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Originally posted by Drakon911
What truly boggles my mind is how it seems as if every new game that comes out is being "produced" by companies run by people that don't play games themselves. Maybe I should narrow that down to the people that hold the purse strings.
The movie "Groundhog Day" comes to mind. They live in that type of world that's the same day repeating over and over and they keep trying different things and not realizing that the outcome will be the same.
These people appear to have one thing in mind and only one thing, money. Regardless of common sense or their programmers or whomever telling them the idea is a bad one, they think it'll make them a few more dollars and they go with it.
For example, pushing a game out too early. How many times has that caused a game to do poorly or even to cause it to fail completely? Yet these people continue to do it. Another biggie to me is alienating and/or pissing off your customers by poor communication or lack of communication completely. SWG is THE prime example of both of these. It was pushed out too early, but it was able to recover. It continued on a while longer before it alienated and pissed off it's customers by totally ignoring their wishes/needs. Like an airplane that takes off with too little fuel and a rookie pilot who just got his license by reading "Flying Planes For Dummies". It might take off, it might fly a little while but it's destined to crash and burn.
Sadly I think that Champions Online is rolling down the same runway. Before the game has even been released Cryptic has managed to alienate and anger a large chunk of it's potential playerbase with the whole Lifetime Subscription fiasco. People hate to feel like they've been deceived, they also hate to think that a company that makes a product they enjoy doesn't care about their feelings.
Where do these guys think the money comes from? They act as if there's this huge pool of money and since Blizzard figured out a way to tap it, they can too. I've got news for you guys, it's not by running that huge pipe across the backs of your customers.

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This is a fantastic post and I want to draw more attention to it.

You don't get money from players by making it seem like you want to get money from them. That doesn't mean tricking them, either, (though I think that is what happened in SWG) it means focusing on making a game that is enjoyable to play. And this doesn't mean this ridiculous focus on FUN FUN FUN I keep seeing recently. Fun isn't the only thing that makes a game...fun. I need tension in my PvP, a genuine fear of something, probably death, in my PvE, crafting that takes time and effort and planning.

Of course, some might see this as grindy and not fun. And that is the problem. There is no one formula that makes games people enjoy playing. Just look at WoW V EVE. Both have large playerbases, both continue to get new players in, and they couldn't be more different in design and implementation.

The only way to make a good game is not to focus on making a "game" so you can make "money." People that play MMOs want a living, breathing world that in no way resembles our own Developers need to have their own, new, unique visions, and then run with them. WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). That is what people want. That and the polish. You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.

People complain about a grind, but if the combat is fun in a game, a grind suddenly isn't so much a grind. You need some level of grind just to take up time. If players can master everything too easily, they will quickly grow bored and go do something else

I, like you, Drakon 911, am somewhat horrified yet mystified by investors that do not listen to the people making the games. Most of the time, someone making the game itself, the designers and programmers, like games themselves and in a general sense know if something will fail horribly. And yet...

What I think MMORPG should do is have an "article" about "What to players want in an MMO." That thread would be massive and have more fantastic suggestions than developers could handle. No, we wouldn't agree, but that fact alone should help developers.

You could have probably filled the space for this article with an advertisement.

I have played both and I enjoyed both. Game sdie when the makers deem them no longer profitable or worth continued investment of resources. I played TR to the end and it was just too little effort towards end game that came too late to save it, still wasn''t a bad game. I have plaayed SWG both before and well after NGE and it's a completely different game. It's still complicated, but not in the same way. The biggest problem with SWG is the stigma of the NGE. If you were to never have heard of or played it before in your life, there is a good chance you would enjoy it today.

There are other games you dont hear about expect maybe once a year that have been around forever and are still being played as much as any that survive the initial buy and try 30 days: DAoC, EQ1, EQ2, Eve, Anarchy Online, nd many others. Should these die too because people dont rave about how great they are constantly?

Originally posted by Bob_Blawblaw

And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?

Uh, all over the place actually.  It started immediately and hasn't stopped since.  But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.

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Originally posted by USFPutty

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Originally posted by Bob_Blawblaw

And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?

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Uh, all over the place actually.  It started immediately and hasn't stopped since.  But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.

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Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.

Originally posted by SunwolfNC

Originally posted by Isturi

When can we put WoW out of its misery??

 

Are you stoned? You surely sound like it. Oh wait - I know... you failed at trolling. I get it.

Why else would someone suggest that a game with over 10 million CURRENT subscriptions should be put out of its "misery". Where, until recently, an estimated 3% of a countries ECONOMY is based off of selling items in the game world.

