Because for all we complain, everyone still pre-orders and subscribes and deals with it. Consumers are still too thick to realize that unless the publishers see a reason to put out a polished game and stall their profits, they won't.
As I'm sure has been said, the majority of the time it is mainly the fault of the people counting the beans and the people providing the beans, whether they be the same entity or not. And as for your idea, while it is a good one, if we can't even get the money people to pay for an appropriate amount of development time and resources then we're never going to be able to get them to agree to your idea. The problem is that people that are investing the money most times have no knowledge of what they are putting money into. They see someone like Blizzard's financial reports and expect that, and have no clue what is actually going on. And for some reason, either they are remaining willfully ignorant of the reality of MMOG development or the right people with the knowledge aren't taking the time or effort to really explain to the investors what it is exactly they are getting into...
------------------------- "Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
This is exactly how I feel after playing the game for 2 hours. I simply cannot play it. My computer is medium to high end and should run this out dated software fine, yet it tends to run worse than age of conan.
The gameplay is bland. Shoot mob 20 mobs, turn in quest. Shoot 10 more turn in quest. Oh what's this? You have to do it now in 15 minutes. No challenge here. Only made it to level 4 but couldn't really stand the game past that. I have played everything from NexusTK (first mmo ever) to Ultima (first commercial mmo ever) to Everquest to Planetside (first commercial FPS mmo) to WoW to Age of conan to Warhammer to everything else. This game simply does not cut it. Maybe it's not for me, but if it's not for me it's not for a lot of gamers too and that's sad. Fallen earth had a ton of good going for it, but the lack of polish, bugs and repetitive gameplay will not keep me coming back.
Best guess...investors and people wanting to see their share of the money sooner rather than later. Yeah, a little more time in the oven would do all of these games good, but with the idea that they can just patch fixes in later seems to give rise to the idea of "release now, fix later". It's a sad state of affairs, but the mentality won't change until enough of these games fail. Just my two...
This was Age of Conan's problem, as well as Warhammer (just to mention 2 of them). The amount of investors that want quick money is common and until investors realise an MMO is the long haul and not the instant return a normal game is.
Small company that has run out of time most of the time. Icarus is small and not a Blizz or NCSoft. Sometimes they do not have the luxury of unlimited resources and time. MMOs are a beast and if it not for the small companies trying then we would end up with the same crap over and over. Small guys are what drives innovation. Not saying FE is innovative but to a great extent EVE is and CCP had about 5000 subs after the first couple months. Now look at it so although it sucks to go through it is the nature of the beast as well. People should be slightly more forgiving of the small guys as long as they work hard and communicate as to what is going on.
I would have thought that people who come to this forum are serious about MMOs, after all this is MMORPG.com
Is it so new for MMOs to be released unfinished? No it is not, for what ever reason it happens and will continue to happen.
There are numerous posts above to the reasons and it affects all producers, rich, poor, large and small and i will not go into them here.
Do you for one instant think that the people who release these games like to do it this way?
If you are indeed serious about MMOs then you will accept this as many 1000s have already. It is up to you to buy a game early, hence supporting the game and the genre, avoid for the first 6 months till the game runs smooth......,
Or come here and whine and bitch about it, which helps no one and actualy makes you look like a noob, not only in MMOs but in gaming in general, go back to console games where you can get what you want and leave us in peace on these forums, thanks.
