You get what you pay for

During my quest to find quality video game entertainment that suitably fits my self-proclaimed Business Casual play style, I recently discovered the literally dozens of free MMORPGs available. “What a great idea!” I thought. “I can have my cake and eat it too, for free!” Oh, how wrong I was.

Free MMORPGs differ from your typical WoW or Everquest in that there are no monthly subscription fees. You download the game (usually for free), install it, and start playing as much or as little as you would like, free of charge. Ah, but there is a catch. If you want the really GOOD items and weapons in the game, you must purchase them from an online store. Now, you certainly aren’t required to buy these items in order to progress in the game, at least not that I’ve seen yet. But who wants to be running around in crappy rust colored gear when nArUtO_xx_4321 is zooming around on a tiger with jet engines while wearing armor that shoots fireworks out of his back?

A lot of the items purchased with IRL money seem to be largely cosmetic. But I assume plenty of them are in fact stat based, and therefore designed to give buyers a leg up on the more frugal players. Thanks to this system, hardcore (at least western-style) players will never be interested in these games. When you can buy your way to the top, there’s really no incentive to do anything other than gaining levels (although, let’s be honest, people find ways to get around leveling plenty in subscription games). A game without a solid foundation of dedicated players is bound to have problems, though, especially when dealing with a large casual player-base. To be honest, I’m not sure how the developers even make money. Part of it is probably from the fact that said developers typically have three to five of these games going at one time, and I assume there’s a good chance that there are even more connections at higher levels. So it’s all sort of combined, but I still have my doubts.

Anyway, my thought in trying out these games—I’ve tested out three or four now, chosen on reviews and ratings—was that as a casual gamer, it would benefit me more to play a game with the plan to still spend the fifteen dollars or so that a subscription game would cost a month, but spend it on productive items rather than on time that I’m not playing the game. A good idea in theory, I think, but no games are currently set up to work well this way. The problem is that by not requiring the purchase of these special items, they essentially become meaningless, merely a method of showing off.

A healthy blend might be reached if a game did charge for, say, essential items or maybe even the ability to do certain quests or enter certain areas. All players would be required to pay for these things at some point in order to progress, but at their own pace. How do you determine the value of each item? How do you charge players that have reached end -game content? I think it’s worth looking into. As long as the cost averaged out to about that fifteen dollars a month would anyone really argue with it? Maybe end-game content like raid instances has a cost per run that is automatically charged to your account. Now obviously a company like Blizzard isn’t going consider ideas like this seeing as its current subscription service has made it several billion dollars, but a new franchise could attempt it to possibly grab a good portion of both hardcore and casual players.

But here’s my main issue with these free games: I understand that they probably don’t make a ton of money (at least it would seem that way), and therefore can’t afford to have the best graphics or production value or even support staff. But it’s the ideas and concepts that seem, to me, to be making the games so bad and sometimes even unplayable. Four class choices? Seriously? I can only move by clicking where I want to go? Really? These are not things that have to do with financial resources.

When I play these free games, the first thing that comes to mind is, “This is a cheap knock-off of [successful MMORPG].” And it’s fairly obvious. You have races—typically two to four—and classes or jobs—again, not a very robust selection—and you go out and do quests and kill mobs. But these quests are extremely unimaginative and repetitive. One game I played had such poor controls that I could barely get my character from point A to point B. In another, the game was so buggy that I literally could not progress due to being unable to talk to NPC’s.

I’ve stuck with one of the games for a couple of weeks now, but only because I’m interested to see how it progresses after the basic introductory levels. But nearly every single quest I get requires me to kill 20 mobs! It’s grinding to the extreme, and we all know my feelings on grinding. And it’s super frustrating because all I want to do is fly around on a sword, but I have to reach a higher level to do that. Frankly, I don’t think I’m up to the task.

I find this all a bit disheartening, even though it’s really a minor thing since there are plenty of quality games out there that I’m actually willing to pay for. But these companies reek of cheapness and a desire to throw any product out there to see if it will make any returns regardless of how good it is. I was fortunate enough to have some friends in college who were really talented programmers and generally bright guys, and they were constantly striving to come up with innovative ways of programming and playing games. And they were doing it in their spare time for free!

So yes, these developers are technically offering a “free” game, but who really cares if it’s trash? I’m not claiming that I should be able to pay nothing for entertainment. I think that the initial idea of a different pay system for MMORPG’s that is kinder to the casual gamer is a great idea, but it’s insulting to assume that because I might be casual I don’t deserve a quality and entertaining product to play.

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