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Too many mediocre MMOs - Are the developers really the problem?
Asariasha
Member UncommonPosts: 252
as a self reflected person I love to think a lot and to play around with numbers. For quite a few years, tons of topics show up stating that most of todays MMOs are mediocre at best and that the developers did not offer enough content. Please, do not misunderstand me. I love gaming and MMOs, but I believe that it is important to have at least some sort of balance. Not only work life balance. An overall balance helping us to enjoy our life. Enough said, I present you an interesting quotation of an interview with James Ohlen, Senior Creative Director for SWTOR.
Ohlen said the BioWare team had expected players to take three to four months to go through the 180 hours of content they'd created. The metrics they were getting informed them the average player was going through the game at 40 hours a week, with some players spending 80-120 hours in the game in a week. Source: http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/30/4158734/bioware-details-the-bumpy-first-year-of-star-wars-the-old-republic
Let's play around with numbers.
A week has got 168 hours. Most people tend to use 33% of that time to sleep (8h per day). After sleeping you take a shower and have a coffe which makes 4% (1hour per day). Driving to work takes roughly 2% (30minutes). Approx 23% of the overall time is work time (25% if you have a 30 minutes lunch break.). Let us be fair and add 1 hour for shopping and other stuff that needs to be handled. Plus 4%. Dinner? We live in a fast living world, so we add up 2% (30minutes). Now, count everything together: That makes 70%.
Taking the numbers of James Ohlen, a player investing ...
... 21 hours (12,5%) (3h per day) per week to play reaches 82,5%
... 40 hours (23%) per week to play reaches 93%
... 80 hours (47%) per week to play reaches 117%
... 120 hours (66%) per week to play reaches 136%
... and we did not count in meeting and socializing with friends, shopping, or doing anything else besides playing an online game.
Now I'm asking you:
What do you think? Are developers and publishers the reason why the last major MMO releases were not accepted by many players, or do certain players due to their way of life cause a lot of rant that leads to public rejection of a game?
Comments
Nine consecutive years of failures, across a dozen (more) publishers?
The failure lies in gamer subculture, I'm afraid. The only consistent factor that all of those "failed" titles have in common.
Lots of varieties of denial, of course. Expectation of a replacement life. Expectation of recapturing the happy joys of my youth or that ultimate game that never was. Superstitious belief in Magic Sandboxes or Perfect PvP or the One True Publisher that will save us. Adoption of whatever hype magic's being peddled next week.
But what can you do, people are gonna be people. Either review your expectations or blame EvilCorp for everything, as suits your temperment.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
You can also blame too many MMOs on the market for the problem. Right now games are designed to keep people actively playing for 1 to 3 months than move on to something else. Thats what you get when you have everyone trying to get a piece of the Blizzard Billion dollar pie. Instead of making a dozen to 15 really good MMOs and let players pick 1 or 2 of those games to play in.
Western games. It's a damn shame too. It reminds me of the time when my Father would talk about how American car manufactures building cars they new would rust out in 3 or 4 year, know people would want a new one. This was happening all the while Asia was building a better car.
Woah dude, TSW is very different.
Also, GW2 is different enough that most of us quit playing it.
To you comments....... RIGHT ON.
I would add game executives who want to sell game ideas to investors and promise some safety for the investment by saying they will use "proven" features.
Combine this with a lack of understanding of the gaming community by game decision makers who think yesterdays information is still relevant.
bcbully,
I will somewhat agree with this. However I still think that a game at a certain point in its life was to undergo a complete shut down and redesign still keeping some of the core things that make the game enjoyable.
For example if you take Ultima Online and redesign it not like Ultima Forever or that Lord British game. Really keep the world as is but up date the graphics. Add some new features like instances with keeping the essence of open world and sandbox intact. Maybe add in a few world raid bosses. Maybe a half dozen new crafting skills. Bring more to the overall game it wouldnt be a reskinning as much as a 2.0 of a game.
