A few follow up notes here: (not going to argue anyone’s thoughts, if you don't like something its your opinion I am certainly not going to change it)
1-I feel this "not playing the game" point needs some clarification. Its not that nobody played the game, many people played the game quite a bit. It is that EVERYONE did not play the game every day. With the team crunching we thought it was more important for people to work on deliverables than to force a time carved out every day for every person in the company to play. This is something we are doing now with each of our projects once the game is to a playable point.
2-We spoke to performance quite a bit in our talk, not really reflected here. Our point is simple, poor frame rate equals bad game experience. Having higher specs in general hurt us on this project no question. We continue to optimize the AA engine and squeze more performance all the time.
3-The talk for us was really more about a good process for making games more than specifics about Auto Assault.
4-Great points on Jumpgate, that’s why we have a team working on a complete revamp now. I still think Auto Assault is a very cool game and we are far from giving up on that project. Hopefully some of the changes in store will give players a reason to take another look at the game. Scorch
The reason that my entire guild left the game had absolutely NOTHING to do with "complexity" of the game. Most of us had been beta testers and were enjoying the game itself. We all realized that it takes time for fixes to be implemented and were willing to wait. However, our patience was finally exhausted when after 6 mths of repeated annnouncements that the first patch for all the bugs reported during the final stages of betaand the beginning of live, they were still telling that the patch was coming out "soon". If you tell your players that a patch is coming out soon, this is not >6 mths down the road. If you take a poll of people on here, I'm sure that soon would be < 3 mths.
I terminated my subscription at this point (and yes they had already stated it was free at this point), and left my email address up on their announcements. If I remember correctly, it took at least another 3-4 mths before that patch was released, AND THE BUGS WERE STILL NOT FIXED.
The real reason my guild and I left was that we were sick of being lied to.
Those are good advices for future game developers. If you screw up once it will scar your game for life and it's very hard to recover from bad impressions. First impression is very important here as consumers will only give you ONE chance to take a look at your game and will either dismiss is as crap or praise it and invite their friends over. Early beta are not good, you should polish your game first before going beta. Auto Assault is a good game, unfortunately people dismissed it as a blah game so it didn't caugh on the momentum and eventually the population of the game dwindled and that spelled it's death.
AA is a great game, plain and simple... Scott should not be out there apologizing for anything. It breaks my heart to read some of the comments that he made. Especially when I really think that he's missing the boat on what the core issue with the AA subscriber numbers are...
The issue with AA is this, and only this (imo): AA is deployed on the WRONG REVENUE BUSINESS MODEL. End of story. You can comment about this and that, the controls, the gameplay, blah - blah - blah. And this is fine, you are definitely entitled to your opinion. But I have maintained this from the start and I will continue to maintain it until NetDevil wakes up and changes things and starts earning money (I have 2 AA acounts btw - one for my son and one for myself) by having more subscribers.
AA is not a retail box + $15.00/month subscription based game. It's trying to compete in the wrong business space. There is just too much competition in this market area and AA is not the type of game that is going to glean a decent revenue stream out of this market.
NetDevil/NCSoft should try out another business model. Namely:
#1) Adopt a Station Pass (SOE) type of approach where AA is offered as one game in a set of games where a monthly fee is charged (let's say $15.00/month or $19.00/month) depending on what other games are included in the set.
#2) Adopt a Guild Wars style model where on-line play is free, and revenue is gleaned by offering timely expansion packs and releases.
#3) Offer a lower monthly sub (let's say $4.99/month) and do in-game advertising. Heck, it's an auto based game for heaven's sake. There are millions and millions of advertising dollars available in this arena. If they got one or two big in-game advertising accounts, and lowered the sub (or eliminated it), AA would be an incredible hit.
All of the other observations that Scott has made I feel are just way off base. Yes, there's beta, and communications, and frame-rate, and all of this other stuff. But when it comes down to it, it's not why AA has such a low subscriber base. He needs to think in terms of how much a person is going to spend on a monthly game fee. It's going to be a limited amount. As a basis, people are probably going to throw their $$ into one of the big boys: WoW, EvE, EQ, etc. etc. They are not going to throw it into a game like AA.