OK, I think I know what's happening here. Having been a rabid beta tester of FE since late March, I've seen the game go from nearly unplayable to really smooth to today's fiasco. And I think I have at least a theory on what's up. First, let's look at the general viewpoint of pundits and media. Sci-Fi doesn't sell. We've seen this said about almost every TV sci-fi series from Star Trek to Firefly and beyond. For some reason, corporate execs LOATHE sci-fi. Sci-Fi games are a niche market. Again, the gaming public has heard this for years, and is innundated with fantasy games until our eyes are bleeding. Open-ended games don't sell. The WoW model tells us that directed experiences are what the public wants And for the last 5 years or so, we've been deluged with directed fantasy games. So many that the term "WoW-clone" has been applied to just about everything. So, along comes a little Indie company with an idea for a more open-ended sci-fi game, with the twist of adding a little bit of almost-FPS shooter style combat into the mix. (Please note that I'm refraining from the use of the term "sandbox" here. This is NOT Ultima Online or EQ1.) Man, that's gonna be a small niche market for sure. They round up a few investors and get to work. They've done their research. They have a general idea of the size player-base they'll be seeing at launch. Their projections say a single "server" (yes, I know, they're clusters...but One World, like EVE, is what I mean) will be fine. They're not a deep-pockets corporation. They don't have multi-billionaire backers. They're not traded on the NYSE. They've got some cost-savings decisions to make. They can't afford, say, an industry-standard real-time database system costing a million bucks. They've gotta go with something more traditional and less expensive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in the long run...AND for us), they've totally underestimated the thirst of the gaming public (that'd be us) for something that's NOT strictly of the WoW model. And, come launch, they're totally swamped. Perhaps an order of magnitude more than anticipated. The pundits and media and research were WRONG. The gaming public is DYING for something different, and is flocking to FE as the first in a LONG time to try a newish system in a newish setting with some open-ended elements. Not revolutionary, no. But such a refreshing change from EVERYTHING that's come out in the last 5+ years that we just have to try it. Factor in all those (Smedley says small in number...but we know how wrong he is) SWG refugees and we're seeing the result. There was no way they could have known what this launch would bring. So, what's next. This week will see a number of patches, I'm sure. There will be more downtime. The game itself is NOT in bad shape. This isn't a case of bugged missions, no content or vast imbalance and open exploits. This is a TECHNICAL failure quite different from most bad launches. This is a failure in SCALE-UP. This one is different even in its launch problems. I speak from some experience. I KNOW the content for 3 sectors is there and functions properly. I'm already into Sector 2 and nowhere have I experienced any problems with the actual content. In fact, until the 22nd, the game ran more smoothly than ever. But the shear numbers of people flocking to the game has overwhelmed the technology. This, fortunately, is fixable. Whether or not they have the cash on hand to FIX it (e.g., a couple of more "servers", i.e., shards-worlds-whatever) is another story. But I think they'll get through this and come out the other side with a great game for us to enjoy. I know all the GAME pieces are in place. I just hope they get the technology straightened out quickly.
Absolutely spot on. It so quite refreshing to read such a sober, realistic, yet positive assessment - that is most probably correct, too.
Thank you
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
While code increases arithmetically, bugs increase exponentially.
This is the fundamental cause-->effect relationship behind buggy releases. Get used to it as the amount of code in any program is pretty much following Moore's law.
I played sat & sun and the only bad issue I had was with the missions, I still suffer hardly any lag, maybe I'm just lucky when I play (total of 4 hrs sat and about 9 hrs sun)
If laggy, buggy releases bother you; 1/ dont buy any mmo at release OR 2/ don't play mmo's
WoW on release was by far the laggiest game I've ever played and they had more cash than many games will have for development and release for quite some time to come. This is the nature of these games.
As for the 3 months free play, the last sizable survey (was linked here a week or so ago) I saw had the average play time of an mmo for players that deemed the game good, was.... 90-100 days so they just threw all thier sub money out the door.
Besides which I've enjoyed the FE release the community comes together in a wave of 'give me my fkin quest!'
----- The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
while it's understandable, as to why a lot of mmos have to launch early, very few ever get enough time to work out most problems, let alone the content the box says is included. i personally would be happy, if they changed the standard one month free, to two months included in the price. at the very least, it'd be a nice "we know launches tend to suck, and there may be extended downtime, as unforseen problems arise, so here's hoping next month goes well". it sucks too many games launch unready, and that a lot of the times, it's something no one thought of being a problem. SWG, the damn activation servers crapped out, when something like 200k to 300k tried to login for the first time. i can't even remember if i was able to create my account on day two or not. nothing like bringing a game home, and not being able to sign in to set up your account.
Well, I spent my weekend in the lowest parts of S1, trying to get my crafting maxed and finding any SP quests. So I was in the worst laggy areas for launch.
Yup it was laggy. Yup it took 10 mins+ for a quest to update and I lost count on the times I had to log back in again but I must admit the game is a good game.
I am a sucker for playing MMO's at launch and am used to bumpy launches. This one is no different.
If your going to play MMO's at launch then you need to learn patience. It comes with the territory. Otherwise wait for a few months then buy an MMO when the game settles down.
MMO's at Launch are like a raging fire.
Some people put their hand in the fire and say 'ouch'. They then see another MMO launch and put their hand in and say 'Ouch'.
They then moan that fires should not be so hot, rather than stop sticking their hand in the fire. Me! I just put on fire protective gloves
Lesson : MMO launches ARE going to burn. If you don't like fire, stop sticking your bloody hand in it!
MMO's are now over a decade old and video games themselves are over 30 years old!
If you think about it that is rather young when you compare it to other entertainment industries. I find that FE actually had one of the better launches compared to other I have been in. However why are they so bad?
