Special Christmas Features In Games? 62
An anonymous reader writes "Some online and offline videogames make special changes for the holiday season. There's the Planetside Christmas decorations, where Sony has embedded the holidays into their futuristic online war, and also a Christmas mutator for Unreal Tournament 2003. What other holiday changes are people seeing in their gaming today?" Phantasy Star Online has also instituted some neat changes for Xmas.
Everquest (Score:4, Insightful)
Everquest used to give all players gnomish fireworks for Christmas, completely saturating the market there with these useless items. Of course, since they're useless, there really was no market for them in the first place. Christmas brought about the only time that Gnomes could really sell those items. I also remember a few oversized Trolls or Ogres handing out presents to newbies... to be honest, Everquest always seemed to have the most Christmas spirit in any of the MMO games I've played (and I've played most).
At this point, I dont see any reason why a massively multiplayer world wouldn't give their user base a christmas gift, unless the dev team is made up of Grinches.
I dont know if MMO games really qualify within this topic. I am sure that games like 'Animal Crossing' would have time sensitive items to unlock. I seem to remember Black and White having a Christmas 'easteregg', and possibly Warcraft2, but someone will have to verify those. Considering the small amount of code required to add features like these to games, the only thing that would keep the developers from adding them is the risk of 'feature creep'; IMHO it would be a better world if features like these were the norm.
Re:Everquest (Score:2, Insightful)