Seriously though, you're right. The misery of a game that makes about $150,000,000 A MONTH, is in horrible misery. Damn, just close the servers and delete the databases.. it's a horrible travestiy...

No, it's a simple and boring game.  However, it's just that perfect balance of mindless and serviceable that somehow combines to be a lowest common denominator favorite.

McDonald's does great business, even though most folks will acknowledge that most of the food will kill you and tastes like it was coagulated from soylent green.  Jerry Springer was hugely popular even though most folks admitted it was mindless sensationalist crap.

That a game makes money is an indicator that it is successful, not that it is good.  Do not mix those two up.

That being said, no, I imagine WoW will be with us a long, long time.  More's the pity.

Originally posted by Leodious

 

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Originally posted by USFPutty

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Originally posted by Bob_Blawblaw

 

And that makes 4 very public negative critiques of SWG in one month! Where was all this anti-NGE speak years ago?

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Uh, all over the place actually.  It started immediately and hasn't stopped since.  But it didn't really help since they admittedly were paying no attention to anyone on this end of the computer.

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Everyone with any sense hates SOE now and won't touch them. This is a good thing in my opinion.

I'll be a frankly honest whore now, though, and say that if they brought the game back to the day before NGE went live and I could have my Master DE / Master Shipwright, my house, and my piles of materials back and go back to doing what I loved, I'd probably be there in a cold minute.

But, yeah, death to SOE.

Originally posted by Leodious

 

 

The only way to make a good game is not to focus on making a "game" so you can make "money." No a games company is a buisness, but your not entirely wrong in my opinion, they need to focus on making an achievalbe amount of money People that play MMOs want a living, breathing world that in no way resembles our own Well again, no and saldy the exisitance of certain games prove you wrong but that's just me being a redant Developers need to have their own, new, unique visions, and then run with them. YES YES YES!!!! WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). YES That is what people want. That and the polish. YES You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. NO Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.

People complain about a grind, but if the combat is fun in a game, a grind suddenly isn't so much a grind. You need some level of grind just to take up time. If players can master everything too easily, they will quickly grow bored and go do something else

I, like you, Drakon 911, am somewhat horrified yet mystified by investors that do not listen to the people making the games. Most of the time, someone making the game itself, the designers and programmers, like games themselves and in a general sense know if something will fail horribly. And yet... Yes and No, the example frequently used is the movie industry. Your always gonna have your Hollywood Blockbusters that appeal to as many people and are brought to life by committee and focus group. Nothing wrong with em, but there only one side of the coin what is needed are more Indie films. Games made to the directors vision and his bank balance, this is the side of the MMO industry that serious needs to be gorwn for the future. Right now the MMO industry to me kinda seems like a one sided coin.

Originally posted by Gyrus

Originally posted by Bob_Blawblaw

Originally posted by Baltizaar

Wow I couldn't agree with you more.  No matter how good the story or graphics are the one main question is does it all come together to make the game FUN.  Are the players being entertained at every step of the way in their MMO world so that they never want to leave or do they have to do so many tedious and time consuming tasks that it becomes a choir to play.   Make a truly fun MMO and you will literally have millions of players returning again and again, but make one that looks good or sounds good and has very little fun as a result of its complexity or design then you will see subscribers coming and going never to return.

 

It's the truth that so many publishers/developers seem to just not get. I was a game developers conference a few months ago, and there was a lecture by some high up marketing/research fellow who literally thought he had the equation for fun! Turned out the guy was giving us the equation for what perceived as the 'metacritic code', which many game execs see as the holy grail.

He was off his rocker btw. These people should stop looking at metacritic numbers and start reading the reviews which give the numbers weight. But yet, PLAY SOME F***ING GAMES! But I digress.

btw, the equation was something along the lines of 'x feature + y feature + z IP X better graphics = fun!'. He never mentioned releasing bug free code or polishing a game. Booo!  Yes, these are the people making your games.

Ahh yes.  Fun.

The danger here is that you can take the whole concept too far.  MMOs are interesting things and often what makes an MMO fun is a combination of elements including elements that are not fun by themselves.

