Musical instruments as weapons? No one would ever be stupid enough to do that? Right?
Oh wait, LotRO has that, by itself jarring into harsh reality any roleplayer that cares about the world of Arda.
/endrage
This is a good article; it's always good to remember why these games fail. It's just as you say, because the developers don't actually play and test it enough to see if it's fun. Formulas and concepts only go so far.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
I like these SOE hit pieces, It gets the 3 people that still play the nge really steamed.
Funny thing is we have moved on, most of us play polished bug free games, published by great companies. Your the ones that haven't. Your still playing the biggest chunk-O-pooh since 2005.
Musical instruments as weapons? No one would ever be stupid enough to do that? Right? Oh wait, LotRO has that, by itself jarring into harsh reality any roleplayer that cares about the world of Arda.
/endrage This is a good article; it's always good to remember why these games fail. It's just as you say, because the developers don't actually play and test it enough to see if it's fun. Formulas and concepts only go so far.
EQ2 have it also. But it works rather ok in a fantasy setting. Too bad TR was Sci-fi.
Heck, anyone whos been playing D&D knows that bards can be dangerous. The question here was more: "Will this fit the TR lore"?
Anyways, fun is the most important factor for a game and devs should think more about it. I hope that Bioware have, they use to spend a lot of thought about it when they make a game.
i would assume a clean shot through the mainframe followed by a fuel doused burning of the datahubs and a final cleansing (bloody or otherwise) of the gameplay mechanics would do a pretty good job of putting an MMO out of it's misery.
Of course this could be achieved by a few well placed explosives but the neighbours may complain about shards of MMO splattering their nice walls
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds -Solid non level based game -Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another.
Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't.
So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.
An MMO goes down when it stops making money. Until that point, why does anyone care "when it should be put out of its misery"? This is really only an opportunity for the game haters to whine about about the "why ___ company or game sucks" to post their nonsense.
If the player base wants to play and the game is pulling a profit then that is all that matters.
The ironic thing is most of the people who feel they should "put a game out of its misery" don't even play them.
I just bought a brand new 20 gauge shotgun I was going to do some duck hunting with soon. When Spare (no Idea who this is but Garret does) decides to put a round or two into SWG(NGE) I want in on that action. Closure is a good thing, right?
I have had my 12 guage ithica for 20+ years now, I want in on the action too
While an interesting subject to be sure An MMO goes down when it stops making money. Until that point, why does anyone care "when it should be put out of its misery"? This is really only an opportunity for the game haters to whine about about the "why ___ company or game sucks" to post their nonsense. If the player base wants to play and the game is pulling a profit then that is all that matters. The ironic thing is most of the people who feel they should "put a game out of its misery" don't even play them.
While certainly an interesting perspective... Thats not how it tends to work in some cases. Tabula Rasa was still making a profit when NCsoft pulled the plug. It just wasn't making "enough" profit for the Korean suits. As for the NGE, its usually a good topic to draw eye balls to a web page, simply because a LOT of people had invested hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the game before the bone headed changes took place.
Originally posted by Drakon911 What truly boggles my mind is how it seems as if every new game that comes out is being "produced" by companies run by people that don't play games themselves. Maybe I should narrow that down to the people that hold the purse strings. The movie "Groundhog Day" comes to mind. They live in that type of world that's the same day repeating over and over and they keep trying different things and not realizing that the outcome will be the same. These people appear to have one thing in mind and only one thing, money. Regardless of common sense or their programmers or whomever telling them the idea is a bad one, they think it'll make them a few more dollars and they go with it. For example, pushing a game out too early. How many times has that caused a game to do poorly or even to cause it to fail completely? Yet these people continue to do it. Another biggie to me is alienating and/or pissing off your customers by poor communication or lack of communication completely. SWG is THE prime example of both of these. It was pushed out too early, but it was able to recover. It continued on a while longer before it alienated and pissed off it's customers by totally ignoring their wishes/needs. Like an airplane that takes off with too little fuel and a rookie pilot who just got his license by reading "Flying Planes For Dummies". It might take off, it might fly a little while but it's destined to crash and burn. Sadly I think that Champions Online is rolling down the same runway. Before the game has even been released Cryptic has managed to alienate and anger a large chunk of it's potential playerbase with the whole Lifetime Subscription fiasco. People hate to feel like they've been deceived, they also hate to think that a company that makes a product they enjoy doesn't care about their feelings. Where do these guys think the money comes from? They act as if there's this huge pool of money and since Blizzard figured out a way to tap it, they can too. I've got news for you guys, it's not by running that huge pipe across the backs of your customers.
