As any parent knows, choosing a name for your offspring can be a tough decision.
Publisher ngmoco has certainly been making hard work of the process with its promising online first person shooter that was originally called LiveFire and then became KillTest.
It now appears to have settled on Eliminate, although there's probably time for a last minute change to something more of the moment like Obama...
More significant than the name though are details of how the game will work.
The basic concept is that you're testing weapon systems for a company called Arsenal MegaCorp. It tracks your performance, giving you in-game credits which can be used to upgrade your armoured suit and weapons systems, depending on how successful you are.
Every time you enter a batle arena, you'll use up some of your energy quota. This is replenished every day, which limits the number of games you can play and earn credits.
When you've used up your daily energy allocation, you can still play Eliminate but your stats won't be tracked and you won't earn credits.
However, using the micro-transactions features of OS 3.0, you can buy - with real money - additional energy.
In this way, ngmoco enables players who want to quickly build up their experience and credits to pay for the privilege.
The system is explained in the first official Eliminate video.
There's no news yet about how much extra energy you'll get for your 99c, €0.79 or 59p though.
We don't know when Eliminate will be released either, but we'd expect it to be sometime during September or October.
This will be a disaster. You pay real money to gain energy, you convert energy into credits, you convert credits into upgrades, and the game becomes completely imbalanced. Those who spend the most money dominate the servers. Those who don't spend money cannot compete with those who do. Just like with all those reskinned, menu-based MMOs. Dumb, just dumb.
Not sure that it's as obvious as converting energy into credits because the better player you are the higher the level of conversion, so it will cost rich bad players a lot of money to get to the upgrades of a good but poor player.
I guess that's the plan at least.
Azrael |6 September 2009
Ngmoco should scrap this idea of micro transaction, and we as consumers must let Ngmoco know that we are against cash based microtransaction....if this succeeds other devs will follow and that will make idevice gaming more expensive than it should be!!!!
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