First off all you can not find every bug in the game and most might only be found when you have loads of people getting into the game. Some game companies, like Fallen Earth, do not have the money to run a open beta program for a long period of time.
I also lolled at the car example. I mean rocket drop out of the sky because of a minor misunderstanding (English team used different measurement standard then the US team I believe) so this stuff happens even outside of the games and MMO industry. How often do products (Especially food and kids toys) not get recalled because they sometimes appeared to be wrong after all or that stuff do not work as they though they should (exploding phones). It happens in every industry, however some less then other because there are more rules (duo to safety like with cars and airplanes).
We might all massively not buy games at release when there bad. I tell you what that will do. It will destroy the MMO industry. No investor want to invest in it anymore because they get no return without investing a lot of money in testing the product alone (you know how long it would take to properly test an MMO? Well not sure myself, but very long).
second issue seems to be the releasing of incomplete products. This you could blame the Dev's for. Often they speak out of term because they love what they produce saying things that might not be reachable (Fable 1). Fallen Earth however was never to supposed to start huge and they always said there was a lot of room to expend the game. They even mentioned expending into Las Vegas at one point.
The game is complete, will get bigger and has a huge amount of minor bugs and server issues (shamefully some that where mention in testing). The only way they could have fixed this was by doing more testing (open beta) and this is simply not possible for a company with less money. So that is the risk of buying a game early on. Should we accept that? I do believe we should from Indy companies as long as they make there intentions known and as far nothing has surprised me or that I feel they lied to me.
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month.
We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like.
Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. Samuel Adams
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month. We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like. Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
There main investor is Icarus LLC. Fallen Earth LLC came out of this company for the only reason to produce Fallen Earth and showcase the tools created by Icarus (the tools FE is made from). This also makes Icarus the biggest (Maybe even only dunno) investor, so it is as importand for Icarus to have a good product as it is for FE.
In most other cases the investors only care if they make a profit or not and do not really care for the product. Off course it needs to be good, but if they can make a good profit now, why keep working on the game?
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month. We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like. Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. Samuel Adams
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month. We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like. Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
Actually, it can. You're paying for the content, not who develops it, otherwise you wouldn't pay full price for say....Baldur's Gate back when it first came out. Or....Hellgate:London. Following your logic, if it's not a big, well-known firm, then they have no business pricing their games the same as other well-known companies.
Its cause companies are crap, most companies treat employees not very well or bad, the same they use to treat the players, as if they didnt count. Then employes dont make thinks as fast as they could and that means more money to company. Or maybe cause they were stupid enough to make a bad planning for the time would take to make a mmo.
Blade with whom i have lived, blade with whom I now die. Serve right and justice one last time. Seek one last heart of evil. Still one last life of pain. Cut well old friend. Then farewell!
OK, I think I know what's happening here. Having been a rabid beta tester of FE since late March, I've seen the game go from nearly unplayable to really smooth to today's fiasco. And I think I have at least a theory on what's up. First, let's look at the general viewpoint of pundits and media. Sci-Fi doesn't sell. We've seen this said about almost every TV sci-fi series from Star Trek to Firefly and beyond. For some reason, corporate execs LOATHE sci-fi. Sci-Fi games are a niche market. Again, the gaming public has heard this for years, and is innundated with fantasy games until our eyes are bleeding. Open-ended games don't sell. The WoW model tells us that directed experiences are what the public wants And for the last 5 years or so, we've been deluged with directed fantasy games. So many that the term "WoW-clone" has been applied to just about everything. So, along comes a little Indie company with an idea for a more open-ended sci-fi game, with the twist of adding a little bit of almost-FPS shooter style combat into the mix. (Please note that I'm refraining from the use of the term "sandbox" here. This is NOT Ultima Online or EQ1.) Man, that's gonna be a small niche market for sure. They round up a few investors and get to work. They've done their research. They have a general idea of the size player-base they'll be seeing at launch. Their projections say a single "server" (yes, I know, they're clusters...but One World, like EVE, is what I mean) will be fine. They're not a deep-pockets corporation. They don't have multi-billionaire backers. They're not traded on the NYSE. They've got some cost-savings decisions to make. They can't afford, say, an industry-standard real-time database system costing a million bucks. They've gotta go with something more traditional and less expensive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in the long run...AND for us), they've totally underestimated the thirst of the gaming public (that'd be us) for something that's NOT strictly of the WoW model. And, come launch, they're totally swamped. Perhaps an order of magnitude more than anticipated. The pundits and media and research were WRONG. The gaming public is DYING for something different, and is flocking to FE as the first in a LONG time to try a newish system in a newish setting with some open-ended elements. Not revolutionary, no. But such a refreshing change from EVERYTHING that's come out in the last 5+ years that we just have to try it. Factor in all those (Smedley says small in number...but we know how wrong he is) SWG refugees and we're seeing the result. There was no way they could have known what this launch would bring. So, what's next. This week will see a number of patches, I'm sure. There will be more downtime. The game itself is NOT in bad shape. This isn't a case of bugged missions, no content or vast imbalance and open exploits. This is a TECHNICAL failure quite different from most bad launches. This is a failure in SCALE-UP. This one is different even in its launch problems. I speak from some experience. I KNOW the content for 3 sectors is there and functions properly. I'm already into Sector 2 and nowhere have I experienced any problems with the actual content. In fact, until the 22nd, the game ran more smoothly than ever. But the shear numbers of people flocking to the game has overwhelmed the technology. This, fortunately, is fixable. Whether or not they have the cash on hand to FIX it (e.g., a couple of more "servers", i.e., shards-worlds-whatever) is another story. But I think they'll get through this and come out the other side with a great game for us to enjoy. I know all the GAME pieces are in place. I just hope they get the technology straightened out quickly.
