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A Bad Trend in MMO's: Launching Unfinished Games
Hypodermica
Member Posts: 154
Fallen Earth, another game with boundless potential but a terrible launch. This begs the question, why do MMO's launch with so many bugs/lagging/issues/unfinished content/zero polish?
As I write this, I await yet another "patch" and of course, an unknown amount of downtime.
Over the years, I've been around for a few MMO launchings and I have yet to be part of a "smooth launch". What gives?
MMO's are now over a decade old and video games themselves are over 30 years old!
Alpha Testing, Beta Testing, population load tests, 4-5-6 years of development and MILLIONS of dollars spent yet.... even here in 2009... games just launch like watermelons dropped into oncoming traffic.
My question to you good people here at MMORPG is... Why? Can you tell me why companies have not improved this proccess?
Seems the benefits of waiting another 3 months for a fnished product would far outweigh a messy launch.
How about a free launch? Launch the game for free... playable for 3 months. Like a full-beta where nobody pays anything. Then, whnen all the bugs are worked out (especially bugs caused by population stress on servers) you can change over to a P2P format. Bad idea?
Oh well, I'm off to do some laundry while I wait for Fallen Earth to come online. 1/4 of the way through the first month, $50 and only about 6 hours of playtime.... ::sigh::
Comments
Best guess...investors and people wanting to see their share of the money sooner rather than later. Yeah, a little more time in the oven would do all of these games good, but with the idea that they can just patch fixes in later seems to give rise to the idea of "release now, fix later". It's a sad state of affairs, but the mentality won't change until enough of these games fail. Just my two...
I pretty much agree with Zym. It's hard to compare/state that a game is "unfinished", when a large part of what you and alot of people claim as "polish" is actually server stability/instability. I think this game to be honest has a fair amount of polish, with the exception that the engine really needs to be tuned to run better on lower gear systems.
The game is laggy, because quite frankly as a dev. you really just don't have 100k+ people to play in a beta. Hell, warcraft still plays/lags like poop and its been around for 5 years, and comparatively also has "dated/aged" graphics and did so when it launched back in 2004. To expect a game to NOT lag or have similar issues that a developer with near unlimited resources can't even reasonably do probably IS asking too much imo.
I do not understand this logic. Everyone MMO is unfinished. Everyone knows the launch through about three - six months are a rough go for any MMO released. This came especially apparent after last years launch of a few games. Buying any MMO in the first week of launch is a time when you expect not to play(Hell look at the Diablo II launch for example, you couldn't even get on bnet unless you were lucky, and it crashed constantly) so this is not a new problem. Its called under estimating the server loads, thousands more people to report new bugs, find crashes, etc. If you do not want this, do not buy until quite sometime after release. I told myself I would never buy a game at launch again because of the said above issues, yet I still felt compelled to buy this game regardless knowing full well the desicion that I made.
Sorry to hear you've been having issues and have been able to play only 1hr a day. I logged on about an hour before my son woke up this morning at 7am and crashed once before I took of to visit family between that an 11am, then I left it up chillin in a science lab until after I got back home and it was fine until servers went down. No crash nothing. Looks like its errors on your end.
Only time an MMO is going to be completely stable is when there isn't anybody playing on the servers anymore. WoW wasn't stable on release, nor were most MMO on release. AION as been out for more than a year and they still have some issues. No idea if you have played other MMO's at launch or not, but stability issues and connections issues are to be expected. If this is a major issue, maybe you should wait until the game has been out for a few months until you decide to subscribe.
These kind of issues are going to be ongoing as well, to a lesser or greater degree, every time they add a patch or expansion. You just can't test this kind of program fully until you actually see how it runs on the live servers.
Releasing "unfinished" games... an MMO needs to grow throughout its lifespan or expect to lose its customer base when there isn't anything new to experience. An MMO that is completed is one nearing the end of its lifespan.
The lag, and how many server crashes today?
They can't wait and they can't give it to you for free for 3 months for a very simple reason.