As an example of the concept I like to use Silent Hunter III.  It's not an MMO but it does demonstrate the point.
Travel in SH III involves physically sailing from port to your patrol grid and back again.  Even with time compression this can take ages (hours).  Boring stuff.  Only it isn't.  Because there is tension.  Every time you see a ship, or get a sonar contact, or see an air craft there are choices to be made and the very real possibility that a wrong choice could spell "GAME OVER". 
They could have designed the game to 'warp' you to your patrol zone and back again.  But if they had done that the game would have lost something that gave the player a sense of attachment to his boat and his crew.  So a boring element becomes 'fun' or at least contributes to it in a meaningful way.

Back to MMOs (one that should probably be on the list already and one that is sure to join if it is ever released)
PotBS and The Agency.
Pre release for PotBS I saw a video interview with one of the FLS devs (can't find the link now).
For that entire interview he rabbited on about "FUN!"
"We ditched this because it wasn't fun...", "...couldn't find a way to make it fun..." etc etc.
Right then I knew the game was in trouble.
Yes, they stripped out stuff that wasn't fun, and in doing so somewhere along the way they stripped out the game's soul.
What was left was a shell of an MMO that people just don't want to play.

The Agency is the same.  Again I saw a video interview and saw the same idotic focus on "Fun, fun, FUN!"
Yes, this approach might work for a console game, but MMOs are a whole different style of game.
Sometimes it's the 'non-fun' elements that allow the fun elements to even work.

So the pursuit of fun can be a double edged sword.

Your Silent Hunter 3 reference actually reminds me of an MMO equivalent (sort of) in EVE, where I used to have endless fun running high-value parts through the gauntlet out to 0.0 space through hordes of PvP-happy pirates using my little cloaked frigate.  It's a long tedious run, and to survive it, you have to manually jump the ship.  It COULD be uneventful, or you could be running for your life.  Tension and excitement in a 'nonfun' activity.

I beta tested PotBS.  I played it live for over a year, involved in a nice big society and making big ships.  And I came to be VERY BORED with the game.  Other than a lot of 'fun' changes which are supposed to increase/improve PvP (the ONLY thing the devs seem to consider fun), there really hasn't been any content added in, uh, EVER.  And you can only play a game of capture the port back and forth for so long before it's boring, repetitive, and no longer interesting.  "Fun."

Originally posted by Leodious

Of course, some might see this as grindy and not fun. And that is the problem. There is no one formula that makes games people enjoy playing. Just look at WoW V EVE. Both have large playerbases, both continue to get new players in, and they couldn't be more different in design and implementation.

WoW is the paragon of games NOT because of it's depth (or lack thereof) or storyline (or lack thereof). It is so popular because it is easy to get into, and easy to understand (but in some ways, difficult to master). That is what people want. That and the polish. You just will not find a game with the level of polish WoW has. Everything looks just as it should, even without addons the default UI is better than anyone elses (they are kind of stupid for not letting you move it around wherever you want ala GW/LotRO), the movement is organic, the early levels hold your hand, but don't feel too much like a tutorial; that hooks a new player.

A couple points here.  First one is exactly what I've ben saying for years now.  The fact that some games out there ARE, ostensibly, WoW clones (a term I hate) is a major problem.  They're not WoW clones because WoW is a pioneering MMO.  It's not.  It's a well-assembled conglomerate of the most successful aspects of games that came before it (most notably the EQ family, UO, etc.).  It's about as derivatively vanilla as you can get.  But it became RIDICULOUSLY popular, and other gaming studios wanted that success (read: money) and tried to make their games WoW.  But there is ALREADY a WoW, so everyone else suffers the Xerox effect, and fails, does poorly, or at least not as well as hoped/expected.

EVE, on the other hand, is a wholly independent game design.  There's no room in the world for 12 WoWs.  There is certainly room for WoW and EVE.   So the focus needs to be not on cloning something currently successful, but finding an unoccupied niche (or creating one if you're bold) and filling it.

As for polish, I agree.  I am not a fan of WoW; this is obvious.  That being said, there is no denying that its easy learning curve and ability to direct the player without being super hamfisted about it is a welcoming and comforting aspect for new players and probably explains a good deal of its success.  I would NEVER go so far as to call it a paragon of ANYTHING. :-D

Originally posted by Torak

OMG cry more about the NGE.

 

They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another.

Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't.

So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.

 

You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here?  PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community.  People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.

Originally posted by beowulf2014

Originally posted by Torak

OMG cry more about the NGE.

 

They changed it for a reason folks, the game sucked. It always sucked and it still does. It was losing subs way before the CU. It was not "fun" grinding in that hell hole of a game that was worse then L2. They never went back for a reason...it sucked and wouldn't change anything just swap out one crying community for another.