For $15.00/month people want some other immersive type of experience. But under a different revenue model - heck ya! People are gonna want to log in and blow stuff up, and trick out their car, do a little crafting... It's totally a no brainer.
I hope NetDevil doesn't throw this game away. It's just too good, and it's too much fun. Just get real about how you can make money with this title (and YOU CAN!). Please think out of the box - and for Pete's sake: DON'T PULL THE PLUG ON NEXUS!!!!!
IMO Auto Assault suffered from the same problem that Earth and Beyond suffered from. It isn't actually a science fiction setting, it's a fantasy setting. In a technology based setting all abilities come from equipment and the skill to use it comes from the character. In AA (and E&B) the character themselves have what equate to magical spells. Other then the hazard mode there was no equipment requirment to use your special abilites which makes them spells, not technology. In a sci-fi based game the technology should be disposable and easily replaced, it's the skills to use that technology that should lie in the character. Players relate to the character, not the vehicle. The vehicle should only be a tool.
Meh I still think its how the game was advertised, I mean I definately woulda tried the game if it had large faction vs faction warfare and team battles. Or at least if the combat vs AI looked interesting
But the main thing was it needs to look more about driving skill and fast and furious speed than auto aim guns and a tiny amounts of enemies, maybe our technology isnt developed enough for this genre..
1-I feel this "not playing the game" point needs some clarification. Its not that nobody played the game, many people played the game quite a bit. It is that EVERYONE did not play the game every day. With the team crunching we thought it was more important for people to work on deliverables than to force a time carved out every day for every person in the company to play. This is something we are doing now with each of our projects once the game is to a playable point.
Here's the thing. You should not have to schedule your staff to play your game.
Your game should be such that people WANT to play it - you should be writing memos to your staff to STOP playing the game on company time. Fun games are things the rest of us not in the gaming industry secretly load onto computer and play when the bosses aren't looking. If you have a legitmate reason to have the game on your computer, then a fun game will keep you after work, at the office, playing with your co-workers.
If enough people aren't doing this, and at a fairly early stage of the game, it's probably a good indication of the general fun level of it.
I've seen gaming companies where people will be working on one game, then stay after hours at the office to play another game. It can be a PC game, a console game, or even a card game. But it's the fun level of these OTHER games that companies should be striving to produce. If they're own game isn't competitive with games that are truly fun then they should realize their doing something wrong.
I'll try not to repeat what people have said, but here are the things I see wrong with AA.
1.) It was dasigned as a casual game, but priced for and marketed to the general/hardcore MMO market. The way the game is structured, specifically the ammount of XP you get for missions as opposed to killing mobs, makes the game easy to stay competitive without logging hundreds of hours a week. This game is awesome for casual play, but the only places I've seen the game marketed are MMO sites and Computer gaming magazines. Not exactly the best places to find casual gamers. And when casual gamers happen to actually find the game, the $15.00/month fee is very offputting.
2.)At it's most basic level, AA is an vehicular-combat game, yet 90% of the vehicular-combat fans I've talked to wont touch AA with a 10-foot pole. the original AutoDuel from Origin is more engaging at some points. That's pretty sad. Also to note; the other auto-combat MMO, DarkWind, has gotten a better reception from fans of the genre so the 'Ease of Use + Graphics = awesome game' theory doesnt fly.
If ND would lower the price to say $5 per month, they could easily triple their subscriber base and not lose money. There was a game store here that had the game-time cards for $5. That was the only time I considered buying them. I did actually buy a retail box recently, but only because they were selling them for a penny. People shouldnt have to wait for your game to go on sale to think it is a good value.
What someone said about AA essentially being a fantasy game is accurate. If it werent for the Havok engine, it would be a fantasy game with post-apoc graphics overlaid.
Hard to say AA is a horrible game. Vehicular based MMO is what i love and always dream of. AA is just like EvE minus that avatar move around in town. Only AA failure is the missions that is fixed.
On the early start, it have enforce the kill this.. kill that.. collect this.. collect that. AA might be in a successful path if the game have sandbox enviroment or convoy enforced to most of the missions.
All canceled. Waiting on Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning.
