• 16Jul 09

  The mmo market and why games fail

  Opened my email today and found Andrew Parks blog on the 'Age of Conan' mmorpg. Good article on how this game has fixed bugs and added more content. They are trying to lure people back to the game. I thought to myself, good luck on that one...

  Why the pessismism? Quite simply the MMO market is the most unforgiving sector in the video game market. News travels fast and nothing kills a game quicker than a pre mature release filled with bugs and lack of content. Gone are the days of the original Everquest when there was only a couple choices in the market. MMO's are a funny genre, people can get frustrated with them very easily and it is not unusual to have a spike in the first month and then lose a large percentage of these subscribers. These subscribers will hate you and move on to the next MMO, not giving the game a second chance.

  So What does it take to make a good mmo right from the start? One that will last? Heres my list

  #1 Relatively bug free.

  Don't rush a game to market and then patch later. Nothing will kill a game faster than this. TEST your game first. A prime example of this was Vanguard. Vanguard was probably one of the worst bugfests upon release. My wife (who is an mmo addict) played on the beta test and it was obvious that the game needed a lot of work before it was should be released. Atleast another 6 months work. Yet they released it anyways. So what did the developers do when people started to exploit these bugs... fix them? of course not, they banned the accounts of the exploiters! now thats how you keep subscribers... At the other end of the spectrum is the industry leader WoW. Although not bugfree, its release was relatively smooth due to heavily testing and releasing it when it was ready. This also can be applied to patches, please Test your patches first... an example of this was when I played Planetside... It ran just fine on my system and then a huge patch came and the performance on my system drastically dropped... needless to say I cancelled my account.

  #2 Its not the graphics!

  Look at most MMO's today and they have fantastic graphics. The problem is that the developers concentrated more on the graphics than the gameplay. EQ2 and WoW were released approximately at the same time... EQ2 was very graphics intensive where WoW had 'cartoon' like graphics that would run on any system. EQ2 has about 250,000 subscribers and WoW has 11 million. Vanguard would barely run on a bleeding edge system. Please developers learn to scale your graphics engines better. When a game is developed for only bleeding edge systems you cut out 99% of the PC market. Is it any wonder why WoW is the industry leader?

  #3 Interface has to be intuitive

  This one is subjective, but in all the mmo's that I have seen or played Wow is the most intuitive. Things are ordered logically. Most MMO's take alot of tweaking with the interface to get things to work comfortably.

  #4 Don't massively change gameplay

  This one is pointed directly at you SWG. Annoying customers by turning an mmo into an FPS will devastate your community. Small updates are nice, massive changes will destroy your game. This also can be filed under 'TEST YOUR PRODUCT FIRST'.

  #5 Have content up to the highest levels

  Content should be evenly spread amongst all levels, One of the biggest problems with the original Everquest is that 95% of the expansions are ghost towns... when you add new content try to give it some life in the future.

  #6 When the game starts to lose subscribers, merge servers quickly.

  Ghost towns are no fun. It makes it look like nobody is playing and the game is dead. Instead, merge servers so that the remaining players feel that they are playing a Massive Multiplayer game and not a single player game. MMO's are generally about the community... No community, no game and more subscribers lost.

  I am probably not your average gamer. I am a married father of two kids (16, 11) who is a regular active church attendee. I often play video games as a family activity and have been playing video games since you could hook up 'pong' machines to the TV... I've played computer games since the Commodore PET computer! I tell you this because I want to admit to my biases up front. I have played MMO's since the original Everquest and have played EQ1, EQ2, WoW, FlyFF, City of Hero's, Planetside, Neocron etc... Everyone in my family has their own system an plays mmo's

  Will Age of Conan regain its subscribers? probably not, people have moved on... what they can do is keep the ones they have now. All games mature and end up with a steady group of players who have invested too much time into a game to switch unless given a reason to... If the company does not nurture these hardcore players they will disappear...

  Just my 2 cents rant

  • Posted Jul 16, 2009 9:18 am GMT
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• 16Apr 09

  House of the Dead 2 + 3 : Wii

  Walking through the local Zellers I always check the bargin bin (yes I am cheap) and found this little gem. $20 Canadian, so what can I lose right?

  Generally I have a rule, if it has zombies, you can't go wrong.

  Pros

  - lightgun/wii mote combination works great

  - lots of action

  - amusing look for the zombies

  - 2 people = 2x the fun.

  Cons

  - dated graphics

  - it is a rail shooter

  - the voiceovers are terrible!

  This game is a hit or miss, depending whether you enjoy rail shooters or not. Personally I have had alot of fun with this game. I enjoy 'gun' games on the Wii, with the wii gun add on... if you don't own one it will seem like you are in a twisted 'star trek' world where you use phasers! (My son said that )

  My rating 8/10

  good mindless fun!

  • Posted Apr 16, 2009 9:32 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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