Great post. My question now is, What will happen when the boxed copies hit store shelves on Friday and another 30K or so people subscribe and log in to the single server..? lol
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month. We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like. Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
Actually, it can. You're paying for the content, not who develops it, otherwise you wouldn't pay full price for say....Baldur's Gate back when it first came out. Or....Hellgate:London. Following your logic, if it's not a big, well-known firm, then they have no business pricing their games the same as other well-known companies.
Personally, you're full of crap.
Lmao Im the one full of crap? You must be a verry shallow troll to think that..
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. Samuel Adams
Fallen Earth, another game with boundless potential but a terrible launch. This begs the question, why do MMO's launch with so many bugs/lagging/issues/unfinished content/zero polish? As I write this, I await yet another "patch" and of course, an unknown amount of downtime. Over the years, I've been around for a few MMO launchings and I have yet to be part of a "smooth launch". What gives? MMO's are now over a decade old and video games themselves are over 30 years old! Alpha Testing, Beta Testing, population load tests, 4-5-6 years of development and MILLIONS of dollars spent yet.... even here in 2009... games just launch like watermelons dropped into oncoming traffic. My question to you good people here at MMORPG is... Why? Can you tell me why companies have not improved this proccess? Seems the benefits of waiting another 3 months for a fnished product would far outweigh a messy launch. How about a free launch? Launch the game for free... playable for 3 months. Like a full-beta where nobody pays anything. Then, whnen all the bugs are worked out (especially bugs caused by population stress on servers) you can change over to a P2P format. Bad idea? Oh well, I'm off to do some laundry while I wait for Fallen Earth to come online. 1/4 of the way through the first month, $50 and only about 6 hours of playtime.... ::sigh::
This is one of those hot button topics because you are going to have people who make comments like "you can't expect perfection" so on and so forth but the question is when is a game unfinished and pushed onto the public in comparison to a game released with some bugs. There are people who swear by AOC and that the launch really wasnt that bad in my opinion as far as that game goes it was released unfinished still isn't finished and no one should be paying to play it. Now for those who were around for the launch of WOW that was a situation where the game was finished and just had bugs that needed to be worked out but missing advertised features, systems that don't work and things of that nature is unfinished product that should not be pushed out onto the public but is more and more becoming common because far too many of us are fanbois willing to pay for potential as opposed to actual product. But again this problem will persist as long as companies like AV,FC,and whoever made Fallen Earth can continue to get away with it and by gauging the responses I usually see to crap games like those it isn't going to stop for quite some time.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Fallen Earth, another game with boundless potential but a terrible launch. This begs the question, why do MMO's launch with so many bugs/lagging/issues/unfinished content/zero polish? As I write this, I await yet another "patch" and of course, an unknown amount of downtime. Over the years, I've been around for a few MMO launchings and I have yet to be part of a "smooth launch". What gives? MMO's are now over a decade old and video games themselves are over 30 years old! Alpha Testing, Beta Testing, population load tests, 4-5-6 years of development and MILLIONS of dollars spent yet.... even here in 2009... games just launch like watermelons dropped into oncoming traffic. My question to you good people here at MMORPG is... Why? Can you tell me why companies have not improved this proccess? Seems the benefits of waiting another 3 months for a fnished product would far outweigh a messy launch. How about a free launch? Launch the game for free... playable for 3 months. Like a full-beta where nobody pays anything. Then, whnen all the bugs are worked out (especially bugs caused by population stress on servers) you can change over to a P2P format. Bad idea? Oh well, I'm off to do some laundry while I wait for Fallen Earth to come online. 1/4 of the way through the first month, $50 and only about 6 hours of playtime.... ::sigh::
This is one of those hot button topics because you are going to have people who make comments like "you can't expect perfection" so on and so forth but the question is when is a game unfinished and pushed onto the public in comparison to a game released with some bugs. There are people who swear by AOC and that the launch really wasnt that bad in my opinion as far as that game goes it was released unfinished still isn't finished and no one should be paying to play it. Now for those who were around for the launch of WOW that was a situation where the game was finished and just had bugs that needed to be worked out but missing advertised features, systems that don't work and things of that nature is unfinished product that should not be pushed out onto the public but is more and more becoming common because far too many of us are fanbois willing to pay for potential as opposed to actual product. But again this problem will persist as long as companies like AV,FC,and whoever made Fallen Earth can continue to get away with it and by gauging the responses I usually see to crap games like those it isn't going to stop for quite some time.