This is a fantastic post and I want to draw more attention to it.
You don't get money from players by making it seem like you want to get money from them. That doesn't mean tricking them, either, (though I think that is what happened in SWG) it means focusing on making a game that is enjoyable to play. And this doesn't mean this ridiculous focus on FUN FUN FUN I keep seeing recently. Fun isn't the only thing that makes a game...fun. I need tension in my PvP, a genuine fear of something, probably death, in my PvE, crafting that takes time and effort and planning.
Of course, some might see this as grindy and not fun. And that is the problem. There is no one formula that makes games people enjoy playing. Just look at WoW V EVE. Both have large playerbases, both continue to get new players in, and they couldn't be more different in design and implementation.
The only way to make a good game is not to focus on making a "game" so you can make "money." People that play MMOs want a living, breathing world that in no way resembles our own Developers need to have their own, new, unique visions, and then run with them. WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). That is what people want. That and the polish. You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.
People complain about a grind, but if the combat is fun in a game, a grind suddenly isn't so much a grind. You need some level of grind just to take up time. If players can master everything too easily, they will quickly grow bored and go do something else
I, like you, Drakon 911, am somewhat horrified yet mystified by investors that do not listen to the people making the games. Most of the time, someone making the game itself, the designers and programmers, like games themselves and in a general sense know if something will fail horribly. And yet...
What I think MMORPG should do is have an "article" about "What to players want in an MMO." That thread would be massive and have more fantastic suggestions than developers could handle. No, we wouldn't agree, but that fact alone should help developers.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
You could have probably filled the space for this article with an advertisement.
I have played both and I enjoyed both. Game sdie when the makers deem them no longer profitable or worth continued investment of resources. I played TR to the end and it was just too little effort towards end game that came too late to save it, still wasn''t a bad game. I have plaayed SWG both before and well after NGE and it's a completely different game. It's still complicated, but not in the same way. The biggest problem with SWG is the stigma of the NGE. If you were to never have heard of or played it before in your life, there is a good chance you would enjoy it today.
There are other games you dont hear about expect maybe once a year that have been around forever and are still being played as much as any that survive the initial buy and try 30 days: DAoC, EQ1, EQ2, Eve, Anarchy Online, nd many others. Should these die too because people dont rave about how great they are constantly?
And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Originally posted by USFPutty Originally posted by Bob_Blawblaw And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
Are you stoned? You surely sound like it. Oh wait - I know... you failed at trolling. I get it.
Why else would someone suggest that a game with over 10 million CURRENT subscriptions should be put out of its "misery". Where, until recently, an estimated 3% of a countries ECONOMY is based off of selling items in the game world.
Seriously though, you're right. The misery of a game that makes about $150,000,000 A MONTH, is in horrible misery. Damn, just close the servers and delete the databases.. it's a horrible travestiy...
No, it's a simple and boring game. However, it's just that perfect balance of mindless and serviceable that somehow combines to be a lowest common denominator favorite.
McDonald's does great business, even though most folks will acknowledge that most of the food will kill you and tastes like it was coagulated from soylent green. Jerry Springer was hugely popular even though most folks admitted it was mindless sensationalist crap.
That a game makes money is an indicator that it is successful, not that it is good. Do not mix those two up.
That being said, no, I imagine WoW will be with us a long, long time. More's the pity.
And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.
I'll be a frankly honest whore now, though, and say that if they brought the game back to the day before NGE went live and I could have my Master DE / Master Shipwright, my house, and my piles of materials back and go back to doing what I loved, I'd probably be there in a cold minute.
