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Vanguard's positive effect on the industry.
Gweyr
Member Posts: 93
It's nice to see that Vanguard is having a positive effect on the industry.
pc.gamespy.com/pc/warhammer-online/783684p1.html
Thanks to the wonderful example of what happens when you release a game too damn soon, Mythic has decided to spend more time developing and polishing WAR.
Hopefully other developers will look at the cautionary tale that is Vanguard and realize that release incomplete unpolished games is not a good thing in todays market.
pc.gamespy.com/pc/warhammer-online/783684p1.html
Thanks to the wonderful example of what happens when you release a game too damn soon, Mythic has decided to spend more time developing and polishing WAR.
Hopefully other developers will look at the cautionary tale that is Vanguard and realize that release incomplete unpolished games is not a good thing in todays market.
Comments
Or it will get cancelled again.
Sounds to me that either:
a) developers have been moved to another project.
or
b) game is no where near ready and the new parent company knows so.
Now playing: VG (after a long break from MMORPGS)
Played for more than a month: Darkfall online, Vanguard SOH, Everquest, Horizons, WoW, SWG, Everquest II, Eve
Whats this got to do with Vanguard? A lot of games get delayed, Duke Nukem Forever is still being delayed
Odds are even with the delay when Warhammer gets released it will still have bugs and issues to work out... Hell non MMO's get released to early all the time, I've yet to buy a game I didnt have to patch a few weeks later...
Both EQ2 and WoW were slated as Q2 2004 releases (probably even earlier, those are just dates I remember personally). Heck, even single-player games have releases pushed back, and still come with bugs.
About par for the course Id say, nothing whatsoever to do with VG.
Edit; Warning Gweyr, you're in danger of falling for the spin; next it will be the hype and before you know it you will be crying all over the WAR forums this time next year when the game didnt live up to your expectations!
EA wants to make as much money as fast as possible, like Microsoft and SoE.
Mythic is the expert in the field, EA knows a fuckhole about MMORPGs, that's why they bought Mythic instead of making their own game.
I think WAR development is doing fine, but I guess Mythic wants to be sure to have a WoW killer, instead of "another" MMORPG (LOTRO for instance).
And from what I see, they might just do it.
MMO. A few extra months of polish and quality testing can make the difference between an acceptable game
and a winner. Look how many people came here claiming how Vanguard is finally where it should be three
months after release. EA / Mythic opted to delay the product three months rather than trying to address the
problems after release.
Does it mean there won't be bugs ? Absolutely not. As the article says, they are focusing on polish
and game play issues. The very same kinds of bugs that Vanguard is still trying to address now.
It is doubtful you or anyone else will ever buy a game that does not have to be patched. No one is
demanding that a game be released without bugs or without being patched. What is being demanded
though, is that the game give a positive first impression.
That should help reduce over-inflated expectations...but it seems to be human nature to create something larger than life..it seems.
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
lol, when i read the title of the op, what you posted is EXACTLY what had come to my mind.
cheers.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
MMO. A few extra months of polish and quality testing can make the difference between an acceptable game
and a winner. Look how many people came here claiming how Vanguard is finally where it should be three
months after release. EA / Mythic opted to delay the product three months rather than trying to address the
problems after release.
Does it mean there won't be bugs ? Absolutely not. As the article says, they are focusing on polish
and game play issues. The very same kinds of bugs that Vanguard is still trying to address now.
It is doubtful you or anyone else will ever buy a game that does not have to be patched. No one is
demanding that a game be released without bugs or without being patched. What is being demanded
though, is that the game give a positive first impression.
Why not demand games be released without bugs? Before the Internet games had to be released without bugs, all the internet has done is make programmers lazy with the attitude will fix it later with a patch....
Couldnt agree with you more...
If people sold the games you get in boxes today even 10 years ago the company would meet with so much backlash they would go bankrupt.
But we've come to accept and even expect subpar and barely functional games coming out of the box. Looking for a patch to make the game playable has become a part of the installation process and thats just wrong.
Post release patches for single player games are a mark of shame for a developer dont let them try to spin it off as normal. They f'ed up and its our job to call em on it.
While mmos may be a different kettle of fish its still the same concept. If they are releasing major patches immediately after launch to make the game playable they totally dropped the ball and have proven themselves to be nothing but completely incompetent.
I think IDSoftware in the late 90s was the last company I had any respect for.
Even tho im not a big fan of WOW, Blizzard has always had my respect regarding there games, they have always been playable out of the box, the only tweaks were usally for Multiplayer balance issues and patching exploits cheaters were using......
