The titanic struggle going on right now between cloud-based game streaming platform GeForce Now and studios who are pulling their titles from it is creating one clear loser: the consumer. Belghast of Tales of the Aggronaut is absolutely livid at what is happening with this situation.
“So yes, I get frustrated when developers — be it small indies like the dude behind The Long Dark or big companies like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda — take an anti-consumer action and claw their games off of the GeForce Now service,” he wrote. “This is the point where I get told that there are business decisions that we are not privy to and that there are complications.”
This week’s collection of MMO blog essays aren’t all gnashing of teeth, of course, as we look at WoW Classic, RIFT, SWTOR, and driving, drinking, and grinding in online games!
Going Commando: Content creator discontent
“You see, I’d also started to experience a certain feeling of discomfort during those two months when I was quietly ‘on trial.’ I want to be 100% clear that there had not been the slightest hint of being asked to not be critical of the game or anything like that. Frankly, based on the things I’ve seen and heard from some official content creators in the past, I’m pretty sure BioWare doesn’t ask people to censor themselves in any way. But I was feeling weird.”
Mailvatar: Driving, fishing, and shooting in ArcheAge
“We’ll most definitely do a couple more runs before the boats expire, and there have already been talks about if/when we’re going to build our own, permanent ones. I for one am all for it. I really like these time-limited gifts as they give players an opportunity to try out those expensive toys in a realistic environment and thus help them decide which one, if any, they want to aim for.”
GamingSF: Conjured food and drink
“Although I’m sure it doesn’t taste that great, and the lack of variety could get on my modern-sensibility nerves, in MMORPGs I do enjoy playing with classes and items that can conjure food and/or drink. I suppose it’s less of a thing in most modern games, as your character having to equip food and drink is a distinctly old-school mechanism. It seems I’m spending a good amount of my gaming time in old-school games at the moment, so it’s a mechanic I’ve encountered more of late.”
The Friendly Necromancer: Playing lost and found in RIFT
“My ability bars were a tragic mess and come to find out I needed to completely respec my character. It was an absolutely terrifying 10 minutes that resulted in me finding a lot of lost and forgotten items. I imagine it’s like someone renting a storage shed, leaving the country, and coming back nine years to find a pile of strange microwaves and coffee pots they had completely forgotten about.”
Contains Moderate Peril: The admiralty system and farming dilithium in Star Trek Online
“Cryptic’s ‘reset’ is not quite as catastrophic as some players would have you believe. It is a nuisance to those who farm and will impact upon how much dilithium they can obtain a day. But it didn’t take long for some rather comprehensive actions plans to emerge on the official STO subreddit. Knowledgeable players have already suggested alternative means of farming Dilithium.”
Jinxed Thoughts: Classic WoW — I want it to be there for me
“I have done these things a thousand times before. There is pretty much nothing in Classic WoW that I do not know inside and out already (I didn’t do a whole lot of raiding in current Classic so that would be the one exception). Whenever I log on it is solely for the nostalgic feeling and pretty much nothing else. I don’t feel like there is any wonder of learning or discovery left for me in this game. And in many ways that is absolutely OK.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
