Randomly Mine #10

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Ubisoft recently announced – quietly – that mid-season reinforcements will no longer happen. For those who don’t play Siege, mid-season reinforcements would be large updates to the game released between seasons. These would include bug fixes and tweaks, but also entire redesigns of characters, buff or nerf.

Ubisoft’s reasoning for giving up this practice is to help with their Pro League, and ensure that the Meta isn’t changing too drastically too often.

On the one hand it’s understandable, Hockey teams would be annoyed if rules and regulations changed every two months. However, Siege’s pro league seasons have already extended themselves to six months from three. Meaning that a big Meta change is going to happen mid-season and Ubisoft’s problem isn't fixed, just extended.

Pros in said league have even expressed concern over this change, making Ubisoft’s choice only more bizarre.

But it may have to do with something else entirely.

Updating games is the norm these days, and in-fact, they’re often judged for how often their updating.

I’ve seen people argue in favor of Fortnite over PUBG, not because of gameplay, design, or resources, but because Fortnite updates more frequently.

You can never experience something for the first time twice, but a big hook of today’s Multiplayer are games trying to recreate that initial rush again and again.

The appeal of genre’s like Battle Royale, Tactical Shooters or MOBA are their depth, the amount of ways that maps, characters, and abilities can be played.

However, server infrastructures were never made for this kind of constant overhaul. It was only 10 years ago when Microsoft wouldn’t allow updates bigger than 50mb on Xbox 360, and today, a good point is when a game isn’t eating up your data cap.

Ubisoft said last year “We are quickly approaching the limit of our data sizes,” and I believe the real motivation behind this change is to make content that overwrites rather than build on top of data that’s reaching a cap.

This is a problem that developers around the world are dealing or failing to keep up with, games like Halo 5 are over 100gb in size these days.

It seems that between expensive graphics cards and slow internet speeds across the world, developers are already encouraged to optimize rather than realize their desired fidelity, and the limit on updating games years after launch is just the latest motivation.

Due Process

Actually, speaking of Siege, there’s another aspect that Ubisoft should be concerned about.

People are blown away by Siege’s success and often theorize about why it is, I can tell you as someone who’s played it since the Closed Alpha; the game isn’t successful because of its polish or accessibility.

Things like hit-detection, net-code, hackers, ranked play, are in a state of chaos years after release. I often dream of this game being made with Blizzard’s polish.

Siege isn’t popular because it’s the best, Siege is popular because it’s one of a kind. The closest game to it on the market is Counter Strike, but no matter what fans of either tell you, the games are far different in practice than they are similar on paper.

Siege’s intrigue in spite of all its issues are due to it being the one and only, until now.

Due Process is a pixel-art indie title that takes Siege’s 5v5 small-scale competitive formula and innovates with a planning phase that lets people physically draw on the screen, and has every match take place on a procedurally generated map, meaning that skill won’t be based on map knowledge, but raw tactics and gunplay.

Is this game going to overtake Siege entirely? I highly doubt it. It’ll lack the serious-tone of Siege’s gameplay and in general comes across as a more casual companion to Ubisoft’s tactical shooter.

But between it and another independent Tactical Shooter, Ready or Not, Ubisoft has inadvertently inspired competition, and will have to bring their A game, in order to keep its fanbases from wandering off, instead of relying on having nowhere else to go.

EB Please…

Stop using three green stickers that wreck used game cases. Its sticky, icky, and goes into the trash where it’ll end up in a fill, and crush an innocent Raccoon. Stop it.

Apprehension and Apathy

Warframe is a breath of fresh air in the free to play world. It doesn’t limit the use of weapons, or facilitate a competitive pay to win atmosphere. Its payments are more about convenience which for those who love to grind, can be easily ignored.

However, the game doesn’t do a great job of giving new players the best of impressions, and it’s not directly the game’s fault. 

You see, when you start Warframe, get your ship, and go to the Arsenal, you will see a list of characters and weapons with their price in platinum on the top right corner of the screen. 

This immediately gives the vibe that if you want any of these things, you’re just going to have to pay up.

But in reality, the game likely has locked off these things because there’s so much more to learn about the looting system, modding, abilities, boss fights, clans, stars, scanners, materials, etc, and to bombard you with weapons and frames would only overwhelm you more.

But, due to the prevalence of free to play games that use their mechanics and systems to squeeze as much money as possible from their consumer base, you’re naturally going to default to that first assumption.

It’s a shame that Warframe exists in a market where its competitors are obnoxious and devious, but it’s the sad reality, and it’d be best to distance oneself from that as much as possible, for it may only discourage people who’ve lost any hope for the Free to Play genre.