You can say the same for SWTOR, if they kept more SWG elements like the crafting and open worlds not the instanced worlds it might have been move loved. Yea add in the instances and ops. Some ship combat. The game would be a reskin of wow and SWG however it would be more than it is now.
This is a very subjective matter to discuss. For example what is 'average MMO' would change from player to player.
For example i consider Age OF Wushu and Defiance very mediocre and average MMO where as bcbully would swear by AOW. Same goes for Defiance as many consider it an amazing MMO shooter.
Bcbully considers TSW to be average MMO where as according to me it is easily in my top 5 best MMOS ever made.
So sorry but this topic is pointless unless you can get everyone to agree on same thing.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
Agree the problem is publishers aren't willing to try something new. They leave that to indie companies who usually screw it up.
Secondly I'm tired of games that try to only have 1 style of play. They get boring fast. But that's probably the only game that will be coming out for... well I don't see an end to it any time soon. EVE is probably the closest game to what I'm talking about that is still pretty active. Lots of different things to do in that game. UO was the same. If you give people different types of gameplay to work on while they're bored of PvE or whatever then they'll stick around longer.
nethervoid - Est. '97
[UO|EQ|SB|SWG|PS|HZ|EVE|NWN|WoW|VG|DF|AQW|DN|SWTOR|Dofus|SotA|BDO|AO|NW|LA] - Currently Playing EQ1
20k+ subs YouTube Gaming channel
devs are to blame.
http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/knowledge/story/sto_set.html
/Thread.
People keep buying the junk, so the developers keep producing it. Just go to the forums of Wildstar, TESO, ArcheAge, etc and look at the hoopa-ha of retards, trying with all their might, to convince themselves that these games are 'unique' and def not clones.
This isn't just an MMORPG problem either. This problem extends across multiple genres and is even more prevalent in FPS games. **Cough** COD.
When you remove features, game mechanics, and give a bare bone mmorpg on launch, its the devs fault.
The players fault for whinning about wanting easy, fast, give me know, and i dont want risk vs reward.
When you spend 50% of your budget on voice acting and crappy story lines that dry up in a few weeks, and your game doesnt have the features needed to survive by using player creativity and draws players into the game...... it can only be the developers fault.
Hanging onto WOW's coat tail and not wanting to make a good mmorpg because you are afraid you wont hit the 10mil sub mark, only to release another failure........ devs fault. Not being able to see the market and see all of the failures and make something different...... devs fault.
Give me a damn mmorpg not another eye candy wow clone console rpg!
I agree but you are forgetting to add ESO to that list alongside Wildstar.
IF Arch Age is not unique then nothing can ever satisfy people like you.
I like how you used /end thread though as if your subjective opinion is some fact that ends this discussion.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Indeed.
The market will produce what it deems "best". Now, the market tends to base much of this on profits. So, when gamers stop buying the crap, devs will stop making it.
I see no hope though.
Many many years ago, "Boy Bands" burst on to the scene with gusto. As is the case with boys, they grow up. But a new generation of "Boys" rises up to fill the void. New Kids on the Block>Backstreet Boys>1 Direction....there will be more and more, it will never stop.
Do you know how you combat players not buying your product?
F2P
There can be no denying of the fact that the developers made the games... poor design, misjudging the market, just plain laziness... call it what you will but the captain goes down with his ship. It was his design, it's his failure. They deny ownership of their own failures.
There can be no denying of the fact that developers rely too heavily on what has already been done. The guy who invented the Rubik's cube didn't go out and try and reinvent the game of chess. You spend all your time reengineering the same thing you ultimately end up with the same thing. They need to take a page from Apple and invent their own ideas instead of reinventing what someone else has already come up with. The knock-offs will never be more than knock-offs because you know where the original idea came from. They lack originality.
You can't blame the market for the product... it can't be mediocre if it satisfies the market... it can only be mediocre if the product is mediocre.
