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I'm getting worryed about the future of MMO's industry...
Anthara
Member Posts: 75
Why are we buying and paying for games that are released in a bad quality.. i mean, incomplete and unpolished games.
Every year that passes every gaming company seems to feel ok by just releasing complete crap games with loads of bugs and low quality gaming experience. Lags, bugs, client crashes, server crashes, etcs
Seems to become the new way of making games simply cause they know we keep buying and paying for them? So they dont care anymore? Arent we losing a bit of our self respect by just beeing to much "soft" about this companys?
I understand that an MMO release got problems, but its becoming a bit banalized and is getting me scared... people are just buying and paying for this games just cause somehow they are "fan" of the game? Whats a fan of a game? I'm actually seeing ppl that are already fans of games that havent been released yet, neither in alpha, beta or whatever. How can you be fan of something that dont exist yet?
Also.. why do people think is ok to pay for a game that should have been developed, at least the major aspects of the game before its release? People seem to be paying the actually development of games this days. Companys release incomplete, broken games, expecting for ppl to pay for the big part of its development.
All games have bugs and maybe server stability problems, but games are beeing released with their basics totaly broken already and people seems to answer that by paying a monthly fee cause with that money they will fix the game. Cmon guys.... we should pay for new content and minor problems... not for 50% of a game development. People are actually ok with this. "Im a fan and this game is awsome so ill pay so they make this game playable".
I cant understand this "growing" attitude from people... think we are getting what we deserve for beeing so tolerant towards incompetence. If a small company dont have budget to make a Massive Multiplayer Game.. dont do it! Simple! Major problem is that even companys with huge budgets are also in the same crap boat.
Am I beeing retard and missing any picture or is this crap actually hapening and beeing banalized every day.
..my english sucks a bit so I'm sorry if i repeated myself to much or missed anything important, but cant find many words to explain 100% whats on my mind.
Thanks
Comments
Don't worry about the future of the MMO industry. Worry about the consumers of the present who are simply too stupid to learn from the past.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Because so many players are idealistic in nature. They loved the books, movies and television shows, so naturally they expect that the MMO will reproduce that kind of experience for them. It's important for people to understand that the MMO part plays a greater role than the RPG part - the players dominate the gaming experience.
"MMOrpg"
"Incompetence" is a strong word. As a software engineer, I'll remind folks that MMOs are a rather high end technical challenge. Players are always clamoring for the developers to push the envelope farther out, and the developers are always trying to accommodate them. I think the developers spend a little too much time operating with their "player" hat on instead of their "engineer" hat.
That said, we ARE getting what we deserve for our tolerance of buggy products. That has always been the case in all software. I believe that it happens because buggy software is considered far better than no software at all.
Why else would players clamor for the Next Great Game now? I get the impression that players think of game development as some kind of magic because they don't understand it at all. They just call for it and something shows up.
It's a phase for the industry. There was an MMO gold rush and people were cranking out games right and left. Things should start to settle down a bit now and we can hope that some emphasis on quality and innovation will build up.
You did a fine job.
I'm surprised you think these problems are new. Unpolished releases and unstable servers and clients have been the norm in MMORPG's for as long as I've been playing them which has been since Meridian 59. There have been plenty of exceptions, but the good releases are few and far between.
It's a phase for the industry. There was an MMO gold rush and people were cranking out games right and left. Things should start to settle down a bit now and we can hope that some emphasis on quality and innovation will build up.
as a software developer myself,i think that nowadays we (the customers) have way too high standards
sure,we shouldnt accept buggy/unfinished products. but then,thats it.dont expect to see any new games ever,or greatly lower your expectatives , your call.
WAR costed south of $100m, AoC something along those lines, and look at them.
simply put,forget it. we arent gonna get a better,bigger,prettier,flawless WoW. the cost of such project is more than ANY major company (bar Blizzard possibly) can afford. nobody will ever produce a major hit in 6 years of development with a 500ppl team, plus another year of full out testing, just to see it doesnt do as expected...you'd need at least WoW's success (CURRENT success) to see the reimbursement after...1 year maybe
who's gonna risk that?
i can tell you. nobody. they will do the best they can with their budget (big or small,depends on the company), and then release the game whatever its state is when they see their coffers empty...or cancel. in 99% of the cases, the initial budget wont be enof to support the "total" completion of the game, and the best we can expect is a game being "as closer" to completion as possible
I understand what you mean.
But there are many players who'll go for "brands"; they will sign up for a game without hearing anything about it simply because it's made by their favourite company. Lots of people remain loyal to a certain franchise or "brand" and therefore take the good with the bad.
Bugs are, to be honest, something that I would expect in any MMO game; consider how many possible scenarios there are in comparison to a linear single-player game and then you'll understand that it would take years to find all of the bugs.