Dude....are you completely daft? I love how history changes once your past it. WoW was complete yet had some missing features that were advertised.....how is that complete again? And let me slip this tidbit past you here (Direct quote from IGN's review of WoW's launch):
Somehow, Blizzard underestimated its own popularity by a massive margin, and after a rush first-week sales, there was a crush of players on too few servers. The results were angry players who often waited in 40-minute queues in order to log on, badly overcrowded zones where most of the indigenous wildlife had been wiped out, and nasty lag that caused everything from stuttering to a 10-minute wait in order to do anything with your inventory.
Hm....that sounds eerily familiar; oh, except for the queue part....or here's another one from Gamespot:
* Some stability issues immediately following launch
* Player-versus-player elements not complete.
So....PvP is in game, but not fully, because they haven't implemented Honor points or the battlegrounds yet, which will presumably come in a later patch. (Which it did) Now I ask again how is that complete? Fallen Earth, as it stands right now, is complete, with all the features in the game. I believe you wanted to say that 'Fallen Earth was a situation where the game was launched complete but they had some bugs to work out.'
Your logic is full of holes and your mouth is full of crap. While I don't mind people comparing WoW and saying it's a better game or what have you, I do mind when you try to pass off fiction as fact. I WAS there for WoW's launch and I remember how bad it was for around 2 weeks after that. FE solved their problems within a day for the most part.
No launch will ever come without problems, lag, issues. Ever. No game on the planet. There are just too many variables involved to ensure 100 percent perfection. If you can't handle those issues, i would suggest to never, ever play an mmo within the first month of launch.
Not true, Guildwars did just that. And... Ok, no one else have pulled it off yet but it is possible, just extremly hard. You need someone like Arenanets Jeff Strain for a perfect launch (Diablo, Warcraft 3, have quited now BTW).
Still, the OP have a point. MMO companies releasing the game a year too early nowadays. It isn't just some issues like lag, odd errors and and login problems.
Take war. They cut out for of the 6 starting citys and several classes just a month before launch. And they have never patch in those citys as promised. They also cut all cool small things like the neat idea that the character models should change whne you level. And they totaly cut out the endgame too. One more year in development and the game would have been a very different game.
Or AoC. It had really bad performance at launch and had way to little content. If they would have waited another year they would have a lot more players today.
They all released way too early and and lost some or many players on it, Vanguard lost most of any game because of it. I do costs a lot of money to keep a game in development longer than you have to but games like Vanguard would have won that cash many times over.
I blame the beta tester fanbois. When I tried beta testing this heap of junk many months ago you could not post anything negative on the beta forum wihout getting flamed.
Pointing out bugs and flaws got you flamed, I kid you not. According to them everything was great, it was an awesome game.
Comments
Because for all we complain, everyone still pre-orders and subscribes and deals with it. Consumers are still too thick to realize that unless the publishers see a reason to put out a polished game and stall their profits, they won't.
As I'm sure has been said, the majority of the time it is mainly the fault of the people counting the beans and the people providing the beans, whether they be the same entity or not. And as for your idea, while it is a good one, if we can't even get the money people to pay for an appropriate amount of development time and resources then we're never going to be able to get them to agree to your idea. The problem is that people that are investing the money most times have no knowledge of what they are putting money into. They see someone like Blizzard's financial reports and expect that, and have no clue what is actually going on. And for some reason, either they are remaining willfully ignorant of the reality of MMOG development or the right people with the knowledge aren't taking the time or effort to really explain to the investors what it is exactly they are getting into...
