Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story 235
sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project."
The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.
David Jaffe is full of shit (Score:2)
Since when was hoping your boss an unreasonable expectation? Jesus. Makes me question his competency.
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The guy in TFA sounds full of shit too. Honestly, it just comes off to me as a guy who's bitter that he's getting let go, and taking the opportunity to blast people who he didn't like.
Maybe there's truth to it. I don't know. But I sure as hell stopped reading about halfway through because with so many personal digs, it destroys his credibility in my eyes.
Ya pretty much (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure there is some truth in there. Most people don't just make shit completely up. I mean he's right in that Warhammer wasn't all that good of a game. However there's a ton of bitterness there. That is going to cloud judgment and the truth. I'm going to guess the people aren't quite as incompetent as he pretends. I've rarely found it to be true when someone just goes off on their boss as being worthless. Not saying there aren't bad managers, but they aren't the abysmal problems many people pretend.
Also it does really smack of what Jaffe said: The guy thinks his opinion is more valuable and everyone should be listening to him. No not necessarily. For damn sure the problem with Warhammer wasn't one of not having dancing. It was mostly a balance issue, and also one of the leveling system being too grindy and not interesting enough. Warhammer was not a horrible MMO, it just wasn't all that great and had some issues. However that is hard to pull off when you've got WoW as competition, and even Mythic's own DAoC. These days with an MMO, you are mostly stealing players from another MMO, usually WoW. Means that your game has to compete favourably to that, and WoW is pretty good. So you might be ok, but ok doesn't cut it.
At any rate, way too much hate in there for that to be at all objective. He lost his job and he's furious, so he's lashing out. I just can't take what is said in a situation like that seriously.
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How do you know that what he is saying is not 100% objective and true? Being furious and lashing out does not mean he's not truthful and objective.
Re:Ya pretty much (Score:5, Interesting)
This kind of reminds me when an employee resigned and in their letter of resignation gave their reason (basically pointing out how corrupt, dishonest and incompetent our manager was). Of course, the next layer up just ignored it as "that person no longer works here, and therefore their observations will not be considered". After hearing about what was written, we all thought that it would be certainty that the manager was going to be replaced. Long story short, they just blamed the guy that left.
Needless to say, two months later the entire engineering team (all five of us) resigned in the same way. All five letters were put on this guys desk within the space of 30 seconds. The look on his face was priceless. This was years ago, and that guy is still working there.
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I believe you. Not sure why terrible people are kept around like that. In that kind of situation, it's the good employees that leave.. the shitty ones will stay because they are atleast getting paid.
Re:Ya pretty much (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus from the organizations perspective, if the team has just lost one or more of its most talented core members then it cannot afford to also lose the group leader. No matter how incompetent the person might be.
In my experience employees that jump ship like that are seen as immature, and any issues that they raise during their resignation are chalked up to that employee having poor conflict resolution skills. I've done something similar to what the GP described, and in hindsight I regret it. After speaking with contacts at my former organization, the company's management looked at the situation as my supervisor being cursed with a number of disloyal employees, and gave her an opportunity to restructure her team.
Remember that throwing your immediate manager under the bus to their boss is not always a good strategy. That persons boss is likely the person that hired or promoted them in the first place.
Re:Ya pretty much (Score:4, Insightful)
The anecdote from another developer about item generation does ring true though from a player perspective, it was pretty clear that item generation was a giant cluster fuck (and excuses about how hard it was, so have patience, were frequent in the early game).
Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, at least the complaint in the summary sounds more like Mythic were the incompetents, not EA.
I mean essentially the complaint in the summary boils down to "we blew deadlines once too many, but EA is to blame for eventually wanting to see something for its money right now." Which seems to be a surprisingly easy sell for fanboys everywhere. The publisher is always some big evil entity that doesn't nothing but come out of the blue and force people at gun point to ship too early.
In reality, EA shopped around for a dev after the first attempt failed, and Mythic won the contract by asking for X months and Y million dollars to deliver product Z. Which was presumably a better offer than anyone else had. (And probably in typical game dev fashion, it was a deadline and budget they knew they can't meet, but were basically hoping that the publisher would then keep throwing money at it just to not lose the existing investment.)
But eventually the publisher has enough of throwing good money after bad (and if they don't, look at what happened with Duke Nukem development), especially since most games won't even break even anyway. As ROI goes, when you have a finite R to expect, you can't throw infinite I at it.
Then the fanboys complain that the publisher are the evil guys and to blame for everything wrong. Now a dev does the same too. WTF?
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The sad thing is how often that happens. Developers have to make unrealistic promises in order to get that initial contract all of the time, especially with MMO's. Not only do you have to make an unrealistic promise, but you have to make an even more unrealistic promise than the dev house up the street just did. The "publisher" might care, but the accounts managers making the deal don't seem to realize or care.
