Slashdot Mirror
Why Vanguard Sets a Bad Precedent for MMOGs
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."
In Elysium's mind, this sets up a really, really bad precedent:
The precedent has already been set. Microsoft, Sony (and I'm thinking EQ expansions here more than PS3), whoever released NWN2...I'm sure there's more but I don't want to bother google searching for this junk. Only company that bothers to release stuff as best they can is Valve I think.
The whole plan is 'release now, patch later.' Patches are too ingrained in the norm these days. Heck, people practically EXPECT patches. If a company didn't release patches, people would begin to think they're leaving their product unsecure or something. Catch-22. Blame the public for accepting patches.
Y'know? Betamax is actually a superior technology to VHS. There's a reason it's what TV stations and recording studios have been using until they went digital.... It records better picture quality, and better sound. VHS won out because of marketing.
The rest of that stuff... can't really argue against it. It's all overpriced and mediocre. But I'd like to point out that SOE probably learned from Everquest (the first)... Millions of subscribers paying $13 US/month to beta test it makes a pretty compelling argument in favour of this kind of business model.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Oh, there are definitely a lot of bugs in Vanguard:
/follow and riding mounts, to shifting you from 3rd-to-1st person, to crashing the game entirely, to "teleporting" you way ahead virtually and getting you attacked by aggro mobs upwards of a kilometer away, to--from what I've heard--reducing you a few levels to a previous save state.
...but where's the fun in that? ;-)
Some quests are just plain broken.
Items "disappear" from your inventory at random times, which seems to be a form of "virtual stacking" and takes you resorting a lot of items or logging off to clear up.
"Soft-zoning" through chunks can have a lot of effects, ranging from breaking
The biggest annoyance is the common tendency for mobs to "teleport" to another area nearby; they are still where they were before, but their model wanders from out of eyesight back to the location. You can still hit it, but it makes targetting between mobs difficult. Mobs "disappear" in this way differently for each person, so you could be fighting one that's always there, but to your companions it has taken off. (Thankfully the "virtual location" does not aggro more mobs.) VERY irritating.
That being said, the game is still very stable, and not out of line with other horribly buggy launches (like Anarchy Online and Asheron's Call 2, as notable examples). It's tightened up pretty well on some fronts, and while it still has a number of issues, it's a solid game.
WoW has a solid launch (but was certainly not brimming with content and all their "promises") and it looks like LotR:O will as well (though it's much more a question of "Why bother?" when sitting side-by-side with WoW), but the "reviewer" is patently nuts if he thinks there's any precedent being set here.
You can make the "released too early" comment about ANY MMO, and if you had your druthers, you'd never play one until it's been out for 6-12 months to shake out bugs, get the biggest balance patching in, and adding some more flesh to the content.
HA! Both the mob models disappearing and the inventory problems have been around for literally 9 months. These two issues were probably one of the most reported bugs in beta. If that's not a perfect example of the game, I don't know what is.
-Woad