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"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
Member Since March 2004
This is exactly how I feel after playing the game for 2 hours. I simply cannot play it. My computer is medium to high end and should run this out dated software fine, yet it tends to run worse than age of conan.
The gameplay is bland. Shoot mob 20 mobs, turn in quest. Shoot 10 more turn in quest. Oh what's this? You have to do it now in 15 minutes. No challenge here. Only made it to level 4 but couldn't really stand the game past that. I have played everything from NexusTK (first mmo ever) to Ultima (first commercial mmo ever) to Everquest to Planetside (first commercial FPS mmo) to WoW to Age of conan to Warhammer to everything else. This game simply does not cut it. Maybe it's not for me, but if it's not for me it's not for a lot of gamers too and that's sad. Fallen earth had a ton of good going for it, but the lack of polish, bugs and repetitive gameplay will not keep me coming back.
/end rant I'm not a troll morons
This was Age of Conan's problem, as well as Warhammer (just to mention 2 of them). The amount of investors that want quick money is common and until investors realise an MMO is the long haul and not the instant return a normal game is.
Totally agree
Whatever
I would have thought that people who come to this forum are serious about MMOs, after all this is MMORPG.com
Is it so new for MMOs to be released unfinished? No it is not, for what ever reason it happens and will continue to happen.
There are numerous posts above to the reasons and it affects all producers, rich, poor, large and small and i will not go into them here.
Do you for one instant think that the people who release these games like to do it this way?
If you are indeed serious about MMOs then you will accept this as many 1000s have already. It is up to you to buy a game early, hence supporting the game and the genre, avoid for the first 6 months till the game runs smooth......,
Or come here and whine and bitch about it, which helps no one and actualy makes you look like a noob, not only in MMOs but in gaming in general, go back to console games where you can get what you want and leave us in peace on these forums, thanks.
Absolutely spot on. It so quite refreshing to read such a sober, realistic, yet positive assessment - that is most probably correct, too.
Thank you
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
While code increases arithmetically, bugs increase exponentially.
This is the fundamental cause-->effect relationship behind buggy releases. Get used to it as the amount of code in any program is pretty much following Moore's law.
I played sat & sun and the only bad issue I had was with the missions, I still suffer hardly any lag, maybe I'm just lucky when I play (total of 4 hrs sat and about 9 hrs sun)
If laggy, buggy releases bother you; 1/ dont buy any mmo at release OR 2/ don't play mmo's
WoW on release was by far the laggiest game I've ever played and they had more cash than many games will have for development and release for quite some time to come. This is the nature of these games.
As for the 3 months free play, the last sizable survey (was linked here a week or so ago) I saw had the average play time of an mmo for players that deemed the game good, was.... 90-100 days so they just threw all thier sub money out the door.
Besides which I've enjoyed the FE release the community comes together in a wave of 'give me my fkin quest!'
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
while it's understandable, as to why a lot of mmos have to launch early, very few ever get enough time to work out most problems, let alone the content the box says is included. i personally would be happy, if they changed the standard one month free, to two months included in the price. at the very least, it'd be a nice "we know launches tend to suck, and there may be extended downtime, as unforseen problems arise, so here's hoping next month goes well". it sucks too many games launch unready, and that a lot of the times, it's something no one thought of being a problem. SWG, the damn activation servers crapped out, when something like 200k to 300k tried to login for the first time. i can't even remember if i was able to create my account on day two or not. nothing like bringing a game home, and not being able to sign in to set up your account.
Well, I spent my weekend in the lowest parts of S1, trying to get my crafting maxed and finding any SP quests. So I was in the worst laggy areas for launch.
Yup it was laggy. Yup it took 10 mins+ for a quest to update and I lost count on the times I had to log back in again but I must admit the game is a good game.
I am a sucker for playing MMO's at launch and am used to bumpy launches. This one is no different.
If your going to play MMO's at launch then you need to learn patience. It comes with the territory. Otherwise wait for a few months then buy an MMO when the game settles down.
MMO's at Launch are like a raging fire.
Some people put their hand in the fire and say 'ouch'. They then see another MMO launch and put their hand in and say 'Ouch'.
They then moan that fires should not be so hot, rather than stop sticking their hand in the fire. Me! I just put on fire protective gloves
Lesson : MMO launches ARE going to burn. If you don't like fire, stop sticking your bloody hand in it!
If you think about it that is rather young when you compare it to other entertainment industries. I find that FE actually had one of the better launches compared to other I have been in. However why are they so bad?
