The Daily Grind: Is an MMO's origin important to you?

by Lesley Smith on Jun 7th 2009 8:00AM

World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Age of Conan, Aion, EVE Online, Perfect World International, Culture, MMO industry, The Daily Grind, Final Fantasy XIV

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MMOs fall into two main categories: eastern (titles like Aion and Perfect World International) and western (AoC, WoW and EVE Online). I've noticed over the past week's Daily Grind columns and a piece I did on Perfect World International that a lot of our readers seem naturally wary of any MMOs not made in the west, barring familiar franchises like Final Fantasy.

Now part of this I can understand, eastern MMOs usually have very anime-like visuals and often borrow from unfamiliar Asian mythologies. This can often scare off western players. At the same time, players in Asia seem to lap up western MMOs like WoW. I'm curious, readers, do you judge an MMO the location of the company which made it? Do you prefer western MMOs or are you just as curious to try eastern games which other players just don't get?

Tags: age-of-conan, aion, aion-the-tower-of-eternity, asia, asian, asian-mmo, asian-mmogs, eastern-mmos, eve-online, final-fantasy, perfect-world, perfect-world-international, the-daily-grind, western-mmos, world-of-warcraft

Reader Comments (43)

to me its all about the game story line, interesting quest and low movement restriction.....over the years the only game that actually stuck were gunz and ragnarok online

I agree with the sentiments herein which depict the reader's inability to locate a good asian MMO.

I've tried... tons of them. They are far, far too formulaic. "Oh, look, a little cute blob-like creature that makes funny facial expressions when I beat it up with my gigantic sword... oh... look... it dropped a leaf... great... look, now an anime girl in a robe is telling me the importance of some strangely adapted Western Mythology in this completely fantastic world... oh, look, there goes Rrrradicallz112 spamming about his favorite episode of Naruto..."

Done with that experience, completely. Never meaningful PVE or PVP.

http://www.judgex.com/

It's not like asians have less MMOs as someone other stated before. I'd even say, asians have much more MMOs than the western nations. However, most of this asian games are on a "Free2Play" basis where you either buy addiotional items and gain some small advantage ingame and play free otherwise or you pay for the time you play.

Problem with the Free2Play games is, that every i've seen or heard simply sucked. Most of them contain from mindless mobgrinding for items, no real content or good mechanics. The Free2Play games usually don't have that big income as Pay2Play games and so their development is slow and the content is bad.

Guess that's also one main reason for them being free2play. If they'd have great content, game mechanics etc. they would be Pay2Play. But if you don't have enough people to play, the servers would be quite empty and eventually even the paying customers would leave. So they make it free2play for everyone and offer extras for the paying one to inflate the population on a usually "bad" game, just because it's "free".

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