MMO Rant #6: Why Learn from Others’ Mistakes…
… When I can make them myself?! Um, because you don’t deserve to be making games unless you learn from the mistakes of others. I’m tired of seeing mistakes repeatedly repeated. How many games have you played that had the same idiotic mistake that could have been avoided by looking at roughly any other game out there? Probably a few. Probably a bunch.
How many games have you seen launch with glaring errors in them? Buggy ass pieces of junk that should still be considered in beta and are played off as final products worth the discs they’re printed on. Haven’t we learned as an industry that we can’t get away with that anymore?
Sure, you could get away with it years ago when MMOs were babies and people didn’t have a dozen other viable options. People were more forgiving then.
How many games have you seen that incorporated heavy-handed mechanics that really don’t seem logical in the first place and end up creating far more player frustration than fun? Too many? I thought so. Sometimes it seems like companies are willing to sacrifice fun for their own control. Guess what players don’t want… you controlling everything and destroying their fun.
How many games have you seen with graphics that weren’t actually “good” but did require “uber machines of ultimate doom with optional sexbot mod” to even play at a respectable framerate? Technical requirements do not equal good graphics. Using new technologies the wrong way is a mistake that people have made so frequently it is starting to really cheese me off.
Learn to make a freaking game. Play other games. Play a lot of other games. Figure out what they did wrong and how to avoid doing so yourself. Holy crap, how novel. The next MMO company that I see making the same obvious mistakes as others before them will get a sticker from me that says, “Dumbass,” and a request that they stop making games that pollute the genre.
I have to agree with the mistakes part, but couldn’t the same be said for the same game-play part as well. I mean why does every character class in every game have to play much like only the Bard’s did in EverQuest?
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel ‘auto-attack’ was the ‘right’ mechanic, but I am sure we can do something in between.
As far a graphics, I am with you full heartily, heck Guild Wars is by far the most ‘fantasy’ looking work, Vanguard is by far the most resource heavy world, and WoW is by far the best use of colors (in places) in a world so far. I don’t feel we need to be so engrossed in the graphics we forget to give time and effort to the game-play or mechanics. DDO is still the funnest of the games to actually play it, just the lack of content is mind boggling.
Bitter, but so, so true.
I would say I have hope for the future except for the fact that the console market still repeatedly puts out garbage on a regular basis and stupid people buy it. I want to believe that since MMO’s are harder to do and usually more expensive than console games, people will be less likely to lack the really obvious things like polish and an early hook… but my magic eight ball says it’s not looking good.
“Learn to make a freaking game. Play other games. Play a lot of other games. Figure out what they did wrong and how to avoid doing so yourself. Holy crap, how novel. The next MMO company that I see making the same obvious mistakes as others before them will get a sticker from me that says, “Dumbass,” and a request that they stop making games that pollute the genre.”
Dude, you are so tempting fate. 🙂
Remember: One man’s mistake can be another man’s feature. Context can mean a lot.
The big mistakes also have a whole lot of roads, which might look completely different, but get you to the same point of failure. The really hard part is figuring out where you’re headed early enough to take another road before you arrive in the big city of Suckville. Problem is, there are scant few maps, visibility is poor, and you’re not always the one driving 🙂
Of course, there’s the classic “It didn’t work because they did X wrong. We’ll do it right” vanity.
“It didn’t fail because they didn’t have the time/resources/talent/technology to make it work. We do. (( Please ignore the fact that we, too are on a budget, schedule, and limited resource pool… and we lack the experience gained through the original failure… We wouldn’t hire anyone from that failed experience lest they taint the current project)).
That, to me, is the #1 reason for repeated “mistakes.” Just like that rabid forumite frothing at the mouth over the devs’ incompetence, we seem to lose respect for our colleagues when an idea we like fails elsewhere. We assume that it isn’t our idea that’s flawed, it was just poor implementation.
Could I get one of those stickers for a friends car?
Thats one hell of a rant! (oooo the preview shows automatically as I type, nice! – sorry randomly noticed it).
The genre is already badled polluted imo, and I really hope things turn around. And for that, people do need to look at others mistakes.
Not sure who this quote is from, but it fits well huh?
“An idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.”
Ryan, can you tell us what triggered this rant?
I wonder how much of the end product that we see is the result of committee design, politics, scope creep, or a patch for a huge bug?
I worked on one game that had a very cool graphical feature that was tied to a core game function. It created a slew of problems however, and we barely had time to scrap the feature and spackle the holes. The game was still fun, but ultimately the designers realized that the feature was an “equal or plus”, not a “minus or equal”.
Nothing triggered the rant. I just finally hooked up my desktop computer, which has my long list of MMO rants I want to do on this site on it. 🙂 I learn a decent amount from responses to these rants (and from doing them), so I did a rant in favor of a lesson this week, which will probably happen fairly often.
A good lesson out of this: One man’s mistake can be another man’s feature.
Good one.
I think the problem is that people have learned from other people’s mistakes, but what they’ve learned is that they can ship software that’s buggy as honk and still get away with it.
Featurewise, though, you’re right with your last comment. One look into any thread with a death penalty war is enough to confirm that 😉
Just send them a bumper sticker that says “I’m an MMO dev dumbass. What’s YOUR excuse?””
Devs hear what they want to hear, that’s all. They divvy up their base and say, aha, this person is the one we want! These other people over here, they can say what they want, but we’re not really listening to them.
VG devs went to the most prominent MMO players and said, we’re making a game for you. What do you want? They ignored the people that said, hey, we don’t have ubergamer machines.
SCEA went around and heard that people would pay any price, any price at all, for a game machine that could also display HD movies on the HD TVs they were sure to have. Microsoft asked around and heard that young males loved their machine and had plenty of money. Nintendo said perhaps people don’t care so much about technical specs and are looking for inexpensive family fun. And so Wii wins this round.
It’s not that companies don’t take input from everyone. But they only listen to those telling them what they want to hear. And should not be surprised when the only people who buy their products are the ones to whom they catered. That’s not necessarily bad, but they shouldn’t expect to make a product for a select few and then expect to win over a large part of the market.
In VG’s specific case, you can’t ask someone to drop two grand on a premiere gaming computer only to give them the same run-and-grind every other MMO provides. WoW gives the same gameplay and runs on a $500 computer.