First off all you can not find every bug in the game and most might only be found when you have loads of people getting into the game. Some game companies, like Fallen Earth, do not have the money to run a open beta program for a long period of time.
I also lolled at the car example. I mean rocket drop out of the sky because of a minor misunderstanding (English team used different measurement standard then the US team I believe) so this stuff happens even outside of the games and MMO industry. How often do products (Especially food and kids toys) not get recalled because they sometimes appeared to be wrong after all or that stuff do not work as they though they should (exploding phones). It happens in every industry, however some less then other because there are more rules (duo to safety like with cars and airplanes).
We might all massively not buy games at release when there bad. I tell you what that will do. It will destroy the MMO industry. No investor want to invest in it anymore because they get no return without investing a lot of money in testing the product alone (you know how long it would take to properly test an MMO? Well not sure myself, but very long).
second issue seems to be the releasing of incomplete products. This you could blame the Dev's for. Often they speak out of term because they love what they produce saying things that might not be reachable (Fable 1). Fallen Earth however was never to supposed to start huge and they always said there was a lot of room to expend the game. They even mentioned expending into Las Vegas at one point.
The game is complete, will get bigger and has a huge amount of minor bugs and server issues (shamefully some that where mention in testing). The only way they could have fixed this was by doing more testing (open beta) and this is simply not possible for a company with less money. So that is the risk of buying a game early on. Should we accept that? I do believe we should from Indy companies as long as they make there intentions known and as far nothing has surprised me or that I feel they lied to me.
The real problem is games need to stop chargeing 50Bucks right outa the box, and you get a free month.
We need to switch over to a game is Free you pay the first month. There are lots of games id love to try "Like FE" but Im not gana pay 50 bucks for a game im not sure im gana like.
Hell leave it 50 but make it say 3 months game time. let us have some real game time and a few bug fixes in there.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
There main investor is Icarus LLC. Fallen Earth LLC came out of this company for the only reason to produce Fallen Earth and showcase the tools created by Icarus (the tools FE is made from). This also makes Icarus the biggest (Maybe even only dunno) investor, so it is as importand for Icarus to have a good product as it is for FE.
In most other cases the investors only care if they make a profit or not and do not really care for the product. Off course it needs to be good, but if they can make a good profit now, why keep working on the game?
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
Actually, it can. You're paying for the content, not who develops it, otherwise you wouldn't pay full price for say....Baldur's Gate back when it first came out. Or....Hellgate:London. Following your logic, if it's not a big, well-known firm, then they have no business pricing their games the same as other well-known companies.
Personally, you're full of crap.
I had the same question.
Its cause companies are crap, most companies treat employees not very well or bad, the same they use to treat the players, as if they didnt count. Then employes dont make thinks as fast as they could and that means more money to company.
Or maybe cause they were stupid enough to make a bad planning for the time would take to make a mmo.
Blade with whom i have lived, blade with whom I now die. Serve right and justice one last time. Seek one last heart of evil. Still one last life of pain. Cut well old friend. Then farewell!
Great post. My question now is, What will happen when the boxed copies hit store shelves on Friday and another 30K or so people subscribe and log in to the single server..? lol
Well investors wont front the money otherwise. So unless you want to have rampant pop-ups while you play for somthing that looks like a garage project you have to front the 50$ and pay the subscription. Initial money is in essance back pay and developement costs. FE's investors have been remarkably patient and giving.
Don't beleive me? Invest in caterpiller and wait 6 years before you MIGHT make some positive cash flow. Its possible the company will fold and you loose anything you invested. Most investors will blow thier tops. Hell if I sunk money into one of these I'd be chomping at the bit after all this time.
In a year when developement and trading are in the black then they can do a free week to try before you buy.
We are also in a recession making all of this even worse
Lmao I know all of that.(Been playing mmos Since UO launch) But a Indie Developer CANT charge the same ammount as a Well known One. Its all well and good that the Investors have taken the risk. But the game wont make it W/O players.
I have One friend who played it in Beta and dident like it. I am stuck waiting for a price Drop OR some Free play time. In that time the player base will Either Grow, Or like 99% of the games Shrink. Resulting in the Vanguard effect of everyone saying "Id play but there's No one on."
So NO the company cant charge the same ammount as say Soe or Blizzard. It just cant. And I hope the game pulls of a Eve and keeps growing till it reaches the point the developers Pull their heads outa their ass and drop the price. But i have a feeling that this wont happen.
Actually, it can. You're paying for the content, not who develops it, otherwise you wouldn't pay full price for say....Baldur's Gate back when it first came out. Or....Hellgate:London. Following your logic, if it's not a big, well-known firm, then they have no business pricing their games the same as other well-known companies.
