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Hellgate crits production for 1300 hp's. Production dies.
Hellgate crits production for 1300 hp's. Production dies.
| Name: | Devon Winter | |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Nov 10, 2007 | |
| Rating: |  3.3 out of 5 | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
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| Profile Page: | View profile page for Devon Winter |
Blog post
So this past week I was supposed to be starting work on the quest system. Unfortunately, Hellgate:London actually got released on the 31st, and I've pretty much spent every free minute I was supposed to be working on the prototype playing Hellgate.
This is not all that uncommon. I play a LOT of MMO's, and it has been a common pattern throughout the lifetime of this product that I'll get pulled away for a month or so from time to time when the next bright and shiny MMO comes along. Now granted, it's debatable whether or not this game even is an MMO, but it's close enough, and has enough MMO-ish qualities to merit some observance. It's also a helluva lot of fun.
In fact, it's probably the most broken, bug-ridden, poorly designed, and yet incredibly fun game I've played in a long time. And that's what I want to talk about for just a bit.
Hellgate is absolutely terrible for indie developers. The reason it's terrible for Indie developer is that it serves as an incredibly bad example. No seriously. One of the things we constantly fight as low budget but impassioned developers is trying to produce a game that doesn't LOOK like it was built by one guy working in his game room part time. And here comes a product developed by a supposedly reputable developer. Financed by EA. Darling of E3 for three years running, and designed by the guys that built friggen Diablo!
And yet when it launches, their subscription service is MIA. It has massive crashes to desktop, memory leaks, poorly designed UI's, networking issues, graphical glitches, and huge performance problems on a variety of platforms. But they launch it anyway. And it sells. And worse, it's fun!
And as a consumer, I pay for this game, I play it, and I curse all its brokenness while really having fun in the core gameplay. And as a developer, a little voice whispers in the back of my head that THIS developer.. this publisher, well they released this bug-riddled mess but it's still fun, people are still buying it, and well.. maybe.. maybe it's okay if you let some of those little things go and just get it pushed out the door.
Don't listen to that voice. Don't do it.
That's the thing I have to tell myself. That's the thing I hope you say to yourself. Because it's a very easy temptation to listen to. There are so many pieces of polish and systems and pieces of things to fix up that it's easy to say "hey we got the core gameplay working, so what if the chat window lays completely over your user interface, or half the time you enter an instance with your group you can't see your own group members!
But mark my words, ultimately, that kind of shit is the stuff that's going to kill this game. Yeah, it's fun. But it's not solid. And people buy the game and play it and they're assaulted by the bugs and they will leave this game before they ever get to the part that's fun. Make no mistake, I give this game a lifespan of a year at the most.
So as I go forward with my quest system, I'm going to strive to keep Hellgate in the forefront of my mind. And I'll compare it to games like WoW and Guild Wars and games that are incredibly polished, and made damn sure I cross all my t's and dot my i's before I start showing it off.
Of course, I'm still going to finish the game. :P I'm more forgiving than most..
Until next week, Devon out.
This is not all that uncommon. I play a LOT of MMO's, and it has been a common pattern throughout the lifetime of this product that I'll get pulled away for a month or so from time to time when the next bright and shiny MMO comes along. Now granted, it's debatable whether or not this game even is an MMO, but it's close enough, and has enough MMO-ish qualities to merit some observance. It's also a helluva lot of fun.
In fact, it's probably the most broken, bug-ridden, poorly designed, and yet incredibly fun game I've played in a long time. And that's what I want to talk about for just a bit.
Hellgate is absolutely terrible for indie developers. The reason it's terrible for Indie developer is that it serves as an incredibly bad example. No seriously. One of the things we constantly fight as low budget but impassioned developers is trying to produce a game that doesn't LOOK like it was built by one guy working in his game room part time. And here comes a product developed by a supposedly reputable developer. Financed by EA. Darling of E3 for three years running, and designed by the guys that built friggen Diablo!
