Region Locked | Can't play an MMO game due to Region Locking

Every week I’m given a set of games to review and every week I spend quite a bit of time looking into those games. A review doesn’t only need to be a quick play through of a game – that’s something that you can get on Youtube - but an expert opinion on the pros and cons of playing that game, so for that you really need to know the origins of the game, where it comes from and what the developer wanted to achieve by creating that piece of software. Before even playing a game I know exactly what to expect from not only the first few hours, but from the game as a whole.

Region Locked: You’re in the Wrong Place, Bud

Last week I was given a couple of games to add to my list: Seven Souls and Elsword. Both seem fairly interesting and, after playing Dynasty Warriors Online and interviewing Aeria Games about their bringing the title out for western audiences, I was interested in seeing another action MMO up close. So I hit download (and the file wasn’t small, let me tell you) and start to do some research in and out of the various other work I have to do. I came across multiple reviews for the beta, all fantastic; players worldwide loved what they saw and planned to carry on. It was a game, in short, that I’d be a fool to miss out on.

Annoyed!

Downloaded and ready to go, I booted up the program, not before starting up FRAPs and getting ready to take some fresh screenshots for the review, and watched through the opening cut-scene. Again, it looked pretty great and my suspicions that this could be a pretty high scoring game were coming to fruition. I took a couple of screenshots and made a note of just how much I liked the opening movie. It asked for a username and password. I didn’t have one and followed the link available. “Sorry, we’re unable to service SevenSoulsOnline to users in your region.” You can imagine my annoyance.

With deadlines looming, paragraphs already written and screenshots ready to go, I’d been allowed to download the client and install it onto my computer (as well as run it for a short time) without any indication that I wouldn’t actually be able to get into the game. I had all the files on my computer, ready and waiting to go. All I needed was an account and no matter what I tried I couldn’t find a way to finish that piece of work. It was more than a little bit frustrating and I decided the best way to get over that frustration would be to get on with my work and start on the next game I had on my list. I tried to play Elsword.

Elsword too

“After a successful game and manga launch in Korea and Japan, Elsword has finally come to North America,” the official website reads. “Take on the roles of Elsword and his friends in this story based multiplayer online action game featuring exciting anime style graphics.”

I’m not a big fan of anime, but I’ve heard of far worse games and was quite happy to give something a little different a chance to impress me. If you’ve ever tried playing Elsword from a EU country, you’ll know the joke already. Instead of a fantastic anime-based experience that I could attempt to enjoy with friends, I was met by another screen telling me that I should give up and move to either Australia or America or somewhere where games like this are popular enough to warrant server support. Elsword, at least, had the decency not to make me download the client and install, they block the download as well as the account registration.

Reasons to region locking

Now, I’m not here to rant about region locking because there are a million reasons that a developer might decide not to run a game in a certain region. Perhaps there are laws in place that disallow performing micro-transactions in a certain way, perhaps it would cost too much to get a server working for the game in so many regions (although the beta test for Seven Souls was available in Europe, I believe), perhaps there just wasn’t enough interest. There are plenty of reasons to not release a game worldwide, but it’s about how you do it. I was slightly annoyed by Elsword because I’d already done research and a little bit of writing, but I was incredibly frustrated by Seven Souls because they’d let me got so far into the game before telling me that I’d be unable to play.

It can't be good, whatever the reason is...

And this got me thinking about all the places in the world that don’t get the level of support that Europeans and Americans get when it comes to gaming. World of Warcraft, a game that has quite an important place in the West, has been banned in China more than once; for the millions of people that dedicate their life to that game – people who found friends, enemies, acquaintances and lovers in Azeroth – probably couldn’t imagine having the game turned off randomly just because they live in the wrong place. For whatever reason, and it’s not always the developers fault, it’s just not something that would be good.

We're luckier than we feel

Region locking is one of those things that some people have to deal with on a daily basis. For somebody in the UK or the US, it’s not something we have to think about very often. We all speak English, anything translated into that language is instantly accessible to us and, let’s face it, anything worth bringing over to the west will be translated in English and, with a few exceptions, available to anybody who wants to play it. For that, we’re far luckier than perhaps we feel when we download a free-to-play MMO and complain about little bugs or annoyances. Really, there are people who would love to play but can’t.

Not being able to play Elsword and Seven Souls annoyed me because I’m so used to being able to click, download and play anything that I want to. I hope that it’s something they can get sorted rather quickly so that I can give them a go and possibly even finish up that review. And It’d be nice to think that developers of western-only games are thinking about expanding their player bases as well.