The MMO Wars

With the upcoming release of Aion, Champions Online, SWTOR and many other great looking MMOs, I thought I’d comment on the whole MMO situation going on.

For several release cycles now, MMOs have been released after great hype, great promises, great ambitions but ended up as incredible flops. To count a few: AOC, WAR, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London, Darkfall. There are always going to be people that think that these were great games. Sadly those are fanbois, who are about as objective as FOX news.

The MMO industry has had an incredible drop in quality after WoW released and claimed the throne of MMOs, and the listed flops serve to prove that. There is a reason for that too. There are two mentalities that have dominated the developers for these flops: “Let’s try to steal some WoW players!” or “Let’s be completely different than WoW!”. Both are catastrophically stupid. I will try to break the flop reason down and provide some discussion for each.

Let’s be like WoW

The people who already play WoW will not want to switch to a WoW clone based on PvE and raiding. Unfortunately the WAR developers seemed to have trodden knee deep in this mistake. Not only does WAR try to immitate WoW with the gear grind and dungeon progression that they have implemented, they also marketed WAR as a RvR game. DAoC was a RvR game. WAR is not. Mythic did not grasp what made DAoC special in that aspect and sprinkled forced PvE for great gear into the PvP, much like they did with the TOA expansion for DAoC, which many people say was the reason they stopped playing.

The other extreme is being completely different than WoW and abandoning “standard” MMO guidlines. For example Darkfall or Tabula Rasa. They tried completely different systems of gameplay. TR tried mixing in FPS gaming within an MMO along with the capturable mission hubs. DF tried a skill based system and Morrorwind-like gameplay. Both seemed great on paper, but paper is a flimsy thing that turns seethrough when you rub grease on it (yes I stole this shamelessly). The FPS portion of TR was more of an annoyance than a feature, the capturable mission hubs were supposed to bring players together but just annoyed them because they could not quest in peace. DF just seems… off… with its fighting.

What MMOs need to do is copy the good parts of the competition, discard the bad and add in their personal touch. Champions Online has the “joing scenario from anywhere” mechanic from WAR as well as the PQ system and AION has taken some of the better parts of WoW gameplay. Copying good ideas is why WoW has stayed so incredibly popular. It has interated all the good ideas that have come up in other MMOs and modified them to fit into WoW. If another MMO manages to do this then it will be on a good path to success.

Released Too Early

Both WAR and AOC fall grandly into this category. Both had horrible bugs and a terrible endgame (AOC didn’t even HAVE an endgame) when they released. A lot of the content was unfinished or simply did not yet exist. The developers seem to believe that they will have time to polish the endgame by the time their players get there. Unfortunately, this is not EQ or DAoC where it took months to get to the top level and begin the “endgame”. In modern MMOs it takes the obsessives 1-2 weeks and the casual gamers 3-4 weeks to reach top level. That is NOT enough time to polish (or hell, CREATE) the endgame.

Another horrible symptom of early release is a game overrun with bugs. Now I can’t speak for all MMOs, but in WAR, it was extremely frustrating. Bugs that had been seen in beta, were reported in beta (repeatedly) were not fixed and plagued the game for months. Getting stuck on geometry, equipment bugs, graphical bugs (salad fingers anyone?) etc. Since first impressions are extremely important for MMOs, having such low grade polish is horrible. It kills immersion and that “WOW” feeling of a new MMO. Having bugs is normal, but not HUGE bugs, or huge AMMOUNTS of bugs. If you can’t fix them before release, make sure to make it your No. 1 priority for the first few weeks or you will loose a lot of subs.

Deadlines are great and all, but the companies need to realize that unless their product is of good quality, it will not matter when you release it. It will fail anyway.

Performance

MMOs are the only games with such mass appeal. This means that they need to be accesible to the masses, which have very different computers.  Let us take WoW for example. It has great scaling of graphics depending on what settings you use and can be played on both very weak and very powerful computers without many problems. This allows it to have a mass appeal. Even in mass battle situations the engine did not stutter that much. I remember the South Shore battles in the first few months where the server lagged out, but I was still sitting at about 20fps on my ancient laptop with a ATI 9700 Mobile, 128mb Ram. Is the engine perfect? Hell no, there is no such engine, but it made the game look iconic with a unique style and played very well.

Fast forward to AOC. Promised DX10 support, incredible graphics but incredible hardware hunger. However, on powerful systems it ran just fine. The problem here is that very few MMO gamers have such powerful machines. Mostly FPS players have them and not many would like to buy a whole new computer just to play an MMO they want. They will look at the competition and most likely find something that runs on their computer. At least AOC did not lie about its graphics and told people that you would require a monster to play.