Issues with lag may depend upon your location or your ISP. However, they could also be a problem with the servers. You can run betas and such to give you an idea of what specifications you'll need, but until you release the game and the hordes of players come flooding in, how are developers (or those responsible for maintaining servers at decent speeds) supposed to know whether their game will lag or not?
Of course there's expertise involved and these people aren't just bashing their heads against walls. I don't mean to play Devil's advocate, but certainly there are limitations to what a game company can do within a certain amount of time. Deadlines are set, details are over-looked, caffeine molecules begin to out-number red blood cells in the circulatory systems of programmers, artists, writers, musicians (etc) and something gets released that looks "good enough".
After that? You work on making it better...
I really feel sorry for the artists, to be honest; writing reams of code is one thing, but creating millions of textures, models, animations, etc must be heart-breakingly difficult.
The expectations of today's gamers aren't impossible, they're just extremely difficult within the amount of time these games seem to be developed in! What would be wrong with taking a little more time to make something slightly better? Is it a case of "I'm sick of working on this, it's (again) 'good enough', just release it" or could it be due to competition from other companies? "They're releasing their game dd/mm/yyyy; we need to finish by then"?
Who knows? I'd ask a real MMORPG developer! Heeh.
http://hermitpaul.wordpress.com
Those are certainly two ways to go. There are still others, including the idea that a game can be built incrementally. Don't tell anyone what your long term plans are, just build the thing with an eye to enhancing it for years. It is your operating system for an MMO and it will be improved and enhanced in small increments for the lifetime of your company.
CCP seems to be doing a pretty good job of this in EVE Online. They created the basic game and have been adding to it. In some cases content, in other cases technology improvements. The ambulation expansion is going to add not just 'more of the same' but completely new experiences.
Speaking of which, I very much admire Blizzard as a company, but they are remarkably inept when it comes to leveraging their audience. They've got millions of people playing World of Warcraft and their notion of how to expand the game is to continue to add more levels and more raids. They haven't added new experiences, and the game presents great potential for that. I think the Blizzard designers may have Achievement Myopia: there is no form of entertainment other than achievement.
I assume that Blizzard is currently doing what game companies invariably do - they take their treasure chest of cash and go off to build a new game from scratch. It would be nice if they would design one that doesn't have built-in obsolescence and that allows for enhancement, morphs and improvements for decades. That's why I used the analogy of an operating system; it's a long term proposition.
Is happenig just at MMO industry? is happening only now? ... selective memory i think.
My impression is that game company management is primarily responsible for pushing things out the door early. I assume it's because they just run out of resources and need the cash that the release will generate. A good engineer never says "I'm sick of working on this" unless what he's working on isn't his. A good manager makes sure that his engineers have a sense of ownership of their work.
The balance point is when the managers allocate sufficient resources and the engineers understand that they have a limited time and must hit their schedules. The great majority of engineers are notoriously bad at schedules and would happily continue development until the end of time. That's because they enjoy building stuff.
A rule of thumb for those curious: if you are scheduling your project, let the engineers design the software, then have them break down all tasks until the subtasks identified take between 0.5 and 3.0 days to complete. At that size, an engineer can be fairly accurate in his estimates. It also helps to ensure that the engineer understands exactly what he's going to build and how he's going to do it.
In truth, it kinda takes some of the fun out of it too.
You act like this is at all unusual in the software world. Look at any new version of Windows. Right out of the box, it's a buggy piece of crap, it usually takes until at least SP1 for it to be remotely stable and often until SP2, more than a year down the road, before it becomes really usable. And people keep buying new versions of Windows!
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Think about it from the perspective of game developers. They can't possibly have enough people to test the whole game for bugs in house. There's a huge amount of different PC components and drivers on market at the moment. Different operating systems too. Hell I have a Wacom tablet and because of it's drivers I couldn't get BioShock working. How strange is that when tablet has nothing to do with the game as far as I know?
This is why there are beta tests and their purpose is finding and fixing biggest issues before the release. Of course new bugs are found all the time from games no matter how polished they are (World of Warcraft for example where they fix bugs in every patch) and with patches new bugs are introduced and just waiting to be found. Test servers are for findings bugs and problems in the upcoming content, but amount of people participating is much smaller so bugs can and most likely will get in the final release also.
It's impossible to create a huge MMO that doesn't have some sort of problems in the beginning. That's one of those reasons I prefer to wait for some time before buying so they get biggest problems fixed. Another reason for waiting is for example what happened with Age of Conan where the companies involved lied to people about the content and features. Game companies advertising game as something it's going to be in 3 years is a much bigger problem in my opinion.
Ant,
I understand where you are coming from and have just commented on a darkfall article and can relate to this thread. If you can go back in history almost every "goldrush" or "oilrush" has created a virtual feeding frenzy within a community of people that are trying to catch the wave. Of making money that is, if you go back to the late 90's with the internet commerce/search engine/e-advertising bubble, you could see a rash of companies popping up. All trying to create the killer app or the New,NEW thing after seeing it done successfully by others.
