding of how online gaming works is unproven - I'll need to hear a lot more before I'm halfway to being convinced that they know what they're doing here.
Microsoft haven't traditionally been a games company, but then neither were Sony up until a few years ago. What Microsoft appear to have done is to have combined knowledge gained from general Internet activity with that from the failed Dreamcast online experiment, looked at what works and what doesn't and built Live up from there. The 360 excites because it looks like they're now adding the influence of the modding community to that list - what is the promise of downloadable games from old home hardware if not an attempt to legitimise emulation? That's an acknowledgement of the fact that a large number of Xbox owners modified the hardware because they wanted to revisit old titles from the comfort of their armchair. You can accuse MS of many things, but not being able to reconginse when something is proving to be popular and passing up the opportunity to half-inch it for themselves isn't one of them.
I'm not sure what the answer is to the problem of Live's community being fickle. Maybe something that could be better explored in certain titles is to find ways to increase the player's sense of connection to and ownership of their in-game avatar. That's definitely how MMORPGs get their hooks into people initially - what keeps them there, as far as I can tell, is a combination of that and the relationships that they build up with others during the process of learning the rules and exploring the world.
That's only something that can comfortably sit in certain games, though. What would be the point of it in Outrun 2? It's also something that has to be balanced properly - Rare attempted to do it with their Xbox remake of Conker, awarding the player experience points for playing online and having these open up stronger abilities for use in the online game, but it simply led to a situation where those players who were able to put the most time in ended up having a significant advantage over newer or less regular players, regardless of their ability. As a result, that game has a tiny band of dedicated players, but is impossible for anybody else to enjoy.
I think the current answer to the problems mentioned in the two posts directly above - people moving from one game to a newer one at the drop of a hat, people being incapable of conducting themselves in a decent manner online - is to build up as extensive a friends list as possible and generally stick to playing with the people on it. It's not a proper solution, but it's a way of guaranteeing that the online experience remains fun and that older games don't end up gathering dust. toks, I do remember those games I had with you, but in terms of the amount of time I've spent on Halo 2 online, that sort of thing has been relatively rare because I've tried to make sure that I only play it when I know at least half of the people on my team. If you'd have been online on a night when there was a proper party of friends list people playing, you'd have got a lot more enjoyment from it.
It's a shame that this has to be the case, though. When Live's matchmaking system randomly manages to place you with people who play the games for fun, who have a laugh and a chat with you and who obviously *get* it, it's almost unbeatable. This is why, in a lot of ways, those games which aren't massively popular are often a safer bet than those which are. If somebody's still playing PGR2 or Outrun, it's because they enjoy the game for what it is, not because they can annoy other people through it. In a funny way, Halo 2 is doing the rest of the Live community a whole world of good by eating up all the wankers' time - Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike is far more successful in public games, because the idiots and trolls are all causing hassle on Halo.
I quite like Miscrosoft's plans for the new version of Live as far as the changes to the feedback system go. Whereas negative feedback currently only results in temporary bannings from the service (according to whatever metrics MS have in place to measure feedback), with the 360 they're suggesting that yr bad attitude crew - the team-killers, the abusive knobs, the glitchers - will end up only being able to play games with each other. The system will match those with large amounts of negative feedback with each other exclusively, removing their reason for being idiots - the joy they get from pissing somebody else off.
PC MMORPGS> Yeah, I keep forgetting about the subscription fees for them. I don't consider the charges to be too expensive, myself - as long as GMs are always present should they be needed, as long as updates and events within the worlds are regular and as long as you're obviously getting a service which is carefully maintained and monitored, I can accept the extra, regular cost. I can totally understand why a lot of people don't like the idea of having to continue forking out every month once they've made their initial purchase, though.
Maybe a better model, from the consumer's point of view, would be for the game disc to cost no more than one month's subscription - it *is* more than a bit cheeky to charge full whack for a disc which can never be used offline. It'll never happen, though - publishers would lose out a lot of the profit that they're currently making from selling these games to people who play them for a couple of weeks, then never boot them up again. |
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