My other thought is that all the people that grew up playing games are now adults with jobs, families, and other real life timesinks. This is the crowd that is looking to “accomplish” something in the half an hour chunks of time they have to play, and there are a lot of them. I think more hardcore gamers will have to accept that they are a niche market and will be best served by niche games that have niche production values (good gameplay coupled with cheaper graphics, sounds, effects, etc).

Just passing through, btw. Hope you’re well!

I have a post scheduled at PPI on “Questing for Immersiveness in MMOs,” too bad I stumbled over this post after I had already written mine.

The one comment that I will make here is that I don’t think most players want their MMOs to be immersive. To me, underlying all of this is the reality of the profit motive and human nature. Human beings are different. They want different things out of their games. And if one’s goal is to make as much money as possible then one needs to appeal to widely divergent sets of interests. One of the things that has made WoW so successful is that it manages to do that without being totally bland. Yes, maybe it is bland compared to some others but it is not Peggle bland.

The fundamental fact of the matter is that one can make a super game with awesome immersiveness and most of the time it will go broke. There’s a message there, though your internal role player may not want to hear it.

The reality is, that most of what’s been determined as good or bad gameplay is usually reactionary. Games are taken apart by reviewers and bloggers alike and popular theories are made, rather than accepting or rejecting the game as a whole. There’s more than just the gameplay involved too, the biggest games have always been at the right place at the right time too.

And finally, we’ve often been led to believe that X is good gameplay and Y is bad gameplay, because Y is hard / expensive to make.

1) the setting had me hooked from the beginning. I have been waiting for a mad max / fallout style world that I could get into, explore and spend hours wandering the wasteland.

2) the intro tutorial to the game is awesome. I think it was a perfect way of introducing the game, getting you familiar with how things work, and in general introducing you to the FE.

3) the realtime combat system is crucial – I watch people ‘playing’ world of warcraft and other ‘click / wait / see results’ types of games and just don’t get it. You can see that alot of wow players on the FE chat don’t get the fact that combat in FE actually requires skill – that is, you can be beaten by a lower-level monster / character simply because you missed shooting at them, not because of some arbitrary dice roll behind the scenes decides that your character should win because you are higher level than them

4) the crafting – oh the crafting. The realtime queue system, the harvesting materials etc – while in a fantasy or other type of game would feel like pointless grinding – in a post-apocalyptic world, these are essential, crucial elements that work perfectly in FE. The joy of finally being able to craft myself that first pistol, or even little items of clothing to kit my character out is simply awesome.

FE rocks, see you on the wasteland ;}

The enemy Thane then offered me (and only me) to leave instead of taking me prisoner in recognition of my bravery. This felt great, almost like a total victory.

As much as I love WoW and other modern MMOs, none has come close to making me feel like I existed in a world as Ultima Online did.