Cool premise? Check. Decent art direction? Check. Story and Lore? Check.
WoW treadmill/quest hub/kill ten rats style gameplay? Check.
As the business expert Jimmy John Shark would say if developers still don’t understand what “different” is. If every other entrepreneur didn’t figure it out either, we would still be cranking our cars with a handle out the front grill to get them started.
I know. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – right? What if a large group of consumers actually thought it was broken?
Losing will to help out said developer by seriously testing the alpha stage? Check.
Good lord but you have me curious as to what you are alpha testing.
Having no damn idea what game you are playing, i will submit this: if the game does a good job of telling a story you actually give a shit about with their pedestrian quests it’s doing something that most MMOs don’t. If it provides even the most shallow illusion of meaningful choices (and I do not mean in terms of paths of character development) so much the better. If it isn’t doing either of these things, you are playing a WoW clone that will fall flat on it’s face unless it has a highly visible IP attached to it.
I feel the need to clarify: if choices that you make in game (good vs evil, beans vs sprouts) change the character development paths that are open to you,…keen. If the only choice you have is whether to spec guns vs knives…not so keen.
I had to be really careful writing that – I had a lot more points but the savvy reader may figure out the game, so I kept it so vanilla to make sure. I definitely respect the NDA and testing process.
Frustrating part is, once you start testing, you already get the “core” of the game. While a lot of balances, tweaks, etc can change, the core gameplay is set. So you already know you are looking at DIKU v123234.22 from the outset, its depressing =)
I am going to dig in and give more fair time though, no doubt the programmers, etc. have poured their life’s work into it so it is only fair to keep plugging away and giving them fair opportunity and merit. Bare minimum I can find some bugs.