Of course, my opinion is that if you have to make a bad deal to get a contract, it's time to wa
Also, one thing... they said before too, you know? (Score:3, Insightful)
They actually said the same thing before WoW, and could even offer numbers to support it. Each time someone got 100,000 players, you could see a bunch of other games losing a total of 100,000. Market saturated, all you can do is steal players from Everquest, etc. Heard it before. Quite eloquently too.
T
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Warhammer sucked because it was, obviously, released WAY too soon. There was only one zone with any reasonable polish (the one with the burning Windmill), classes weren't complete, **STARTING** zones were so buggy you couldn't complete quests. The bugs go on...
As TFS states, this is why I know so many people tried and left the game within days/weeks and not renewing past their 'free' 30 day included play time.
There was some good parts of the game that you could see the potential... but it wasn't cutting i
Re:Ya pretty much (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to guess the people aren't quite as incompetent as he pretends.
You're either completely foreign to software development or have been ignorantly blessed in the people you've been privileged to work with. The comic strip of Dilbert exists not because its some strange world but because its something most anyone in industry can relate. In fact, most of the jokes in the strip are literally, parodies of true events.
The reality is, in the software industry, the following are truisms:
1) Your boss is likely a PHB promoted well beyond his capabilities.
2) Those managing the project will create a schedule with absolutely no footing in reality while demanding you adhere to it. Worse, its frequently made by marketing for features absolutely no one wants.
3) Releasing a half finished, unusable product, is the norm.
4) Testing and documentation is almost always neglected.
5) Testers are typically treated like the enemy. And should their findings conflict with the schedule, they will likely be ignored.
Basically, the software industry is completely fucked up. Doubly so in the gaming industry. In most other industries, they would all be fired for complete incompetence. One of the responses is the party complaining didn't have realistic expectations. That's certainly one way of looking at it. Realistically though, those saying he has unrealistic expectations are the ones with unrealistic expectations and are only compounding the problems.
Basically, his expectations are unrealistic exactly because the software industry is completely fucked up. Then again, the expectations of the industry are unrealistic, resulting in extremely poor quality, incompetent behavior exactly because the industry is completely fucked up and that's the accepted norm. So its become a catch-22. If you act responsibly, you are bucking the system of incompetence and will likely be censured.
There definitely are some exceptions, but it doesn't change the fact, that this is the software industry at large. In some ways, Microsoft actually help lower the bar for the rest of the industry. So its not exactly surprising Microsoft is reflecting glass; which typifies low quality and way overdue projects as the norm.
AoC (Score:2)
I guess they did not learn anything from Age of Conan.
Summary not so good (Score:5, Insightful)
We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times
Just reading the summary, you'd think it says "we shipped too early". Only the few words I emphasized mentions the main point of the article, which is that the project was horribly mismanaged, had slipped many deadline and that more time would not have helped at all. It wasn't done but it was never going to get done, EA simply cut their losses and decided to stop throwing good money after bad. The rest is just seeing what could be salvaged...
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If it was launched and sold to the public under these (now documented) circumstances, with known bugs, that sounds like a pretty damning class action case right there.
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Fair point. Honestly though, as long as customers get their money back, or some part of their money back, to discourage this from happening again, I don't really care who's sued within the organisation.
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"They would have punished for our incompetence if we didn't act negligently, so we decided to act negligently, rather
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Dont know about Duke Nuken Forever, but it took about 7 or 8 years for them to release Team Fortress 2.
TF2 has succeeded because it was released when it ready, and has been extremely well maintained.
Its an example of why gamers should manage gaming companies.
A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made (Score:4, Interesting)
Myself included, even if we had no intention of investing the time required to play an MMO anymore.
Warhammer's real problem was that it learnt all the wrong lessons from WoW, and tossed out the superior RvR design from DAoC. The silly instanced RvR bled off too many people from the in world zones because it was easy to just jump into. Rather than the back and forth of DAoC's RvR where you'd sometimes be outnumbered and have to mount a last stand at an important keep, there was bland, perfectly balanced by numbers twitch RvR.
Of course, even numbers doesn't mean balanced. If your pick up group got matched with an opposing guild group, you had no real chance.
Still, I might play from time to time if they made it f2p.
Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made (Score:4, Informative)
It is free to play, and I still couldn't stick to playing it for more than a week. The fact that free play is restricted to Empire vs Chaos Tier 1 may have been a factor, but probably not the deciding one.
It seems mostly bland and uninspired to me, where it doesn't seem thrown together or buggy.
Not really (Score:2)
Free to level 10 is an evening or two of play. It's more of a more rational demo strategy.
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Damn it, its been what, 5 years? That horse is not only dead its decomposed, they have all but publicly apologised for it, you can now have all the ToA stuff done and completed in a day or two.
Please go back to VN.