I dont believe this. Basically what the poor developers are saying is "we took a risk bringing something new to the MMO market, got unlucky and learned our lesson".. "take it from us, dont bother developing anything innovative, risky or creative" ... "we should have just made our game dummed down, pretty to look at (even if it was just superficially good), and mainstream".
I followed Auto Assault since it was a rumour. And was lucky enough to play it for a while. I thought it was the best thing in a stale genre to come along in a while. The MMO market is going down hill - nothing but fantasy clones. They are also becoming dummed down. Games used to have elements of strategy or skill in them.. That used to be the draw - testing your wits and mettle against other players or the game AI. Now it just seems like a barely interractive movie. Get wowed by graphics and effects, direct your character and watch all the action take place with little or no input from yourself. Auto Assault was a little bit different. Tried to introduce some player skill in the equation and some speed and action. I thought the system they had was innovative and a fresh change from the norm. Some players love complexity and if the model is given a chance It can become popular to all players once they are weened off the 'norm' of dummed down games.
I think Auto Assault suffered bad luck in its release. But in no way do i think that new developers out there should heed some of that advice. Without risk taking, trying new formulas and innovations we will be stuck with WoW/lineage clones for the next 10 years- people only playing it safe. And gamers being hypnotised into a consumer norm, only playing one type of experience and being made to believe anything remotely challenging is over complex and not fun.
Awesome first post, I 100% agree.
Wwelcome to0 MMORPG, we need a few more like you around here
They are still in denial, there was nothing complex about the game, at all. It was far too simple. Pretty graphics may grab your attention in the beggining, but complexity is what keeps you interested and draws you in deeper.
Massively: What was massive about it? You went from one small area, blasting a few enemy types that fall within your level range, and then move on to the next very small area, to blast whichever 1-2 new enemy types appear. It couldn't have been more linear if it had been an old side-scrolling console game.
Multiplayer: It felt dead already, during the month they launched. As noted by others, the principle problem was bad word-of-mouth advertising, first from beta testers, and then early players such as myself. Their advertising campaign wasn't anything special either, not that it would have mattered much in the end. If you are doing something new, you really need to sell people on it. A few banner adds here and there on sites like mmopg.com aren't enough. Why was it Multiplayer? It certainly never felt like a multiplayer game. There was no reason to form teams or guilds or the like. This ties closely with my next complaint:
Online: Auto Assault is not an multiplayer online game. It is a single player console game where the creators wanted people to pay an additional monthly fee to keep playing it. That's the only conclusion I can come to. Its online because they want online fees. The game would play vitually the same as a console version.
Role Playing: What role was I playing, other than chump? I looked the same as anyone else, and I functioned pretty much the same. There was no real reason to play healer/buffer types, other than to try to self-inject a little variety into my playing experience. Straight-up combat was the order of the day, every day, 24 hours a day, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars. In a game where the only activity is shooting your weapons (even crafting began with you first blasting apart the terrain) then combat is the end-all be-all of your existence. What's complex about that? The coolest looking weapons often had the greatest drawbacks, so there wasn't even that to keep me entertained (I liked the single target lasers, but weapons that affected areas were of much greater utility). And gettting a different chasis was mostly pointless, other than to make you spend your money. There was no reason to advance, no world-building to engage in, no end-game other than pvp which, as someone pointed out earlier is completely missing from the early game (and how weird is that? Its like two different games, one you play PvE for a while, then Wham! suddenly its a PvP game).
I gave AA an honest try, and it was fun . . . for about 2 weeks. By the fourth week of my included month of play, I had gone back to EQ2. It wasn't bad, really, just nothing you can call a mmorpg. And that's what I like to play.
Not sure I understand this, is Auto Assault still running? If so, why would they call it post-mortem, or even admit the game is dead at all? I would think they would point out mistakes made and how they were going to improve them if it is still running.
That was the lamest apology I have ever seen from a developer ever.
Performance + Easy + Pretty = Fun! ?? Are you kidding me? Of course a game has to be easily accessible, but are you joking? People dont need dumbed down games...they just dont need games where they are thrown to the wolves from day one.