Fanatics, that's the sorry old truth. Business decisions don't lie, a profit motivated company like SOE would have changed something if they thought they could score a worth while amount of YOUR dollars off of it. Obviously they don't.

So have a coke and smile and for the love of Pete stop your f*cking crying already.

 

 

You have lost your damn mind. The game most certainly didn't "suck" to most of the players. It sucked for YOU,, and most likely because you sucked at IT.. All MMO's loose an amount of subs after release just because the game isn't for everyone. Grind? I never felt like I was grinding.. Maybe the phrase "You're doing it wrong" should be put here?  PRE CU was a blast of a game and a huge community.  People were not all about the "end game" race to get to the top. It actually had heart and again COMMUNITY. That is lacking from a lot of MMO's today.

It's been years and I'm STILL looking for the next SWG.  So to speak.  And there really WASN'T an endgame, per se.  Since folks were constantly deciding they could better optimize their builds and tweaking their skills, pitting their custom ideas against someone else's custom ideas.  And some of us could just craft.  Beautiful.

Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read.

My 2 cents:

The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space?

Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game?

Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.

Originally posted by Quale

Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read.

My 2 cents:

The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space?

Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game?

Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.

I think this question comes up at the end of just about every beta for the last decade when most reasonable people are aware of a plethora of remaining bugs that the developers can no longer afford to remedy pre-release.  This kind of piss-poor planning and development is one of the key reasons expectations have dwindled and a shoddy product at launch has become the de facto standard.  And that does NOT bode well for your industry, especially when hunting for investors.

Originally posted by roz17

HEY... why didn't you touch on the converse as counterpoint... E&B which was put down far too early.....

just a thought... don't want to write your next article for you or nuthin'...

Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market.  To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.

MYtwo cents worth.

Originally posted by Quale

Quite a few sharp posts here. Good read.

My 2 cents:

The unprofessionalism of the gaming industry continues to baffle me. Granted, the industry is young and I'm sure other art forms had their share of wild days, but do they all have to go through the same process individually? Do they all have to invent the wheel each in their own seperate space?

Making a good MMO may be alot of work and demand great skill, but is it theoretically really that hard? If you stick your finger in the ground and acknowledge the fact that it has to be polished, user friendly and maybe even a tad fresh, doesn't that carry you a very long way towards a successful game?

Maybe there just isn't enough talent to go around.

What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players. Which is to say it's not baffling at all.I'm actually a bit disappointed in the lack of industry knowledge by the author of this article.

The fact is MMOs are the most complex piece of software that exists in the marketplace. And it's not just the whole, it's the parts. Rendering, graphics, animations, networks, server technology, database. MMOs tie all the relevant technologies together to create a seamless world, and this is non-trivial. Which is why we see a trend towards middleware solutions. But technology and design have a fairly intimate relationship, and many studios don't like to be bound by such external requirements (they want to be able to modify source code as needed). But I digress. To make a triple-A MMO you need really a lower bound of about 100 developers working for a couple of years minimum, not including QA or customer service. In reality it's somewhat higher and longer. This is a relatively large scale for a single software project, so in addition to the technical requirements you also need competent project management. This also assumes the designers are experienced, and are capable of making a fun and well-balanced game. And MMOs are the hardest genre of game to design, because players inherently impact the game experience of other players. Considering the impact of anonymity on human behavior, if there's any chance of that impact to be negative, it will be. Players rarely do what designers intend, and the more freedom a player has, the rarer that becomes. If this is a single player game it doesn't matter. I'm sure Will Wright never intended players of The Sims to get the most enjoyment out of torturing the denizens of their game world. In an MMO it does matter, because player A directly impacts the subscription revenue from player B - interacting with others is why we play MMOs after all.

There are two other facts worth mentioning. The first is that by software industry standards, game developers are some of the least paid on average, and this makes it hard to obtain the top talent. The second fact is that most commercial software projects (even projects on very well-known applications such as accounts receivable programs) are failures, for a variety of reasons. Heck, most businesses fail in their first year, so this isn't even limited to the software industry.

Contrary to the position put forward by the article, in my experience most MMO developers enjoy playing MMOs. You don't take less pay to work on a game, unless you are really into games. You don't work countless hours of unpaid overtime, unless you are passionate about making a great MMO. So it's not a matter of going into a meeting and saying "oh, let's remember to ask if this is fun" Quite frankly, that's pretty insulting.