I wanted to be a game programmer... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Independent game design can be a good portion of that idealized vision you have of game design, so long as you accept the uncertainty of a paycheck or health insurance, have the patience to grow slowly on small projects, and have supreme amounts of confidence in yourself and your team. If you're a part of the "industry" though, it's just your standard corporate bullshit and politics with a "game company" skin laid over it. They will use and abuse the talent exactly the way the music industry does, and promo
Re:I wanted to be a game programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all studios are run by EA or the way EA runs their studios. There are some sane people out there that are actually interested in long term goals and not only in short term revenue, especially independent studios with own funding (like the one I work for). Instead of playing poker and betting everything (or even more) on the next title those studios plan carefully and have realistic expectations and goals. They might not (ever) make the headlines like WoW & Co - but they make a decent living in their niche market(s) with a pretty solid business plan, without the fear to lose your job next month. They payments are not stellar but fair - a pretty good deal I'd say.
Games dev doesn't suck! Please mod parent up. (Score:2, Interesting)
Dear Moderators,
I'd like to request substantive support for the parent post.
Games development can have great advantages over non-games development (irrespective of cubicles) but it's posts like the grandparent that can scare people away from an otherwise fulfilling career.
Sure, you probably end up trading in potential salary, but if you find the right studio and right team for you, it's worth the pay cut.
Regards, from someone who took a $15k/year pay cut to join the games industry almost half a decade ago,
Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm working in the games industry for quite a few years now, meanwhile as a project manager (just for a small, independent studio) and those are some of the lessons that I have learnt so far:
- Have a plan and and be ambitious - but have realistic expectations.
- Ship it when it's done.
- Stop it when you see you will never reach your goal.
- Don't release crappy software, it will hurt you in the long term.
- Be honest to yourself and the people around you (in that order!)
So stuff like Warhammer, Age of Conan, Hellgate London, etc. should have never been released the way they got released.
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It doesn't seem too obvious to even big studios and publishers.
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[i]"Ship it when it's done."[/i]
There were more than 110 people working full time on AoC at the time I left funcom, most of them working in Oslo with salaries adjusted for the high cost of life there. That's expensive as hell.
Unless you're blizzard and swimming in money, you have to rely on external sources of funding for that kind of project, and if you need to push the release back, you have to convince them to pour in more money instead of cutting their losses and pulling out.
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"stop it when it's shit" would be the better option then. It doesn't make sense to ship something that's not done. Yes, you might cut your losses because you still get some customers to pay for the crap that you call a game but what is in fact an early beta at best. But in the long term this customer will think twice if he'll buy your next game.
If you aren't Blizzard, don't attempt a project as big as Blizzard's titles. "Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten" is an old German proverb, meaning "stick to what yo
Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you aren't Blizzard, don't attempt a project as big as Blizzard's titles. "Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten" is an old German proverb, meaning "stick to what you are able to handle". Being too ambitious doesn't help anyone and will just end up in a disaster - happened many times, especially in the gaming industry."
Well, AoC's failure was not caused merely by a funding problem. After all we did have 5 years, and a lot of good people. I think it was mostly a combination of being shy on some things, like not being willing to rewrite the engine and tools from scratch instead of reusing the crap from anarchy online.
And there was also kind of a poor philosophy of trying to add too many feature in the game right at release instead of doing fewer things but doing them well (like blizzard originally did with WoW).
For instance, the guild city raid thing should have been cut from release (it just wasn't ready) and released in a polished form in an expansion pack imo.
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Still kind of proves my point. If you don't have a producer/manager/whateverheistitled that has the balls and the authority to call the shots and cut features when it's getting out of hands then you aren't capable of handling such a project.
Developing a game is much more than having a bunch of good programmers. Someone needs to keep the strings in his hands and have a plan and a schedule to follow - and the ability to make people (all of them) follow his lead.
It was a fun game... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It was a fun game... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The big problem I have always had in RvR is that there is nothing to strive for ... it's all a gear treadmill.
If my guild could plant a flag on a keep and get something really good out of it (not advantages in the gear treadmill) there would be far more involvement. Faction pride is a fucking fantasy ... also there should be an economic aspect to War, it should consume resources.
Resource gathering for GOOD siege need to be in, not just ballistas ... but things like the fuck huge summons from the original ci
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It won't be perfect, but it'll be another of a lot of steps in the right direction.
The game was where it should've been at launch about 6 months ago, but it took a year and a half to get there. If you ignore that time and pretend that the game is only about
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I remember when entering the game first time, getting the "go forth and kill 10 sprites" thing, I thought it was a joke, a cheeky parody on earlier lesser games.
Then after some more quests I got that sinking feeling...
To be fair tho, the rvr was pretty fun and I did spend quite alot of time in game.
It is obvious tho that the producer failed at many points;
- massive pvp advertised and key part of design, but noone bothered to check if the system could actually handle that: it couldnt, not even close
- decent
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They should have ported the game code from Warhammer to AoC (combat system and scenarios, but allow player made factions). Then they'd have had a half decent game with a half decent engine.