Hell, a lot of us jumped right in to the early MMOs with no clue and did amazingly well. Whoever thinks that games need to be dumbed down ought to get fired from an MMO job and move to making console games.
They need to make this game Free2Play, They should sell the game remove monthly fee, add item mall. This will bring the game alooooot more players and they will make alot more money. This game could be great..
Lots of interesting points here. Scorch has already clarified a few things. I understand the frustration to the "play your game" points. What is so difficult about this is that it DOES seem so obvious. The goal, of course, is to WANT to play your game, but to get there you have to force people to play it, every day. This is how you reveal what it is that makes people not want to play it in the first place. It's tricky because game development is usually tons of hours on difficult tasks that require lots of focus. When people are working on some hard problem, or building some complex asset, they don't want to be interrupted for an hour or so to be forced to play a game... especially a game that isn't done (and not fun ). It can also be demoralizing because now they have to go back to work on a game that isn't fun and no one knows how long it will be until it is fun!
They'd rather finish their work and "play later" or play "when it's ready." The trick is, they won't play later, and if they never play it'll never be ready . When you're staring down a hard deadline and are worried about your game getting canned it's hard to prioritize playing the game over finishing up this last thing. I guess maybe a better way of thinking about it is we didn't make playing our game a #1 priority, and if it's not then in effect you are not playing your game... at least not really. The other thing is to take what you learn from game play sessions and making those issues the top things to fix (also hard if you have a hard and fast dev schedule). It's all tied together and one of the points we were trying to make in the PM is that the contract side strongly affects all these things.
We did, of course, play the game... but not nearly enough and I am guilty of embellishment to drive a point home.
With regard to the game being too hard... this is a general statement as everyone is different. I can say from first hand experience now that getting people not on your team play your game and writing down what they do is incredibly painful and educational to watch. Buttons that are really obvious are missed; paths that are clear as day are ignored; giant glowing flashing signs are skipped over . A game being too unintuitive (perhaps a better word than complex) and not having enough things to do are very different things. The issue that we face is that, in general, if you pull someone off the street to play your game, they won't have any idea what to do without tons of focused iteration. By doing this (and forcing people to watch) you get a really good sense of where people get lost and if you plug those holes people will either like or dislike your game on it's own merit as opposed to not liking it because they simply don't understand how to play.
They STILL don't know what's wrong with AutoAssault, and it's really very simple; The game is antisocial, you had to desperately want to be in a group just to bother, and when you did it just slowed things down. I'm usually a soloer in most MMOs, and I even joined a guild in AA to try and maximize my ability to team up, but the fact was it was easier to just go on my own. It still felt lonesome and samey day in and day out.
Though another thing did factor in, that the game never quite worked and that therefore they weren't able to maintain a population. The PvP system where you could join in tournaments would often drop me out (leaving me emptyhanded) or send me against weaker or stronger opponents who would have no chance against me, and that's just on the off chance it was able to send me against ANYBODY.
So, AutoAssault would be good if there were enough people, but there was never a point in actually interacting with them. Without the interaction there's no long-term reason to play. Without that longterm reason to play you won't have anybody to interact with.. then again, there's no reason to anyway.
That it was easy to get to maximum level was not a problem, WoW does that, WoW is an easy game and it's ginormous. That it was utterly pointless to team up, that there was no auction-house, that there were precious few enemies you'd even think to get a group for, was a problem.
Comments
A few follow up notes here: (not going to argue anyone’s thoughts, if you don't like something its your opinion I am certainly not going to change it)
1-I feel this "not playing the game" point needs some clarification. Its not that nobody played the game, many people played the game quite a bit. It is that EVERYONE did not play the game every day. With the team crunching we thought it was more important for people to work on deliverables than to force a time carved out every day for every person in the company to play. This is something we are doing now with each of our projects once the game is to a playable point.
2-We spoke to performance quite a bit in our talk, not really reflected here. Our point is simple, poor frame rate equals bad game experience. Having higher specs in general hurt us on this project no question. We continue to optimize the AA engine and squeze more performance all the time.
3-The talk for us was really more about a good process for making games more than specifics about Auto Assault.
4-Great points on Jumpgate, that’s why we have a team working on a complete revamp now.