The only way to make a good game is not to focus on making a "game" so you can make "money." No a games company is a buisness, but your not entirely wrong in my opinion, they need to focus on making an achievalbe amount of money People that play MMOs want a living, breathing world that in no way resembles our own Well again, no and saldy the exisitance of certain games prove you wrong but that's just me being a redant Developers need to have their own, new, unique visions, and then run with them. YES YES YES!!!! WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). YES That is what people want. That and the polish. YES You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. NO Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player. People complain about a grind, but if the combat is fun in a game, a grind suddenly isn't so much a grind. You need some level of grind just to take up time. If players can master everything too easily, they will quickly grow bored and go do something else I, like you, Drakon 911, am somewhat horrified yet mystified by investors that do not listen to the people making the games. Most of the time, someone making the game itself, the designers and programmers, like games themselves and in a general sense know if something will fail horribly. And yet... Yes and No, the example frequently used is the movie industry. Your always gonna have your Hollywood Blockbusters that appeal to as many people and are brought to life by committee and focus group. Nothing wrong with em, but there only one side of the coin what is needed are more Indie films. Games made to the directors vision and his bank balance, this is the side of the MMO industry that serious needs to be gorwn for the future. Right now the MMO industry to me kinda seems like a one sided coin.
Wow I couldn't agree with you more. No matter how good the story or graphics are the one main question is does it all come together to make the game FUN. Are the players being entertained at every step of the way in their MMO world so that they never want to leave or do they have to do so many tedious and time consuming tasks that it becomes a choir to play. Make a truly fun MMO and you will literally have millions of players returning again and again, but make one that looks good or sounds good and has very little fun as a result of its complexity or design then you will see subscribers coming and going never to return.
It's the truth that so many publishers/developers seem to just not get. I was a game developers conference a few months ago, and there was a lecture by some high up marketing/research fellow who literally thought he had the equation for fun! Turned out the guy was giving us the equation for what perceived as the 'metacritic code', which many game execs see as the holy grail.
He was off his rocker btw. These people should stop looking at metacritic numbers and start reading the reviews which give the numbers weight. But yet, PLAY SOME F***ING GAMES! But I digress.
btw, the equation was something along the lines of 'x feature + y feature + z IP X better graphics = fun!'. He never mentioned releasing bug free code or polishing a game. Booo! Yes, these are the people making your games.
Ahh yes. Fun.
The danger here is that you can take the whole concept too far. MMOs are interesting things and often what makes an MMO fun is a combination of elements including elements that are not fun by themselves.
As an example of the concept I like to use Silent Hunter III. It's not an MMO but it does demonstrate the point.
Travel in SH III involves physically sailing from port to your patrol grid and back again. Even with time compression this can take ages (hours). Boring stuff. Only it isn't. Because there is tension. Every time you see a ship, or get a sonar contact, or see an air craft there are choices to be made and the very real possibility that a wrong choice could spell "GAME OVER".
They could have designed the game to 'warp' you to your patrol zone and back again. But if they had done that the game would have lost something that gave the player a sense of attachment to his boat and his crew. So a boring element becomes 'fun' or at least contributes to it in a meaningful way.
Back to MMOs (one that should probably be on the list already and one that is sure to join if it is ever released)
PotBS and The Agency.
Pre release for PotBS I saw a video interview with one of the FLS devs (can't find the link now).
For that entire interview he rabbited on about "FUN!"
"We ditched this because it wasn't fun...", "...couldn't find a way to make it fun..." etc etc.
Right then I knew the game was in trouble.
Yes, they stripped out stuff that wasn't fun, and in doing so somewhere along the way they stripped out the game's soul.
What was left was a shell of an MMO that people just don't want to play.
The Agency is the same. Again I saw a video interview and saw the same idotic focus on "Fun, fun, FUN!"
Yes, this approach might work for a console game, but MMOs are a whole different style of game.
Sometimes it's the 'non-fun' elements that allow the fun elements to even work.
So the pursuit of fun can be a double edged sword.
Your Silent Hunter 3 reference actually reminds me of an MMO equivalent (sort of) in EVE, where I used to have endless fun running high-value parts through the gauntlet out to 0.0 space through hordes of PvP-happy pirates using my little cloaked frigate. It's a long tedious run, and to survive it, you have to manually jump the ship. It COULD be uneventful, or you could be running for your life. Tension and excitement in a 'nonfun' activity.
I beta tested PotBS. I played it live for over a year, involved in a nice big society and making big ships. And I came to be VERY BORED with the game. Other than a lot of 'fun' changes which are supposed to increase/improve PvP (the ONLY thing the devs seem to consider fun), there really hasn't been any content added in, uh, EVER. And you can only play a game of capture the port back and forth for so long before it's boring, repetitive, and no longer interesting. "Fun."
Of course, some might see this as grindy and not fun. And that is the problem. There is no one formula that makes games people enjoy playing. Just look at WoW V EVE. Both have large playerbases, both continue to get new players in, and they couldn't be more different in design and implementation. WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). That is what people want. That and the polish. You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.
A couple points here. First one is exactly what I've ben saying for years now. The fact that some games out there ARE, ostensibly, WoW clones (a term I hate) is a major problem. They're not WoW clones because WoW is a pioneering MMO. It's not. It's a well-assembled conglomerate of the most successful aspects of games that came before it (most notably the EQ family, UO, etc.). It's about as derivatively vanilla as you can get. But it became RIDICULOUSLY popular, and other gaming studios wanted that success (read: money) and tried to make their games WoW. But there is ALREADY a WoW, so everyone else suffers the Xerox effect, and fails, does poorly, or at least not as well as hoped/expected.
EVE, on the other hand, is a wholly independent game design. There's no room in the world for 12 WoWs. There is certainly room for WoW and EVE. So the focus needs to be not on cloning something currently successful, but finding an unoccupied niche (or creating one if you're bold) and filling it.
As for polish, I agree. I am not a fan of WoW; this is obvious. That being said, there is no denying that its easy learning curve and ability to direct the player without being super hamfisted about it is a welcoming and comforting aspect for new players and probably explains a good deal of its success. I would NEVER go so far as to call it a paragon of ANYTHING. :-D
They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another. Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't. So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.
You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here? PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community. People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.
They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another. Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't. So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.
You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here? PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community. People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.
It's been years and I'm STILL looking for the next SWG. So to speak. And there really WASN'T an endgame, per se. Since folks were constantly deciding they could better optimize their builds and tweaking their skills, pitting their custom ideas against someone else's custom ideas. And some of us could just craft. Beautiful.
The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space?
Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game?
Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.
Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read. My 2 cents: The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space? Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game? Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.
I think this question comes up at the end of just about every beta for the last decade when most reasonable people are aware of a plethora of remaining bugs that the developers can no longer afford to remedy pre-release. This kind of piss-poor planning and development is one of the key reasons expectations have dwindled and a shoddy product at launch has become the de facto standard. And that does NOT bode well for your industry, especially when hunting for investors.
HEY... why didn't you touch on the converse as counterpoint... E&B which was put down far too early..... just a thought... don't want to write your next article for you or nuthin'...
Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market. To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.
Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read. My 2 cents: The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space? Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game? Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.
What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players. Which is to say it's not baffling at all.I'm actually a bit disappointed in the lack of industry knowledge by the author of this article.
The fact is MMOs are the most complex piece of software that exists in the marketplace. And it's not just the whole, it's the parts. Rendering, graphics, animations, networks, server technology, database. MMOs tie all the relevant technologies together to create a seamless world, and this is non-trivial. Which is why we see a trend towards middleware solutions. But technology and design have a fairly intimate relationship, and many studios don't like to be bound by such external requirements (they want to be able to modify source code as needed). But I digress. To make a triple-A MMO you need really a lower bound of about 100 developers working for a couple of years minimum, not including QA or customer service. In reality it's somewhat higher and longer. This is a relatively large scale for a single software project, so in addition to the technical requirements you also need competent project management. This also assumes the designers are experienced, and are capable of making a fun and well-balanced game. And MMOs are the hardest genre of game to design, because players inherently impact the game experience of other players. Considering the impact of anonymity on human behavior, if there's any chance of that impact to be negative, it will be. Players rarely do what designers intend, and the more freedom a player has, the rarer that becomes. If this is a single player game it doesn't matter. I'm sure Will Wright never intended players of The Sims to get the most enjoyment out of torturing the denizens of their game world. In an MMO it does matter, because player A directly impacts the subscription revenue from player B - interacting with others is why we play MMOs after all.
There are two other facts worth mentioning. The first is that by software industry standards, game developers are some of the least paid on average, and this makes it hard to obtain the top talent. The second fact is that most commercial software projects (even projects on very well-known applications such as accounts receivable programs) are failures, for a variety of reasons. Heck, most businesses fail in their first year, so this isn't even limited to the software industry.
Contrary to the position put forward by the article, in my experience most MMO developers enjoy playing MMOs. You don't take less pay to work on a game, unless you are really into games. You don't work countless hours of unpaid overtime, unless you are passionate about making a great MMO. So it's not a matter of going into a meeting and saying "oh, let's remember to ask if this is fun" Quite frankly, that's pretty insulting.
I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses. Yet an MMO world seeks to provide fun for all them, in a manner where nobody's fun detracts from anyone else's. Niche MMOs attempt to address this issue by deliberately and unabashedly limiting the scope, and say: we are only catering to X kind of gamer, who enjoys Y kind of fun. This is an admission that certain kinds of fun are mutually exclusive, which is why we will never see a mainstream hardcore PvP MMO. And at the end of the day, MMOs are a business. Gaming is not a human right, players are not "owed" anything by the gaming industry as a whole. There is no consumer entitlement to great products
If you buy a $60 single player title, you would reasonably expect to get a month's worth of enjoyment out of it. But with the same $60 spent on an MMO box (with a free first month), players feel that if they don't get at least a year's enjoyment it was a complete waste of time. So I also think MMOs are held to a higher standard. Why? Because there is something uniquely compelling about living in a virtual universe, with virtual friends and virtual things, and remaking yourself into whatever you want to be inside that universe. Everyone can fulfill the American Dream, just in pixilated format.
So if there is such a burning commercial demand for an MMO wherein a player can completely immerse himself in a believable and spectacular game world, and such an MMO does not exist, one has to wonder why. Is it because supply and demand stopped working? I don't think so. I think the only obvious conclusion is simply that MMOs are extremely difficult to get right.
HEY... why didn't you touch on the converse as counterpoint... E&B which was put down far too early..... just a thought... don't want to write your next article for you or nuthin'...
Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market. To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.
MYtwo cents worth.
I well remember E&B. I still have the original box up on my game shelf. Good game, and great community. Its too bad that EA(as usual) didn't have a clue about what a gem they had. All too typical of their usual short sighted corporate mentality.
Comments
Musical instruments as weapons? No one would ever be stupid enough to do that? Right?
Oh wait, LotRO has that, by itself jarring into harsh reality any roleplayer that cares about the world of Arda.
/endrage
This is a good article; it's always good to remember why these games fail. It's just as you say, because the developers don't actually play and test it enough to see if it's fun. Formulas and concepts only go so far.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
I like these SOE hit pieces, It gets the 3 people that still play the nge really steamed.
Funny thing is we have moved on, most of us play polished bug free games, published by great companies. Your the ones that haven't. Your still playing the biggest chunk-O-pooh since 2005.
WoWs goal is to put you out of your misery first....>=)
EQ2 have it also. But it works rather ok in a fantasy setting. Too bad TR was Sci-fi.
Heck, anyone whos been playing D&D knows that bards can be dangerous. The question here was more: "Will this fit the TR lore"?
Anyways, fun is the most important factor for a game and devs should think more about it. I hope that Bioware have, they use to spend a lot of thought about it when they make a game.
i would assume a clean shot through the mainframe followed by a fuel doused burning of the datahubs and a final cleansing (bloody or otherwise) of the gameplay mechanics would do a pretty good job of putting an MMO out of it's misery.
Of course this could be achieved by a few well placed explosives but the neighbours may complain about shards of MMO splattering their nice walls
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
OMG cry more about the NGE.
They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another.
Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't.
So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.
While an interesting subject to be sure
An MMO goes down when it stops making money. Until that point, why does anyone care "when it should be put out of its misery"? This is really only an opportunity for the game haters to whine about about the "why ___ company or game sucks" to post their nonsense.
If the player base wants to play and the game is pulling a profit then that is all that matters.
The ironic thing is most of the people who feel they should "put a game out of its misery" don't even play them.
