Nov 18
MMOs Are Not Like Other Products
In a comment to my post yesterday about Warhammer, Snafzg said: “If you’re releasing a product you’re damned right I’m going to compare it to another established product in the market. If you launch something that doesn’t compare in terms of quality, why should people give you the benefit of the doubt, especially as paying customers? We don’t do it with automobiles, restaurant food, or clothing. Why do MMOs get a free pass?”
Sorry, I just don’t buy these ‘we’re too easy on MMOs’ arguments. Should they be good? Yes. Should they run? Yes. Should they be fun? Yes. If any of these things are untrue at launch, I totally agree, that’s unacceptable. Witness: Vanguard, Age of Conan, Auto Assault, etc, etc.
But if the question is, “Should they be as good as a game that’s been running for four years?”, the answer is no. If you think the answer should be yes you’re dreaming. Seriously. Look at this realistically. While WAR was still deciding whether to wear boxers or briefs World of Warcraft was fiddling with PvP balance, raid tweaking, even superfluous fun content like mounts. Blizzard has had four years of live service to tweak, fix, and change their game. As a result (as I said on SUWT), World of Warcraft is the best MMO ever made, hands down, do not pass Go.
Warhammer has had two months. If you seriously expect a game that’s been out in the sun for two months to compare, polish/content/balance-wise with a four year old game, you’ve really got to re-examine your priorities. MMOs are not likes restaurants, automobiles, or clothing. If a car doesn’t run, it’s because there was a problem in the factory that could have been fixed on the drawing board. If clothes don’t fit, it’s because they were sewn wrong in the factory. If restaurant food tastes bad, it’s because it was prepared badly in the kitchen.
Get it through your heads:
Beta testing is a joke. We’ve talked about it for ages, about the motives behind ‘free players’ and the lack of actual testing. People do not play Betas like they play live games, it’s a demonstrable fact. As a result, the only way to know for certain if you’ve done the right thing is to launch your game. Warhammer did the right thing; they launched, they hit the waters, and now they’re swimming like crazy.
They’re trying to understand what exactly they’ve built in relation to how players interact with the systems, in relation to how the systems interact with each other, and so on and so forth. In a couple of months Warhammer is going to have more content, two more classes, and a lot more balance. That’s when I’ll go back, and that’s when we’ll start to hear a lot of amazing things about this great game Mythic has created.
So, say it with me: MMOs are different.
12 Comments so far
I agree Michael. It is impossible for a new MMO to have as much content as an established MMO. New MMOs will continue to grow as they launch expansions and update patches. MMOs are truly different than other products.
However, this difference makes product launches very difficult for MMO companies. How do you pull people away from great games when your game is not as complete as their current game? I don’t know the answer to this. Maybe that should not be the goal of MMO companies. Maybe a slow and steady player base growth is what MMO companies should strive for with the goal that in 2 years their game will be the best MMO.
I disagree. Not only are MMOs not finished products at launch, they’re not finished products five years after launch. The balancing never stops, and there is never a point at which even the developers consider the game balanced. There’s little qualitative difference between balancing in beta and balancing post-launch.
The Achilles’ heel of MMO developers is their persistent belief that continuing access to the game code means that a final deadline is unnecessary. They have created their own problem. Most players would not pay half so much attention to the balance of power if they were offered a final (if not finished) product.
Their endless tweaking of the game does not lead to refined gameplay, and helps no one.
If we were talking about releasing a game without bugs, I’d agree with you. MMO’s *are* different in that respect. Hell, even in WoW I find the odd gremlin. Software design is different from mechanics or baking. However, most of what I’ve read about with respect to people’s problems with WAR is NOT about the game being riddled with bugs. The lion’s share of complaints have to do with the failure to deliver on promises made.
Dreaming or not, consumers are consumers and they want a product that they believe they’re getting their money’s worth from. If consumers expect a product that is ‘as seen on TV’ in terms of its features, that’s what you have to deliver. If you can’t, it shouldn’t be delivered.
I don’t want to beat this analogy to death but, if a car company intends to build a product that they believe is an alternative to a Ferrari, talks shit about Ferrari and then delivers a Corvette for the same price as a Ferrari, yeah, it’s going to fall flat. A Corvette isn’t a bad car. In fact, it’s a great car, but a Corvette is NOT a Ferrari. Not even close. No one is going to point to the Corvette and say “but the Corvette is new and they’re trying hard to understand their place in the market”. It’s a stretched analogy, I know, but I think that it gets the same point across. A company has to understand what it’s competing against, understand it’s niche in the market and most importantly of all, it needs to deliver on what it promised.