They need the money.
AOC, WAR, DF and now FE, they all launched when they did, regardless of how much more time they should have waited because the financial people who backed the game finally lost patience with the Devs and told them to ship it or else.
I suspect poor requirement gathering coupled with next to no change control leads these games to have an almost endless development cycle.
It has often been seen that development MMO's has traditionally been more of an art rather than a science. I suggest until more MMORPG dev teams start running like a professional software development group the problems will continue.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
about unfinished part i only want to add FE was planed to be a lvl 120 game but only released 3 sectors and limited to lvl 45 but there are lvl 80 NPC and also lvl 150 NPC
how is supposed to kill this NPC i have no idea ......
BestSigEver :P
Saturday wasn't too bad, there were a few things that weren't working right such as mission items not updating in the tracker... Sunday had so much lag it was unplayable. But it's a new game and I guess they couldn't test it. Whichever way you look at it the game is 100x more fun that WAR.
The option of a free trial at launch as a new standard for all MMO's sounds like a good idea to me, especially considering the makers of these games expect players to cough up a monthly fee as well. This way players can pop into the game and decide for themselves if the game is in a state that warrants paying money for. Demos of single player games are available afterall.
The Chronicles of Spellborn did this and it was a great idea. I actually subscribed to the game for a month (before it went F2P of course) because they werent expecting me to fork out £30 - 40 for an unfinished product (no they didnt even charge you the full game price......just a monthly fee and that was all).
You mentioned that computer games are over 30 years old as if thats an incredibly long time. It actually isnt when you consider what "games" used to be like 30 years ago. I can go back roughly 25 years when I used to play games on my ZX Spectrum 48k. I had to load games on a seperate cassette player......and if the volume wasnt set correctly then the game often wouldnt load at all. It took ages, the games were mono-colour, 3D graphics were the equivalent of gold dust from the heavens and there was no save option unless specific games had passwords to allow you to start at the beginning of a level you just reached. Compare that to what we now have 30 years later and....well....I think complaining about the luxury we have now shows how spoilt we all are.
But yeah I still agree that games companies charging for players to fund their unfinished products is rather naughty. Its a trend that has caught on with MMO's and it isnt likely to change. People pay up for an MMO even when they know damn well the game isnt quite ready, and the games companies know this so they just carry on doing it. If people are eager to give them their money then these companies certainly arent going to turn it down. Afterall you yourself have bought a copy of Fallen Earth knowing full well that its an MMO and is therefore subject to the same naughty "charge the players to be beta testers" policy.......or did you somehow expect the state of this game to be different to all the rest?
OK, I think I know what's happening here. Having been a rabid beta tester of FE since late March, I've seen the game go from nearly unplayable to really smooth to today's fiasco. And I think I have at least a theory on what's up.
First, let's look at the general viewpoint of pundits and media. Sci-Fi doesn't sell. We've seen this said about almost every TV sci-fi series from Star Trek to Firefly and beyond. For some reason, corporate execs LOATHE sci-fi.
Sci-Fi games are a niche market. Again, the gaming public has heard this for years, and is innundated with fantasy games until our eyes are bleeding.
Open-ended games don't sell. The WoW model tells us that directed experiences are what the public wants And for the last 5 years or so, we've been deluged with directed fantasy games. So many that the term "WoW-clone" has been applied to just about everything.
So, along comes a little Indie company with an idea for a more open-ended sci-fi game, with the twist of adding a little bit of almost-FPS shooter style combat into the mix. (Please note that I'm refraining from the use of the term "sandbox" here. This is NOT Ultima Online or EQ1.) Man, that's gonna be a small niche market for sure. They round up a few investors and get to work. They've done their research. They have a general idea of the size player-base they'll be seeing at launch. Their projections say a single "server" (yes, I know, they're clusters...but One World, like EVE, is what I mean) will be fine.
