Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story

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.

Comments

Re:1st post?

[Dunbal]

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.

Summary not so good

[Kjella]

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...

Re:Summary not so good

[AK Marc]

And where's the personal integrity? These people shipped a known bad product. And all because of the threat of being fired. Let me in on a little secret. That's unethical, and it gets the company out of business almost as fast as you'd have gotten your pink slip. So why act unethically then loose your job? I'd rather act ethically and look for a job than unethically and look for a job.

"They would have punished for our incompetence if we didn't act negligently, so we decided to act negligently, rather than take responsibility for actual mistakes we've made." Sounds like they should run for office.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Dunbal]

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.

...EA

[phorm]

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

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:...EA

[Digital Vomit]

Mature gamers who remember what EA used to be, and hope that a company as old and (once) respected as EA

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 (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 1982, when development of the game began.

A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Rix]

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

[Kindgott]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[mykos]

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:David Jaffe is full of shit

[bigstrat2003]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[MagikSlinger]

Mod parent up. :-)

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[TheLink]

It may not have the same namepower as Starcraft, but it still sold 1+ million copies. So that's namepower enough.

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.

I wanted to be a game programmer...

[MetalFlow]

but then I read articles like this one that made me realize that I had just idealized this job as somehow different from the rest of the cubicle farms...

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 promote the bland, boring, two-faced corporate assholes in charge when they're done firing all the real brains behind the product.

If you must work in the games industry, do it to get some experience for a resumé, then leave with some patient friends to start a little shop and have some fun. That or start the shop off your own ideas and spare time while working a real job. Sticking with "the industry" will chew you up, spit you out, sap your soul, and generally make you hate life.

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[fadir]

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.

Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

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.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[MORB]

[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.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

"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 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.

I really don't understand why even medium sized studios with medium or low funding attempt to build AAA-titles. And while Mythic is definitely a good studio - they are simply not big enough to compete with Blizzard & Co. It's suicide.
It wouldn't make me wonder if Mythic would get shut down by EA or at least merged with/into another studio sooner or later. It's common practise for this publisher.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[MORB]

"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.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

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.

Ya pretty much

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ya pretty much

[MartinSchou]

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

[pipedwho]

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.

Re:Ya pretty much

[Pinky's Brain]

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).

Re:Ya pretty much

[GooberToo]

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.

Re:Ya pretty much

[tibman]

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

[tophermeyer]

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.

It was a fun game...

[CougMerrik]

The game was actually really fun up to a point. They did a great job with the low level experience. Once the game got to the high end, and especially once keep runs or city seiges were the norm, the game became as much fun as actually pursuing an extended siege on a castle. Not so much RvR as RvDoor. I think most of their gameplay systems were great -- expanding tactics slots, passive vs. active talent points, etc. The problem was with the content, largely devoid of alternatives to RvR at the high end, repetitive PQs and their strange and arcane reward systems which turned into a grind for gear that ended up being just really bad compared to stuff you could get just as easily from other places. In the end, once they started flailing wildly in patch after patch to try and make their content fun, I knew it was probably over.

Re:It was a fun game...

[DaAdder]

The game actually is quite a lot of fun and it's finally been going in the right direction for the last 8 months or so. They've focused entirely on the PvP/RvR experience though, so those looking for updates to the PVE aspect of the game should probably look elsewhere. As for the dull keep-taking in T4, that's being overhauled in the patch that's currently on the test server. They did a similar overhaul of the end game that's city invasion which turn out to be quite good. They're definitely on the right track these days, but it be too little too late. I know me and my friends will stick around for a while longer though, there's simply no pvp experience that gets close elsewhere.

Re:It was a fun game...

[NBolander]

A shame I don't have the points to mod you up. Since Carrie Gouskos took over it has been moving in the right direction. It's not a well run software project by any standard but the game is great fun and certainly nowhere near dead yet.

Re:It was a fun game...

