Why Vanguard Sets a Bad Precedent for MMOGs 135
The ever-enjoyable Gamers with Jobs has up a fascinating look at the recently released MMOG Vanguard . The article's author, Elysium, takes pains to point out that it's not a review. He didn't play the title long enough to get a firm grasp of the game; he just didn't care enough to spend the time. He outlines what makes Vanguard a bad game, and then points out that the game's creator Brad McQuaid himself has as much as admitted it was released too early. Sony Online Entertainment saved the game from bankruptcy, and released it when the schedule said to and not a moment later. In Elysium's mind, this sets up a really, really bad precedent: "Now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers. Let me put it bluntly, if a game is not ready for retail when the money runs out find another investor or shut the doors. We are customers, and the retail end of the industry is bad enough about not supporting incomplete or inoperable products without developers and publishers assuming we are investors in the development process. Your job as the industry is to create product, and then, and only then, we buy it."
Informed customers knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there were still the die-hards who dismissed these with their standard "Go back to WoW" line, but everybody knew it was true. The die-hards often commented that they knew they were going to be funding a retail Beta, but didn't care because they "believed in the vision"
So I don't think it's setting a bad precedent - the precedent was there long before Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies... all beta'd by me, and all forced out the door too soon. It's no coincidence that they're all doing poorly, with one (AC2) dead.
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers.
The only way we can change the precedent is by being informed customers and not buying crap when we know it's crap. The only way a company like SOE will stop rushing release dates is when they see long-term dissatisfaction outweighing short-term development costs. If they threw another $2 million into development and pushed Vanguard back a few months it would have made a world of difference, giving them subscribers for years to come. Blizzard understood this.
Re:Early? Yes. Bad? No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Community? In EQ, you were forced to group, unless you played one of a handful of classes. Being forced to interact with other people built up a sense of community. All I saw in WoW were random names that happened to be going the same places I was.
Competition? The prevalence of instancing in WoW basically destroyed the idea of competition. All that you have is who is first to beat new content. There's no more racing for big named mobs, which was part of the fun of EQ, imo.
Re:The alternative sucks worse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your idea of of buying it will fund future patches is also faulty. That money goes directly to paying the current debt, and any money left over goes to the investors, and they MIGHT think about reinvesting it back into the project but would you want to depend on that all the time?
Worst case scenario is you end up with a story like Star Wars Galaxies, which is a story in and of itself.
Re:Early? Yes. Bad? No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Community? In EQ, you were forced to group, unless you played one of a handful of classes. Being forced to interact with other people built up a sense of community. All I saw in WoW were random names that happened to be going the same places I was.
Competition? The prevalence of instancing in WoW basically destroyed the idea of competition. All that you have is who is first to beat new content. There's no more racing for big named mobs, which was part of the fun of EQ, imo.
To you, that was what was right about EQ. To me that was what was wrong about EQ. I want to decide when to play my games. I don't want it decided for me. For EQ for all the high level mobs and being first ect.. dictates you sink all free time into it. It's not even all that compelling or fun. The socialization was cool but sometimes you want just log in, finish a few quest and do some fishing ect.. without the necessity to grou into a 40 man raid to find your fishing hole. But to each their own. I prefer WOW mostly. Wow is not made for casual players. it's made for medium hardcore ones while EQ is made for heavy hardcore ones.
Re:Early? Yes. Bad? No. (Score:2, Insightful)
The time to level isn't difficulty, I've played through games that take one hour to finish and are MUCH harder than any MMO I've ever seen and likewise I've played through games that took 40 hours or more but were as easy as a walk in the park (discounting the dog shit you have to dodge all the time on a real walk). Are the fights in Vanguard really more difficult to pull off than the fights in WoW?
Competition? The prevalence of instancing in WoW basically destroyed the idea of competition. All that you have is who is first to beat new content. There's no more racing for big named mobs, which was part of the fun of EQ, imo.
Most people probably didn't like how many more options that gave to griefers and farmers to annoy people.
Re:Setting precedent? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or just out of date. And they'd be right; for one thing, Vista breaks games.
No, the model you want to look for is id software. Game works flawlessly out of the box, only problem is they can take awhile on their Linux/Mac binaries. Once released, they patch it, and patch it, and patch it, until they don't want to patch it anymore and just release the source, so we can keep it rolling.
Patches are a good thing. Relying on patches to fix your fuckups is a bad thing. But there's a big difference between something that's essentially alpha or beta that they expect to patch to release quality, and something that's release candidate quality (think Linux RCs, not Vista RCs), or actual release quality, works pretty much all the time, pretty much anywhere, but it'd still be pretty cool of them to, say, release a patch to support my old Matrox card, or better support my new 64-bit processor.
