Selling Points, Innovations, and Clones...Have they been good enough?

What sells a game? Is it graphics? Gameplay? Music? Well…yea…but I’m here to talk about some other ways devs and publishers try to sell a game to you. You watch a trailer or a gameplay vid made by the team and they specifically they say words like “innovative” and “just like” in their video to appease you into playing the game. This is where I’m trying to get at. Are games, in this case F2P, innovative or reminiscent enough to sell us a game?

When you think innovative games what comes to mind? I’m going to throw an example out, Archeage. When you hear Archeage many will probably turn away by now, but hold on…this is a matter of study than anything. Archeage has many features that are in MMORPGs that aren't in others. Piracy, jail, jail breaking, ships, ship fights, triple class system, multiple “combo classes,” trade route system, gliding, houses, farms, that unforgiving labor point feature, and probably some I haven’t mentioned. Can you find these features similar to these in any other MMORPG at the same time? (If you do let me know, I’d love to play it…) This is how innovation works in a game. Numerous features not in any other game made interesting.

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ArcheAge Screenshot

So here's an older game, Mabinogi, innovative in a lot of ways, similar to The Secret World, and dated in other things like visuals, but it's one of these games I would still go back to just to see how things are. Things constantly change in this game, but originally its selling point was "Your Fantasy Life" at first you'd probably go "huh?" At the cryptic slogan, but when you dive into its features, it's all but generic (at least back in 2008...) you were classless, you could be that magic sword wielding archer with unlimited heals you've always wanted to be in every MMO (...at least that's my dream...) you could grow from kid to adult-ish, there was pretty much no level cap (there probably was but it was probably somewhere around 1xxxxxxxx I'm just guesstimating,) they had a rebirth system where after you hit a certain level you could rebirth and start back at level 1 with all of your skills and base stats intact, there were transformations, demi-god powers, and like any other MMO...crafting but crafting was basically a minigame with the mouse and your performance on the game resulted on the final outcome of your equip. Combat itself was different, a roughly a "rock/paper/scissor style combat" where one skill could beat another skill if it was either stronger, faster, or can pierce though. Those are some of the features, back then, there are a few more now. Unfortunately games like this that has such creative ways of playing a game they hit a paywall very early. Back then they had no mount for beginners, so if you just started Mabinogi this year, you’re lucky to have gotten one. People constantly use the cash shop in that game. There are events especially geared towards the cash shop, something that I don’t especially like as a consumer of F2P, but for a game like that I guess it’s an equalizer.

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Mabinogi - An Innovative MMORPG

Games like this cover innovation, not just in one area, but in all areas of their game. This sells a game they try not to make anything generic and make it new. While one or two things are somewhat bland, it won’t take away from the immersion of the game.

So that was Innovations what about Cloned games? There are a lot of WoW clones, Diablo-style games, as well as MOBAs out there, but what sells clones? My answer is a bit more of a combined version of both innovation and nostalgia. I could say “clone” but “nostalgia” seems more the right term for this.

Let me point out Runes of Magic. It was very popular back then, so much because mainly it had the most accurate WoW feel to it, only it was F2P. It even had rare free features back then like player housing. I believe there wasn't so much of anything new the game had to offer but what sold players was the nostalgic feel of WoW even if the devs never said “Oh play our game, we are like WoW!” in any of their advertisements. Runes of Magic isn't the only WoW clone either. Allods Online from the Russian game studio Nival was yet another game that look suspiciously like World of Warcraft.

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Runes of Magic - One of the WoW Clones

Path of Exile is a good combo of both nostalgia and innovation. Alright this game I would rather switch my nostalgic description to “clone” just because there are way too many Diablo-style games. I never think “ah man I Diablo was cool” when I play. PoE has a ton of their game’s features, from the inventory grid to the looting. But when it’s not cloning, it’s innovative. One of the major selling points actually scares some players, which is their gargantuan skill “tree.” It kind of makes you want to drop your arms and say “ok I give up.” But don’t let that stop you from playing it. There are a ton of builds out there from Grinding Gear Games (Youtube) that they issue out to players. And there is pretty much no need to use the cash shop, making it one of the mare “truly” F2P games out there. It’s one of the more played ones too.

Here’s a clone-type I’m just going to slightly talk about, personally, that will be coming soon. Ragnarok Online clones. Newer players won’t even know the game (sadly.) Soon Tree of Savior is coming to Steam with a F2P model in mind (personally I prefer B2P.) If you have heard the quote, “it’s the spiritual successor to RO” for newer players, RO means Ragnarok Online. “Spiritual successor? What about RO2?” Now if you asked yourself that. There is an explanation for that. The original dev director for RO is making Tree of Savior, so it has that creativeness behind the mind thing behind it. As for RO2 that’s possibly made by some other team (don’t quote me.)

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Ragnarok Online - An oldie but a goodie

The original RO was an isometric 2.5D MMORPG. 2.5 means 2D sprites in a 3D world. There were a few MMOs like RO that used this that decade, but RO used it at its best. How it would capture a player base is totally different though. First of all the game had barely any quest system, it was a grinding game. Field bosses were some of the most spectacular accomplishments you could probably feel after killing one (after they killed you more.) And most importantly their War of Emperium (guild wars) events were fun.

As for RO2? Well first, RO2 was delayed, dropped, revived, delayed, delayed some more, and then finally published. You could say if the game came out before Guild Wars 2, (throwing out some random 3D MMO…) it probably would have had a chance. But after players experienced better games, RO2 just wasn’t up to the generation’s standards and the nostalgia factor just couldn't work for RO2, it was a bust.

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Ragnarok Online 2 - We all wish you were more like the Original

We also had, as an attempted RO clone, Secret of the Solstice, by Outspark. But during this time of its game debut, gamers were transitioning from being hardcore grinders, to “a little less please” (at least in NA and EU…) so not only did the game fail because of its tiresome grind, but the publisher crashed and burned eventually later on (for other reasons.)

So that’s why RO fans are leaning on the anticipated Tree of Savior. It looks like RO, it plays like a modern day game, it has around 80 classes which is something I want to see on one picture one day, and other details I have yet to know about, but I don’t think there will be much extra innovation needed to captivate an audience for this game.

There are varieties of selling points to games and I only talked about two of them. Yet these two are some of the main uses for drawing players to their games. Of course you hold your own opinion to any of the topics I mentioned.