Also look at it this way... you're going to college to learn to be an engineer. You look around you and discover everyone has decided to become an engineer. So now you and a million other students are all now vying for a limited number of jobs because you've over saturated the market with engineers. People work for less money just to have a job. What was once a lucrative job prospect becomes a dismal one. Simple supply and demand at work here. You can't all be engineers. Every game can't be an MMO... and yet they seem to think theirs is the one that will stand out in the sea of MMOs... well guess what, you didn't come up with the original idea so it's still only a knock-off in the end. We've come full circle.
Yes, it is the developers fault. They have it in their power to do something new. Something else. Instead, it's the same old same old year after year... whether it's bagless or uses a bag, it's still a vacuum and it still only cleans half as good as they claim it does. They need to invent something new... which is hard because copying is so easy to do.
Hi OP, not sure where you've reflected yourself too, but there is a slight problem with the numbers.
Primarily being that developers tend to consider "content" all the time spent playing the game. So running between quest hubs is content that is measured by time.
They also count every little thing they included in the game in their total. But they don't take into account that not all players are interested in the same thing. Someone might not want to craft, at all. Someone might skip all the dialogued entirely. People will find the path of least resistance to a goal. Maybe your quest is to kill bandit leader X, players will go around as much of the "content" as they can to reach the bandit leader as quickly as possible. Also, if there are multiple people in the area, mobs will have been cleared thereby eliminating the need to do most of the time consuming "content".
So what we have here is the concept of "content" as viewed by the player versus the concept of "content" as viewed by the developers.
Optional romantic conversations with NPC's might only be seen as content to a small percentage of players, but developers will add up the length of those conversations and add it to their total. They also total up various storylines (faction/class differences) as unique and separate content.
So per Bioware's numbers as indicated in your post, they estimated that it would take up to 4 months to clear 180 hours of content.
45 hours per month. Is that a joke? ~11 hours per week?
Another thing developers need to keep in mind is that gamers tend to game as their primary hobby. Kind of why we're called gamers. Meaning we eschew other avenues of entertainment in favor of gaming. So it stands to reason that yes, we will spend a lot of our time with a game.
Also, when people are excited for a game they often take time off work or set aside their weekend for launch week. A day off work with a launch title can easily yield 12-16 hours of gaming for anyone interested in doing that. 32 hours in two days! (one weekend equals almost a month of content consumption based on Bioware's numbers).
I suppose this is what you're trying to say, "gamers are the ones making the games run out of content!" Well how does this stack up to other forms of entertainment?
The average American watches 32 hours of TV per week. All of a sudden 40 hours per week gaming doesn't seem as excessive, it's actually a very normal rate of consumption. So it's not really a way of life, it's the fact that developers aren't matching reality with their creation. Someone gaming 30-40 hours a week is basically the same as anyone else watching TV. The difference is, those 32 hours of TV are being spread between different shows whereas MMO gamers are dumping that time into one game.
Additionally Bioware probably was looking at its single player titles and how long people enjoyed those for. But they don't seem to understand the mentality between online vs single player. In a single player game, the player chooses to search every nook and cranny and spend forever running around. That's why you can play Skyrim for 400 hours even though you can beat the game in what, 20 hours? But in MMO's, players are not just sitting in a world by themselves looking to entertain their own needs, they're playing with and competing against everyone else.
ArcheAge Looks Generic. Granted, they are trying different ideas inside the game, but the game looks like every other game out there. My qualms with ArcheAge atm are purely visual, which is 50% of an MMORPG. The game looks so damn generic that is makes me throw up that they backed up such a generic look with innovative ideas inside the game. Cry all you want, but ArcheAge is going to fail.
I agree.
Mediocre Developers making junk games and Fanbots that keep buying their crap over and over again.
I consider ever new MMO in development a steaming POS until the Developers can prove otherwise.
So far, none have.
Bringer of Eternal Darkness and Despair, but also a Nutritious way to start your Morning.
Games Played: Too Many
Why cry when its the #1 most anticipated sandbox mmo ever? You reason that its going to fail is that to you the graphics look generic?