Overall though, there's no pressure or urgency, no achievements or cosmetics to grind. The event's only real purpose seems to be to have a bit of fun and set a certain mood, mostly through the temporary costume buffs filling the cities with ghosts, pirates and leper gnomes.
It's quite a stark contrast to how most modern MMOs handle seasonal festivals, and I like it. Similarly to how people complain about many public holidays being too commercialised these days, focused on selling expensive chocolate in seasonal packaging above all else, I dislike it when MMOs use a seasonal event as an excuse to make people do more of the same stuff they already do all year anyway (usually grind special currencies and cosmetics), but with a "limited time only" urgency message attached just to get you to log in every day.
The events I don't mind so much and even like tend to be the ones where some unusual activities are on offer that I happen to enjoy and don't usually get to partake in, such as racing on ice in Neverwinter's winter festival or herding chickens during the same game's summer festival, because I like doing them for the sheer fun of it and for a change of pace.
I get that big and noisy events can serve as an incentive for inactive players to come back, but if I'm already playing your game and enjoying it, trying to sell me on it again while I'm already happily playing what's there tends to feel a bit like overkill.
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The contrast between Classic, EQ2 and GW2 is highly instructive. I might do a post on it later today. Classic, as you say, is some decorations and a bit of fun, EQ2 is a huge smorgasbord of entertainment with no pressure at all and GW2 is a bunch of time-limited, often quite time-consuming tasks backed up by a frenzied, obsessive 24/7 gold farm that's the key money-making opportunity of many players' year.
ReplyDeleteI like EQ2's take best but Classic is perfect for the game as it is.
I was a bit surprised at how low key the actual event portions of Hallow’s End were with Classic. I had a character roll into Southshore last week and did find a couple of related quests that were very much the early early versions of what we’re today. But otherwise it feels very light and unconcerned about being anybody’s main focus.
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly what I like, that it's clearly not meant to be anyone's focus. With more modern events, it often feels like you're supposed to use your limited time on doing all the event stuff for its duration and put your regular activities on hold if needed. In Classic you do what you would have done on any other day... you might just do it looking like a pirate, and eat candy bars instead of fish between pulls.
DeleteI always liked the Halloween event in Classic while I hate the achievement/pet/toy grind of Retail.
ReplyDeleteBut it still has the problem that I don't give a fuck about American holidays, neither in Azeroth, nor everywhere else. To base your in game holidays on real world holidays makes sense if you want to abuse the e.g. Christmas mood to make some additional buck in the cash shop. But for games like Classic, they should really have their own events.
That's a good point; most MMO devs display remarkably little imagination when it comes to holidays in their fantasy worlds. There does seem to be a demand for re-creating real-world holidays at least from certain parts of the player base though. I can't say I bemoan their absence in SWTOR.
DeleteThe mini-Reds --and Ravanel, for that matter-- really liked the Winter Festival in LOTRO, which has a real Victorian feel to it. I realize there's achievements and whatnot with the LOTRO event, but the events themselves are strictly fun oriented.
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