In Game Voiceovers (Score:4, Interesting)
"And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work."
Maybe I'm shallow, but this is one of the biggest reasons I'm interested in The Old Republic. Full voiceovers on an MMORPG implies someone was actually interested in the plot and user experience, and is trying to deliver something on par with a single player game.
And 20 gigs of space? C'mon now. That's not much these days. Hell, I remember when I have a 100 meg hard drive, and my full install of Warcraft 2 was 80 of that. I've dealt with worse.
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Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direct
Re:In Game Voiceovers (Score:4, Insightful)
Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direction the quest NPC has sent me on, trying to get my next level/item/skill and some in-game currency.
Heck, I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands with me because I won't read the quest text before charging off in the direction of my next waypoint.
To each their own, I suppose.
Believe it or not, some people (like me) like to play games and pay attention to the little details like the "backstory" and the "raison d'être" for the things you're asked to do instead of treating the game's goals and objectives like a series of meaningless checkpoints.
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There are degrees to backstory, though. When playing World of Warcraft, at some point, I stopped reading the majority of quest stories because it basically all came down to one thing:
"Hi, I'm a random NPC whose story is completely self contained and unchanging. I need you to kill these monsters and collect the things they drop for an arbitrary and meaningless reason. Once you've succeeded, the only change you'll see is that I will no longer have an exclamation point over my head."
Me: Whatever. Kill things!
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Voice overs can be nice, but not in a MMORPG. It's so fucking frustrating to stand around and wait for the big boss to end his dialogue before you embark on your next spectacular wipe.
In WoW some dialogues can take several minutes, which will make you lose focus and get you agitated since it's wasting precious raid time. LK for instance will give you a solid 2-3 minutes worth of speeches, add run time buff time etc. you are wasting more time getting to the fight than the actual fight (most groups won't make
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Personally, I use the LK speech/cut scene to /grab another beer/take a quick bio break/briefly stand up and juggle a bit for exercise/ before the main event starts and I have to concentrate. I rather like it. The Sauerfang one on the other hand annoys me something rotten as the fight is rather easy and doesn't require much concentration by anyone (it was only ever a gear check anyway). Even when we were training LK, I still didn't mind as it gave everyone a minute or two to make sure they had their game fac
This is EA (Score:2, Interesting)
More recent then: Dragon Age: Awakenings, expansion of the aforementioned game. I have never played a game which was more blatantly unfinished. Characters were rushed in, options were butchered-out. How do you know? Well, because
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That's why I quit playing (Score:2)
I bought warhammer as a digital download and though I felt it had a lot of promise, I was really disappointed that I had bought something that just "needed more time in the oven". Compared to WoW, it used twice as much ram, and I couldn't alt-tab in and out quickly at all like I could with WoW when consulting online references. There were never enough players around for the group quests, which were a cool idea but a COMPLETE waste of time because finishing one was obviously not going to happen for me. Some
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They've actually fixed a few of those issues (make sure you play on a high population server), particularly with the learning curve. Give the free trial a go. Still has some serious problems, but it's good for a couple of weeks of casual play.
I can't wait for PC gaming to "die" (Score:3, Insightful)
When people talk about the "death" of PC Gaming, they're talking about the major game publishers pulling out of the platform. Honestly, I can't wait.
The lack of big name heavy-hitters with huge advertising budgets is creating a vacuum that's being filled by innovative Indie developers who would've never had a chance at mainstream commercial success in a "strong" PC gaming market.
It's not the death of a platform, it's a changing of the guard that has the potential to help normalize the gaming industry as a whole. I wait anxiously for more and more Minecrafts, Dwarf Fortresses, Amnesias and World of Goos as the EAs of the industry find the PC platform more and more unsuitable for their $150 million summer blockbusters.
This isn't me saying that big companies always make bad games or telling major publishers to gtfo, this is me saying that we have an opportunity to deflate and normalize the video game industry before a repeat of the Crash of 83.
Re:I can't wait for PC gaming to "die" (Score:4, Informative)
I just wonder if that might be something the big names are wanting -- a big crash like '83, then they will be able to blame "piracy" [1] for all their ills and get ACTA ratified with more Draconian "anti-piracy" measures like self destruct chips, hardware DRM stacks, and the like. Remember the INDUCE act of '06?
The big names will whine and bitch about how the poor pirates are eating their lunch. In reality, all that does is give them the mandate to make ever more exotic DRM stacks with a game attached to it, lobby Congress, and have excuses for crappier and crappier content with more and more essential stuff as DLC [2]. We used to be pissed about late beta quality games. Now we are ending up with early beta, or alpha stuff being shipped with *one* patch if lucky, then the game is forgotten about.
