No More Heroes, No More Customers, No More Sales.

[Smash_Brother]

Kasz216 said:

 I've also never seen ANYONE call WOW casual. Any game you need support groups to get people off of it, that can destroy lives isn't really what i'd call a casual game. I'm not sure how often low end users play WOW but i'd guess your average WOW user plays it quite often. The question is... how long is the median average player going to put into the game.

Heh, you've never been to the WoW forums then: for a time, half of the threads were about how "Blizzard doesn't care about casuals!", "They said this was the MMO for casuals!", etc. But I digress...

I think what you've brought to light is that there are no hardcore or casual games, only hardcore or casual players.

As with your wrestling example, you can have players who simply play the game on a few occasions when they have friends over and you have people who invest insane amounts of time into it. It's just like Street Fighter: players range from people who screw around with the game against their friends to players who dedicate a huge portion of their life to mastering Ryu so they can play as him in tournaments.

It just like someone who plays 5 hours of Solitaire every night is more hardcore than someone who plays WoW for 30 minutes each week.

So I agree: RPGs can be hardcore games by the amount of time one chooses to put into them, but I fully believe that it's not a genre which is beyond being played casually. I consider myself a casual RPG player and yet a friend and I put 81 hours into Tales of Symphonia on the GC over the period of two weeks. Why am I casual? Because I had another friend who played through it 3 times and got every super weapon and sidequest completed.

It wasn't the game but the players who made the decision regarding how "hardcore" the experience should be.

Man, we've derailed the hell out of this poor thread but this is a great discussion.