I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses. Yet an MMO world seeks to provide fun for all them, in a manner where nobody's fun detracts from anyone else's. Niche MMOs attempt to address this issue by deliberately and unabashedly limiting the scope, and say: we are only catering to X kind of gamer, who enjoys Y kind of fun. This is an admission that certain kinds of fun are mutually exclusive, which is why we will never see a mainstream hardcore PvP MMO. And at the end of the day, MMOs are a business. Gaming is not a human right, players are not "owed" anything by the gaming industry as a whole. There is no consumer entitlement to great products

If you buy a $60 single player title, you would reasonably expect to get a month's worth of enjoyment out of it. But with the same $60 spent on an MMO box (with a free first month), players feel that if they don't get at least a year's enjoyment it was a complete waste of time. So I also think MMOs are held to a higher standard. Why? Because there is something uniquely compelling about living in a virtual universe, with virtual friends and virtual things, and remaking yourself into whatever you want to be inside that universe. Everyone can fulfill the American Dream, just in pixilated format.

So if there is such a burning commercial demand for an MMO wherein a player can completely immerse himself in a believable and spectacular game world, and such an MMO does not exist, one has to wonder why. Is it because supply and demand stopped working? I don't think so. I think the only obvious conclusion is simply that MMOs are extremely difficult to get right.

Originally posted by Warmage38

Originally posted by roz17

HEY... why didn't you touch on the converse as counterpoint... E&B which was put down far too early.....

just a thought... don't want to write your next article for you or nuthin'...

 

Ah Earth and Beyond. A Game that was killed by the publishers before it even hit the market.  To those that don't know E & B was originally developed by Westwood Studios. The concept and stories that were created and the the subsequent development were in essence great. Then along comes EA who bought out Westwood to get the Command and Conquer IP. E & B went along for the ride. EA then proceeded to destroy the game by going in a different direction. With next to nothing in marketing and with little to nothing for development resources the game died. It did manage to last 2 glorious years because of the great community the game spawned but alas EA killed it.

 

MYtwo cents worth.

I well remember E&B. I still have the original box up on my game shelf. Good game, and great community.  Its too bad that EA(as usual) didn't have a clue about what a gem they had.  All too typical of their usual short sighted corporate mentality.

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What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players

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So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.

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I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.

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What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.

Comprendo?

Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.

Why do you think that is?

Originally posted by Quale

 

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What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players

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The football analogy is not good. If the spectators voted on the outcome of a match, it would be good, but they don't. We are armchair customers and what the armchair says, goes.

 

So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.

 

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I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.

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Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.
Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.

 

What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.

Comprendo?

Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.

Why do you think that is?

Human nature for one. People in positions of power do not like to admit mistakes.  The people under them do not wish to risk their jobs(its mainly a pay check to most of those in the trenches).  By the time the train starts to derail, its long past the time to change direction. The code base is HUGE by that time, and horribly complex. Some of the original people are gone, and with them went their experience. Damn few professional programers are any good at documenting their work. Which makes it a waking nightmare to deal with their code contributions. By this time the investors are already in a state of panic, and are not interested in throwing good money after bad, in a gamble on the new direction. This theme has played out in game after game.

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Originally posted by Quale

 

 

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What baffles me a bit more is the arm-chair quarterbacking of players

 

The football analogy is not good. If the spectators voted on the outcome of a match, it would be good, but they don't. We are armchair customers and what the armchair says, goes.
 
So the making of an MMO is a massive undertaking, so what? If noone wants to do it, fine, I can wait. It's not like I play cruddy products anyway so what's the difference? But someone wants to do it and claims to have done it all the time and just a very small portion of them actually deliver.

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This is what I consider a player entitlement mentality. In my opinion, it's not what the customer says that goes. That would be neither practicable nor good business sense. It's what the company which is creating the product says, that goes. They are the professionals after all. You would not want to see the horrible beast of an MMO designed and developed by a committee of players.

To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!

The customer/player of an MMO can choose to purchase the product, or not purchase the product. So I think arm-chair quarterbacking is a very appropriate analogy, because just a skim of these boards shows that many players seem to "have all the answers," which is very convenient when they are not the ones funding and developing an MMO :) Especially on MMOs they neither play, nor have any intent of playing.

Again, the rules of supply and demand are not broken in the realm of MMOs. If customers want something enough (and are willing to pay for it), and it is possible, the marketplace will produce it.
 

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Originally posted by Quale

 

 

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I would counter that statement with the following: "What is fun?" If you ask 100 different gamers, you will get 99 different responses.

