What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players
The football analogy is not good. If the spectators voted on the outcome of a match, it would be good, but they don't. We are armchair customers and what the armchair says, goes.
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.
I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.
Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh. Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here> We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players
The football analogy is not good. If the spectators voted on the outcome of a match, it would be good, but they don't. We are armchair customers and what the armchair says, goes.
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.
I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.
Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.
Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
Why do you think that is?
Human nature for one. People in positions of power do not like to admit mistakes. The people under them do not wish to risk their jobs(its mainly a pay check to most of those in the trenches). By the time the train starts to derail, its long past the time to change direction. The code base is HUGE by that time, and horribly complex. Some of the original people are gone, and with them went their experience. Damn few professional programers are any good at documenting their work. Which makes it a waking nightmare to deal with their code contributions. By this time the investors are already in a state of panic, and are not interested in throwing good money after bad, in a gamble on the new direction. This theme has played out in game after game.
What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players
The football analogy is not good. If the spectators voted on the outcome of a match, it would be good, but they don't. We are armchair customers and what the armchair says, goes.
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.
This is what I consider a player entitlement mentality. In my opinion, it's not what the customer says that goes. That would be neither practicable nor good business sense. It's what the company which is creating the product says, that goes. They are the professionals after all. You would not want to see the horrible beast of an MMO designed and developed by a committee of players.
To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!
The customer/player of an MMO can choose to purchase the product, or not purchase the product. So I think arm-chair quarterbacking is a very appropriate analogy, because just a skim of these boards shows that many players seem to "have all the answers," which is very convenient when they are not the ones funding and developing an MMO Especially on MMOs they neither play, nor have any intent of playing.
Again, the rules of supply and demand are not broken in the realm of MMOs. If customers want something enough (and are willing to pay for it), and it is possible, the marketplace will produce it.
Originally posted by Quale
I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.
Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.
Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
Why do you think that is?
Oh, I'm sure if a project is doomed to fail the developers are the first to know, not the last. It's the same reason horrible movies get made, or horrible cars, or horrible anything.
Here's the problem. Back in 1994 you could make a triple-A game title with a $500,000 and a small team of maybe 10 core developers. The Lead Designer had the vision, and it was easy to communicate to the team and keep an eye on every detail. Projects of such scale don't need a serious project management layer. I suspect this more or less describes Ultima Online (I could be wrong).
These days you need tens of millions of dollars, team sizes numbering in the hundreds, and years and years. Part of this is player expectation, and part is just the evolving technology. Technology has become so specialized you need lots of different experts for different areas of the game. Your engine coders, network coders, render coders, GUI coders, DBAs, technical artists... these are all highly specialized. The technology demands it.
And the fact is the ability to be a good Lead Designer and the ability to be a good Executive Producer have no necessary correlation. In cases where the roles are split, you end up with a polished uninspired mess. In the cases where the roles are not split, you end up with an under-polished "great idea" that never hits a release date and finally ships missing half its features. You need project management to coordinate all those different specialized jobs. But project managers have authority, and are generally not designers.
What trial-and-error has yielded is that applying processes from Software Engineering to what is ultimately a creative endeavor, makes the most business sense. While this works somewhat well for Microsoft Office (or insert random business application) where success is measured by functionality and feature sets, it doesn't quite work out well for MMOs where success is measured in how much fun the players are having. WoW is a success not because Blizzard is packed with super-designers, it's a success because Blizzard had a decade of experience shipping great games. I believe if they had made Shadowbane or Darkfall instead of WoW, it would be just as successful. Most MMO companies don't have this sort of experience, so their internal organization structure is non-optimal, their processes are unrefined, and their expectations are unrealistic. So no matter how great the Lead Designer's vision is (normally it isn't even his vision originally), it's just not going to happen when you throw hundreds of people at it, with varying degrees of experience (as I said it's hard to find talent), impatient investors, and untested technology.
The MMOs that we all want to play will come when the technology catches up in the form of well documented scripting languages where small teams can get back to making games, and some advancements in IK and procedural texture generation. As it stands now the bulk of an MMO development team is coders, artists, QA, followed by producers, associate producers and various managers, followed by designers. You make great business software like that, not great games, unless you are a company like Blizzard which is extremely efficient and has worked all the kinks out of their workflow pipelines (generally project managers are a poor substitute for good pipelines). Unfortunately, what we have now is what we're going to get until MMOs can get made entirely in high-level languages.
Occasionally you have a bright gem like EVE, which was done by a small core team. Note the whole thing was originally written in stackless python which is a high level language. But the game has suffered for it, it has huge limitations (where's my flying avatar?) which relegate it to a very successful niche game.
As a customer you have two options: play the games that are out there, or don't, and wait for the revolution.
To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!
My posts are about fundamentals, and fundamentals is where it's at to a very large degree. (Hence the wheel invention analogies etc)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't debate that there is a number of basic things that any car is expected to be able to do, regardless of what differences there could be on a more detailed level.
There is not a car manufacturer in the universe that would consider going into business with cars that won't even run properly. Yet, that's exactly what mmorpg developers do over and over again.
We're not discussing the same thing.
We're not asking for flying cars. We're asking why so many game developers have to invent the combustion engine (and failing) every time they wanna make a game.
To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!
My posts are about fundamentals, and fundamentals is where it's at to a very large degree. (Hence the wheel invention analogies etc)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't debate that there is a number of basic things that any car is expected to be able to do, regardless of what differences there could be on a more detailed level.
There is not a car manufacturer in the universe that would consider going into business with cars that won't even run properly. Yet, that's exactly what mmorpg developers do over and over again.
We're not discussing the same thing.
We're not asking for flying cars. We're asking why so many game developers have to invent the combustion engine (and failing) every time they wanna make a game.
We must be talking about different things, because I'm not sure you appreciate what goes into making a triple-A MMO. Although I sincerely hope you are reading my posts and not just skimming them for argue points. So let's take a step back.
What do you consider the "fundamentals" of MMO development to be?
Overall, the article was 'okay'. Seemed like the article went into a 'preaching to the converted' mode for a bit, but not a bad write-up on whole.
SWG is an easy target. It's also been a valid target since the CU and NGE. I was once a big fan of SWG. I still just can't see why Sony didn't do something to roll back the servers in some way, shape, or form. I think everyone wonders that. Anyway... any SOE/SWG bashing that takes place = good times, imho.
I know there are still SWG fans and players out there. I guess they like their game, and that's cool... I just miss the old system.
It is importnt to note that the majority of MMOs really do not do well in their first year however often pick up in their second. this is because of patching, fixing, and expansions. An example currently undergoing this change is Age of Conan.
It is importnt to note that the majority of MMOs really do not do well in their first year however often pick up in their second. this is because of patching, fixing, and expansions. An example currently undergoing this change is Age of Conan.
Good point. AoC is alot of fun up to level 20. Then it drops right off the map. The first time through the Island is really enjoyable. The graphics are really nice. But the rest of the game seems hollow. Its like they used most of their time on the first 20 levels for a tech demo for the investors, and then the rest of the game was *much* less well thought out and developed.
Comments
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.
Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
Why do you think that is?
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.
Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
Why do you think that is?
Human nature for one. People in positions of power do not like to admit mistakes. The people under them do not wish to risk their jobs(its mainly a pay check to most of those in the trenches). By the time the train starts to derail, its long past the time to change direction. The code base is HUGE by that time, and horribly complex. Some of the original people are gone, and with them went their experience. Damn few professional programers are any good at documenting their work. Which makes it a waking nightmare to deal with their code contributions. By this time the investors are already in a state of panic, and are not interested in throwing good money after bad, in a gamble on the new direction. This theme has played out in game after game.
This is what I consider a player entitlement mentality. In my opinion, it's not what the customer says that goes. That would be neither practicable nor good business sense. It's what the company which is creating the product says, that goes. They are the professionals after all. You would not want to see the horrible beast of an MMO designed and developed by a committee of players.
To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!
The customer/player of an MMO can choose to purchase the product, or not purchase the product. So I think arm-chair quarterbacking is a very appropriate analogy, because just a skim of these boards shows that many players seem to "have all the answers," which is very convenient when they are not the ones funding and developing an MMO
Especially on MMOs they neither play, nor have any intent of playing.
Again, the rules of supply and demand are not broken in the realm of MMOs. If customers want something enough (and are willing to pay for it), and it is possible, the marketplace will produce it.
Oh, I'm sure if a project is doomed to fail the developers are the first to know, not the last. It's the same reason horrible movies get made, or horrible cars, or horrible anything.
Here's the problem. Back in 1994 you could make a triple-A game title with a $500,000 and a small team of maybe 10 core developers. The Lead Designer had the vision, and it was easy to communicate to the team and keep an eye on every detail. Projects of such scale don't need a serious project management layer. I suspect this more or less describes Ultima Online (I could be wrong).
These days you need tens of millions of dollars, team sizes numbering in the hundreds, and years and years. Part of this is player expectation, and part is just the evolving technology. Technology has become so specialized you need lots of different experts for different areas of the game. Your engine coders, network coders, render coders, GUI coders, DBAs, technical artists... these are all highly specialized. The technology demands it.
And the fact is the ability to be a good Lead Designer and the ability to be a good Executive Producer have no necessary correlation. In cases where the roles are split, you end up with a polished uninspired mess. In the cases where the roles are not split, you end up with an under-polished "great idea" that never hits a release date and finally ships missing half its features. You need project management to coordinate all those different specialized jobs. But project managers have authority, and are generally not designers.
What trial-and-error has yielded is that applying processes from Software Engineering to what is ultimately a creative endeavor, makes the most business sense. While this works somewhat well for Microsoft Office (or insert random business application) where success is measured by functionality and feature sets, it doesn't quite work out well for MMOs where success is measured in how much fun the players are having. WoW is a success not because Blizzard is packed with super-designers, it's a success because Blizzard had a decade of experience shipping great games. I believe if they had made Shadowbane or Darkfall instead of WoW, it would be just as successful. Most MMO companies don't have this sort of experience, so their internal organization structure is non-optimal, their processes are unrefined, and their expectations are unrealistic. So no matter how great the Lead Designer's vision is (normally it isn't even his vision originally), it's just not going to happen when you throw hundreds of people at it, with varying degrees of experience (as I said it's hard to find talent), impatient investors, and untested technology.
The MMOs that we all want to play will come when the technology catches up in the form of well documented scripting languages where small teams can get back to making games, and some advancements in IK and procedural texture generation. As it stands now the bulk of an MMO development team is coders, artists, QA, followed by producers, associate producers and various managers, followed by designers. You make great business software like that, not great games, unless you are a company like Blizzard which is extremely efficient and has worked all the kinks out of their workflow pipelines (generally project managers are a poor substitute for good pipelines). Unfortunately, what we have now is what we're going to get until MMOs can get made entirely in high-level languages.
Occasionally you have a bright gem like EVE, which was done by a small core team. Note the whole thing was originally written in stackless python which is a high level language. But the game has suffered for it, it has huge limitations (where's my flying avatar?) which relegate it to a very successful niche game.
As a customer you have two options: play the games that are out there, or don't, and wait for the revolution.
My posts are about fundamentals, and fundamentals is where it's at to a very large degree. (Hence the wheel invention analogies etc)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't debate that there is a number of basic things that any car is expected to be able to do, regardless of what differences there could be on a more detailed level.
There is not a car manufacturer in the universe that would consider going into business with cars that won't even run properly. Yet, that's exactly what mmorpg developers do over and over again.
We're not discussing the same thing.
We're not asking for flying cars. We're asking why so many game developers have to invent the combustion engine (and failing) every time they wanna make a game.
My posts are about fundamentals, and fundamentals is where it's at to a very large degree. (Hence the wheel invention analogies etc)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't debate that there is a number of basic things that any car is expected to be able to do, regardless of what differences there could be on a more detailed level.
There is not a car manufacturer in the universe that would consider going into business with cars that won't even run properly. Yet, that's exactly what mmorpg developers do over and over again.
We're not discussing the same thing.
We're not asking for flying cars. We're asking why so many game developers have to invent the combustion engine (and failing) every time they wanna make a game.
We must be talking about different things, because I'm not sure you appreciate what goes into making a triple-A MMO. Although I sincerely hope you are reading my posts and not just skimming them for argue points.
So let's take a step back.
What do you consider the "fundamentals" of MMO development to be?
Overall, the article was 'okay'. Seemed like the article went into a 'preaching to the converted' mode for a bit, but not a bad write-up on whole.
SWG is an easy target. It's also been a valid target since the CU and NGE. I was once a big fan of SWG. I still just can't see why Sony didn't do something to roll back the servers in some way, shape, or form. I think everyone wonders that. Anyway... any SOE/SWG bashing that takes place = good times, imho.
I know there are still SWG fans and players out there. I guess they like their game, and that's cool... I just miss the old system.
It is importnt to note that the majority of MMOs really do not do well in their first year however often pick up in their second. this is because of patching, fixing, and expansions. An example currently undergoing this change is Age of Conan.
Good point. AoC is alot of fun up to level 20. Then it drops right off the map. The first time through the Island is really enjoyable. The graphics are really nice. But the rest of the game seems hollow. Its like they used most of their time on the first 20 levels for a tech demo for the investors, and then the rest of the game was *much* less well thought out and developed.