Re:Informed customers knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
Ship a bad game on time and no one cares.
Ship a good game late, and people won't remember how late it was.
Hardly anyone has such faith in their products anymore...
WoW is seen by some as "EQ Lite" (Score:5, Insightful)
The simplest objection some have about WoW is that it is too simple. This is about taste and cannot really be argued.
One of the things is about how death is handled. SWG at one time handled it so bad that players commited suicide as a way to quickly travel back to base. This is not a good thing for a game. There should be at least some suspension of disbelief and everyone in your party jumping into a lavastream after the big fight saying, "see you later" just doesn't do it.
WoW requires you to go back to your body in an invulnerable form from a fixed point and then respawn in the immidiate area of your body. If you don't you suffer a severe hit to your stats for a period of time.
The "punishement" aspects here are obvious. Going back to your corpse is boring, if in a party it requires everyone to wait, and you better hope they wait because what ever killed you will still be there + fresh respawns.
Some people think this is too though while others think it is too weak. Both are right.
If I remember correctly (I haven't played any MMO in months and they tend to blur together) in EQ2 the punishements are slightly more severe, you respawned alive and well similar to were your ghosts spawns in WoW but with a severe hit to your stats and XP. You could lighten the punishement by recovering your "shard" from your place of death.
Think for a second about the difference between WoW and EQ2 right there. In WoW you travel back to your corpse in order to continue meaningfull play in invulenrable mode, it is nothing but a time waster. You died so you don't get to play for a few minutes. Don't die again.
In EQ2 you are back in the game again from the moment you die BUT severely reduced and now faced with the same journey as a WoW player except you are very vulnerable and now got to fight everything between you and your bleeding mangled corpse.
That is not all, your group has not only now lost a valuable member of your party (or a piece of dead weight) but now faces the choice of making their way back to the entrance to pick you up and escort you to your corpse OR going on in reduced state.
A common sight in EQ2 was to see players hitching a ride into a dungeon with later groups to get back to their group waiting inside.
Obviously therefore death is something far more severe in EQ2 then in WoW. Some people like this.
Yeah it can be seen as a waste of time but it can also be seen as a way of getting better players who actively take care of each other. Having played both of them I have noted that EQ2 groups tend to work better together then WoW. In EQ2 EVERYONE in the group shared in your XP penalty. Can you imagine WoW players trying to deal with this? (The shared XP hit was removed from EQ2, as were shard runs apparently)
There is however yet another way of doing death. SWG had an amazing concept that I think was unique. Not all enemies killed you. You had three bars, if one was reduced to zero you were knocked out. It was then up to the enemy to deliver a finishing blow. Not all critters would do that (depending on species) and even if they wanted too it was possible for them to be distracted by your team mates. This added a whole new element to the game. Now there was still the tactical option of "saving" a teammate because a lesser class of healer could recover them on the field then a death character. Any medic could revive a knocked out character while death was only reversible by a highlevel doctor.
This made it actually important to have a few points in medic as a fighter as it allowed you to recover your true medic when they got knocked out. (because of SWG design were actions causes health bar loss a hardworking medic could put themselves in a vulnerable state were a single hit could knock them out)
Needlessly complex OR intresting gameplay? It is a matter of taste. (That is to say nothing of the difference between having a dedicated action/mana bar from wich you perform your actions and having to pay for your actions with your
Don't Forget WoW (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a little more concerned about console games needing patches: wasn't the whole idea with console was that they were different from PCs? The same "push it early, then patch" mentality seems to be affecting consoles, too.
Re:What's to care about? (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, Vanguard has massive potential. Yes, its buggy and incomplete - but every single MMORPG released that I can recall has been buggy and missing some content at release. The fact is that these projects are so large scale and require so much development time that its inevitable that something will go wrong, something will be missing, something won't scale effectively, or it will need more work. Contents will change during the course of gameplay - so says the warning on all of them, and for good reason. If the game was complete at release, players would play it, finish exploring it, and move on. Things *have to change* and have to evolve to keep the players involved in the game and its progress. Things have to be added, expaded, altered, to maintain a level of interest. A completed game design, is a dead game.
Dark Age of Camelot had a pretty smooth release, I was there and I enjoyed it immensely. Yes it needed work, yes the changes they made to it thereafter generally betrayed the original design concept and the game steadily evolved downhill (in my opinion at least). However, if Mythic had had to wait until everything was perfect, they would never have released the game. Its been 5 years and they are still making changes, adding expansions, and changing the class balance. MMORPGs are *never* finished. By definition they will constantly evolve. There are simply too many factors in any such game to possibly allow for all possible permutations of the code and design, to allow for all the possible misuses/abuses/exploits that players will discover and take advantage of - usually to the gross disadvantage of the game. DAOC was more or less designed to address the most common complaints of EQ players at the time - and to introduce large scale PvP in the form of Realm vs Realm combat. It was immensely successful in every regard. I was an EQ player (yes I play a lot of MMORPGs), and I switched immediately based on feedback I got from a coworker who was in the beta.