I completely agree -- the computer game industry needs an enema. However, people would rather have their Sims sequel or play known IPs as opposed to actually trying something that is new. At least in its heyday, Origin Systems always had new IP even with sequels. 10 years from now, I know we will have a Sims 4 or 5, a Madden 2021, something Halo based, and sequels for all the mainstream FPS games, so we can hear some 13 year old kid spluttering obscenities 24/7 just as well in the future as now. Only difference will likely be DRM systems nastier than we ever dreamed of. Perhaps LensLok + activation + mandatory online connection + a hardware dongle that would fry the motherboard if any protection got compromised [3].
[1]: Even on a platform that had a 0% piracy rate, sales were pretty low on the PS3 compared to other platforms, so that is a good judge of how really the game industry is doing without them able to drop a smokescreen on numbers.
[2]: I'm just waiting for games to ship essentially with nothing but a DRM stack and everything past the title screen be DLC. Even though someone spent $80 on a game, they have to pay $20 more if they want to actually purchase the character they will be playing and name it. $20 more actually gets one past the first chapter. The cost will be justified as "Movies cost $20 per chapter to watch. It should be the same with games."
[3]: I remember companies hawking dongles in the '90s that had capacitor arrays to discharge into the user's motherboard if the dongle thought it was being bypassed. I'm sure this technology will be back.
OTOH... (Score:2)
On the other hand, big studios do sometimes put out good games, as well. Mass Effect springs to mind as a well-done game, with a better-done sequel, and DLC I'd actually pay for. Plus, you can't hire that many voice actors of that caliber on an indie developer's budget.
I guess I'm saying that while the "CHURN OUT SEQUELS FOR MONEY BAIL ON RISKY GAMES" isn't helping the industry, there are certainly excellent titles that have come out of that same system.
Not the best rant I've ever read. (Score:2)
Well, here are some actual reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Full disclosure: I was one of the UO design leads during Warhammer's later development years, and everything I'm about to say is tinted by a) not working directly on the product, b) my professional opinion having played it, c) and that I have a contract similar to Sanya Weathers' (who is quoted in the EA Louse comments several times) and will not engage in disparagement.
EA Louse completely ignores actual game design reasons that the product failed, instead focusing on company culture and his/her managers' failings. I won't comment on that, but I will point out the following things that went rather horribly wrong with Warhammer:
* Incomplete content: past level 20 most zones were barely there, let alone fully populated with content.
* Broken systems: the economy, craftinig, Tier 4, and the actual zoning and load balancing code couldn't keep up
* Unbalanced classes: they tried to make equivalents for each faction, and over-powered the Bright Wizards, Warriors Priests, and Witch Hunters. Excellent write up about that here, especially about Crowd Control: http://www.brighthub.com/video-games/mmo/articles/44427.aspx?p=3
* Not moving fast enough on PvP imbalance complaints: The common response would be "We ran the numbers! On average, 50% are Order, 50% are Chaos! It's perfectly even!" and in the real world of course it was usually a massive mis-match between sides in individual fights
* The mandate to produce new content instead of fix old broken content. I'll never understand that one, and I tread on dangerous ground going too much into it, but it was a horribly bad idea.
* Public quests: I have always, truly believed that public quests were a good idea gone horribly wrong. This is probably just me being naive from my days on UO, where if we had a fun system idea we could implement it directly ourselves and things like "automatically adjusting difficulty, loot, time constraints and quest goals" were well within reach for the designer. Public quests in WAR stopped being fun the moment population surges in a zone dropped -- soon becoming impossible to complete. How awesome would it have been to at least have them dynamically adjust to lower/higher levels of difficulty based on how many people were in the zone and their relative strengths? How much better if the same *kind* of PQs weren't spread like filler throughout all the zones and they were a little more creative?
Hopefully other games will learn from this: you have to finish and polish the game until it shines! Only in the emerging F2P market can you get away without doing so, and even that will change over the coming years.
Re:Well, here are some actual reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
I loved the Public Quests.. what a fantastic idea. I played for a month or two and it was pretty low pop. The public quests were a great way to meet people. I would usually chat someone up and go "Hey, want to do that public quest together over there?" They'd go "Hmm, that would be nice because i've tried it solo and it's impossible." That's how friends are made!
I know this sounds overly simple and stupid.. but if you've ever played lots of MMOs, you'd know that most of the time it is a Massively Multi-player yet Single-player game. The public quests forced people into groups in a way that wasn't uncomfortable and can last as long as each person wished. Having to join a guild just to have "friends" doesn't feel natural to me. Feels more like high-school where you're crammed into a group together.
David Jaffe misses the point... (Score:2)
I don't think David Jaffe really understood the dancing thing. Just because you're in a state of war doesn't mean people don't dance anymore. Do you really think just because you're in the middle of a war that no one smiles, everyone is huddled in fear 100% of their lives until they die or war ends?
The reasoning that "War is going on, there will be no happiness whatsoever" is ridiculous to say the least.