They're not a deep-pockets corporation. They don't have multi-billionaire backers. They're not traded on the NYSE. They've got some cost-savings decisions to make. They can't afford, say, an industry-standard real-time database system costing a million bucks. They've gotta go with something more traditional and less expensive.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, in the long run...AND for us), they've totally underestimated the thirst of the gaming public (that'd be us) for something that's NOT strictly of the WoW model. And, come launch, they're totally swamped. Perhaps an order of magnitude more than anticipated. The pundits and media and research were WRONG. The gaming public is DYING for something different, and is flocking to FE as the first in a LONG time to try a newish system in a newish setting with some open-ended elements. Not revolutionary, no. But such a refreshing change from EVERYTHING that's come out in the last 5+ years that we just have to try it. Factor in all those (Smedley says small in number...but we know how wrong he is) SWG refugees and we're seeing the result. There was no way they could have known what this launch would bring.
So, what's next. This week will see a number of patches, I'm sure. There will be more downtime. The game itself is NOT in bad shape. This isn't a case of bugged missions, no content or vast imbalance and open exploits. This is a TECHNICAL failure quite different from most bad launches. This is a failure in SCALE-UP. This one is different even in its launch problems.
I speak from some experience. I KNOW the content for 3 sectors is there and functions properly. I'm already into Sector 2 and nowhere have I experienced any problems with the actual content. In fact, until the 22nd, the game ran more smoothly than ever. But the shear numbers of people flocking to the game has overwhelmed the technology. This, fortunately, is fixable. Whether or not they have the cash on hand to FIX it (e.g., a couple of more "servers", i.e., shards-worlds-whatever) is another story. But I think they'll get through this and come out the other side with a great game for us to enjoy. I know all the GAME pieces are in place. I just hope they get the technology straightened out quickly.
-- Xix
"I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
Its a trend we have to live with. If (through legislation for example) we forced companies to release absolutely bug free.stable,complete from level 1 to level 50/70/80 products you'd have Sony, Blizzard, maybe ncsoft and bioware able to release a mmo. Those 4 I mentioned would probably only release one maybe two. No indie could do it including EVE.
Any failed launches or unexpected low returns would bury a company ie funcom,mythic.
We would have a incredibly shallow and liniear mmo selection since nobody would dare risk a fail.
I can understand the pressures of generating a return on investment, yet I wonder how intelligent some investors are. With fifteen years of MMO releases to examine and learn from, surely investors have realised that an unfinished release is going to have an adverse effect upon their product?
I don't know how different it is with Fallen Earth. It's an indie project so may have much lower investment and also possibly less aware investors behind it. Problem with the investment for an MMO is that it quickly disappears once assets such as audio/visual assets have been prepared and the costs of running an open beta are factored in.
I'm a firm believer in John Carmack's philosophy of "it's done when it's done". There are many resources available that can help developers and technicians accurately evaluate loads placed on hardware as well as identify potential bottlenecks that may eventually lead to unwanted deadlocks in process execution. I'm speaking generally because in order to be specific I'd need to write an article which would invoke responses of "TLDR"!
I don't mind letting people know I've been working on an MMO for the last year and a half, but the public don't know one little iota of info about the game itself because the team aren't wanting to build up expectations before we're ready to blow your minds. One thing we've learned from watching other development houses is that we have no intention of releasing anything prematurely!
I think the big thing point is the price tag. This game isn't cheap and the finish of the product should reflect the cost. Most indie games are half the price or less and it is reasonable to have lower expectations.
I'm glad some poeple here have a grasp of the fact that the industry has had quite a long time to sort this out as a process and technical difficulties or excuses are completely irrelevant to me and you as the consumer.
Cars, planes, I pods are all very techically diffcult as well, but they works on the whole.
I honestly think people are overreacting about fallen earth and it's stability.
The game has only crashed on me once or twice, there have been a few problems since the barrage of people coming in on the 22nd, but people forget that these guys actually care about their game. There is almost always 3 active gms in chat, they address problems fast and average downtime on a restart is 5 minutes.
