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Alpha footage, damned if you do, damned if you don´t
Azrile
Member Posts: 2,582
One of the hardest parts of being a non-EA, Blizzard, Sony developer is building hype for a MMO. They are huge undertakings and many fail to even get into a playable state. You also end up with the Darkfall type fiasco where the ´game´ is in development for like 10 years..
So if you are 18 months away from release, how do you show you have a viable game? This is pre-alpha territory where you are testing systems in a vacuum. Graphics are often placeholders of placeholders. You can have most of the scripting done ( systems), but still be a long way off with graphics and animations and even world building.
We have been thinking of how to handle this. How do you show the cool systems in your game, how the gameplay will be fun and interesting.. but yet not get overwhelmed with negative feedback regarding graphics.
Thinking about it today because I was reading some ´reviews´ of the Shards pre-alpha event going on this week. Comments about how bad the graphics look, how bad the combat looks.. I think the biggest problem is that fans/players do not realize how these games are built. The first thing, and most important thing you do is get your systems right. If the entire purpose of your game is to be able to build castles on clouds, you better make sure you can code it before you spend a lot of money on graphics. It doesn´t matter how bad or low-rez the textures are, but if you can have your character create a castle in the cloud, that is proof of concept.. from there you start working on graphics for it.
The big problem is the internet isn´t timestamped. In 18 months, if someone types ´´ how is combat in Shards online´... they could very well get sent to that review of a pre-alpha. Or beyond that, just reputation. Those players who were turned off by the combat in Shards... they may never look at the game again to see what the launch version looks like.
Of course, you have to show something or else everyone will just say you are making vaporware.. we will see, but I am guessing the Shards event hurt more than it helped.
Comments
Far too much emphasis on hype to begin with. It's like advertising a movie 6 months before it's due to be released... always screams to me, "this movie is so bad that if we can't get them to watch it opening night, we're screwed".
People will try games whether they've been beat over the head about it for 12 years straight or stumble across it by happenstance. The more you try to sell it, the more you end up setting yourself up for failure. The only promise you should be making is that you have made a game. Let the players decide what that game is for themselves instead.
Why not just build a game say like Wildstar for example, behind the curtains with no peep or whisper about it. Then when it is ready, you release it. No one's seen it, tried it, have any idea what it's about. They buy it play it and discover for themselves all they need to know about it. If it's good, they will love it and love it even more because they didn't know anything about it before they played it. They will tell their friends and friends of friends to go play it. It will become a sensation all by word of mouth.
Instead what we get is an announcement that some game is coming, and endless screenshots, betas, yadda yadda yadda for umptine years until the day it actually does go live. At that point you already know everything there is to know about the game to the point that you really don't care to play it for very long since you have "technically" been playing it or watching it for years already.
Surprise is something woefully missing from game development these days... everything is advertised to death to it's own detriment. Hype rarely makes a game better... but it does, very often scream out "this game is so bad that if we can't get them to play it on release date, we're screwed".
Food for thought.
Nice post and pretty much true.
I think in this case for Shards, there is no market for such a game anymore. Under a thousand people are interested in seeing this game made. UO was good for its time and that time has past.
I agree completely. The other problem is if you talk about a system by itself early on, players will often think of that system in the context of another game ( usually WOW). My feeling is that it is better to reveal ´your game´ as a whole so that players can hopefully follow the dots of how systems interact with each other in the grand scheme of the game.
I do think smaller dev teams should look at how EVE did it early on, and not try to mimic the AAA titles by going for huge hype too far in advance. Get your 5000 happy players, and let them be your marketing team.
think the main issue is just the name alpha it can mean so many things.. for example Archeage is in "alpha" now but is technically a finished game the alpha is mainly the translations and server testing. Landmark is in "alpha" but is very playable and has a good amount of features. Alpha for another game could be a framework still with so many things not yet complete.. For me alpha generally means you have the major systems in place though and ready to test.. I have alpha tested a LOT of games over the past 10 years and only a handful were drastically different from alpha to launch when you are talking core gameplay mechanics..
