The whole Age of Conan debacle did more than just highlight that the entire staff at Funcom probably shouldn’t be entrusted to mail a letter, let alone produce a multi-million dollar MMORPG. It also resurrected an old MMORPG community meme that has been repeated 1000s of times in forums, blogs and podcasts. What is this meme? You’ll probably find that you start nodding sagely as you start reading the next few words, “MMORPGs have never been any good in their first six months…” For added emphasis, some forumites/bloggers/podcasters will also slip in a knowing, “… even WoW.”
Now, far be it for me to don my Captain Obvious outfit but there is a vast difference between calling a situation for what it is, and actually being happy with it. In other words, yes, there are definitely many MMORPGs which got better over their first six months of release. But does that make things OK? Is that an acceptable situation for us as consumers? The resigned way in which people parrot the line whenever a bad game launches is rather disturbing. It’s like people have given up hoping for an MMORPG to release with minimal issues. As if it’s somehow impossible. Oh God, it is still possible, isn’t it?
Do I need to start slapping folks around the head at this juncture? This is so wrong, people! You certainly never see an automobile company produce a car which breaks down every few kilometres and have people standing on the footpath nodding and telling you, “Yes, cars are always unreliable for the first six months. But stick with it, mate…” And you never buy an electrical product which fails to work reliably or, worse, tries to electrocute you, only to have someone suggest that this is situation normal, pesky electrocutions be damned. It’s actually your fault for wanting to use that toaster so soon!
Seriously, why is this tolerated in the MMORPG community? Nay, not just tolerated, but celebrated by some? Just because a game can be patched and upgraded on the fly, doesn’t mean it should be released in a terrible state and fixed on the fly as the days, weeks and months go by. Age of Conan has proven, if such a thing was even necessary, that trying to fix an unfinished and buggy game on the fly is a recipe for disaster. Even Funcom fanboi’s are horrified at how the company’s game patches seem to break more than they fix and, worryingly, the company doesn’t even try to fix the worst issues in the first place.
Can anyone suggest why this situation exists? I’m at a loss. It wouldn’t be tolerated in so many other industries, yet we just sit here and collectively eat it up. Things have to change. Thankfully, over 400,000 people walking out on Funcom during the first three months of Age of Conan might be a start. A step in the right direction, if you will, that even though the new car smell has yet to wear off a new game, that people are becoming more willing to take their $50 investment and flush it down the toilet, rather than labor with a flawed game and a never-ending selection of developer lies.
I can only hope that this situation inspires all developers, currently working on games, to take quality assurance a lot more seriously. And, you know, rather than better graphics, more levels, more quests and all the other measures of e-peen that games try and compete on, why not pull your current projects back to manageable levels, employ excellent QA people, run more in-house testing with respected guilds and gamers in the community and basically hash out your problems in advance of beta testing, let alone the actual game launch?
It’s almost embarrassing to have to tell people who call themselves professionals how to launch a good product, but the truth is a good PC game is no different to a good car or good electrical appliance. It simply needs to be as good as it can be when the consumer buys it otherwise your reputation could be sunk quicker than you can say, “What’s Quality Assurance?” Save those extra ideas, or classes, or quests, or zones, for the game’s first update in a year’s time. Concentrate on the core, and get that right, first. You can always continue to build in the future off a solid base, after all.
An MMO is not a product for use by one person at a time, as a car or appliance is. It’s intended to be used by thousands of people simultaneously. So in order to be tested properly, it must be tested with thousands of simultaneous players. It’s important that developers ramp up to launch-like numbers quickly in beta testing.
But acquiring this many testers seems to be the norm, so I don’t see any excuse for stability or latency problems at launch. There will be more simultaneous players in the starter areas on launch day, but this is a foreseeable challenge.
What’s really inexcusable is continuing to install and heavily alter features so close to release (and after). MMO designs never really get locked down. The developers are constantly fiddling with them, and that’s what I see as their main production problem.
“Save those extra ideas, or classes, or quests, or zones, for the game’s first update in a year’s time. ”
This is EXACTLY why I was not dis-heartened by WAR’s announcment of less classes / capital cities.
Hopefully the extra time that it bought was used for something good.
Too bad Funcom has decided NOT to put the 6 months to good use.
They actually had a GOOD launch, and have progressively gotten worse.
This is an oddity, as most of these games do get better (Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Vanguard)
Yet, AoC seems to be going backwards.
They better hope for a darn good patch next week or WAR will eat Funcom for breakfast.
*nodding in agreement*
Let’s hope that AoC cost Funcom enough in real $$$s and reputation to demonstrates that:
1. customers now demand more polish; half-baked games are not going to cut it
2. even with heaps of marketing spend, and 3 or 6 month lock-ins, the game still has to be good to be profitable
Doing some very rough math – if AoC cost Funcom $100m like some posts are reporting, and they sold at $50 ea, with three months sub at $20/mo, Funcom made around $44m – not including any sort of operating expense. That leaves them at a $56m shortfall…. hopefully that is a good enough message…
I think developers and publishers are realising that MMO customers are more sophisticated and that they rely on the ‘long-tail’ for their $$$, so hopefully that means games will get better. Otherwise studios will lose a lot of money, and people will keep going back to WoW.
The horse is dead. Stop beating it. Or at least use a different stick.
This site really is the “AOC ate my cat” site isn’t it. All this Rob guy ever writes about is “how much AOC sux”.
GET OVER IT!! IT’S GETTING BORING!!
Yes, Lichbane, my last few posts on the blog, covering topics like the SWG TCG tournament, Raph Koster’s 10 years in MMOs, being pwned by a BioWare developer, the fragmented nature of the MMO market… yeah… they were all about AoC *rolls eyes* Suggest you read the blog a little more widely before you get too carried away with your comments. At present it would seem that you can’t seem to see the wood for the trees.
As an outsider its easy to come to the conclusion no one at Funcom could “mail a letter” but once you have seen the other side of the fence so to speak and actually worked on an MMO and seen one develop and launch from the inside you realize that so much great work, ability, and talent can be completely wasted by poor project management and inexperienced leadership or just bad decisions. Having come into the industry through customer service and quality assurance before going into design I can tell you its not that QA does not report issues, its that issues get downprioritized due to deadlines imposed by forces outside the development team or by management themselves. Really when a game with as large a scope as an MMO stumbles or falls the “fault” does not lie with everyone who worked on it which your statement is a bit blanket and inaccurate in that regard.
Athelan, I take onboard your point. In the most literal sense, you’re right. But blanket statements *do* serve to quickly establish that there is blame to be taken and there’s a body of people in the company who are to blame for the current situation. To start pulling out specific names or job titles would, in the end, do more harm than good as there would undoubtedly be guilty parties walking free of blame in such a scenario. Easier to point to the company as a whole. Because, you know, at the end of the day, whether someone is directly involced or not, if you work for a company which has done the wrong thing, or play on a sports team which has done the wrong thing, or are part of a government which has done the wrong thing, etc, etc, there is still a portion of blame that will always need to be taken, regardless of your own actions. It’s just the way organised bodies of people work.
Sure, but making those blanket statements is just the same as those stereotypes Americans put on the world, and the world puts on Americans thanks to media portrayal of all of us as ignorant uneducated selfish twats.
You can make a blanket statement targeting management without being individual if you felt that was the source of the issue, or design, or programming, you name it. But instead it’s easier for you from an uneducated perspective to simply generalize and claim that obviously no one on the team had any real talent or ability.
And when I say uneducated, I don’t mean as in you are not intelligent, just that you as an outsider are not privy to the information that would let you make a more subjective analysis.
Oh I can make a subjective analysis. Your use of the word “twat” is very uncommon for an American (if you are an American), for example. You probably also like watching Doctor Who and other “quality British TV”. But getting back to the point at hand, however, I still think anyone who attaches themselves to a company, sports team, government, etc, which suffers hardship, should pretty much expect to be tarred with the same brush. It’s the way the world works. That doesn’t mean you have to like it – it just does.