I have had my 12 guage ithica for 20+ years now, I want in on the action too
url=http://www.enjin.com]
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While certainly an interesting perspective... Thats not how it tends to work in some cases. Tabula Rasa was still making a profit when NCsoft pulled the plug. It just wasn't making "enough" profit for the Korean suits. As for the NGE, its usually a good topic to draw eye balls to a web page, simply because a LOT of people had invested hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the game before the bone headed changes took place.
This is a fantastic post and I want to draw more attention to it.
You don't get money from players by making it seem like you want to get money from them. That doesn't mean tricking them, either, (though I think that is what happened in SWG) it means focusing on making a game that is enjoyable to play. And this doesn't mean this ridiculous focus on FUN FUN FUN I keep seeing recently. Fun isn't the only thing that makes a game...fun. I need tension in my PvP, a genuine fear of something, probably death, in my PvE, crafting that takes time and effort and planning.
Of course, some might see this as grindy and not fun. And that is the problem. There is no one formula that makes games people enjoy playing. Just look at WoW V EVE. Both have large playerbases, both continue to get new players in, and they couldn't be more different in design and implementation.
The only way to make a good game is not to focus on making a "game" so you can make "money." People that play MMOs want a living, breathing world that in no way resembles our own Developers need to have their own, new, unique visions, and then run with them. WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). That is what people want. That and the polish. You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.
People complain about a grind, but if the combat is fun in a game, a grind suddenly isn't so much a grind. You need some level of grind just to take up time. If players can master everything too easily, they will quickly grow bored and go do something else
I, like you, Drakon 911, am somewhat horrified yet mystified by investors that do not listen to the people making the games. Most of the time, someone making the game itself, the designers and programmers, like games themselves and in a general sense know if something will fail horribly. And yet...
What I think MMORPG should do is have an "article" about "What to players want in an MMO." That thread would be massive and have more fantastic suggestions than developers could handle. No, we wouldn't agree, but that fact alone should help developers.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
You could have probably filled the space for this article with an advertisement.
I have played both and I enjoyed both. Game sdie when the makers deem them no longer profitable or worth continued investment of resources. I played TR to the end and it was just too little effort towards end game that came too late to save it, still wasn''t a bad game. I have plaayed SWG both before and well after NGE and it's a completely different game. It's still complicated, but not in the same way. The biggest problem with SWG is the stigma of the NGE. If you were to never have heard of or played it before in your life, there is a good chance you would enjoy it today.
There are other games you dont hear about expect maybe once a year that have been around forever and are still being played as much as any that survive the initial buy and try 30 days: DAoC, EQ1, EQ2, Eve, Anarchy Online, nd many others. Should these die too because people dont rave about how great they are constantly?
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
Are you stoned? You surely sound like it. Oh wait - I know... you failed at trolling. I get it.
Why else would someone suggest that a game with over 10 million CURRENT subscriptions should be put out of its "misery". Where, until recently, an estimated 3% of a countries ECONOMY is based off of selling items in the game world.
Seriously though, you're right. The misery of a game that makes about $150,000,000 A MONTH, is in horrible misery. Damn, just close the servers and delete the databases.. it's a horrible travestiy...
No, it's a simple and boring game. However, it's just that perfect balance of mindless and serviceable that somehow combines to be a lowest common denominator favorite.
McDonald's does great business, even though most folks will acknowledge that most of the food will kill you and tastes like it was coagulated from soylent green. Jerry Springer was hugely popular even though most folks admitted it was mindless sensationalist crap.
That a game makes money is an indicator that it is successful, not that it is good. Do not mix those two up.
That being said, no, I imagine WoW will be with us a long, long time. More's the pity.
Uh, all over the place actually. It started immediately and hasn't stopped since. But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.
Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.
I'll be a frankly honest whore now, though, and say that if they brought the game back to the day before NGE went live and I could have my Master DE / Master Shipwright, my house, and my piles of materials back and go back to doing what I loved, I'd probably be there in a cold minute.
But, yeah, death to SOE.
It's the truth that so many publishers/developers seem to just not get. I was a game developers conference a few months ago, and there was a lecture by some high up marketing/research fellow who literally thought he had the equation for fun! Turned out the guy was giving us the equation for what perceived as the 'metacritic code', which many game execs see as the holy grail.