I don't have anything against steam players but from the 9th to 22nd the game was great and the community was second to none.. since the 22nd it's like perma barrens chat in new player, people troll, grouch, expect quest handouts, post mindless rambling crap and bust the chops of the extremely active and helpful gm staff thats ALWAYS on.
Honestly... 90% of the people that are grouching have a subpar to crappy computer setup that just can't handle the game. I have a 3.2ghz quad, 4 gig of ram and a 9800gt and the game never dips below 40fps for me.
People need to give the game a chance first.. it has that old hardcore feeling of precu swg where you get dumped in a world and are completely confused. Most of todays new gamers just can't deal with this type of game because you have to think/plan ahead and they want to be at level cap within a week... thats not how FE is designed.
To me this is still in the last beta phase. My account still has 30 free days left of the 45 I got from preorder so there will be small problems that need ironed out. It definitely isn't a bad launch though.. the game is completely playable and there has been almost 0 issues so far and I'm in S3. Pvp is just awesome btw
Cars are regularly recalled for critical flaws in safety systems and people die because of it. Airplanes fall out of the sky due to manufacturing and design defects years after introduction.Thousands of ipods failed due to defective batteries. Most indie subscription MMOs cost exactly the same as those launched by the big names. And yet you bought it sight unseen at full price knowing these problems are likely to occur. Again what is the incentive for companies to do anything different?
Yes you right i-pods were not a good example afterall, in terms of first launch. Planes drop out of the sky very very rarely. Cars go for scheduled services known to the customer after long periods, but the car wont breakdown around the corner from the showroom first day and all the electric toys all work.
They may get away with this as the game is different from the usual bulk fantasy theme mass produced by Asian developers. I think & hope it does end up a good game and this doesn't come the norm.
Perhaps the incentive to do better will come from more competition in the same genre or better consumer protection. It seems there are two endemic problems in the industry that need to be sorted out. Proper financial planning like in any other business and a better attitude towards their customers. From the feedback I'm getting the customer is not important and individually expendable. An attitude that can destroy any business in the long term.
I think attitude on the part of the vendor (and their staff) has got to change dramatically for the better. They should listen to their fee paying palyers and not blank them out as the mass rabble. Maybe they might learn more about their market.
People overreact about everything. Honestly, I'm amazed people are complaining about the state of MMO's when they're conveniently overlooking that it's a common problem to software in general and has been a problem for as long as humans have been on the planet.
I think to clear up, there is a difference between a game launching buggy (which is to be expected given the difficulties involved) and a game launching incomplete.
We expect a game to launch with bugs, needing some patching as unexpected problems arise post launch. We expect jiggering and re-configuring when the game is first put under its first real stress.
But I think the OP is talking about games launching undone. Launching before the dev team completed their work. With incomplete or missing content. The kind of launch where the devs were overruled by the bean-counters.
The difference between:
1. Devs have completed their work, lets launch! Oops, there are bugs, lets fix em.
and
2. Even though the devs aren't done, lets launch any way for financial reasons and count on the players expecting a buggy launch to cover our butts.
Cars are regularly recalled for critical flaws in safety systems and people die because of it. Airplanes fall out of the sky due to manufacturing and design defects years after introduction.Thousands of ipods failed due to defective batteries. Most indie subscription MMOs cost exactly the same as those launched by the big names. And yet you bought it sight unseen at full price knowing these problems are likely to occur. Again what is the incentive for companies to do anything different?
Exactly. People will keep paying = Companies will carry on releasing unfinished broken games = These conversations will keep happening.
Cars are regularly recalled for critical flaws in safety systems and people die because of it. Airplanes fall out of the sky due to manufacturing and design defects years after introduction.Thousands of ipods failed due to defective batteries. Most indie subscription MMOs cost exactly the same as those launched by the big names. And yet you bought it sight unseen at full price knowing these problems are likely to occur. Again what is the incentive for companies to do anything different?