I still think Auto Assault is a very cool game and we are far from giving up on that project. Hopefully some of the changes in store will give players a reason to take another look at the game.
Scorch
The reason that my entire guild left the game had absolutely NOTHING to do with "complexity" of the game. Most of us had been beta testers and were enjoying the game itself. We all realized that it takes time for fixes to be implemented and were willing to wait. However, our patience was finally exhausted when after 6 mths of repeated annnouncements that the first patch for all the bugs reported during the final stages of beta and the beginning of live, they were still telling that the patch was coming out "soon". If you tell your players that a patch is coming out soon, this is not >6 mths down the road. If you take a poll of people on here, I'm sure that soon would be < 3 mths.
I terminated my subscription at this point (and yes they had already stated it was free at this point), and left my email address up on their announcements. If I remember correctly, it took at least another 3-4 mths before that patch was released, AND THE BUGS WERE STILL NOT FIXED.
The real reason my guild and I left was that we were sick of being lied to.
Those are good advices for future game developers. If you screw up once it will scar your game for life and it's very hard to recover from bad impressions. First impression is very important here as consumers will only give you ONE chance to take a look at your game and will either dismiss is as crap or praise it and invite their friends over. Early beta are not good, you should polish your game first before going beta. Auto Assault is a good game, unfortunately people dismissed it as a blah game so it didn't caugh on the momentum and eventually the population of the game dwindled and that spelled it's death.
AA is a great game, plain and simple... Scott should not be out there apologizing for anything. It breaks my heart to read some of the comments that he made. Especially when I really think that he's missing the boat on what the core issue with the AA subscriber numbers are...
The issue with AA is this, and only this (imo): AA is deployed on the WRONG REVENUE BUSINESS MODEL. End of story. You can comment about this and that, the controls, the gameplay, blah - blah - blah. And this is fine, you are definitely entitled to your opinion. But I have maintained this from the start and I will continue to maintain it until NetDevil wakes up and changes things and starts earning money (I have 2 AA acounts btw - one for my son and one for myself) by having more subscribers.
AA is not a retail box + $15.00/month subscription based game. It's trying to compete in the wrong business space. There is just too much competition in this market area and AA is not the type of game that is going to glean a decent revenue stream out of this market.
NetDevil/NCSoft should try out another business model. Namely:
#1) Adopt a Station Pass (SOE) type of approach where AA is offered as one game in a set of games where a monthly fee is charged (let's say $15.00/month or $19.00/month) depending on what other games are included in the set.
#2) Adopt a Guild Wars style model where on-line play is free, and revenue is gleaned by offering timely expansion packs and releases.
#3) Offer a lower monthly sub (let's say $4.99/month) and do in-game advertising. Heck, it's an auto based game for heaven's sake. There are millions and millions of advertising dollars available in this arena. If they got one or two big in-game advertising accounts, and lowered the sub (or eliminated it), AA would be an incredible hit.
All of the other observations that Scott has made I feel are just way off base. Yes, there's beta, and communications, and frame-rate, and all of this other stuff. But when it comes down to it, it's not why AA has such a low subscriber base. He needs to think in terms of how much a person is going to spend on a monthly game fee. It's going to be a limited amount. As a basis, people are probably going to throw their $$ into one of the big boys: WoW, EvE, EQ, etc. etc. They are not going to throw it into a game like AA.
For $15.00/month people want some other immersive type of experience. But under a different revenue model - heck ya! People are gonna want to log in and blow stuff up, and trick out their car, do a little crafting... It's totally a no brainer.
I hope NetDevil doesn't throw this game away. It's just too good, and it's too much fun. Just get real about how you can make money with this title (and YOU CAN!). Please think out of the box - and for Pete's sake: DON'T PULL THE PLUG ON NEXUS!!!!!
IMO Auto Assault suffered from the same problem that Earth and Beyond suffered from. It isn't actually a science fiction setting, it's a fantasy setting. In a technology based setting all abilities come from equipment and the skill to use it comes from the character. In AA (and E&B) the character themselves have what equate to magical spells. Other then the hazard mode there was no equipment requirment to use your special abilites which makes them spells, not technology. In a sci-fi based game the technology should be disposable and easily replaced, it's the skills to use that technology that should lie in the character. Players relate to the character, not the vehicle. The vehicle should only be a tool.
