Reformat

Reformat

The reflecting pool on the mall should have been there – but it wasn’t.  Normally this would be a real shocker but in this case it was normally filled with toxic waste and the reflecting pool was part of Fallout 3.  And so starts a Wednesday morning, before that vital first cup of coffee.

Most of the time, this would simply have left me wondering if there was a “glitch” in the game. Most of the time such a problem could simply be solved with a quick reinstall on the assumption the culprit was a corrupted file (corruption, after all, is something that we are used to in Illinois – at least in government).

But most of the time, I’m not playing a game for which I have spent several hundred hours scripting a mod.

What must therefore ensue, is a session of virtual sleuthing that would make Sherlock Holmes Proud – that, and give any gamer with a similar experience a little taste of what a coder goes through all the time.  In the end it wasn’t the scripting I had done that had caused the problem.  However, that didn’t stop the bleary-eyed mistake that was soon to follow.

The game is reinstalled.

A small box pops up asking a question…

“Delete all saves as well?”

A live frog...

I am sure you can guess what I wanted to answer.  By now you can probably guess what I DID answer: yes (sadly). Mind you, it could have all been much worse. When, bleary-eyed, I answered “yes” by mistake, the question might have been “reformat hard drive?” instead.  As life’s little travesties go, this one is not very major – it is up there (or perhaps down there) with the expression “eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen the rest of the day.”

Losing the character I spent so much time on brought to the forefront of my thoughts another issue: the planned closing of the game “Dungeon Runners.”

Times being what they are, when the bean counters at any given game developer or publisher, are done counting the beans we are left with two different definitions as to what makes the ongoing operation of an mmo “feasible.” We will never know what goes on behind closed doors. Chances are, however, that more often than not, the measure is “what is the profit margin?” and not “are the bills getting paid?” The fact that World of Warcraft, with all its myriad franchised products, is so wildly popular doesn’t make things any better.

Now NC Soft will be closing down another MMO, making three in a row:  Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, and on January 1 of 2010 Dungeon Runners will be added to the list. This doesn’t exactly instill confidence in a company that is, at the same time, trying to convince us that Aion is the next latest, greatest, hottest game.  In a similar vein, Cryptic Studios  recently offered a “lifetime” subscription to Champions Online, asking us all to ignore “that man behind the curtain” who was the man behind the now sunk Hellgate London, the game that went down with Flagship Studios.

So what is at stake here?

The Fifty or so dollars it takes to buy a game, plus the fifteen dollars or so a month?   Perhaps the roughly $250.00 it will take if you were fortunate enough to grab Cryptic’s lifetime offer for Champions online that was offered for a grand total of ONE DAY after the game’s release? No, there is much more at stake here than money, and something I consider a lot more valuable. And that something, my friends, is my time.  When I speak here of the “value of my time” I am not speaking in term of dollars and cents.  What we are speaking about here is alternative uses of my time, your time or any gamers’ time: time that could be spent doing something else.  More than that (or as well as, depending on how you view the relative value of your time) is the emotional involvement.  The thought of getting involved with the development of a character, a guild, and the grind to the level cap – only to have it snatched away by some nebulous, faceless bean counter somewhere, whose profit margin has not been met, gives me the screaming “heebee geebees”.  It is nearly akin to coming home to a “Dear Jane” letter from someone who has run off with another lover, or another investor in this case.

In the end I am left with several decisions. First, do I believe the talk on the latest Aion video podcast? You know the one – where they said I will get a better game because it has already been out for a year in another country.  Like a lover who has been jilted, do I take the risk at being hurt again by someone who has a poor track record? But most importantly (and this is a decision that only someone who has played Fallout 3 will understand) I have to face the ultimate question:

Will I blow up Megaton again?

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather