On this week's
Gamesome Mac the guest is John Bergman who will be talking about
Vendetta Online. The second that we've had a MMORPG as the featured
game. Personally, I'm not interested in MMORPGs mostly because of the
monthly fee concept. It just seems to much like I'm renting a game that
I then am obliged to play.
Sure once you stop playing you can cancel the subscription. But then if
you get the hankering to play again you have to subscribe again. And
it's always much easier to subscribe than unsubscribe (and this applies
to all subscription-based services), which is kind of annoying. Very
few companies allow you to cancel a subscription via a web-based form.
Usually you have to call or write which I don't like to do, especially
the calling part because I don't like talking to people and because
they're usually trying to convince you not to cancel.
But like my stance on PDFs, I may eventually subscribe to some sort of
online entertainment product. There is GURPS Online which is still
being worked on and who knows what the progress on that is. There
hasn't even been an announced date for them to miss. To date there even
is nothing saying what the playing experience will be like. It's one of
those things where there is no point in speculating because there is
nothing to speculate on.
Another online game far in the future is Star Trek Online. The license
was announced last September and Beta testing is not scheduled until
2006. The game won't be released until "early 2007". Wow, a 2-1/2 year
development cycle. That's kind of impressive. It'll probably be
first-person like most MMORPGS and I'm hoping there will be non-combat
missions that are more to the TNG feel. Strange for me to say that
since I think TOS is the best series, but TNG captured the essence of
Star Trek best.
|
On the
Macintosh front there is Clan Lord by Delta Tao. It's a Macintosh-only
fantasy MMORPG with a simple 2.5-D graphical view. Apparently somewhat
popular. There is also SFB Online which is not an MMORPG but it is an
online game with Macintosh support (via Java) and it's only $40 a year.
Which still wouldn't be that interesting but you can watch other people
play and that is interesting and less time consuming.
Anyway, back to the Gamesome Mac. I actually stopped listening this
evening because host Sean Smith once again went on a long rambling
rant. Sean is usually a pretty happy liberal guy. But when something
gets in his craw he just goes on and on about how bad it is. This time
it was Cyan cancelling some Myst game for the Mac because they coudn't
get funding.
From Sean's perspective it was all "if they'd cared about the Macintosh
market at all they would have anticipated this and planned/executed
better." Worse, even if reasonable people would have agreed with Cyan's
decision, to Sean it still smacks of incompetence since Cyan is a
veteran software developer. Too much negativity and a guest I wasn't
interested listening to so I left.
Next week will be interesting because it'll be the uDevGames 2004
Awards Show. Now we will finally see which games won. I've already
written about my impression of the games and I'm eager to see how my
choice of winners compares with the official contest winners.
|