If a game I alpha tested felt clunky and little unresponsive it generally wasn't a ton better come launch. So just from my experience unless your talking internal testing or pre-alpha stuff generally alpha is in a state that the core game mechanics and the overall "feel" isn't going to be a drastic difference once the game launches. Now in some games I can say it was but that was very few of the many games I have alpha tested.
Technically in computer programming, alpha is whenever you compile your code and it doesn´t crash. But yeah, the terminology is used differently all over the place. I am playing Blizzards Hero of the Storm alpha now.... and if they put it on Steam for $20, it would be better than most games up there. Completely playable and fun but still an ´alpha´.
clunky combat and GUI are simply because it is not something that is fun to fix, and artists and coders can blame each other. Also, it is a bitch to fix after it is a problem. Once you have 300 NPC models and hundreds of animations... and you say your combat feels sluggish.. that is a lot of work to fix. It is one of those things the devs have to make a priority very early in the process, and then demand the standards be kept up as more models and scripting is added. It is one of the big things that WOW did right at launch.. keypresses are very responsive in WOW and the animations fire immediately. But that is because they set those specs very early and every model and animation that got added from the very beginning had those specs applied to it. If you get into a playable alpha or beta, and then realize your combat is sluggish, it is a HUGE thing to fix, and the artists will say it is easier for the scripters to fix, and the scripters will say the artists should fix it.. blah blah..
i agree which is generally why stuff like that doesn't change much once a game goes into a more public alpha testing phase.. I have noticed that games that feel very responsive and the movement/combat flow well and feel like they should generally felt that way from very early builds of the game... at least from my alpha testing experience
Showing Alpha footage should not be used as a method to get players. Its really a method used to get publishers and additional funding to complete the project. Most players expect a lot out of any product they are given even if it was the first compile a developer got without any syntax errors. I mean you can compile "Hello World" for them and they will wonder why its in a cmd line and why the font is so boring.
However, if your alpha test is showing all the gameplay systems in place, just without the graphics or content; then it really won't hold up anyway if it can't capture players' interests. Probably the best mmo on the market right now is Mabinogi Online because it has firmly solid gameplay systems despite having poor graphics. Graphics are a means to get people to buy the box, Gameplay is a means to keep them playing.
Everquest Landmark is a bit of SOE bullshit. Its clear they spent more time developing the graphics engine than gameplay engine. Hooray in an alpha the graphics look good, but the gameplay is still massively buggy. It shouldn't have really made it to the public until those features were hammered out.
For landmark they are trying something new.. landmark in it's alpha state currently is generally an internal test build for many games. They wanted to try doing a more open development type thing since the game itself will be 100% reliant on the players shaping the world so they wanted as much influence from testers(even in these early stages) as possible which is pretty different from most games in how they are made and tested.. For me the big draw for landmark is the story bricks. I have alpha to landmark but currently waiting for story bricks to be put in till i put more time into testing it.
I think they're trying the Minecraft method.
didn't play minecraft till after it was put out so not sure how minecraft development went
When you go to public and show your product depends on a lot of factors. For most, especially indy companies, they want to draw in investors, be it per crowd funding like Shards, or other investors to get a game financed.
And to get it, you have to draw attention to you, you have to show people something. And therefore nowadays it is usally a lot earlier as it was 10 or more years before..
On the other side if you do have all funds you do require, there is not much need to release early on any information and you could actually wait until you game is almost finished and you need players for beta tests. With other words very late beta state, after family and friends just isn't enough... basicly around 6 month before release... and those 6 month would be really more than enough time to build up hype.
Furthermore not all companies are a black box. Information get out of the office in different ways. If you a public holding company you have to give out information on your shareholders, and withit automatically to the public.. therefore it is almost impossible to keep silence for 5+ years. The same is true with your employees, how many beta versions of early games get out to the public unwillingly? Or just some informations, some videos, whatever. And if there is any information you will get asked about it.. you will get requests from all kind of sources.
And finally bigger companies need constant good press, to be in the mouth of everyone. Therefore they have to give out informations gradually on their projects. It is rather simple.. if noone talks about you, about your products, you are basicly non existence.. it is much more about branding, as about individual products.
So basicly only rather small studios with already funded projects could be really be silent for 5+ years.. and how many game companies are small and do have all the required funds? Yeap.. almost none.