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Anarchy Online - The Perils Of Pushing Products
Johnath writes: "Anarchy Online was supposed to be the next big thing in MMORPG [?] s. It was huge, it was complex, it was sophisticated. Unfortunately, it was also released far far FAR before its time. The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators) and the reviews, which AO reps asked people not to write are starting to come out anyhow." Update: 07/12 5:03 PM EST by CT : Links were randomly redirecting people, so I dropped them.
Not long ago, Lowtax had "Go the Fuck Away" week on Somthing Awful. He can barely afford the normal SA traffic (and by "barely", I mean "usually can't"). He's been fucked over by multiple ad networks, gone for 6+ months without getting a paycheck, and yet continues to put out "teh funney". And then Slashdot links to SA. Goodbye, SA, it was nice knowing you.
Was linking to SA really necessary? I'm sure there are other reviews out there that could have been linked, reviews on major gaming sites that expect this kind of thing. I won't say it's "bad journalism", because Slashdot has little to do with actual journalism. I will say it was a bad judgement call on Hemos' part to leave those links in the submitted story.
I did not play AO's beta (I don't do betas), but I played the second day of release. Or rather I tried to.
The technical glitches in this game are immense. Installing the game was tricky and difficult, and many people screwed it up so badly they corrupted their registries. Once installed, for days it was nearly impossible to log in. To open your account, they forced you to give them your credit card over an insecure web site. And the game crashed to desktop every five minutes or so.
It's gotten slightly better. But there are still problems logging in, horrible memory leaks, graphic card incompatibilities, and problems moving from zone to zone (play areas are divided by zone, with each zone usually hosted on a different server. If you can't zone, then you can either be where the monsters are or where the resupply shops are -- not both.) And these are just the technical problems; game system imbalances and exploitable bugs also exist, as they do in all games of this type but seldom in this quantity.
Although the game is barely playable, it is in no way finished software. Any software that misplaces 50 megabytes of RAM every hour and then crashes when it is forced to use a swap file is NOT ready for primetime. IMHO the game concept is sound and the underlying game is fun, but it's just not finished.
But Cornered Rat (the developers) decided to release this buggy game on schedule, due to budget problems. Approximately one month from now they're going to start charging people $12.95 a month to play. Then we'll see how many people are willing to pay for horribly broken software.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
These games clearly chewed off WAY more than they could, attempting to simultaneously manage a game, a story a communications facility and an overwhelmingly highly representational and large-scale graphical simulation product.
Why are these products failing where their text-only counterparts held so much promise?
Duh! The text-only counterparts focused on what they could do, and did those things as well as they could.
The key to gamemastering multi-player gaming is to get the hell out of the way and to let the players entertain one another. It is why the dumb-as-dirt games such as Diplomacy are so hot in terms of game-playing experience.
The game isn't important if you let the people do what people do best. Formation and breakup of coalitions in a dynamic environment is one of the most exciting things humans do. And its breathtaking fun, win or lose, so long as the stakes are manageable. Get the hell out of the way, and your players will love you, thinking you designed a magnificent game, even where the underlying game is no cleverer than rock-paper-scissors.
Facilitate interaction and providing for growth in such an environment without crunching the first rule is challenge enough, and this is what separated the adults from the kiddies in the text-only game designs. This was among the hardest game design problems of our generation, although very few people noticed, and those who solved it left seminal clues how game designs should move on to the future.
But what happened to single-platform RPGs next happened to their multi-player counterparts: graphic heat. Computers, finally capable of meaningful representational graphics and real-time interaction with graphical worlds brought more numbers, to be sure, to play those games. But the question is really, for how many did the attraction to these games "stick?" (After all, it is the long-term fees, not the package price that holds the greatest commercial promise for MOLRPG.)
Stuck in a world of their own choosing, the game players left because the game sucked. The best gamemasters left because the game could not be game mastered, and the interaction suffered because of the inherent limitations of the (albeit awesome) technology in permitting the kinds of growth and management necessary to make it work.
