No Time To Play

Is it ironic that a MMORPG designed to piggyback on social networking services reached me via someone in my real-life social network? Such is the case with Echo Bazaar, a browser-based title still in beta as of 13 February 2011 (two years after it apparently won an award from Escapist Magazine, hmm).

How about the fact that she has a Facebook account and I have a Twitter account, so initially we couldn’t interact at all in the game? Because, you see, Echo Bazaar is entirely dependent on these two services for authenticating players. That’s good on the one hand, as you don’t need to remember yet another set of credentials, and bad on the other, as many people stay as far away as they can from either.

But I’ll return to that later. For now, let’s see about little things such as story and gameplay.

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Every time some artist, or author, or publisher moves to a “pay what you want” or “freemium” business model, trolls inevitably show up to yell how this is never going to work, despite numerous examples to the contrary. A similar outcry could be heard a few months ago, when several high-profile MMORPGs announced moving to a free-to-play model. So I guess they’re in trouble by now?

In a word, NOPE. Ars Technica gives a quick heads-up on how Lord of the Rings Online is doing:

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I’ve been playing a couple of MMORPGs lately. Now, that’s not usually my thing, but sometimes one needs to try something out of the daily routine. And since we’re talking free-to-play, it was only going to cost me time. What I find interesting is that both games appeal to me considerably, despite being not just very different, but polar opposites in some regards. So I decided to try and review both side by side, and see if that turns out any useful insights.

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