SWG was buggy as hell at release, and in fact on the first day you couldn't even log in at all. I was there and dutifully attempted to log in for a few hours, but was unsuccessful until the following evening. The game was missing a lot of its details, but the overall design was innovative and ambitious. Its player-based economy was the most ambitious element of any MMORPG I have seen I think, and I played primarily as a crafter for the first 2 years I played the game. SOE couldn't manage the game design and improvements well enough and the game has devolved sadly since. In its current iteration its a pale shadow of its former glory and all of the innovations have effectively been lost by inept designers making moronic changes. Its the text book example of how NOT to evolve a game, particularly one with such a huge provenance.
City of Heroes and City of Villains had a fantastic release, virtually bug free. It still took a long time to get a design that was more or less balanced. I was there too at release, and enjoyed playing the game at all levels - and I still play it now and again. Cryptic are the unsung heroes of MMORPG game design, their game is a niche game admittedly, but its extremely well designed, very stable, well written and quite enjoyable if you like the niche it fills. Overall I think its the best piece of game coding - possibly the best piece of coding period - that I have ever seen. Nonetheless, both versions have required constant updates and changes - because the players continue to find ways to exploit design flaws, and the designers must allow for that and make suitable changes to ensure the gameplay runs the way it was intended to originally. Its still an immensely enjoyable game and I recommend anyone who hasn't tried it g
Re:Early? Yes. Bad? No. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what server you played on, but on Xegony, Time was effectively blocked by about 3 guilds that had access to it, for over a year. They killed every mob needed for planar advancement as soon as it spawned. The only way you had a chance was a random server restart that they couldn't mobilize fast enough for, and then you had to race another group of guilds/alliances that were trying to do the same thing you were. There were several times that we were almost to full raid force to take out a mob, and an uber raid guild would run right past our assemblage and take out the mob, because they heard it was up, or they knew its spawn time.
Lack on instanced content meant that one guild or a few guilds could effectively block others from content. So, I pay the same amount of money, but other players can cut me out of the top end content, just so they can keep it to themselves? No thanks!
Lack of instanced content is going to be a problem for V:SoH, if they set things up in a similar fashion. Once the tightest guilds figure out they can block high end content (and therefore, the better loot) to themselves, it will happen.
Instanced content, even for the highest end stuff, means that no one guild/group can keep others from getting to it. Uber Guild A can raid that mob its allotted once a week, and every other casual guild can hit it just as often, or as few times as they want. What's wrong with that?
Oh, yeah, you wanted to brag. Well, if you want to brag, play on a PvP server, where competition is the norm.
Re:Informed customers knew it (Score:3, Insightful)
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers.
But the simple fact is, no MMO is released as a full gold. They haven't been for a long time. They know that once they go past the beta, all sorts of bugs are going to turn up, and their server infrastructure is going to get a serious workout that no stress test can duplicate. WoW had 20 servers that were routinely down due to problems, and it took them quite a while to straighten them out. I remember vividly, because I was stuck on one of them.
So, a beta test eventually hits a point of diminishing returns. No matter how many people you keep adding to it, you are only going to get so much feedback, since 90% of the beta players act like all they are there for is a free look at the game, and don't spend time in the forums reporting bugs.
Re:WoW is seen by some as "EQ Lite" (Score:2, Insightful)
Who DOES like these things? I played a lot of EQ years ago because it was, in my opinion, the best MMORPG out on the market at the time. Later I made it into the WoW beta, and I have been playing ever since. Here are the things that I think WoW has going for it over EQ and EQ2:
- Better artwork with an overal consistency of style
- Easy-to-use questing interface that's actually fun and rewarding
- The ability to almost always play solo with any class
- No more experience penalties on death
- No more painfully long meditation breaks between battles
- More benefit and less annoyance with PvP play
- I can play for one hour and, in that time, accomplish something and have fun no matter my level.
- Retrieving my corpse after death is no longer more tactically complicated than any other part of the gameplay.
- Faster, non-realistic duration, world travel
I'm sure there are plenty more things. But it was because of things like these, that I never wanted to play EQ ever again. I've been playing WoW for over 2 years now, and I still have a great time with it. It has a lot to offer a much broader audience. But, then again, I'm sure that's obvious based on the size of its subscriber base.Re:Early? Yes. Bad? No. (Score:3, Insightful)