the life and times of endenizen » Games

Progress Quest is a game that fulfills all of the requirements of an MMORPG. And, simultaneously, none of them. The game is, in fact, a zero-player game. The character creation process is the last similarity this game has to any other. Once that’s done, you’re done. But really, you’ve just started. You’ll spend the next 12 hours crawling through a seemingly endless dungeon with gamers all over the world. Just kidding, you don’t actually *do* anything in the game. The computer does it all for you.

The game has 4 different servers you can join and a leaderboard to see how you match up to fellow adventurers. Of course, these matchups are boiled down to the raw statistics of your character, and they don’t say much about your true skills in the game. You can join a guild or two if you prefer. Guilds will then get better status on the server and will in turn bestow on you their magical powers and bragging rights. Guilds are divided into 4 categories, Factions, Clans, Bands, and Trivialities. The top Clan of Oobag right now is the “Rectilinear Society” who’s motto is “A right angle is the right angle.” Such creative physical appearances as “square heads” could never be embraced in a regular MMORPG because everyone looks exactly the same. When the game is taken away, however, we’re back to using our imaginations.

Imagine any task you must perform, say, writing a paper for class. Take the end goal out and you’re left with a lot of useless typing. Now take any MMORPG and remove the end goal (if you can even figure out what that is) and you’re left with a lot of dungeon-crawling. This is where Progress Quest comes in. It takes the boring dungeon-crawling out of the game and leaves you with pure statistics to salivate over as you await Level 15 when you finally get the spell “Cone of Annoyance IV.” Of course, this isn’t the end of the game… oh no, you keep going! Eventually you’ll hit another level and get more spells and be able to use them on bigger monsters which give you more valuable loot which you can sell for better weapons and armor! And that’s really the point of the game, the weapons and armor. But that’s not really a point then, is it? There will always be more loot to get, better weapons, more money, more levels. By definition, there can be no point to a game that never ends. Besides that, it wouldn’t be very fun if you had to stop playing now would it? What have you accomplished when all that progress just …disappears?

Seen on the xboxhacker forums:

Word on the street is that some smart people of this board combined their forces, formed an underground team and are very, VERY close to getting the first 360 backup booting…

This comes from a supposedly very reliable source, TheSpecialist, who is well-known in the underground xbox hacking community as a man who can make things like this happen.

Many have been expecting news of a hacked 360 for a long time. It was almost inevitable. For Microsoft to create an unhackable system would be beyond a typical console and indeed would become a work of art in the technology world. Not to say that every system can be exploited, but concerning the trade-off of ease-of-use, timely releases, and features required in modern consoles, it wouldn’t be worth the necessary time and money to be certain a console was flawless; not to mention the impossibility of such an endeavor.

What does this mean for Microsoft? Well there is almost no doubt that more consoles will be sold as a result of being able to hack them… assuming this news is not merely a rumor and hacks are actually created. However, more consoles being sold does not equal profit for Microsoft. It is well-known that they typically take a loss on the console sales to make it up in selling games. Hence the reason the consoles are relatively cheap (compared to the cost of a comparable PC) and games are relatively expensive (though strangely enough, PC games are no different).

Who would buy a game when you can copy a rented one? Well there’s the million dollar question. Perhaps console developers should start investing in the future of game development. Perhaps there will never be a way to make a console hack-proof so they are wiser to spend their money on making consoles more attractive for their features. Microsoft certainly tried a little of that by turning the Xbox 360 into a media center as well as gaming console… however, my antique Xbox *1* has had that feature since a few days after I bought it.

My thoughts are that consoles need to evolve with a new content-rich subscription-based system. Microsoft uses Xbox-live as an online gathering place for all of their multiplayer games, and from what I can see, it’s working very well for them. They’ve started adding additional content, which I would see as a very obvious move on their part, but what if this platform evolved to become the primary distribution center for demos, previews, movies, and ultimately, full games. What if with my simple subscription (hypothetically, of course, I don’t have one now), I was allowed to “preload” a game onto my xbox and have it unlocked the day the game was released. No more long lines at the store, just start playing online right away.

Going beyond that, what if I could develop my own game using a limited version of the sdk, and then release the game on this content distribution system? Besides the almost limitless possibilities for new games from their user-base, Microsoft would still be collecting huge sums of money from all the subscriptions.

I’m sure anyone could come up with many other uses for consoles that are currently unfilled; entire markets of users that feel left out because they don’t play sports games or Halo. I don’t play either, so I use my Xbox almost exclusively as a media center. (Sidenote: I’m reminded of the Xbox 360 commercial where all the neighborhood kids are running out of their houses to play games together, followed by the tagline “It’s good to play together.” Not only would those kids have been unable to afford an Xbox, they’d probably rather play a real game outside than a poor representation of one on a TV. But maybe that’s the point, as the viewer of this commercial, you’re already glued to the TV so, lacking a bunch of friends to play outside with, “wouldn’t you like to have this feeling?”) I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription fee for extra content / a community of like-minded individuals but the current subscription system is hardly what I’m looking for. Not to mention I’m still a long way off from buying an Xbox 360 and I’d really have *no* use for Xbox Live on my Xbox 1.

C’mon Microsoft, I think you can do better.