Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
What do you feel is the biggest failure that released MMORPGs are the victim of?
WinnTech
Member UncommonPosts: 71
What do you feel is the biggest failure that released MMORPGs are the victim of?
FAIL…four letters that have such an impact on society and gaming. They come from many directions and variable reasons. To some, the game may be beautiful but the game runs like a horse on its way to Elmer’s glue factory (sorry animal lovers). To others, the game may be a work of art, but the art may look like the work of a kindergarten art class of kids on a sugar high. Implementation fails are epically abundant these days. The years of great gaming are seemingly slipping away from our grasps and the minds of developers.
So therein is the question, what is the worst gaming Faux Pas in your opinion and why?
For myself, it would be the simple, “Great Idea, Poor Implementation” If you are developing a game that has a style, a flair and you can envision how the aspect would look and react, why would you sell yourself short of actually implementing it in that way? Typically time and money, but then, they release the game with the shortcoming and when this flaw becomes visible “well, it’s planned for a later patch.” Problem is, usually it is not fixed. If a guy is supposed to have an attack that is the normal attack…it doesn’t need to be flashy, that is what special moves are for. In that instance, the developer wanted too much. Make me think that the special attack is special. That would be an example of “Great Idea, Poor Implementation”
WinnTech
Comments
Releasing too early - You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Releasing with cutting edge system requirements - If it's choppy and blocky, it's never going to be fun for that person.
Releasing without features that are advertised on the box - This happens FAR too often. People expect one thing and get another.
Hubris - see, the classical greek metaphor of the person building a pair of wings, getting excited, flying too close to the sun, wings melting, and crashing.
In other words, having too ambitious a project. This leads to too much hype, which leads to overly excited fans & lack of ability to finish all their goals, which leads to bad word-of-mouth and reviews.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
Hype.
If player's expect a steak and you give them meatloaf, they're going to be upset and leave. If you let players know it's meatloaf right now, but it will work up to be steak later, you might lose some people now, but they'll be much more forgiving and may come back later.
for me i think the most common and biggest mistake is they don't make games to be fun from level one.
start out a new game, make a new character and you get one ability and auto attack.
something else i'd like to see is questing to learn abilities. like you are training from a master or something. that right there creates a lot of content.
i don't think its just me but it'd be nice if games were fun from the get go.
die.
Releaing to early is the big one. Doing so with a broke game hurts and u cant really recover. Apb is a prime example of this.
Also dont promise anything u cant deliver on. If u promise dynamic events that will change how the world plays u better deliever or your player base will never forgive u.
Also being unprepared to fix bugs. Every mmo has bugs that get missed or slip through the cracks no matter how ready they are for release. Fix them.
Apb had bugs and never fixed them so what incentive did players have to play the game if the game company knowing there were bugs didnt even try to fix them.
FF 14 is suffering from some of this as well. Players are complaining in droves about some stuff. If the majority of your player base doesnt like someting change it. Otherwise players will leave. Dont look down at your player base and think well who cares what they think we like it so its staying.
Releasing WAY too early, I would say.
You have to release a polished gem in today's MMO market if you wanna compete. 10 years ago you release a game that probably should still be in beta and people might be okay with that. But games like WOW have raised the bar and releasing something too soon gets it laughed straight into bankruptsy.
Budget failures which lead to releasing early.
As many other said before: Releasing the game too early.
Nothing else have destroyed so many games. Just look on Vanguard, it is actually a pretty fun game and yet have it almost no players.
Trying to create an MMO with a huge studio and tons of financial backing seems to lead straight to failure.
Bigger companies are easier to mismanage resulting in a disjointed project with no self idenity. Using tons of money also means that most of the decisions will be made by corporate suits who have no idea what makes a good game. They'll just say "Copy WoW". And since the casual market is already tapped, the game will fail.
Some of the only successful MMOs in the last 5 years (Darkfall, Fallen Earth) have started small and expanded over time.
People not playing has nothing to do with releasing early. Its the best PvE game on the market but no one touches it because SoE isn't developing it or advertising it anymore.
no one plays it because it was released as a steaming pile of bug shit. And that is their only memory.
Trying too hard to make their game like another.