Personally, you're full of crap.
Lmao Im the one full of crap? You must be a verry shallow troll to think that..
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams
No launch will ever come without problems, lag, issues. Ever. No game on the planet.
There are just too many variables involved to ensure 100 percent perfection.
If you can't handle those issues, i would suggest to never, ever play an mmo within the first month of launch.
This is one of those hot button topics because you are going to have people who make comments like "you can't expect perfection" so on and so forth but the question is when is a game unfinished and pushed onto the public in comparison to a game released with some bugs. There are people who swear by AOC and that the launch really wasnt that bad in my opinion as far as that game goes it was released unfinished still isn't finished and no one should be paying to play it. Now for those who were around for the launch of WOW that was a situation where the game was finished and just had bugs that needed to be worked out but missing advertised features, systems that don't work and things of that nature is unfinished product that should not be pushed out onto the public but is more and more becoming common because far too many of us are fanbois willing to pay for potential as opposed to actual product. But again this problem will persist as long as companies like AV,FC,and whoever made Fallen Earth can continue to get away with it and by gauging the responses I usually see to crap games like those it isn't going to stop for quite some time.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
This is one of those hot button topics because you are going to have people who make comments like "you can't expect perfection" so on and so forth but the question is when is a game unfinished and pushed onto the public in comparison to a game released with some bugs. There are people who swear by AOC and that the launch really wasnt that bad in my opinion as far as that game goes it was released unfinished still isn't finished and no one should be paying to play it. Now for those who were around for the launch of WOW that was a situation where the game was finished and just had bugs that needed to be worked out but missing advertised features, systems that don't work and things of that nature is unfinished product that should not be pushed out onto the public but is more and more becoming common because far too many of us are fanbois willing to pay for potential as opposed to actual product. But again this problem will persist as long as companies like AV,FC,and whoever made Fallen Earth can continue to get away with it and by gauging the responses I usually see to crap games like those it isn't going to stop for quite some time.
Dude....are you completely daft? I love how history changes once your past it. WoW was complete yet had some missing features that were advertised.....how is that complete again? And let me slip this tidbit past you here (Direct quote from IGN's review of WoW's launch):
Somehow, Blizzard underestimated its own popularity by a massive margin, and after a rush first-week sales, there was a crush of players on too few servers. The results were angry players who often waited in 40-minute queues in order to log on, badly overcrowded zones where most of the indigenous wildlife had been wiped out, and nasty lag that caused everything from stuttering to a 10-minute wait in order to do anything with your inventory.
Hm....that sounds eerily familiar; oh, except for the queue part....or here's another one from Gamespot:
* Some stability issues immediately following launch
* Player-versus-player elements not complete.
So....PvP is in game, but not fully, because they haven't implemented Honor points or the battlegrounds yet, which will presumably come in a later patch. (Which it did) Now I ask again how is that complete? Fallen Earth, as it stands right now, is complete, with all the features in the game. I believe you wanted to say that 'Fallen Earth was a situation where the game was launched complete but they had some bugs to work out.'
Your logic is full of holes and your mouth is full of crap. While I don't mind people comparing WoW and saying it's a better game or what have you, I do mind when you try to pass off fiction as fact. I WAS there for WoW's launch and I remember how bad it was for around 2 weeks after that. FE solved their problems within a day for the most part.
Not true, Guildwars did just that. And... Ok, no one else have pulled it off yet but it is possible, just extremly hard. You need someone like Arenanets Jeff Strain for a perfect launch (Diablo, Warcraft 3, have quited now BTW).
Still, the OP have a point. MMO companies releasing the game a year too early nowadays. It isn't just some issues like lag, odd errors and and login problems.
Take war. They cut out for of the 6 starting citys and several classes just a month before launch. And they have never patch in those citys as promised. They also cut all cool small things like the neat idea that the character models should change whne you level. And they totaly cut out the endgame too. One more year in development and the game would have been a very different game.
Or AoC. It had really bad performance at launch and had way to little content. If they would have waited another year they would have a lot more players today.
Anarchy online. DAoC. Everquest 2. Vanguard. Darkfall.
They all released way too early and and lost some or many players on it, Vanguard lost most of any game because of it. I do costs a lot of money to keep a game in development longer than you have to but games like Vanguard would have won that cash many times over.
I blame the beta tester fanbois. When I tried beta testing this heap of junk many months ago you could not post anything negative on the beta forum wihout getting flamed.
Pointing out bugs and flaws got you flamed, I kid you not. According to them everything was great, it was an awesome game.