He was off his rocker btw. These people should stop looking at metacritic numbers and start reading the reviews which give the numbers weight. But yet, PLAY SOME F***ING GAMES! But I digress.
btw, the equation was something along the lines of 'x feature + y feature + z IP X better graphics = fun!'. He never mentioned releasing bug free code or polishing a game. Booo! Yes, these are the people making your games.
Ahh yes. Fun.
The danger here is that you can take the whole concept too far. MMOs are interesting things and often what makes an MMO fun is a combination of elements including elements that are not fun by themselves.
As an example of the concept I like to use Silent Hunter III. It's not an MMO but it does demonstrate the point.
Travel in SH III involves physically sailing from port to your patrol grid and back again. Even with time compression this can take ages (hours). Boring stuff. Only it isn't. Because there is tension. Every time you see a ship, or get a sonar contact, or see an air craft there are choices to be made and the very real possibility that a wrong choice could spell "GAME OVER".
They could have designed the game to 'warp' you to your patrol zone and back again. But if they had done that the game would have lost something that gave the player a sense of attachment to his boat and his crew. So a boring element becomes 'fun' or at least contributes to it in a meaningful way.
Back to MMOs (one that should probably be on the list already and one that is sure to join if it is ever released)
PotBS and The Agency.
Pre release for PotBS I saw a video interview with one of the FLS devs (can't find the link now).
For that entire interview he rabbited on about "FUN!"
"We ditched this because it wasn't fun...", "...couldn't find a way to make it fun..." etc etc.
Right then I knew the game was in trouble.
Yes, they stripped out stuff that wasn't fun, and in doing so somewhere along the way they stripped out the game's soul.
What was left was a shell of an MMO that people just don't want to play.
The Agency is the same. Again I saw a video interview and saw the same idotic focus on "Fun, fun, FUN!"
Yes, this approach might work for a console game, but MMOs are a whole different style of game.
Sometimes it's the 'non-fun' elements that allow the fun elements to even work.
So the pursuit of fun can be a double edged sword.
Your Silent Hunter 3 reference actually reminds me of an MMO equivalent (sort of) in EVE, where I used to have endless fun running high-value parts through the gauntlet out to 0.0 space through hordes of PvP-happy pirates using my little cloaked frigate. It's a long tedious run, and to survive it, you have to manually jump the ship. It COULD be uneventful, or you could be running for your life. Tension and excitement in a 'nonfun' activity.
I beta tested PotBS. I played it live for over a year, involved in a nice big society and making big ships. And I came to be VERY BORED with the game. Other than a lot of 'fun' changes which are supposed to increase/improve PvP (the ONLY thing the devs seem to consider fun), there really hasn't been any content added in, uh, EVER. And you can only play a game of capture the port back and forth for so long before it's boring, repetitive, and no longer interesting. "Fun."
A couple points here. First one is exactly what I've ben saying for years now. The fact that some games out there ARE, ostensibly, WoW clones (a term I hate) is a major problem. They're not WoW clones because WoW is a pioneering MMO. It's not. It's a well-assembled conglomerate of the most successful aspects of games that came before it (most notably the EQ family, UO, etc.). It's about as derivatively vanilla as you can get. But it became RIDICULOUSLY popular, and other gaming studios wanted that success (read: money) and tried to make their games WoW. But there is ALREADY a WoW, so everyone else suffers the Xerox effect, and fails, does poorly, or at least not as well as hoped/expected.
EVE, on the other hand, is a wholly independent game design. There's no room in the world for 12 WoWs. There is certainly room for WoW and EVE. So the focus needs to be not on cloning something currently successful, but finding an unoccupied niche (or creating one if you're bold) and filling it.
As for polish, I agree. I am not a fan of WoW; this is obvious. That being said, there is no denying that its easy learning curve and ability to direct the player without being super hamfisted about it is a welcoming and comforting aspect for new players and probably explains a good deal of its success. I would NEVER go so far as to call it a paragon of ANYTHING. :-D
You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here? PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community. People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.
You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here? PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community. People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.