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It's *supposed* to be ridiculous. It's *Warhammer*. Warhammer is supposed to be ludicrously grimdark, with extra grim and some more dark piled on top.
Enjoyable Game (Score:3, Interesting)
After they fixed up the game they announced their "free trial" program, so I decided to give it a shot.
I played EQ1 in high school for two years, and used a buddies EQ2 sub for a year while he was deployed overseas, but other than that hadn't touched an MMO in years.
I actually *really* enjoyed it. I thought the experience was really polished. The graphics were decent. They seemed to fix some of the gameplay mechanics that had always annoyed me in MMO type games. The problem was I simply don't have the time to sink into an MMO, so rather than upgrade my trial account I just quit once I reached the trial level cap.
I've actually tried free trials of other MMOs since then, and have been pretty disappointed. WoW just seemed primitive and missing features after having played Warhammer. I also tried the free version of the EQ game, and was similarly disappointed. If I were looking to actually get into an MMO, I'd go with Warhammer Online in a heartbeat.
"Unrealistic expectations" (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right. Someone should have told us right up front, whenever we first had the vague notion that working in the games industry might just be more rewarding than being an overworked combination of galley slave and cabin boy, just what "realistic expectations" about industry jobs should be.
Here's a tip. At some time you're going to get treated like crap by some self-centred jackfruit with delusions of godhood. In the games industry we call those times "weekdays". Weekends are when you can get away from all that, since there aren't quite so many people in the office then. But don't worry, we'll only have to work weekends and evenings until we get past this next milestone. After that everything will be JUST FINE. Honest.
When you've had enough, you can always quit. I'm sure that nobody will give you any trouble with that at all.
It's entirely possible, in a monkeys-flying-out-of-your-butt way, that your work experience may be better than that, it's just insane to go into the business expecting anything different.
Re:1st post? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly I think it's part of the life-cycle of corporations. The people with the authority to promote tend to lose their objective view of their subordinates, and end up promoting people that they LIKE rather than the people most suited for the job. Repeat this for a few cycles and you end up with the "good old boys/girls" club at the top, who are all best buddies but who are far less competent than their jobs demand. This reinforces apathy down below, since what's the point in busting your butt for a dumb-ass? Initiative and effort don't get rewarded (or worse, get penalized by jealous managers), and the rot sets in.
This is why large corporations can lose money, lose focus, engage in some amazingly ridiculous ventures and go bankrupt. I guess it's only human nature, but nothing lasts forever.
...EA (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet EA is still - overall - making buckloads of money. Many of the best shops have been bought out by them, trashed (as seems to be this case), put to cranking out rapid-fire shit, and then eventually canned.
Look at what happened to the C&C series. They ripped out some of the most fun parts, and the initial release of - for example - Tiberium Wars was a huge buggy piece of shit. I can't count how many times the thing de-synced and crashed during online play within the first 6 months of patch-cycles, not to mention the bugs that often left single-player missions somehow unfinishable.
It's all push push push to release a product, which means a shitty product, which ends up killing the once-good franchises they've bought out.
EA were also the ones to start pushing the locked-to-an-account model. Sadly, the competition has smell money like sharks smell blood in the water. So now we have other companies like Blizzard adopting the same shit.
Re:...EA (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet EA is still - overall - making buckloads of money.
Of course. Because they are such big publishers and have a finger pretty much in every genre of game (through acquisitions), they dominate the market. Especially since games are a wonderful impulse buy - pre-teens and teens who "have to have" the game because whats-his-name at school got it, or because it's version 3 in a series, or because of the bright colors on the packaging. Mature gamers who remember what EA used to be, and hope that a company as old and (once) respected as EA will stand behind their products and patch them ASAP if there are any problems.
It takes a long time to absolutely destroy a reputation, especially when you're in a dominant position. But I can't help but notice that every company franchise they buy out gets destroyed, dumbed down, and processed so much it stops being fun.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If EA was ever a respected company, it was probably just because customers didn't know any better. I recall discussing game development with one of the developers of Starflight [wikipedia.org] (released in 1986) on a message board many years ago. He cautioned others to be careful of publishers like EA (who published Starflight) and lamented how naive they, as developers, were in their dealings with them way back in 19
Re: (Score:2)
You actually got Tiberium Wars online play to work? I must say I'm amazed, after going through EA's online help database and contacting their tech support I found out that in order for me to run it as a client, NOT a server I would have to have roughly half of all available ports forwarded to my desktop.
Oh, and when that didn't work they told me that it was because I was using a "Linux router" (a FreeBSD box actually) and that I should connect my desktop directly to the internet and disconnect the rest of m
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When a game client requires 30k+ ports to be connectable from the outside to function there is something very wrong.
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I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today. Often you keep thinking the good old days will return so you keep on pushing ahead thinking this is only a dip in the market when it's really disappearing.
The other is that like
Re:1st post? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today.