There is a difference between companies selling you a car with flaws, and them selling you a car with missing parts. I think thats what the OP is talking about. Not buggy games, but incomplete games. As if some exec said "Listen, we need the money, lets sell this car thats only 90% down the assembly line. Then we'll sell them the last 10% in an upgrade!"
This isn't only in MMO's. Go play Madden football. They have released incomplete games ever since next gen started with the mindset of well we can always patch. When in reality it turns out we can always TRY and patch it.
MMOs have always needed work (patching) at release. I personally think some of them should have extended open betas of like 6 mo. to a year. But have a ton of added content preplanned for the first 1-2 years.
I'm sorry but the mass market havent shown interest in sandbox/open ended MMOs.
As a sandbox fan I suffer through terrible launches by underfunded Indy companies.
What else could we do? We buy these half finished games and support the devs and hope the games get better (they usually do). If these devs kept the game in closed beta until these games were 100% finished they would release after a 10 year development and look like dog shit.
Until a AAA developer comes along and makes a sandbox we have no choice but to deal with it.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
I don't think a true MMO is ever finished, or at least shouldn't be. It's a matter of at what point they release what they have. I'd agre with the above poster about the surprising number of people that swamped the servers, especially when it became available 'mainstream' on Steam.
Prior to this the servers ran awesome, game was smooth, and had all the the content in place for tons of fun. The sheer numbers of people on launch gave unexpected results. It was numbers and nothing more. Even with the masses suffering lag problems and such in the starter zones, I was running the game perfectly further north and didn't experience a single problem (till today where I think everything caught up to the servers). Once the population spreads out I think the game will run fine for most.
But, as the other post stated, there are many who just don't have the systems needed to run this game and then they complain. You can argue as to why this game needs those high specs but, regardless, they are there.
I hope some of those that peruse these forums read your theory and try to understand it, it reeks of sense. FE and Icarus have undoubtedly underestimated the response they received. And with minimal marketing to boot. How quickly they can scale up their equipment is the key here if they do not wish for the "those that take pleasure in watching others fail," to do irreparable damage to the name of Fallen Earth.
Like many others, I can see the immense potential for this game. But like many others also, I can see the catch 22 FE finds itself in. To stay true to the vision, they need to keep their indie badge, to keep many of their impatient customers, they are going to need to make some moves that require capital. And I'm thinking that kind of capital is the kind with strings attached.
I, for one, would rather suffer a little longer with the growing pains of FE and allow them to take their time and grow at a reasonable pace. If they lose 10k subs, so be it, those were the ones they weren't banking on in the first place.
I think the problem arises because the developer & publisher mechanic that exists in the game industry is broken. Anyone who is familair with how the industry works knows that a deveopment company makes a game and a publisher finances them and handles the marketing and slaes of the box and disk. Developers typically employ a bunch of non-experienced underpaid young adults who work 70 hours a week because making a video game is cool. So many people get burned out that a lot of good talent leaves the industry(or never enters in the first place).
Meanwhile the publisher who is financing the operation wants to earn a huge return but are unwilling to finance the 50-100 million dollars and wait five that a AAA MMORPG requires to compete. They are also unwilling to take a risk on a smaller niche market so nothing innovative gets produced.
Add to all this a lack of goo design that new games seem to have - in other words lets copy WoW but not even do that right because developers can't figure out what made WoW successful.
If you look at Blizzard, and the interview that MMORPG did on the front page you can see the differences. Blizz has a large staff of experienced game developers who enjoy working for the company - so it means their guys aren't getting burned out. This experience is directly evident in the products they release(not just MMORPG's).
Blizzard also has deep pockets and they are willing to spend the time and money it takes to release a quality game.
Now I am not saying WoW didn't have problems on release or still does but it blew away other game launches when it was released. Other games have launched smoothly since then, WAR and LOTRO come to mind but they still lacked polish in their overall game play.
I don't know if FE is as the OP claims as I am waiting on this one, but I believe we will continue to see mediocre MMO's being released as long as the broke ass development cycle of games continues.
Agreed.
They do it because the players will still buy it.
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