It's been years and I'm STILL looking for the next SWG. So to speak. And there really WASN'T an endgame, per se. Since folks were constantly deciding they could better optimize their builds and tweaking their skills, pitting their custom ideas against someone else's custom ideas. And some of us could just craft. Beautiful.
Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read.
My 2 cents:
The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space?
Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game?
Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.
I think this question comes up at the end of just about every beta for the last decade when most reasonable people are aware of a plethora of remaining bugs that the developers can no longer afford to remedy pre-release. This kind of piss-poor planning and development is one of the key reasons expectations have dwindled and a shoddy product at launch has become the de facto standard. And that does NOT bode well for your industry, especially when hunting for investors.
Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market. To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.
MYtwo cents worth.
What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players. Which is to say it's not baffling at all.I'm actually a bit disappointed in the lack of industry knowledge by the author of this article.
The fact is MMOs are the most complex piece of software that exists in the marketplace. And it's not just the whole, it's the parts. Rendering, graphics, animations, networks, server technology, database. MMOs tie all the relevant technologies together to create a seamless world, and this is non-trivial. Which is why we see a trend towards middleware solutions. But technology and design have a fairly intimate relationship, and many studios don't like to be bound by such external requirements (they want to be able to modify source code as needed). But I digress. To make a triple-A MMO you need really a lower bound of about 100 developers working for a couple of years minimum, not including QA or customer service. In reality it's somewhat higher and longer. This is a relatively large scale for a single software project, so in addition to the technical requirements you also need competent project management. This also assumes the designers are experienced, and are capable of making a fun and well-balanced game. And MMOs are the hardest genre of game to design, because players inherently impact the game experience of other players. Considering the impact of anonymity on human behavior, if there's any chance of that impact to be negative, it will be. Players rarely do what designers intend, and the more freedom a player has, the rarer that becomes. If this is a single player game it doesn't matter. I'm sure Will Wright never intended players of The Sims to get the most enjoyment out of torturing the denizens of their game world. In an MMO it does matter, because player A directly impacts the subscription revenue from player B - interacting with others is why we play MMOs after all.
There are two other facts worth mentioning. The first is that by software industry standards, game developers are some of the least paid on average, and this makes it hard to obtain the top talent. The second fact is that most commercial software projects (even projects on very well-known applications such as accounts receivable programs) are failures, for a variety of reasons. Heck, most businesses fail in their first year, so this isn't even limited to the software industry.
Contrary to the position put forward by the article, in my experience most MMO developers enjoy playing MMOs. You don't take less pay to work on a game, unless you are really into games. You don't work countless hours of unpaid overtime, unless you are passionate about making a great MMO. So it's not a matter of going into a meeting and saying "oh, let's remember to ask if this is fun" Quite frankly, that's pretty insulting.
I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses. Yet an MMO world seeks to provide fun for all them, in a manner where nobody's fun detracts from anyone else's. Niche MMOs attempt to address this issue by deliberately and unabashedly limiting the scope, and say: we are only catering to X kind of gamer, who enjoys Y kind of fun. This is an admission that certain kinds of fun are mutually exclusive, which is why we will never see a mainstream hardcore PvP MMO. And at the end of the day, MMOs are a business. Gaming is not a human right, players are not "owed" anything by the gaming industry as a whole. There is no consumer entitlement to great products
If you buy a $60 single player title, you would reasonably expect to get a month's worth of enjoyment out of it. But with the same $60 spent on an MMO box (with a free first month), players feel that if they don't get at least a year's enjoyment it was a complete waste of time. So I also think MMOs are held to a higher standard. Why? Because there is something uniquely compelling about living in a virtual universe, with virtual friends and virtual things, and remaking yourself into whatever you want to be inside that universe. Everyone can fulfill the American Dream, just in pixilated format.
So if there is such a burning commercial demand for an MMO wherein a player can completely immerse himself in a believable and spectacular game world, and such an MMO does not exist, one has to wonder why. Is it because supply and demand stopped working? I don't think so. I think the only obvious conclusion is simply that MMOs are extremely difficult to get right.
Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market. To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.
MYtwo cents worth.
I well remember E&B. I still have the original box up on my game shelf. Good game, and great community. Its too bad that EA(as usual) didn't have a clue about what a gem they had. All too typical of their usual short sighted corporate mentality.