[Jeek Elemental]

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 if simple 3d engine, but with plastered on effects (by mythic?) that looked like example templates from some microsoft dev pack, and performed absolutely horribly, bringing top end rigs to knees
- no music
- oddly inconsistent art and animation quality, from good to complete crap
- overall design seems to have changed during development, miniature terrain, buildings and class details suggest a "meta" design where each character represent an army, but quests and later patches seems to have forgotten that. Incoherent mess.
- amateurs at every level, I dont think there was ANY feature that worked quite right, Ive never seen anything like it. Even bugfixes went out bugged!

So I think ealouse is quite right in blasting the producer, but I dont think any part of the team should be terribly proud here.

Id really hate if the industry concludes from WAR failure that theres no market for this kind of game, people had fun with it despite all the flaws, but the flaws were massive and many and as people started to realize there was no intention of fixing it, they left.

Re:It was a fun game...

[DaAdder]

Then check out the current changes on the PTS, which is evolving every day with user feedback. They're gearing up for a very decent revamp of the RvR. Some of your points will be adressed there, some look like the will be in the not so distant future.

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 a year old, the game is looking pretty decent. It's still not for everyone and there's a lot of rough edges, but it's certainly worth a second shot if you're at all interested in the PvP aspect of an MMO.

Re:1st post?

[pspahn]

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 (or did, it's been some time) promote quality employees. Maybe I should have stuck around, but the Bay Area commute eventually got to me and I decided it was time to leave California and move somewhere with a higher quality of life.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[caerwyn]

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 longer true. But if that happens, then it actually proves my point, because such devices will have *become* general purpose computing devices, and therefore the "PC" and its associated games will still be around.

If and when the tablets "win", it will only be because they have become what they defeated.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[fake_name]

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.

In Game Voiceovers

[maccodemonkey]

"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.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[Kindgott]

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.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[basscomm]

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.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[_xeno_]

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!

I'm told the end game content had a more coherent story, but after a while, I just stopped caring about every little meaningless detail when essentially the entire quest's story is a lame excuse to kill things.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Darinbob]

Naw, it's really timing. He's right that it shipped too soon. It had a huge "omg, this will finally be the WoW killer" vibe going (just like the star wars one has), and a month later it was "omg, this game sux". It has nothing to do with being a PC game.

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 just backfill the content later and hope players will accept it.

This is EA

[TranceThrust]

I already did not expect anything else. Look at Dragon Age. Good game, but bugfest galore when it comes to DLC. And who'd you think is primarily concerned with that specific part: Bioware or EA? And do you think EA even cares, or even puts up half able people at their service desk?
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 they didn't even have the time to properly remove all traces. I realise this has been getting the norm for more and more games nowadays. But it's affecting more and more potentially really good games. Civilisation 5 anyone? Or Neverwinter Nights 2 back in the day?

My only hope is on consumer power. I will not buy any product, specifically EA products, before I *know* it is proper. I will not buy at launch. I will sit and wait until the bugs have been fixed, or until I forget about it. I hope many will do the same and companies will again produce only products which are *finished*, and developers regain their pride and tell publishers to sod off when they have to.

But thanks to the insider speaking out, confirming once again rushing is the norm nowadays.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Kjella]

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 the controller in hand.

The lead computers have had in graphics took a huge step up going from NTSC/PAL to 720p. Yes, I know computers had this resolution in the 1980s. The point is that the next generation is likely to be full HD, and 1920x1080 is very close to the maximum "normal" people have today as 95%+ of all gamers play at 1920x1200 or below and 16:10 monitors seem to be disappearing from the market. Sound? I expect full 7.1 with bitstreaming to be supported on the next generation, as all the latest generation graphics cards support it. The PS3 BluRay is already bigger than most DVD games for PC.

In short, I don't think hardware-wise the next generation consoles will in any meaningful way be performance limited. The biggest question is if someone wants to pick up the glove and really push FPS, RTS and MMORPG games for consoles using keyboard/mouse. Imagine for example if one of them managed to secure an exclusive console license for WoW then that would be a huge, huge seller. I don't know why it's not happening, I think the consoles have spent so much time selling themselves as not a PC that they can't imagine themselves being the PC.

I can't wait for PC gaming to "die"

[primerib]

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"

[mlts]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[houghi]

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.

