Several game publishers recently decided to release free games, such as EA’s Battlefield PLAY4FREE and Need for Speed World and Valve’s Team Fortress 2. It looks nice that the companies are giving us several games to play for free. Naturally we all assume that they’re completely free… but they’re not. The main scheme behind these “free to play” games is that the player can play the game for free with the default settings that the developer releases. To get upgrades such as hats in TF2, the player must pay real money to buy them. Yes, real money. This way, when the player is frustrated at a part in which they can’t upgrade further without paying, they either quit the game or they take out their credit cards and pay money for them.

Unfortunately some of us (me) are short on money but still want to play these games. This is where the publishers really screwed up- there’s no fair play in these games any more. All the fun is nearly lost when you can’t upgrade without paying money. And to make it worse? You can’t use your hard-earned in-game money to use the upgrades. This is exactly what makes me rage about Need for Speed World.

For those who have played previous NFS titles (Carbon, Most Wanted, etc), imagine that the worlds of NFS Carbon and NFS Most Wanted have been glued together somehow in a somewhat sketchy way, with a bunch of online players, pretty much every other non-player car is a cop car and power-ups in races. That’s NFS World in a nutshell.

Nevermind the fact that every other traffic car is a cop (not too against it as I love doing pursuits, but sometimes too much is too much), but power-ups in races… worst thing ever that makes the game nearly unplayable. In NFS World, during a race, a player can use a power-up either for personal gain in a race, or, possibly the worst thing ever, against another player. The only personal gain power-up is nitrous oxide. Even that shouldn’t be a power-up, but more like a car upgrade like in previous NFS titles. The other power-ups attack the people in front of you. The worst one, in my opinion, is traffic magnet. For people who haven’t played NFS World, its annoyance is comparable with Second Chance / Last Stand in Call of Duty. Pretty much what traffic magnet does is it attracts all of the traffic around the targeted player (which is always me, because I pretty much gain first place every singe race).
Also not to mention that most people racing out there in the game SUCK. Especially the bots. Here’s a typical result I always get from this game: me in first place, second place +14.82, third +15.71, etc.
The pursuits aren’t also that hot in this game. They’re very, very cliched. You can pretty much see an entire roadblock spawn right around a turn at the last second. Speaking of pursuits, EA has also added a new race mode into their game in which you are grouped up with three other players and try to escape the cops while driving a longass sprint track through the city.
What I hate about new video games also is that they add a black and white effect when there are intense moments. I don’t know if it’s true for anyone else (most likely it is when I say so), but when I’m intense my vision doesn’t become black and white. Nor does it have red blood stains or a huge red circle that gradients into my vision (Black Ops?). When nearly busted in a pursuit in NFS World, the screen transitions into a black and white vision so much that the only colors you see are black, white, blue and red.

Game developers earn a lot of money from this kind of business. In my opinion, it’s very poor business practice, yet highly successful. It seems like this all started from FarmVille, because a lot of people got really addicted to it (NOT me) so much that they even set their alarm clocks to ungodly times to just water some virtual plants or feed some flash entities that sound like chickens and cows. Zynga then made expansions and started charging money for upgrades and more land, consequently earning a lot of money for the developers. This is OK only if it’s a single player game, but in a multiplayer game? That’s just ruining all of the fun out of the game. This is exactly what happened with Team Fortress 2; when it was first released it was just a popular multiplayer game from Valve that had a certain set of classes that weren’t modifiable and had their own pros and cons. Now the whole game is dependent on hats which give power to the player. AKA virtual leather that you have to pay real money to have to just play with more power in a video game. And now that the game is free, everyone who paid for it back in the day assumed that they would get one of those hats in return for early adoption, but no. Valve just earned money from people like that. Some think they’ve been ripped off, other don’t, but in any case, it was kind of a **** move. It’s good that everyone can now play it, especially friends that are low on money, but bad that it’s not as fun as it was before. But in any case, I wouldn’t buy anything in a free to play game ever. It’s pathetic. I don’t want to spend money on something that I could do better in a game. I’d rather buy a whole new game that doesn’t have those restrictions than pay in it to get some “special” benefits.

Enough of me ranting. I’m going to sleep.

Post originated from my official blog: Link (it has pictures, too!!)