Let us take a look at WAR then. A game that revolves around large battles and city sieges (in theory). Its graphics look good. Nothing special, it isn’t AOC but not WoW either. Unfortunately the WAR developers used the same engine they used for DAoC and screwed it up. The performance in any battle with more than 10 people was abysmal. Running it on a Quad Core with 4GB of RAM and a GTX280 I got about 5-10 FPS in keep and fortress sieges. You would have expected the devs to understand that if the engine they are using can not support what they promised, the game is going to piss off a lot of people. Unfortunately, this was not a new issue. People in beta reported “meh” performance, which got trmendously worse when the game went retail. The devs have made several “fixes” for this issue, but nothing really changed. Supposedly the newest patch increases the performance dramatically, but even if they did find what caused the horrible perfomance, it is already way too late.

What game companies need to understand is that if their game is meant to have mass battles, then their engine needs to be able to support it. AION seems to do just that, with people reporting 50+fps in large battles on powerful computers. Good performance makes for little frustration and more fun. Too bad MMO developer don’t want to spend too many resources on graphic engines. Hopefully SWTOR which uses the Hero engine runs good as well, or it might fall to the same problems WAR did.

Class Balance

This is something extremely important to MMOs. Class balance is one of the greatest factor in longevity of an MMO. Take WoW for example. At release Shamans were extremely powerful, however within a couple months were fixed and other classes balanced. This balance has been going on since then and currently the classes are mostly equal in power. There are extremely powerful abilities, yes, however their are no huge imbalances.

Take a look at AOC. There were classes that were running around and slaughtering people. One or two shotting enemies was normal. Such quick battles are fun for only one side, and then only for so long. WoW had this problem at a point, but then more gear and skills were added (mostly resilience) that helped prolong battles. Ongoing balances is key, since players will always find new ways to exploit skills.

Now let us take a look at WAR. It has absolutely horrid balancing. While it does not have true mirrors for classes, it has “archetype” mirrors. Classes that are supposed to fill in the same job. Unfortunately if one has severely better skills than its mirror, then something went horribly wrong. We only need to take a look at BW vs Sorc and IB vs BG. There are more, but these are the most extreme.

An example of how NOT to do balance are BWs. They have the most extreme damage of any career, an insane amount of CC (including heal debuffs and knockdowns) and a mechanic that increases their crit chance and crit damage by insane ammounts but they end up taking a little damage about 50% of the time they cast something. While this works in theory, a single healer can group heal that damage away easily, allowing a good BW to melt entire groups with impunity. Such insane OPness should have been removed during beta (and many yelled for it and were banned), or at the very latest a month or so after release when everyone was hitting endgame. This was however not done and they are still the most powerful career in WAR.

Such horrid imbalances cause many pissed of people who chose the “wrong” side or “wrong” class and leads a lot of people to believe that they are winning with skill instead of realizing that they are simply playing an OP class. Since more and more people will flock to this class, the inevitable nerf will leave many devastated and casue a massive nerd rage and /quit threads. Another reason why this should be avoided at all costs.

Companies need to balance classes early and provide each one with a job and sufficient skills to do it, but not skills to infringe on other careers. Devs should listen to the players along with looking at their statistics when doing balancing, because if 50% of your playerbase are whining about the same thing it might have a reason. Balancing should be done often, so huge sweeping changes should not be needed, but instead little tweaks to push things in the right direction. If classes get hit with huge gameplay changing patches too often, it gets very frustrating to find your desired class unable to perform what you want it to.

Listen. To. The. God. Damn. Testers.

This always gets me. I’ve been to several beta tests for old MMOs and some of the newer generation, such as WAR. In earlier beta tests, the testers seemed to be taken more seriously and the issues they brought up being discussed. If they found bugs, devs looked to fix them, if they were unhappy with a way something worked then the devs would try different things until it felt “just right”. It was hard work for the devs, but therefor we got games like WoW which had great ammounts of polish and fun right from release.

Fast forward to WAR beta testing. Me and many other testers were disgusted at the way that the tests were run. Any kind of negative opinions about the game, certain parts of the game, skills, classes or anything that was not extremely specifically asked for was seen as bad and usually got you suspened or even banned from the beta. People who complained that Bright Wizards were OP got banned. People that copmlained that the endgame was crap and nobody would fight just for the hell of it got banned. People who said it was impossible to get to forts were banned. You get the idea. Most bugs people brought up were ignored and still exist in the game, or were fixed many months after release.

There was already one huge “revolt” of the testers, which is when the devs decided to add Keeps to the game. WAR was originally designed around instanced combat in order to steal WoW players. Unfortunately, after adding keeps, they did not actually add any decent meaning to them other that RPs to be farmed while nobody was defending. All the fundamental issues that testers kept bringing up over and over again were ignored.

While it is great to have a vision of the game you want to design, developers need to understand that they do NOT play their game, they will NOT be the ones playing the game after release and that they can NOT see the big picture by looking at statistics. People like the testers will be playing the game, and devs will have to accept that their vision is not perfect and they WILL have to change it to the liking of their audience, or they will suffer similar problems to WAR.

ITL;DR – MMOs have been failing recently because too many companies wanted a part of the WoW money pie while providing substandard products that could have easily been made a lot better with some foresight, some common sense and a little less dev ego.