But the main thing was it needs to look more about driving skill and fast and furious speed than auto aim guns and a tiny amounts of enemies, maybe our technology isnt developed enough for this genre..
Here's the thing. You should not have to schedule your staff to play your game.
Your game should be such that people WANT to play it - you should be writing memos to your staff to STOP playing the game on company time. Fun games are things the rest of us not in the gaming industry secretly load onto computer and play when the bosses aren't looking. If you have a legitmate reason to have the game on your computer, then a fun game will keep you after work, at the office, playing with your co-workers.
If enough people aren't doing this, and at a fairly early stage of the game, it's probably a good indication of the general fun level of it.
I've seen gaming companies where people will be working on one game, then stay after hours at the office to play another game. It can be a PC game, a console game, or even a card game. But it's the fun level of these OTHER games that companies should be striving to produce. If they're own game isn't competitive with games that are truly fun then they should realize their doing something wrong.
1.) It was dasigned as a casual game, but priced for and marketed to the general/hardcore MMO market. The way the game is structured, specifically the ammount of XP you get for missions as opposed to killing mobs, makes the game easy to stay competitive without logging hundreds of hours a week. This game is awesome for casual play, but the only places I've seen the game marketed are MMO sites and Computer gaming magazines. Not exactly the best places to find casual gamers. And when casual gamers happen to actually find the game, the $15.00/month fee is very offputting.
2.)At it's most basic level, AA is an vehicular-combat game, yet 90% of the vehicular-combat fans I've talked to wont touch AA with a 10-foot pole. the original AutoDuel from Origin is more engaging at some points. That's pretty sad. Also to note; the other auto-combat MMO, DarkWind, has gotten a better reception from fans of the genre so the 'Ease of Use + Graphics = awesome game' theory doesnt fly.
If ND would lower the price to say $5 per month, they could easily triple their subscriber base and not lose money. There was a game store here that had the game-time cards for $5. That was the only time I considered buying them. I did actually buy a retail box recently, but only because they were selling them for a penny. People shouldnt have to wait for your game to go on sale to think it is a good value.
What someone said about AA essentially being a fantasy game is accurate. If it werent for the Havok engine, it would be a fantasy game with post-apoc graphics overlaid.
I guess thats enough ranting for me.
----------------------------
Currently Playing:
DarkWind: War on Wheels
Games Played/Beta Tested
Matrix Online
Auto Assault
Anarchy Online
Everquest 1 & 2
EVE
DarkWind: War on Wheels
On the early start, it have enforce the kill this.. kill that.. collect this.. collect that. AA might be in a successful path if the game have sandbox enviroment or convoy enforced to most of the missions.
All canceled. Waiting on Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning.
Awesome first post, I 100% agree.
Wwelcome to0 MMORPG, we need a few more like you around here
They are still in denial, there was nothing complex about the game, at all. It was far too simple. Pretty graphics may grab your attention in the beggining, but complexity is what keeps you interested and draws you in deeper.
Massively: What was massive about it? You went from one small area, blasting a few enemy types that fall within your level range, and then move on to the next very small area, to blast whichever 1-2 new enemy types appear. It couldn't have been more linear if it had been an old side-scrolling console game.
Multiplayer: It felt dead already, during the month they launched. As noted by others, the principle problem was bad word-of-mouth advertising, first from beta testers, and then early players such as myself. Their advertising campaign wasn't anything special either, not that it would have mattered much in the end. If you are doing something new, you really need to sell people on it. A few banner adds here and there on sites like mmopg.com aren't enough. Why was it Multiplayer? It certainly never felt like a multiplayer game. There was no reason to form teams or guilds or the like. This ties closely with my next complaint:
Online: Auto Assault is not an multiplayer online game. It is a single player console game where the creators wanted people to pay an additional monthly fee to keep playing it. That's the only conclusion I can come to. Its online because they want online fees. The game would play vitually the same as a console version.
