Saturday, October 6, 2007

Legends of Norrath, I weep for what could have been.

Now this isn't about an overpowered card combo, or a rule misstep, it is that the biggest problem as I see it with Legends of Norrath(The recently released in-game card game from SOE) is that I can't play it! Well I should be more specific, I have to jump through hoops to play what should be a universally accessible card game.
There are two ways to play LoN:

  • While inside of EverQuest or EverQuest2 you can launch the LoN client software and play from within the game.

  • From stand alone client software that must be installed and run on a Windows PC



Now this probably covers 90% of those who wish to play LoN, but I am in the minority here. I'm a mac user. And its safe to say that SOE will never release a mac client(especially after their half attempt at EQ mac development). So what you are cutting out the mac users, oh well. Well really it is much more than that, you are cutting anyone who doesn't have admin on their machine(aka the working public), this is a serious chunk of folks who on their lunch break or downtime might play a game or two. Oh and those "linux" users out there, whoever they are...(internet sarcasm, I run linux on a few boxes).

This is a problem, both for SOE and for the potential users, what oh what could solve this catastrophe? Well in today's day and age we have this thing called "Internet" and the "Web" oh and "Standards complaint browsers"(the last one sort of). And with all of that fancy "Web 2.0" out there, why can't we just use a little bit of that black magic and have a web client for Legends of Norrath? I sincerely wish they would, I understand with the web comes a whole load of issues that are a pain in the neck, but SOE would seriously open up their possible customers by doing this, and in turn please me. Well I can just BootCamp it up to play, but really who wants to reboot their computer just to play a card game? Especially if you are just a casual player. So please SOE, just think about it, besides its what all of the cool kids are doing, web clients that is.

--
Cheston

1 comment:

Red15 said...

No, it's even worse then you think.
The client itself is almost entirely in Java, so they wouldnt have to rewrite that much at all, but I guess they want their launcher pretty much everywhere where possible :)

Sony rootkit anyone ? :P

I'm just now installing it on my Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) using wine. Hope it works :)