Blizzard wasn't the first but they made it very attractive to all these other new, indie startups. Yeah there are some old hats int there but for the most part Blizz seems to have a working formula that many companies are try to capture or emulate (means: copy). And just like the dot.com bubble and the real estate bubble there will be the mmo bubble; it will burst and the cream will naturally rise to the top as usual. You will see alot of smaller co's closing or gobbled up that is already starting to happen and the big dogs will just get bigger.
As far as the consumer is concerned they are and always be the herd looking for the next fresh field to graze on. The lead bull says, hey the grass is blue here. ERRRRR! the whole herd just stampedes over not looking for pitfalls or even if there is grass, it's just different and new to them. OH WAIT, this grass is bad, let's go here the grass is better and FREE! ERRRR and the herd is on the move again.
I am part of that herd, as much as I'm in denial it;s the truth. But now I am a little more cautious, I listen to the community, ask questions and talk to people before I just jump on any old bandwagon. I also listen to my gut and if I want to play something I just play it, and if I'm done then I'm done with it; It's over for that game. I've played a quite a few games and now I view it as something I call, "recreational investment", I'm investing my time and money like you would in a stock. If it worked from you, great, if not then keep it moving.
My point is: if you don't like it, keep it moving. There is a TON of tried and true games out there and many more on the horizon.
Have fun and play safe,
Ink
PS: I understood you fine, which means your english is perfect. English is my first lanquage and sometimes people don't even understand me, go figure.
Those are certainly two ways to go. There are still others, including the idea that a game can be built incrementally. Don't tell anyone what your long term plans are, just build the thing with an eye to enhancing it for years. It is your operating system for an MMO and it will be improved and enhanced in small increments for the lifetime of your company.
CCP seems to be doing a pretty good job of this in EVE Online. They created the basic game and have been adding to it. In some cases content, in other cases technology improvements. The ambulation expansion is going to add not just 'more of the same' but completely new experiences.
Speaking of which, I very much admire Blizzard as a company, but they are remarkably inept when it comes to leveraging their audience. They've got millions of people playing World of Warcraft and their notion of how to expand the game is to continue to add more levels and more raids. They haven't added new experiences, and the game presents great potential for that. I think the Blizzard designers may have Achievement Myopia: there is no form of entertainment other than achievement.
I assume that Blizzard is currently doing what game companies invariably do - they take their treasure chest of cash and go off to build a new game from scratch. It would be nice if they would design one that doesn't have built-in obsolescence and that allows for enhancement, morphs and improvements for decades. That's why I used the analogy of an operating system; it's a long term proposition.
This is exactly what i expect from this companys... I dont expect a full complete game full of content, without any bug or problems, but theres fundamental basics in games that i hope to find when I decide to buy them. But recent games seems to be missing a lot of the basics. And when we see them selling more or less 1 milion copys at launch and drop to 200k subscribers, kinda show how much the game was missing or the over hype created around it.
Ofc that us consumers got our share to blame in this hypes, but Im also sure that it tastes good for this companys, to use that hype, cause they know it will sell tons of copys right after the launch. I wish they would focus in the long term and not in the short term of getting back all the money invested.
Anyway, I'm happy with this answers cause it kinda "fill" my lack of knowledge in this issues. I have no clue whats needed to "design" software and the problems they face, technical or human. I'm just a consumer, that is often "cheated" (yeh is not the proper word but my english starts to fail) about what a game has to offer. A small example.. returning to the hype thingy... is when all your friends and comunity overall, keep saying "this game pvp will rock" and then you buy it, play 2 days and find out that the pvp system is complete nonsense or pretty much badly designed or it ends beeing a PvE feast. Shouldnt the company clarify people of what the game is about and its current state and long term objective?
Its like going to a restaurant to eat rabbit and since the head of the poor animal isnt there, we kinda dont know if we are eating cat or rabbit exactly.
Thanks for the calm/inteligent and honest answers.
Sometimes MMOs need time to get better.
Hell the game I play Atm took a year+ to get good and even now 6 years after release gets better and better.
Thing is if people gave up on the game during the first 6 months like most people did to WAR and AoC then I would never have one of the most polished and complete MMOs on the market to play.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
It is why I neither pre-order nor purchase "MMORPGs" in advance. It is not worth it. It is risky. They should have to pay ME for beta-testing their product and finding bugs.
It is unfair to the consumer, and the product released is, in one word, defective.
I have learned my lessons, and I know put my money where my mouth is.
Wait and hope ...theres all left to say for me. Atm i see nothing above average including the upcoming stuff . Maybe ive spend too many hours on mmo's wich makes me rather pessemistic , resulting in only seeing the half empty glass of water
I am not and if other people want to part with their money for bad games, who am i to disagree? It is their money. Why would you care?
Let companies release bad games. Many died and went bankrupt.