Posted on January 12, 2015, in Miscellaneous and tagged hasbro, jagex, mmo grinder, shutdown, sidebar, transformers, transformers universe. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
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MMO Grinder 
Yeah, the moment ChaosD1 mentioned “MOBA”, as his footage shows a bunch of bots running around an obvious control point shooting each other like it’s “Loadout: Transformers Edition”, I also thought “wow, some corporate idiot ran this thing into the ground”.
People talk about how how “the game industry is dying”, but they keep glossing over two very important things:
1) We have really, really hit a saturation point here. Physically, a human being can only play so much in a day, and there’s so many new games coming out all the time, especially on the MMO front.
For example, if I, myself, wanted to be REALLY lazy today, I COULD take about 3-4 hours out of the end of my day and do nothing but play games. I’m in the middle of playing Payday 2 with people (which would prolly eat 2 of those hours), a speedrun of Dark Souls (I’d probably do an hour of that), and Kingdom Hearts 2 HD (there goes that last hour).
Now, the last game I played involving Transformers was War For Cybertron, and I actually liked that a lot. Not a huge fan of the series, but a child of the 80’s, and I appreciated it.
…even with fond memories of that game, I would not have the time, or the want to push everything else aside to MAKE time, to bother looking into Transformers Universe, even as a FTP game. There’s just too much else on my plate that’d take priority.
2) Corporate meddling. Pretty much enough said there, in this video. Trying to shoehorn it into being “a MOBA”? Really? Like that’s the only MMO type that people are interested in? You know, it;’s funny, he mentioned the Smite Beta $30 pack. I’m one of the people who bought into that way back when, and I did enjoy the Smite Beta, but I just plain stopped playing once they really started LoL-ifying it and people would not ever, EVER stop shrieking about “the meta”. Look, if as a company, you think you need to retool what you’re doing so that you’re emulating the front runner in a field, like you’re some overweight dude huffing and heaving as you’re jogging sweatily trying to catch up to them, that’s fine. That’s your right and your priority. Just don’t expect folks like me to stick around, because as I said, I’ve already got other things to do, and my time’s valuable to me.
The second ChaosD1 mentioned the sudden creep of cash shop literal-pay-to-win items into Transformers Universe, I knew the next part of the story would be “and then the game swallowed its own tongue and died slowly in a matter of months”.
Great video. I’m so glad you just point-blank said calling it a MOBA was a dumb move designed to rope in people based on the current hot genre at the moment, apparently.
I loved even more the call-out on how dumb and broad the acronym is, and how it unfortunately is used to refer to “Dota clones” (i.e. Lane Pushers). God, I hate that “genre” label…
It got very tiring explaining to people that this was more like WOW Battlegrounds, or the Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes spinoff if anyone remembers that. I could give that it is just a straight arena shooter though… in which case, look on the bright side. Fall of Cybertron is the game that TF fans can still play, which is a shooter, still has a community playing it on all platforms, lets you create your own bots in classes, etc.
This was a weird, sad situation, and I’m glad you did SOMETHING about it since The MMO Grinder is a source of intelligent, humorous commentary on these things.
I’ll say this though; the fact that not one Transformers toyline was announced as compatible with this thing (Like LEGO Minifigures now, which let you play the toy you just bought in Funcom’s MMO) really pointed to just how clueless and toxic Hasbro was to this thing, I’m sure. Just look at all their other licensed video games… oh yeah, that’s right. They don’t do sh**. :P
I can’t believe that Hasbro Interactive used to be one of the Top 5 biggest publishers back in the day when they were publishing and developing games like Glover and Frogger. That’s true, in 1998 they were the THIRD largest in the WORLD (Youtube search: “Glover 2 – the N64 Beta Project); how crazy is that!?
This looks like it could have potentially been recycled into a driving/flying sabotage racing game, ala GTAV Online racing, with player-made maps. They still could have made a profit off of that without scrapping the whole thing.
Its kinda sad to see this game go away cause it honestly looks like a fun arena shooter thingie with transforming mechs… Oh well can’t have it all. Just sad that the players had no say in what would happen to this game whatsoever.
Yeah, from what you said, executive meddling sounds like the culprit that killed this game. Shame, because it actually looked kind of fun.
I know you said you didn’t expect to make these a regular thing, but… have you considered doing a “Sidebar” for Dawngate? I remember you did a Sidequest about it a while back, and I don’t know if you heard, but it’s going the same way as this game. At the end of January, the open beta for Dawngate will end, and the game will be shut down entirely, never to see a full release.
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