Starcraft, Warcraft 1-3, Diablo 1-2 were all very polished games when released...
And as far as Smooth running MMO's goes, there MMO (World of Warcraft) has probably had the least amount of problems among all MMO's that are out....
rofl - Guild Wars had a far better launch than WOW. Blizzard were too successful and overloaded their servers.
Keep holding your breath for a game with no bugs - closest you will get is console games where they cant patch the game, so it has to be as bug free as possible before release.
Do you really want your games delayed a month because one person out of 100,000 found some bug no-one else has encountered.
Developers have to draw a line and say - these bugs are rare / non-game breaking so they will get fixed eventually or maybe never, and these other bugs are critical and need to be fixed before release.
Vangauards problem is they drew the line in the sand at the wrong point (the point where they ran out of money). Any other company in any other business would have gone bankrupt. Its only here that we let games be released in the state of Vanguard or Dungeonlords.
This is a myth.
Before the internet we had to either play through bugs (or not if they were that bad) or get the games company to send us a fix on floppy disk.
My Eye of the Beholder 2 never let me into the final room for the end fight. I cherish the series nonetheless and still went on to buy EotB3.
Edit: If you dont think duping is a major bug then I guess you can say Diablo was released smoothly. The thing is Diablo was basically a single-player game, so bugs like duping are not as detrimental to the game as they would be if it were an MMO. Had Diablo been released as a MMO the lashing it would have received would make VGs pale to nothing in comparison.
The biggest influence on the industry today is WoW. No longer are (major) game company's going to be content with a few 100k subscribers when they know that, theoretically at least, they can reach millions. The more subscribers you can potentially attract, the more the money-men are willing to invest.
If people sold the games you get in boxes today even 10 years ago the company would meet with so much backlash they would go bankrupt.
But we've come to accept and even expect subpar and barely functional games coming out of the box. Looking for a patch to make the game playable has become a part of the installation process and thats just wrong.
Post release patches for single player games are a mark of shame for a developer dont let them try to spin it off as normal. They f'ed up and its our job to call em on it.
While mmos may be a different kettle of fish its still the same concept. If they are releasing major patches immediately after launch to make the game playable they totally dropped the ball and have proven themselves to be nothing but completely incompetent.
I think IDSoftware in the late 90s was the last company I had any respect for.
While I appreciate this belief (I share it to an extent), I don't entirely agree.
Making PC Games is far more difficult now than it was over a decade a go. There are so many hardware options, multiple operating systems, and different formats available now, that it's hard to keep compatibility together the way it used to be. 10+ years ago, there were only so many requirements for games...now there's tons more.
So while I do agree, programmers are getting lazier, it's also partially due to the fact that technology has become less forgiving.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
I know it must be difficult coming up with your own adjectives.
Wow was horrible at launch just like damn near every other MMO at release. It has since been polished into a good game, but the first few months it had all sorts of performance issues which is pretty sad considering the lower graphics quality. Server performance was an issue almost a year after launch and I still cringe to this day whenever my 13 year old mentions WoW's patching process.
Sorry but "its hard so we shouldnt have to put in that much effort" isnt a valid excuse for me.
But your right.. 10 years ago the games werent as complex and there werent as many hardware configurations. But then again 10 years ago most OS's didnt have a hardware abstraction layer and APIs making it the hardware mostly irrelevant since your program will never speak to it directly anyways.
The games themselves have gotten more complex but debugging and ensuring hardware compatibility has gotten much easier.
In my opinion at least the difficulty hasnt changed much but the quality has fallen drastically.
I think its because the industry has become more commercialized. It used to be most employees of a game company did it because they enjoyed it. The industry has "grown up" since then meaning people put on suits and ties and became obsessed with profits and doing no more than the "minimum acceptable level of productivity".
Part of the problems is the methods and languages we are using to descibe and solve problems. I remember an AI class at UCLA I took about 20 years ago. We got into a discussion of the industry and it's problems.
What if we had a better way to describe problems? Currently we have a apple pie and we write code to describe how to make an apple pie. But what if we could describe what an apple pie is and build the code automaticially from that. Lanuages such as prolog are kind of like that. This is the future of software development IMO.
EA wants to make as much money as fast as possible, like Microsoft and SoE.
Mythic is the expert in the field, EA knows a fuckhole about MMORPGs, that's why they bought Mythic instead of making their own game.
I think WAR development is doing fine, but I guess Mythic wants to be sure to have a WoW killer, instead of "another" MMORPG (LOTRO for instance).
And from what I see, they might just do it. A WoW killer? LOL, well God bless'em....
We'll see about this time next year, won't we....
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon