Everything goes into some sort of beta phase these days whether it’s a website, an MMO, a single player video game, or even a product. Beta has become a natural phase for nearly everything we buy and consume today and despite our favorite MMOs going through a rather lengthy closed and open beta process it appears that even upon the official release we are really just transitioning into yet another beta phase: the paid beta.
Now, as we are entering into the next wave of upcoming MMORPGs it appears that this mantra is holding true even more so than in previous years. Back when World of Warcraft was first released it was arguable to say that you were just paying for a beta. After all, all games need to go through these phases and there are likely to be bugs in any MMORPG that gets released. However, what with MMORPGs getting more and more advanced we are starting to see these “pay to play beta” beta phases get dragged out longer and longer. While the World of Warcraft eventually tied down most major bugs, even they must issue patches every few months to keep the bugs down. It’s an interesting problem that probably doesn’t have a permanent solution.
Of course, games having bugs is nothing new to the video games industry. Don’t believe me? Go back and put in any old NES or Atari 2600 game you can find and you’ll notice that there were tons of graphical and physical bugs that made for surprisingly glitchy game play. Back then, however, these were natural occurrences that you just had to accept and ignore as there was no way to get any sort of update. If fact, the first time we did really start to notice how buggy games were was when the first graphical MMORPGs started appearing on the internet which enabled the ability for devs go back and polish their game even after release in order to appease the player base. Before the standard MMO the whole concept of patching was relatively alien to the industry.
Today we have games, MMO and non-MMOs, that are patched regularly and while some games may eventually be considered to be fully patched and complete without bugs, I’d be willing to bet that we are getting awfully close to that becoming yet another part of history. This of course raises an almost philosophical question: if a game an MMO is constantly being patched and fixed can it ever truly be considered complete? I don’t think so…
Just like an operating system (windows especially , but not alone) the software is just too big for it to come out perfect. Even with a more than normal amount of time spent before release.
I argue with the point about MMO’s starting the patching idea though. More accurately, it would be the internet that made patching a normal thing. Before that it was not reasonable to get a patch out to people. While i cant think of any off the top of my head, it was not a new thing to be getting patches when I was playing UO, and that was pretty close to the start of large scale MMO’s.
I really, really wonder what game this may be referring to?
(LOL)
I assume it is brand new, and is on a bi-weekly patch schedule until major issues are ironed out?
There is no doubt that every MMO now has been “Oh look a patch”, and we as subscribers go on our merry way.
Patching is so normal for MMO’s, that my wife who is not a whiz or guru of any sort, never blinks when she turns to me and says…”Hey, our game has a patch”…
It has become synonymous with MMO’s…and for people to expect this to change (the many complaints of this “New” MMO is why it needed to be patched so much, and should not have been…please get real people)…it will not happen as code gets more involved, more detailed…
I think as long as the game in question is able to be played..(I still think of starting WoW over a year after release, and coming in when a new patch introduced a serious bug with servers coming down every day for hours on end for about a month or so..)…then my purchase is worthwhile.
Developers should have a list at release of game features they can alter and game features that can’t be touched (clean up the bugs, but no balancing or such). Massive online games will never be finished products to the degree of smaller games. But consumers should be able to count on any game being basically the same from one month to the next.
MMO developers have given themselves a pass by claiming MMOs are services and not products. That’s garbage. MMOs are products with services attached to them. When I buy an MMO, I’m interested in the static lines of code included on the discs and the servers that support that program. Sure, I’m paying for server maintenance, but the object of my purchasing decision is a program that could be polished and otherwise left alone.