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Even if you did get 99 different responses (which is a wild exaggeration and perhaps even a little off topic) The game that those 100 players would like to play would have to be.. you got it: Polished, Userfriendly and A tad fresh.
Which of those 99 players the developer would like to cater to is entirely up to them. It doesn't change anything with regards to my point.
 

 

What some of us are trying to say is that you should be able to foresee what's going to happen. You should be able to say: Our game at the very least has got to be these things: <Insert list here>
We are going to build something with wheels and experience has shown us that in order for the vehicle to hold up, the wheel has got to have a minimum number of spokes. If we can't guarantee that, forget it, we need to work on figuring that out before we do anything else.
Comprendo?
Many people are able to foresee what's going to happen early in a development process but the choo choo steadily continues on it's way to doom, sometimes for years, spending millions of dollars in fuel on it's journey towards a crash and burn into the wall of consumer reality.
Why do you think that is?

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Oh, I'm sure if a project is doomed to fail the developers are the first to know, not the last. It's the same reason horrible movies get made, or horrible cars, or horrible anything.

Here's the problem. Back in 1994 you could make a triple-A game title with a $500,000 and a small team of maybe 10 core developers. The Lead Designer had the vision, and it was easy to communicate to the team and keep an eye on every detail. Projects of such scale don't need a serious project management layer. I suspect this more or less describes Ultima Online (I could be wrong).

These days you need tens of millions of dollars, team sizes numbering in the hundreds, and years and years. Part of this is player expectation, and part is just the evolving technology. Technology has become so specialized you need lots of different experts for different areas of the game. Your engine coders, network coders, render coders, GUI coders, DBAs, technical artists... these are all highly specialized. The technology demands it.

And the fact is the ability to be a good Lead Designer and the ability to be a good Executive Producer have no necessary correlation. In cases where the roles are split, you end up with a polished uninspired mess. In the cases where the roles are not split, you end up with an under-polished "great idea" that never hits a release date and finally ships missing half its features. You need project management to coordinate all those different specialized jobs. But project managers have authority, and are generally not designers.

What trial-and-error has yielded is that applying processes from Software Engineering to what is ultimately a creative endeavor, makes the most business sense. While this works somewhat well for Microsoft Office (or insert random business application) where success is measured by functionality and feature sets, it doesn't quite work out well for MMOs where success is measured in how much fun the players are having. WoW is a success not because Blizzard is packed with super-designers, it's a success because Blizzard had a decade of experience shipping great games. I believe if they had made Shadowbane or Darkfall instead of WoW, it would be just as successful. Most MMO companies don't have this sort of experience, so their internal organization structure is non-optimal, their processes are unrefined, and their expectations are unrealistic. So no matter how great the Lead Designer's vision is (normally it isn't even his vision originally), it's just not going to happen when you throw hundreds of people at it, with varying degrees of experience (as I said it's hard to find talent), impatient investors, and untested technology.

The MMOs that we all want to play will come when the technology catches up in the form of well documented scripting languages where small teams can get back to making games, and some advancements in IK and procedural texture generation. As it stands now the bulk of an MMO development team is coders, artists, QA, followed by producers, associate producers and various managers, followed by designers. You make great business software like that, not great games, unless you are a company like Blizzard which is extremely efficient and has worked all the kinks out of their workflow pipelines (generally project managers are a poor substitute for good pipelines). Unfortunately, what we have now is what we're going to get until MMOs can get made entirely in high-level languages.

Occasionally you have a bright gem like EVE, which was done by a small core team. Note the whole thing was originally written in stackless python which is a high level language. But the game has suffered for it, it has huge limitations (where's my flying avatar?) which relegate it to a very successful niche game.

As a customer you have two options: play the games that are out there, or don't, and wait for the revolution.
 
 

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To use an analogy of another consumer product, you are not entitled to a car that GM makes for you, personally. You cannot demand things of GM because you drive a car. The most you can do is simply purchase some other brand. Saying GM should do this or that, with all the authority of a customer, is the same armchair. aka: where's my flying car?!

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My posts are about fundamentals, and fundamentals is where it's at to a very large degree. (Hence the wheel invention analogies etc)

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't debate that there is a number of basic things that any car is expected to be able to do, regardless of what differences there could be on a more detailed level.

There is not a car manufacturer in the universe that would consider going into business with cars that won't even run properly. Yet, that's exactly what mmorpg developers do over and over again.

We're not discussing the same thing.

We're not asking for flying cars. We're asking why so many game developers have to invent the combustion engine (and failing) every time they wanna make a game.