Editorial: Fun is Serious Business

Greetings people of the interwebs!

Today I have a question for you. When did games become big business? I know that might sound like a big ol’ gripe about the game companies making me pay money to play their games, but it isn’t. It’s something much bigger.

A little bit of context for you all. I recently found an email in my in box advertising the one year anniversary of Age of Conan, and the offer of fourteen free days of reactivation with no obligations. “Well I’m certainly not up to much else” I say to myself as I navigate over to the Funcom website and wait for the agonizingly GIGANTIC twelve gigabyte download that is the AoC client. I’m thankful that I had the presence of mind to wait until the download was complete until I reactivated my account.

Anyway, I digress. I started it up and started playing around with all the things that I had tried using when I first bought the game. I say tried using, because when I first got it out of the box they didn’t actually work. I don’t mean they didn’t work well or they were “broken” as in unbalanced. I mean there was more than one core game mechanic that simply was not implemented.

I decided though that since these fourteen days were free I could let that slide, I mean heck they’ve had a year to work on the thing, perhaps they’ve improved some. Well it turns out they’ve improved a little more than some. They’ve actually improved nearly everything, and the entire game feels much more finished now. In fact I was actually having a great deal of fun, though I found the ranger I created at launch amongst hordes of barbarians and assassins was now crowded out by hundreds of other bow wielders. That aside though, I’ve actually been enjoying myself enough to start experimenting with different classes. I suppose I could go on about this for a while, but I won’t; I’ll just say that it feels like a completely different game.

This got me thinking, “I’ve heard something similar recently”. Oh right, there were two entire character classes cut out of Warhammer Online near the end of development. I haven’t yet gone back to experience those, now that they have since reintroduced them, but I imagine it would likely be a similar situation.

Neither game is without fault, they both still have their niggling little annoyances, but they both clearly feel like much more complete games at this point. I can’t imagine that it’s simply a coincidence that these two games released so very close to each other (at least in the grand scheme of things) just happened to suffer the same issue. Rather I think that somewhere in the offices of the parent companies of these development teams, rather than in the design offices, the decision was made that it was time to release the game.

Now I don’t want there to be any confusion on my opinion of business people making technical decisions so I’ll be very precise. If there is anyone, anywhere else on the planet who is worse at making them I certainly don’t want to meet them, because they’ve likely managed to have their eyes ripped out by their CD tray. As unpleasant as that certainly sounds, it illustrates my personal dislike for technical decisions being made for business reasons.

Now having said all that, I can’t say that I blame the business folks at these companies for wanting to get their games out there; after all I’m sure they’re looking at the various reports coming out of Activision-Blizzard and seeing the frankly obscene amounts of money that the game is surely raking in. “I want some of that pie” is very likely the thought that precipitated the whole situation.That particular thought is reasonable enough, however it was the follow up thought that bothers me, namely “Hey, let’s push that game out now, it looks finished enough!”.

Having had a slight bit of experience working with software I can say that getting in all of the features that are initally designed is pretty much as common as the sun going supernova, it just doesn’t happen. There are always going to be those features that just don’t make the cut for a variety of reasons, however there is a difference between say, a polish notation interpreter for an online chat application, and an entire playable class in an MMO. Especially two classes that are widely publicized and have marketing material out relating specifically to them. Likewise, when half of your player skills are not implemented beyond the ability to sink skillpoints into them only to get nothing in return, your product is simply not complete.

There are things perhaps that you could defer and patch in later. A particularly finicky one time quest mechanic perhaps, if it’s not too deeply entrenched in the main storyline. Certain cosmetic systems, like a dance dance revolution style thing when the player /dances maybe. These are the sorts of things you can patch in later. The situation these two games found themselves in however were with unfinished products being unceremoniously shoved out into the unforgiving public, and they were quite appropriately taken to task.

I hate to sound like a crazy lunatic hermit screaming about all those “Gall darned normal folk coming in and taking our games, and they were so much better before all you kids and your hippity hop”, but there is clearly a downside to on line games becoming a much less niche market. It’s not even as though I’m lamenting the loss of some artistic genius that would have necessarily been present. It’s simply that when the bags with dollar signs on them get well enough packed, important decisions start getting made by the wrong people.

Anyone who has ever worked at anything anywhere will be able to tell you that oppressive deadlines and “crunch time” simply do not beget acceptable results, and that goes double for triple-A product hopefuls. I do suppose that the problem may not lie entirely with the “mainstreaming” of the genre, as I’m sure that the no doubt excessive investments made to produce games nowadays must show a return in order that the makers keep getting their money, but that’s a conversation for another day.

To me the worst part of the whole situation is that the two games i was thinking specifically of when I wrote this, and I’m sure the countless others that are going to suffer the same problems, show such great promise. I mean Warhammer and Conan are two incredibly rich worlds to draw from, and both games had enough players there to try them out in the first month that they could have been much more succesful, but I suppose it’s just the way that this industry goes; you are your launch and both games completely botched their launches, and now no matter how much they improve what they started with they will never be able to get past that particular hurdle.

In the future, I can only hope that the suits and the ties stay out of my development teams, but for now I have to get back to levelling my new Bear Shaman.

Until next time!