They should concentrate on their own vision.
Something that seems to be more common is the developer focusing on one element too much instead of the package as a whole.
Champions Online and FFXIV spent far too much time on graphics, and not nearly enough on gameplay. Aion probably focused too much on PvP and had a miserable economy and crafting systems.
I think the biggest and most common mistakes these days are .
1) Not being honest with themselves about how good their game actually is and...
2) Knowingly feeding and riding their own hype train so they can make a quick cash grab with box sales when they know they just sold you a box of crap.
Greed.
Indeed we see way to much "Cloned" games that try to steal another game's thunder. I have heard the term "Asian MMO" used many times to describe the plethora of cloned games that seem to flood the market and they act as if adding a sparkle here and there makes the game unique. No, it is not unique, it was (hopefully) when it was an idea. But the implementation failed and they either rushed and stole ideas from another game or they simply cut their losses when they could not be unique enough.
But therein is another question of, are they limited due to sharing a same or similar gaming engine? How many new games do we see that come out using the Unreal 2/3 engine? If they can use the engine to make something new, then and ONLY then should it be granted. But if they will use it to clone another game, it is a waste of resources, go work for that team...or did they kick said designer out so they created their own version of "X" game. Who knows.
What we do know is that developers stopped innovating and now the MMORPG genre is falling and failing to the RPG genre again. Dragon Age and Fallout 3 vs Allods or Runes of Magic. Ok...come on...no comparison.
WinnTech
Giving an inch.
In anything. You make something free to play, as soon as you charge for something it'll get blown out of proportion. Have 3 good months of updates, and take 4 to work on a really big one... YOU FORGOT ABOUT US! EVIL DEVS! They add some dynamic one time content to give players a unique experience, and NOW they're being content Nazis and hording all of the exclusive content for their buttfriends!
I think the biggest failure for a MMO after release is thinking that inch given is going to have just a MILE taken as it's ratio. No, no.. We're PAYING customers folks, we're spending a good portion of our government checks to OWN a part of your content. Give us all or we'll RUE you. RUUUUEEEEE!!!
Really the biggest failure for any MMO is the community.
I'll even lump myself in to that statistic and FFXIV's release. I read bad things before, figured they would be fixed during beta because it all seemed fixable. I was busy, didn't get to open beta so I just waited for my week of early access. I played that week and was like.. "Oh, well I'm in early I'm sure by offical launch day there will be a patch." Lauch day comes. "Oh, no patch? Wow lots of people what fun! I'm level 10.." 1 week later still silence and I've moved up in content.. to nothing. "Uh this fucking sucks..." A message about the problems and 30 more days of playing towards.. Nothing? I'm not getting any reward for doing all of this repeative crap? Oi...
My expectations were as loafty as the game's specifications. My bad.
Non-smooth gameplay kills it for me.
Some time ago, when I played trial of WoW and trial of WAR. In case of WoW, I had fun through the first 15 levels, with cute smooth animations, lack of lag and beautiful open landscape. Sure, the kill X quests got boring after lvl 15, but still...
now with WAR, as soon as I started the game, I got the claustrophobia feeling, everything was zoned, barely any players running around and from the lvl 1 the quests felt "OMG ANOTHER X RAT TAILS QUEST" rather than "ok it will have better quests later".
i think newer MMOs should try to make their games more open rather than tight zones with single entrances
FAILure to recognize the market is already saturated with mediocre quality MMO's. Not only is nobody building a better mousetrap, most look the same and operate on the same principles.
If it's not broke don't try to fix it and don't expect to capitalize from copying what someone else is doing if they're doing it better than you already.
For the remaining 5% of MMO's with a serious budget that still managed to fail - early release was the problem. First impressions in the MMO industry is everything!
The ONLY reason WoW got away with as many bugs and flaws as it did on release is because the market was NOT saturated at that time.
The biggest issue with modern mmos being released is that they generally are in such an unfinished state they can barely be called alpha versions.
The second biggest issue is the fact that they all rip each other off. Blizzard managed to rip off the 1st gen mmos in a such a way that it appeared to many, many first time mmo'ers as though WoW were the original and best. Since then, we've seen other mmos copying WoW's approach in one form or another, and it is generally met with disaster or at the least, much lower than projected sub retention.