Role Playing: What role was I playing, other than chump? I looked the same as anyone else, and I functioned pretty much the same. There was no real reason to play healer/buffer types, other than to try to self-inject a little variety into my playing experience. Straight-up combat was the order of the day, every day, 24 hours a day, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars. In a game where the only activity is shooting your weapons (even crafting began with you first blasting apart the terrain) then combat is the end-all be-all of your existence. What's complex about that? The coolest looking weapons often had the greatest drawbacks, so there wasn't even that to keep me entertained (I liked the single target lasers, but weapons that affected areas were of much greater utility). And gettting a different chasis was mostly pointless, other than to make you spend your money. There was no reason to advance, no world-building to engage in, no end-game other than pvp which, as someone pointed out earlier is completely missing from the early game (and how weird is that? Its like two different games, one you play PvE for a while, then Wham! suddenly its a PvP game).
I gave AA an honest try, and it was fun . . . for about 2 weeks. By the fourth week of my included month of play, I had gone back to EQ2. It wasn't bad, really, just nothing you can call a mmorpg. And that's what I like to play.
Performance + Easy + Pretty = Fun! ?? Are you kidding me? Of course a game has to be easily accessible, but are you joking? People dont need dumbed down games...they just dont need games where they are thrown to the wolves from day one.
Hell, a lot of us jumped right in to the early MMOs with no clue and did amazingly well. Whoever thinks that games need to be dumbed down ought to get fired from an MMO job and move to making console games.
Lots of interesting points here. Scorch has already clarified a few things. I understand the frustration to the "play your game" points. What is so difficult about this is that it DOES seem so obvious. The goal, of course, is to WANT to play your game, but to get there you have to force people to play it, every day. This is how you reveal what it is that makes people not want to play it in the first place. It's tricky because game development is usually tons of hours on difficult tasks that require lots of focus. When people are working on some hard problem, or building some complex asset, they don't want to be interrupted for an hour or so to be forced to play a game... especially a game that isn't done (and not fun
). It can also be demoralizing because now they have to go back to work on a game that isn't fun and no one knows how long it will be until it is fun!
They'd rather finish their work and "play later" or play "when it's ready." The trick is, they won't play later, and if they never play it'll never be ready
. When you're staring down a hard deadline and are worried about your game getting canned it's hard to prioritize playing the game over finishing up this last thing. I guess maybe a better way of thinking about it is we didn't make playing our game a #1 priority, and if it's not then in effect you are not playing your game... at least not really. The other thing is to take what you learn from game play sessions and making those issues the top things to fix (also hard if you have a hard and fast dev schedule). It's all tied together and one of the points we were trying to make in the PM is that the contract side strongly affects all these things.
We did, of course, play the game... but not nearly enough and I am guilty of embellishment to drive a point home.
With regard to the game being too hard... this is a general statement as everyone is different. I can say from first hand experience now that getting people not on your team play your game and writing down what they do is incredibly painful and educational to watch. Buttons that are really obvious are missed; paths that are clear as day are ignored; giant glowing flashing signs are skipped over
. A game being too unintuitive (perhaps a better word than complex) and not having enough things to do are very different things. The issue that we face is that, in general, if you pull someone off the street to play your game, they won't have any idea what to do without tons of focused iteration. By doing this (and forcing people to watch) you get a really good sense of where people get lost and if you plug those holes people will either like or dislike your game on it's own merit as opposed to not liking it because they simply don't understand how to play.
Though another thing did factor in, that the game never quite worked and that therefore they weren't able to maintain a population. The PvP system where you could join in tournaments would often drop me out (leaving me emptyhanded) or send me against weaker or stronger opponents who would have no chance against me, and that's just on the off chance it was able to send me against ANYBODY.
So, AutoAssault would be good if there were enough people, but there was never a point in actually interacting with them. Without the interaction there's no long-term reason to play. Without that longterm reason to play you won't have anybody to interact with.. then again, there's no reason to anyway.
That it was easy to get to maximum level was not a problem, WoW does that, WoW is an easy game and it's ginormous. That it was utterly pointless to team up, that there was no auction-house, that there were precious few enemies you'd even think to get a group for, was a problem.