True, large corporations rarely are very nimble. The problem might be a different one though; I haven't come across a lot of truly stupid top managers in large corporations, but I did often find them very myopic when it came to making business decisions.
Many managers run their companies by the numbers... the numbers in the quarterlies, that is, and the pretty red, yellow and green "dashboard" spreadsheets that are sent up from the departments down below. These sheets rarely tell the whole story, but they do give the manager a false sense of being informed, and so they will make decisions instead of delegating the decision or asking for advice. And more importantly, once that decision has been made, it is set in stone. No matter how wrong it turns out to be later. In other words, many managers are actually very poor decision-makers.
In the case of Warhammer, perhaps it is just the simple mistake of blindly applying a tried-and-true project management tool to a project that was running late: timeboxing (or sticking to the deadline). It's often a good way to manage delayed projects and ensure you still get something within budget and on time, after which you can decide what to add in updates and at what cost. However in case of MMOs, having a feature-poor or buggy launch is an extremely dangerous thing to do in today's market with plenty of competitors, especially if you count on your customers to pay you each month for the privilege to play. Once you disappoint an MMO player with a buggy or boring game, it is extremely hard to win them back.
But the megacorp that is EA is not alone in this; Age of Conan suffered from the same rushed release... when the game launched, the bank/auction NPC didn't even work! Funcom sold a million copies IIRC and the game got rave reviews, but they were forced to spend the subsequent 2-3 quarters fixing bugs instead of working on new content. By that time, many people had left due to frequent crashes, buggy quests, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For what it's worth, I worked at EA briefly after high school in phone support. Not long after starting, I think it was observed that I was of higher skill than most of the other employees and was given new opportunities to grow that were outside my then current role. I am certainly not an ass-kisser; I just did my job and did it well. You can bet your ass this caused some jealousy among coworkers.
Now, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I'm just stating that from personal experience, EA does in fact
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the bottom ranks that's the problem in larger corporations. As the crowd thins towards the top and the roles are primarily managerial, the temptation to promote those you like becomes more prevalent.
Down the bottom, the people are still relatively new and actual performance and capabilities are easier to gauge. Promotion generally comes in the form of more challenging roles, possibly with the opportunity to assist and supervise less skilled hires. Again, due to the shear numbers of transients at th
Re: (Score:2)
The people with the authority to promote tend to lose their objective view of their subordinates, and end up promoting people that they LIKE rather than the people most suited for the job.
In fairness, it not easy to always choose the person most suited for the job. Which is probably why it degenerates like that so often.
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You mean there's a phase where they don't do that?
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Can I refer to your post as The Law of Dunbal? It seems to hold not only for most large corporations, but also for government, politics, small companies, non profit organisations, heck almost any kind of structored organisation I know. If you like, I will appoint you for the Nobel prize
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I'd be suspicious that that's not the case at all. To be honest, this guy seems like someone who got far to into office politics and not enough into just making a bloody game. He seems to declare decissions to be bad, simply because he dislikes the people who made them, and gives no objective view on exactly which decissions were bad, and why.
It may well be that EA breeds this sort of office politics by making it a very dog-eat-dog world, but ultimately, it sounds like the project failed, because everyone
Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
I've argued this before, and I will argue it again:
PC games will never die. Simply because the "barrier to entry" for PC game development is so low. No specialized equipment is needed. No specialized software either (you can download a free version of Visual Studio directly from Microsoft). All you need is a basic knowledge of programming, and the desire to build a game.
So while the big studios try to lock up the market on proprietary consoles, or charge huge up-front fees for "Software Development Kits", and buy out any upstart before he ever gets a chance to publish; the creative talent, the innovation, the new ways of doing things - will always be seen first on a PC.
While sure, some guy on a PC can never code the same eye-candy as a $50 million team or compete with version 5 of a highly successful franchise, the PC is destined to be the platform for new concepts not seen before in the game industry. And as we've seen before with games like Doom, Darwinia, etc, you can go from no-name to best seller in a matter of months, thanks to the internet. Frankly, I'm not worried.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
Most new exciting games are being released for consoles. There are only a few really hot titles for the PC.
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent up. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
That's because Linux has poor game support and it's the Year Of The Linux Desktop.
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Problem is, these games are massively expensive to make. And so the investors and producers are pressuring to ship while they think they can still make a profit. This problem has hit a lot of the MMOs that people predicted would be great. You can't jus
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I don't see why, but it seems no console wants to take up the fight with the keyboard/mouse. You have buttons and sticks and motion sensors but nothing comes remotely close to the accuracy of the mouse allowing you to pinpoint targets a few pixels big in no time and the vast number of hotkeys on the keyboard. Obviously the downside is that you need a desk or table to use it well, I guess it just doesn't fit the "use case" of the box being hooked up to the TV and people using a lounge chair with t
Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
Most new exciting games are being released for consoles. There are only a few really hot titles for the PC.
