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Metroid DS Title Not So Much Online
The much anticipated Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS has been revealed to be slated to release without multiplayer. 1up.com has the story: "Really, we could have made this game online. But Nintendo's vision of online play is different from that of other companies...We wanted it to be free, easy, and easy to access for everybody. To set up the kind of infrastructure that we needed, and to meet the launch date we have for this game, the two just didn't match."
Something that drives me crazy is that most video game writers have no clue how much it takes to produce a videogame; they assume that there is virtually no effort and no cost associated with adding features to a game (and they're wrong).
Metroid's development probably started any where between 18 and 30 months ago; in the early design stages they were probably pretty uncertain what type of online plan there would be and they probably never intended to have any features that took advantage of it. Now Nintendo probably came to a final decision about the Nintendo DS' online infastructure 9-12 months ago; well after the feature set of Metroid Prime Hunters' had been decided upon. Now (hypothetically) Nintendo could have spent more money, diverted development resources from other features in the game, and delayed the game to tack on some second rate online multiplayer.
A delay of the game would be costly because Nintendo thinks that this game is needed to attract the 'core-gamer' audience to the Nintendo DS; and reallocating resources would have been costly because it would have lowered the quality of the game and thus sold less games (and potentially less Nintendo DS').
Ultimatley it is a trade-off; You can create a game that is of higher quality to the 90% of potential users who are not interested in Online Multiplayer or you can create a game that is better for the 10% that is. It sounds one sided but it was probably a tough decision because the 10% that are interested in Online Multiplayer have more influence over the general gaming public.
The big loss is that, especially for us adult DS owners, we aren't going to be playing local wireless DS with 4 friends very often. If this game were online it would have provided me with much fun, now I have to judge it solely on single player, which might make the game not worthy of a purchase depending.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
If you read the article, you might get the impression that Nintendo somehow changed its plan for Hunters. This is not the case. Hunters was never planned as an online game.
Considering that it's almost a launch title (a Demo version was included with many DS consoles), it's fair to assume that Nintendo had this game planned for quite some time now. Most likely way before they finished the specs of their online service. That makes it very obvious that 1up's article shows a severe lack of understanding of how software development works, as this quote shows:
In fact, it's hardly a news piece as much as it is a rant. It almost looks as if the author was searching for something to complain about, and when finding nothing, decided to just make something up. He calls online play in Hunters a "hot button issue" when, in fact, neither Nintendo nor anyone else has ever hinted at Hunters having an online mode:
He then castigates Nintendo for not "fixing" the very prolem he had just made up a few minutes before:
I don't usually question Slashdot's posting policy, since even stupid articles often lead to interesting discussions, but considering that Hunters was never supposed to be an online game, and considering the overal lack of quality of the article, I really think this one doesn't deserve to be even on Slashdot.