Although my career is more directed to hardware than software, one of my personnal objectives is making (sometime in the future) a game (or games) of my own.
One of my ideas relates with a free to play rts since currently (in my opinion) there are lots of things labelled as f2p and rts but most are not really f2p nor an rts. One of the few f2p rts i enjoyed playing was Age of Empires Online (whose servers should have been closed last month) even though it started poorly and had an huge ammount of bugs and a lack of races. Despite the bad things it had some interesting ideas and was an Age of Empires game, in essence simillar to its precessors. GPG was simply too small/expensive/unproductive to get it done right and in the end Microsoft pulled the plug (not before leaving the servers open the suficient time to attract new players who would spend money on things which woud vanish shortly). The game was actually one of the few that had a pay to win nature and with one major update began a total free to play, since i acquired all premium civilizations by playing rather than paying. Not that paying to support f2p is a bad thing, but it demonstrates how it really became a free to play. Vanity gear and buildings should have generated for Microsoft a nice revenue, although its introduction was too late and the initial bugs (which in some cases never got solved) made the player base too small to be sustainable.
That said, the f2p i have been thinking about would have several features which i never really saw implemented or well implemented in rts games (in general):
- Its financial source would be based on vanity gear/decorations/buildings and not premium packages/special wargear/super powerful consumables (like super fast levelling);
- The game would occur in the ancient times, so think Greeks, Romans...;
- The player would be represented by a personallized avatar (selectable unit type, visuals and so on) with some personallization things (like a special looking helmet) being dependable on the vanity items refered;
- All units and buildings would have the possibility to use gear to improve its stats;
- Levelling up would occur on several levels with the player itself levelling up based on total experience gained (from missions/pvp/activities...), avatar would level up based on units killed by it or any units close to it, unit types would level up based on enemies killed by that unit type (lancers' kills would increase lancers experience in general) and all this experience would be used to personnalize your armies based on talent trees for each unit type, for the avatar and for the civilization in general with a complementary research unlock system in the case of the civilization in itself;
- Players would build up a capital city whose development would benefit players on the battlefield with resource bonus and other things;
- No premium storage facilities (know the feeling of playing mmo's and having no space to put things? the opposite would occur here);
- PvP would have several ranks being the basic mode based on equal rights with no gear effects in use nor level effects with all research unlocked independently of level in order to guarantee a fair game. Other pvp modes could make use of gear effects and would be for those that like having better gear.
- And much more...
So do you have any opinion, on this particular concept/ideas?
Never been a fan of the free 2 play layout, specially for an RTS game. You just simply in the end make profit from comodity, not through sheer sake for effort whatsoever, and here are my thoughts on this:
- Despite that cosmetic changes on buildings might be just suitable for those who can afford it, in the end the richest player will demand for something to pay up for it; say something that will change the metagame.
- Sets an imaginary gap between "rich" and "poor" players. Taking a glance at how they see fit, despite that both kind of players might be separate it might still be seen as a disadvantage for the "poor" players. Bare in mind though, that these two terms I did not use them to disrespect.
I would prefer the old traditional system, just like in AoE2 and how it got up to the times (they even released a fan-made expansion called the Forgotten and simply put, they kept the game alive without sustaining it through cosmetic changes or differences between players.
Making a regular payed game sets an even greater gap between rich and poor people nowadays, since games are overpriced by retailers. For example a game in Portugal costs around 60€ (80€ for xbox, PS and other games like that) when new while on other countries in Europe that same game can cost 40€ (our minimum wage is less than 500€ while countries with lower game prices have minimum wages of 1500€ or 1800€).
Most of the profit from those sales actually goes to retailers and producers only receive a small portion of the money. Digital distribution also has prices that do not revert significantly to producers.
There are bunches of free to play out there that make use of a system that makes players either pay or leave which wouldn't be the case here as only visual personalization was payed. To be honest there are people today who would spend all they earn to have an army with floral, dragons, hello kitty,... images but i personnaly have played games where you could barely see if the unit was male or female so visual aspect is not significant to me but is for many.
I've always been the poor player in f2p, mostly because i never had much available to spend. I never buy a game while it is new because it is way cheaper to wait a while and buy something for 10-15€ for a game than 60€.
Microsoft keeping AoE alive? The HD editions and even the Forgotten DLC were simply a way to get easy money with the AoE franchise after the lack of profit of AoEO.
If i were to make it as a non f2p game bare in mind the online component would be greatly reduced since i am not a fan of paying for a game and need to be online to play the campaign and i always prefered local multiplayer to online one. It would also mean selling the "soul" to a big corporation just to get it famous enough to have any profit to compensate the effort.
"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a videogame", and well said :P
Well, sure times do change and all, and anyone has to adapt to the new system, it is just up for the players to decide what to pay for.
About the AoE HD edition, yeah, it might be true that it was just a cashgrab, but keep in mind that it actually kind of resurrected the game to the point that even Twitch sometimes has a lot of streams and people got hooked up into the game again.
Moddb.com
I know of 0 AD since at least alpha 7 a few years ago.