Listen, I’m going to get really serious for a moment here. You are all going to buy this game, I don’t want any goddamn excuses like, “I don’t own a Wii” or any of that bullshit, I don’t care, buy it anyway.

People are always complaining that good developers like Clover become defunct because no one bought their awesome fucking games (myself included to be honest.) I’m not letting this happen again. Platinum Games is essentially Clover under a new name, you’re being given a second chance to redeem yourselves by supporting a good developer. If you don’t buy this game you CANNOT complain about games not being good anymore. I don’t even care if MadWorld turns out to be a steaming pile of crap (and it won’t), you’ll still be funding the developers to have more resources for future games, some time get dig their feet in and make a name for themselves.

The only possible downside is that, if and when, Platinum Games gets bigger and starts pumping out awesome at a faster rate than anyone can comprehend they will inevitably get bought out by EA Games. But to be honest, with the current state of the economy and EA having the majority of its assets invested very thinly across the board, I don’t foresee them buying any new companies in the relative future.

Also, take a look at the other games they’re developing right now:

Bayonetta

Directed by Hideki Kamiya, creator of the Devil May Cry series, it will tell the story of the eponymous witch, Bayonetta, who has guns on her feet and hands, blowing off the heads of monsters masquerading as angels. Creator Hideki Kayima has said that ” Bayonetta will blow the doors off the action genre”.

No, violence doesn’t automatically make a game good, but how can you read the premise of this game and not think, “Wow, that sounds pretty freaking awesome.”

To sum it up, if you don’t buy MadWorld, you will have killed gaming. What’s the worst that happens? You spend $50 on a game that might not be everything you thought it would be but still support a small company instead of a tyrant that’s been pumping out the same old garbage year after year after year?

EA Mythic’s hyped MMO has been out for a couple months now, so what’s been going on with it? Well, long story short, it’s failing. It seems the cynics were correct when they said it would be a time killer while people waited for the next World of Warcraft Expansion (Wrath of the Lich King.)

Let’s talk about exactly -why- this game is going down the tubes. First of all, as a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, you’d expect to see lots and lots of people, right? With the existence of 85 separate servers, it’s rare to see a server population over “low” outside of peak hours, or a population of “high” ever. Mythic’s solution to this was to introduce free server transfers, which could have been a good idea, but THEY chose what servers transferred where and, in-turn, made a number of servers even worse. It seems as though they would take server (-_-) as a failure. When you log-in, run around for over an hour without seeing a single person or getting into a scenario, that’s a problem. This leads me to my next issue.

Scenario RvR… Why do it? Why even include it in the game when it goes against everything Mythic was trying to accomplish with Warhammer Online? The allure of WAR was that it was going to get rid of the structured player versus player gameplay. They boasted gigantic sieges on great castles that would be downright “epic.” So why does this aspect of the game feel like such an afterthought? Siege castles are essentially copy/pasted in every zone. Aside from a slightly different skin to go along with the race of that area, they always have the same basic layout and you always have to run in and kill the keep lord (while NPCs shoot you through walls with arrows.) Combat revolves around trying to break down a door while the defenders drop hot oil on you from the wall and casters drop AoE spells on the siege. It’s fun for the first few times but then you realize it’s nothing more than a numbers game. Besides the ram and oil, siege weaponry has absolutely no use. Scenario RvR actually is quite fun, but it’s really quite similar to instanced PvP in WoW. Not to mention that only half (or less) of the scenarios actually get played due to being more efficient for grinding out XP and renown.

Speaking of grinding, it’s not exactly difficult to level up in this game but good lord is it boring. You have two options, PvE (Public Questing, normal questing or grinding) or PvP (unless you’re playing off-peak hours, then you have one option; grinding solo). I have to say, Public Quests are a lot of fun… when people are actually doing them. When the game first launched, every PQ was packed to the point where 75% of participants did not get loot, so they spent 10 minutes doing it again and it was great. This brings us back to the lack of players: PQ’s are deserted, and even when you advertise for them, nobody ever wants to participate. General questing is just bland and generic. Every quest in the game involves killing X amount of Y, collecting X amount of Y or running from point A to point B; it’s extremely repetitive. So, in truth, Mythic fulfilled their promise of leveling solely with RvR, which entails sitting next to a quest giver in a War Camp for a repeatable scenario quest (and refer back to my RvR section for other reasons why this is a problem.) So what do they do? They make most of the best gear obtainable through PvE. Awesome.

All in all, the game had some potential but went the way of most games EA is involved in and fell short because it was rushed out. The game took many elements that have been seen in other MMOs and implemented them poorly. There is virtually no end-game content, thus, no reason to hit the level cap. MMOs need a reason to play long-term. There’s a reason for that monthly fee (to make money from people playing for an extended period of time) and this seems to have been completely overlooked.