Between these two issues most of the modern mmos released since 2004 have not been able to gain a substantial grasp on the western market. At one point in time Lineage 2 had 14 million worldwide subscribers; WoW just reached 12 million. There have been bigger games than WoW, which often gets overlooked by both gamers and publishers alike.
Until we see a new mmo from Blizzard I fear we will be stuck in this endless cycle of repetition and corporate theft. The only mmo I've even played that was nothing like WoW out of current gen p2p mmos was released in an alpha state, based on my experiences in beta and the fact that the dev/pub (same company) did hardly any changes to the game during beta. So it seems we're either doomed to an incomplete pile of buggy code, a cheap knockoff of a polished knockoff of a first gen mmo, or both.
Other than companies imposing limitations to questing, etc, nothing new has been brought to the table for quite some time. Even Aion's flying idea was roughly taken from a f2p, Flyff. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people buy games based on graphics, so the marketing department shows off some trailers and some hawt ingame footage, and a new mmo sells at least 500k box copies, which is usually close to enough to churn a profit. It doesn't cost as much as they claim to make mmos.
In other words, I see a lot of people gripe about the mmos that come out and have come out the past several years, but yet when the new mmo launches those same people are usually first in line with a fistful of cash, ready to invest in the "next big thing that will kill WoW".
I think we are ALL guilty of being a cruel community, more for paying games than non. I will admit that a game that I pay for, I want it to deliver. I recently played a FPS Call of Duty: World at War. Great awesome game, problem is the game was short. If I can beat a game in 3 days without playing heavily, then the game does not have enough hours built in the storyline. I, of course, went as ballistic as the rest of the gaming community that bought the game.
We expect the developers to deliver GOLD if we pay for the game. Problem is, my gold may be your silver or platinum. The Devs never know what to expect. As for FFXIV, they probably figured that the look would capture enough people. Well, I won't say that particularly, we are all the "Simon"s of critics for video games. This is well known. But this is progress. Without the community to look at a game and tear it apart, digest it, then spew out obscenities at the terrible game that is lacking in "A, B and C" how would the devs know where or how to improve?
I think also that the Devs fail to listen to the community and command their game more like communists. It is THEIR game and you will play the way they want, broken or not. This is, IMO, a failure to comprehend the market to whom you are trying to sell the game to. When this happens, they go F2P...after that, they die a slow death in server merges and then ultimately the one or two players left on the game leave when the game is laid to rest.
Sad process, but progress is progress. Devs need to learn from mistakes and grow, don't bandaid them with glitter.
WinnTech
Do I have to limit it to just one?
Seems like a combination of things:
- Launching too early: before the game is ready content and/or gameplay wise
- Not listening to beta testers: not every little gripe but when a significant portion of your testers have the same complaints the light bulb should go off there may be a legitimate concern or oversight
- Having customer service features and personnel in place at launch: not weeks or months later
-Communication with customers and potential customers
-Check their calendar: it's 2010 not 1999. People are not going to be as patient or forgiving with a game that releases with severe issues in gameplay, content, ui, etc.
-Increased knowledge of the playerbase the game is geared towards: Doesn't seem like many have a clue anymore. You could make an argument that some aren't even following trends that have happened with other mmo launches or at least appears that way with some.
-Lose the ego: It doesn't matter if you're "Company X" that has made "Game Y" or is using "IP Z". If your game is not ready or a significant portion testing it are unhappy then when you release the game you can expect the same results. The majority of players will not stick around no matter what. There are too many other games out there at this point.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Most people with a brain long since figured out Vanguard is a great game. Thousands upon thousands have returned, only to see that SoE has absolutely no intention of trying to do anything with it, so they leave. The stigma over launch has long since passed.
Dumbing down instead of adding depth.
yeah it's all up to Blizzard. lol
releasing a game too early - definately
using up more then 3/4 of your development budget before release and hoping that initial sales will pull you through to fix the bugs beta missed - APB
releasing a game when advertised features are not yet included - AoC
releasing a game simply because it's spearheaded by someone that is supposed to know something - TabulaRasa, Hellgate London
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.