NOONE TO DATE has understood the separation of concerns necessary to make these products work. In my (here's my "old fart" credentials) past, the single most amazing games were the multi-player and outrageously distracting, but awesomely simple in comparison, games on the PLATO system. Nothing before or since has captured, at least, my passions for the game as did these. And it is because it did everything well, rather than trying to do all of everything now. The graphics and game designs were modest, the interaction was suited to the game and communities lived well.
Someday, someone will do this right. But not for awhile, regrettably, given the publisher's misreading of the market and their concommitant propensities to do things the wrong way. It comes from trying to do these games as concept products: Doom on a large scale, and so forth.
Some things don't scale. You need the vision first, and then exercise sound design and engineering techniques to implement this under the guise of a competent director.
Unfortunately, these products are producer-driven, not director-driven. Until they figure it out, these products will be doomed to (at least critical, if not commercial) failure.
Anarchy Online people: The minute your product hit the shelves is the minute that we, as an industry, get to review your game. What, it still has problems? Then it shouldn't have been released in the first place. Period.
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...but they couldn't even get that right. after downloading the 600 meg beta, installing it, creating an account and finally logging in, I was told that there was a financial problem with the account. Interesting, seeing as how there are no financial aspects to a free beta testing account.
After 3 weeks and repeated emails from myself and hundreds of others, I never heard back from Funcom and gave up.
But, along the way, I visited all of the forums, and alt.games.anarchy-online, and discovered that I really didn't want to get involved anyway. Right up to the day before they "launched" people would spend hours getting to the goal of a mission such as picking up an object and returning with it, only to discover that they couldn't pick it up.
People are getting trapped in rooms without any way to get out, even after quitting, suiciding and restarting. The lag is often interminable.
Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete, but really, if they recognized that it wasn't complete, why go gold? Why ship?
There are articles here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Hope this helps.
Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game. If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.
I'm not defending either camp, so put away that (-1: Troll) click for a second.
The Director always wants to get it done right, taking forever to do it.
The Producer always wants to get it shipped, even with a few flaws.
These are naturally at odds, and the MMORPG market is no exception. When external beta testers get involved, however, they act as an extension of the Director: fix this, fix this, it's not ready yet. The Producer has to intensify the push to release the product before it's perfect but while it still has a market. Every week of development can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are scheduled marketing agreements in place (say, retail endcaps), it's ruinous to blow your deadlines.
The MMORPG genre has a couple other wrinkles that Hollywood doesn't usually have, that complicates these roles.
For one, an Internet-age game can be patched or upgraded AFTER it is released. So 1.0 sucks, that's nothing new. 1.1.6b.alpha.release3 is where it gets better.
For two, the beta testing crowd is a fickle bunch. Some stick to the new product for a long time, while some flee for the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not the core audience. See my writeup on Everything2 about the Life Cycle of an Online Community for my three-act summary of this phenomenon.
Three, the shelf life of an Internet game is far longer than a movie or a solo game. Movies are in the dollar theaters and videotapes in a few months. Solo games are in Wal*Mart bins in a few months. An online community takes that long just to get up a good head of steam.
As Guy Kawasaki (ceo Garage.com) said, "Don't Worry, Be Crappy." You have to ship to make money. You have to get Revision One out there so you can see HOW to make it better, instead of noodling around in the workshop forever.
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"The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"
.Plan... ;)
.plan update, before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops. :)
Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer you can just leverage the Power of the
"I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest
As if FunCom's servers aren't getting hit hard enough, everyone has to go and slashdot them. *sigh*
I'll never get to play.
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
Just think about it: With a console, you CAN'T issure patches for a game. That means that you have to have it right the first time, and you can't get away with rushing a half-finished game out the door and thrust it upon unsuspecting buyers.
Also, I admire Somethingawful for not kissing major game publisher ass to gain favor with them. This is in contrast to most site which, like Lowtax said, will do almost anything to get "inside looks" at unreleased games. Journalistic integrity is not in their vocabularies (although it probably isn't in CmdrTaco's, either).
Is your company running tools written by ma