Developer Perspectives: Immersion

Or how about foraging? Foraging and similar skills are put into the game because hey, what could be more realistic than walking past an orchard and picking an apple, or walking past a berry bush and having a wee snack? Why is it possible in any game for me to fail at picking up a piece of fruit after I get past the first five levels? My dog can successfully pick berries and she doesn’t have thumbs. I could understand having the amount of fruit or weed or metal being a variable. I could understand if the quaffing of in game alcohol reduced my chances to pick something off the ground. I’d even be on board for weather being a harvest variable. But every time I fail to harvest a resource from a ground level spawn, and me at level fifty with maxed out skills, a little piece of willing suspension of disbelief is burned away with a branding iron shaped like the letters WTF.

What really burns my britches is when I quit crafting and attempt a little questing. It always seems like I find the worst quests when I’m in the worst mood.

I know firsthand what goes into these things. I even wrote a column on it. That doesn’t stop me from getting annoyed. It actually makes it worse, sometimes, because I know what it would take to fix it, and that half the time these annoyances result from pure carelessness.

Take for example a quest requiring me to talk to a monster that only spawns at night. Every MMO has to have at least one of these quests. It must be in the secret handbook you get issued when you’re hired as a writer. Anyway, as a player, I always seem to get the quest five or ten minutes before “dusk.” Not quite enough time to go do anything else, but plenty of time to sit there at the spawn point and get my nose rubbed in the fact that the “local color” scripts run on a precise 45 second schedule.

“Meow.”

“Good evening to you!”

“And to you, ma’am.”

(distant bell rings)

“Meow.”

“Good evening to you!”

“And to you, ma’am.”

(distant bell rings)

“Meow.”

This seems like such a neat little script when you’re just running by, but after ten minutes of waiting for a ghost to pop, you find yourself trying to kill the cat. And you can’t. You can’t move it, you can’t pet it, you can’t feed it, and you realize, good lord, I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes like some kind of zombie. Why is there always a script running in the spots people are most likely to be sitting at for any length of time longer than the script? Why is it always the short, lame script, and not like the long, clever, hilarious one that runs in the most dangerous high-aggro zone nineteen thousand miles from the nearest quest, let alone shop?

I know why. Because someone got handed the city zone and said “Here, put in scripts to make the city feel alive, because we’re cutting 20% of the content and 100% of the interactive features we were talking about in the last dev journal. You’ve got until tomorrow, when the press event starts.” And the awesome script in the back of beyond was lovingly crafted for several days back when they thought the zone was going to be a crossroads zone, not a fringe zone.

What’s the answer to all this?

Play testing. Not beta testing. Play testing. By developers. The day always comes when one of the devs comes by that night spawn, goes fishing, sews some pants, and by the next patch it gets fixed. To be honest, scheduled play time is always built into the schedule, but it’s the first thing to get cut when the project manager, promoted for his charm and not his talent, fails to hit his deadlines.

If we can’t have play testing, can I at least give the cat a fish?