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
Indeed. I'm younger (28), and I recall it being said in the '90s, repeated ad nauseam this decade ('00s), and I'm sure someone will repeat it next year making it three decades I've heard it in before I'm even 30.
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2001 called, it wants its market prediction back.
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Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu (Score:5, Insightful)
Their problem is they didn't retain enough subscribers.
If you want to know why it failed, ask the subscribers why they left, and then pick out the common points.
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I left because:
* I was forced into PVP and I hate PVP with a passion (at a certain point I ran out of missions I could complete with my regular group because they ramped up difficulty, missions did not reward, and killing mobs was worth jack squat exp),
* and the story lines were too linear (finish this town and go to the next)
Granted, all MMOs now are too linear for my tastes so I quit playing them. I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for a single player linear story that allows me to teleport to any point
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On which platform do newer developers have a much easier time gaining entry into the market? For now, at least, one has a significantly better shot at making a name for oneself out of nothing by creating games for the general-purpose computers, rather than for consoles which require paid-for SDKs and physical media. That said, digital distribution and creative pricing may ruin even this.
And yet, I'm still going spend my time and money on products to be used outside those saccharine ghettos of gaming which t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is pretty much complete BS.
Netbooks, tablets, iDevices, etc *are* taking a lot of people's computing time and interest away from the PC. However, there remain a huge number of tasks- any sort of content creation whatsoever, really, some few app examples notwithstanding- that simply are not suited to that sort of form fact. People's computing will always have, in the background, some sort of general purpose device.
Now, you may say that portables, tablets, etc will evolve to the point that this is no lon
Mod up (Score:2)
Absolutely - people will always need to do [stuff], and will always need devices that support [stuff] applications, ie personal computers.
Christ, I'm so sick of hearing the GP's argument (maybe I should get off /.) It only ever makes sense to people who think of these things in terms of "devices" and their inherent capabilities, rather than "functions" and their supporting devices.
...which pretty much defines most console fanatics.
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While I'd like to agree that PC gaming isn't "going away" I think it is hitting a "lull" because more and more people buy laptops and without further investment they don't make for awesome game machines like the PC does. (They are getting better, but still...)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
oh gosh, you are crazy. If you think (even in a few years) that you can cram my desktop into a phone.. you're insane. The games i play daily are fairly demanding on a computer. I don't think a phone can even play HL1 at a decent resolution, that game is over 10 years old. A phone doesn't have the storage capacity to download my TV shows.. i can store about 20 good res episodes which means you NEED a pc to store and manage all that content. Unless you plan on paying a service to manage it for you. If y
Just buy indie (Score:2)
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if you're referring to Warhammer, it's been out what, 2 years? I doubt it's going to change much anymore.
Anyway, the first tier is free to play, so get it and have some fun.
To some people it must be new (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I dunno... at the risk of coming across as schadenfreude, I kinda feel vindicated. Relatively soon after launch I wrote a post titled something like "Warhammer: Curse Of The Half-Arse", detailing some ways in which it was a half-arsed unfinished mess. Not only I had a bunch of fanboys telling me I'm wrong -- and verily, according to them even WoW had never been better -- but some flat-out accused me of lying.
Now it turns out that it _was_ unfinished, and even at least one dev says so. And it's apparently insightful now to say "what else is new?" about that.
Not that the fanboy squad will learn anything from it. Come next game, they'll again bark to defend their corporate idol and accuse users of making up issues that get officially fixed in the next patch, or are documented in some patch notes, or is acknowledged in some dev blog or interview. But woe if you're the one saying that their corporate idol did anything less than _perfect_.
At any rate, I'm guessing for some people it must be new. 'Cause it sure wasn't obvious to them at the time.
Re:To some people it must be new (Score:4, Insightful)
You're describing what happens to fandom when expectations are too high. Do you recall hearing anyone criticize George Lucas before Phantom Menace ("Yoda was a bad muppet", etc)? Anyone who dared such a thing was immediately ridiculed. We were so enamored with the fictional universe the man had created he could do no wrong. Until, of course, he did.
Or perhaps the genius that was Joss Whedon. Firefly was pure art. The actors cast were perfect for their roles (and I say this while not caring much for Summer Glau). You don't create a long running show like Buffy without something going for you -- and then a spinoff like Angel that lasted a few years to boot. Then, with a gigantic "thud", Dollhouse. For whatever reasons that everyone had, Dollhouse had loyal viewers, but I'd never have considered them fans.
Fans will zealously overlook imperfections in order to better enjoy and advocate for the object of their affections. And then, when they're shunned, they have a habit of either just walking away or even turning on the remaining fans. You shouldn't be surprised that Warhammer (a franchise with 20 years of fans) had some people who were less than receptive to legitimate criticism. Nor should you be surprised when the fans who now feel scorned by their idols acknowledge the problems were there all along.