No, they aren’t because you sidestep the main issue: core design. Content is garnish!
WAR main issues are core design issues not content. Of course, you can’t compare a 4 year old MMO with a brand new one on content! But the core concepts are the backbone of your game. If they are (perceived) as shit, no amount of content will change anything in a million years. Your product is a flop and back to the design board.
This idea of “it’s because of content” is a straw argument. If you make the best prime rib in the world, everyone will forgive you if you serve it on a stick in a bamboo hut. If it’s average at best, no china, silverware and French waiters will save you. Still, on his success, the hut’s cook will be able to have the china 4 years later.
People expected it to be massive like WoW, this brought in a bunch of ADD WoW kiddies who expected nothing less than WoW version 2.0. Mythic knew that and had enough servers to support it. I think they knew all along that the WoW kiddies would get tired of the FOTM mmo and go back to WoW. Well then why would they have all the leftover servers? Because they know how to merge servers, see DAoC. If I remember correctly, server merges used to be a gdamn insane idea, “there is no way it would work!” and “it’s never gonna happen!”
I think the majority of vocal bandwagon jumpers are the ones who were hesitant to plan on playing WAR at release. The people who would never describe themselves as a PvPer. Why? Peer pressure, hype, some slick ass salesman pitches all changed their minds. Made them feel comfortable with the idea of a game with a PvP focus by nudging them with the idea that it wasn’t just a PvP game.
Bullshit.
Its a software product that investors spend millions of dollars paying supposedly smart hardworking people good money to generate something other than a trivial return.
If I delivered work product in my job that some of these folks delivered to us, I would be and should be fired. I shouldn’t ever be trusted with their money again, thats for damn sure.
If you decide to release a product that is buggy and doesn’t work, it means you failed as a result of management choices made– you hired shitty people who weren’t up to the actual task, you failed to managed the scope of your project such that you diluted your resources ensuring a shitty product (which includes fundamentally understanding the task at hand or the nature of your competitive marketplace.
Guess what? Your product, if successful, will be required to host likely several thousand simultaneous users. They will want to communicate with each other, exchange things, and otherwise interact with the game environment. Design, build, test.
If a game company decides to launch with 2 zones that are 1/2 done versus 1 well done (apply the same logic to every aspect of the project– testing, QA, etc.), that’s a management decision and the companies have to live with the consequences. If they didn’t have the budget, then they are faced with tough choices and hard questions to answer, not the least of which is how did we get it (budget) so wrong?
Thousands of creative technology companies are undertaking greenfield development on limited resources everyday and have to live or die by the same decisions.
No one gives a startup chip company a pass because they are new or use of their product as designed and shipped resulted in sub par performance. If they aren’t better than industry leader X on some level (price, features, etc.) they lose.
MMO companies need to deal with it.
Can I ask why mmo’s deserve this special treatment? I know when I put Oblivion in my pc for the first time, while it had bugs I didn’t have a crash to desktop every hour. I never was unable to finish a map in Battlefield 1942, even if we had 8 people playing or 64. When I purchased Baldur’s Gate 2, no one said wait 3 months for this game to be good.
The problem with mmo’s is that most of them are made by these second tier developers that have usually never made a game before. With the exception of Origin, Square Enix, and now Bioware, none of these developers have a portfolio even close to Blizzards. In my opinion, until these studios start getting some more products under their belt, they are going to continue to release products that imitate and not innovate.
Why is it unrealistic to expect an MMO to launch with exceptional polish and balance? I agree that people may not beta test as “hardcore” as they play a game at release, but that is also something Mythic can really incentivize.
Yes, I understand your game may encounter a few unforeseen bugs at launch because of the massive influx of new players, but there’s no excuse for a lack of polish and balance…
It’s quite simple really - Don’t release your game until it is ready.
Don’t tell me WAR didn’t launch early so it could establish a market before WotLK would obviously draw many hundreds of thousands of cancelled subs back to the game. A couple more months spent solely on polish and balance would have made a much better game.
I don’t envy their launch situation. In retrospect, they probably made the right decision launching an incomplete product before WotLK. Launching a more complete product in the couple months following WotLK wouldn’t have yielded as many results.
It still doesn’t change the fact that they had a huge change of game direction 8 months before release and they couldn’t get everything right in that amount of time.
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