Then all we need is something like Visual Studio for Linux and there will be a shitload of games for Linux. Right?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[VJ42]

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.

Re:1st post?

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Well, here are some actual reasons

[Draconi]

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

[tibman]

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.

Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[Moraelin]

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?

Re:Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[cgenman]

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 walk away. But you can't walk away from every contract and still have a company. I've seen far too many bad deals in my day because the company got hungry.

Games dev doesn't suck! Please mod parent up.

[TBBle]

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, and is still thrilled to be making video games for a living.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[nschubach]

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 in the world (negating the world part of the game.)

To some people it must be new

[Moraelin]

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

[chrysrobyn]

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.

Enjoyable Game

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Also, one thing... they said before too, you know?

[Moraelin]

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.

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.

Then comes WoW and enlarges the market by a whole order of magnitude.

Turns out there was still room to grow. But of course, you needed to offer something to people who didn't already like Everquest. Everyone who wanted to play an Everquest clone was already on Everquest, and everyone else didn't want to play an Everquest clone. You couldn't enlarge the market by just catering to the same group of people. You needed people from outside that group.

My take is that the same happens at the moment. Sure, if you make a WoW clone, your market is kinda limited to the people that WoW already caters to. You need something new to get new people.

"Unrealistic expectations"

[Minwee]

David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.

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:David Jaffe misses the point...

[Chris Mattern]

The reasoning that "War is going on, there will be no happiness whatsoever" is ridiculous to say the least.

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[tibman]

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 you have your phone loaded up with music, that deeply cuts into your tv show storage.

Your phone is a communication device. If your phone becomes powerful enough to play high-end games and manage all your music/videos.. guess what? You have a portable Personal Computer (PC) that can also make phone calls.

I also doubt that people are migrating from PCs to Consoles. Consoles were the gaming machines before PCs were. The people who play on PCs like it that way and Consoles are for people who want something that "just works". They can also coexist together. Some people prefer their MMOs and RTSs on the PC and their FPS and RPGs on console.

Damn, i feel like i've been trolled.

I will agree though that smartphones will likely replace portable consoles like gameboy and psp.

Lessons not learned

[KriticKill]

Sounds like EA needs to take a look at Blizzard's success and their unofficial "It will be ready when its ready" motto. EA appears to employ short sighted business execs who lack common sense, as a general rule.

I was one of the people who played at launch, and quit shortly after. A few things bothered me (not the issues with the Bright Mage snares; I was playing one after all). The linear, progressive nature of the campaign was really irritating. Finish an area? Good, your done, forget about it and never come back. Other than maybe pick up some old titles you might have missed there was probably no reason to go back. Coming from WoW where there are good excuses to revisit old areas (farming, achievements, old instances/raids, etc.) it was annoying to realize that once you finished up with the campaign, there was literally nothing to do, except pvp constantly (which I suck at anyway). The public quests were an interesting idea, but ultimately a failure. For about a week after launch it was fairly easy to get people to stop by and join in. After that everyone moved on, and the only way to do them was with a guild or friends. For someone that doesn't have very many friends that mmo game (and the ones that do, didn't bother trying WAR), this was a killer. The crafting system was a steaming sack of shit. I don't think I ever did more than glance at it and gather a few things, in the three or so weeks I played. Finally, there was little reason to go to the major cities. You could find all the vendors, skill trainers, and almost everything else you needed along the way (I didn't play to far, but the library and the trophy stuff seemed to be the main reason to visit the cities). Again, for someone coming from WoW this was a huge turn off.

On the good side, the idea of public quests was solid. It just needed a better player finding feature. The titles, the lorebook, the bonuses for killing lots of creatures of a single type, were all very cool, much better than WoW's achievement system, simply because there were tons of titles for all kinds of crap, and you could get alot of them with very little work, making it easy to feel like you were really accomplishing something. For example, there were titles for thing like clicking on yourself 50 times, or doing pvp naked, scoring critical hits, and survivng pvp fights with 5% hp or less (getting that one was awesome; I wish WoW had a Toothskinner title), as well as situational titles that you got if you found certain static world objects and such. This game showed alot of promise. Its a shame EA fucked everything up.