And yet when it launches, their subscription service is MIA. It has massive crashes to desktop, memory leaks, poorly designed UI's, networking issues, graphical glitches, and huge performance problems on a variety of platforms. But they launch it anyway. And it sells. And worse, it's fun!
And as a consumer, I pay for this game, I play it, and I curse all its brokenness while really having fun in the core gameplay. And as a developer, a little voice whispers in the back of my head that THIS developer.. this publisher, well they released this bug-riddled mess but it's still fun, people are still buying it, and well.. maybe.. maybe it's okay if you let some of those little things go and just get it pushed out the door.
Don't listen to that voice. Don't do it.
That's the thing I have to tell myself. That's the thing I hope you say to yourself. Because it's a very easy temptation to listen to. There are so many pieces of polish and systems and pieces of things to fix up that it's easy to say "hey we got the core gameplay working, so what if the chat window lays completely over your user interface, or half the time you enter an instance with your group you can't see your own group members!
But mark my words, ultimately, that kind of shit is the stuff that's going to kill this game. Yeah, it's fun. But it's not solid. And people buy the game and play it and they're assaulted by the bugs and they will leave this game before they ever get to the part that's fun. Make no mistake, I give this game a lifespan of a year at the most.
So as I go forward with my quest system, I'm going to strive to keep Hellgate in the forefront of my mind. And I'll compare it to games like WoW and Guild Wars and games that are incredibly polished, and made damn sure I cross all my t's and dot my i's before I start showing it off.
Of course, I'm still going to finish the game. :P I'm more forgiving than most..
Until next week, Devon out.
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 07/08/08 - On Cursors and Code, and Mickey Mouse 06/20/08 - Upgrading to TGEA - Twice 06/04/08 - Truespace and Torque - Part II 06/04/08 - Truespace and Torque - A Study in Four Year Old Technology 03/03/08 - Mission Complete! 11/15/07 - Fixing the Zombie Shuffle 11/10/07 - Hellgate crits production for 1300 hp's. Production dies. 10/30/07 - Teh Ph4t L3wtz |
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Submit your own resources!| Johnathon (Nov 10, 2007 at 04:32 GMT) |
For Indie developers it's a little more difficult. The indie games need to be spot on, because why would anyone purchase it when they could probably find the same kind of game by another indie developer that works or plays better? There are so many indie developers with freeware games or cheap (cheap to purchase; not cheaply made) games out there that you're indie title will just be skipped over.
do a search for free MMORPG's, there's a ton of them out there, if you product is buggy, people will just move onto a free version, and your company name will be tainted, and as an Indie developer, that will make it rough to sell future games.
Good post!
| Novack (Nov 10, 2007 at 19:43 GMT) Resource Rating: 4 |
| Dan MacDonald (Nov 11, 2007 at 17:07 GMT) |
| Johnathon (Nov 11, 2007 at 19:45 GMT) |
Yes, but people will buy the product because it has the round little EA Games logo on the box.
| Brian Wilson (Nov 12, 2007 at 11:08 GMT) |
| Devon Winter (Nov 12, 2007 at 14:42 GMT) |
| Ross Pawley (Nov 12, 2007 at 22:22 GMT) |
| J Sears (Nov 12, 2007 at 22:42 GMT) |
They destroyed the C&C franchise, by focusing on pretty graphics (as EA tries to do with every title since apparently way too many people haven't caught on that a game can look nice but then get boring in 3 days, so they keep buying it). There was a cheat in C&C 3 or whichever it was called that allowed a person to glitcha superweapon to instantly build on game launch and thus ruin the multiplayer side of it, never fixed because they already made their money.
So just to counter Johnathon there are those of us who won't ever buy an EA title again to balance out the fools who buy EA games instantly.
Comment to Ross, WoW shows us one thing, extremely simple games with interesting looking epic weapons do well, very well. To hold an audience that large in a game (even with expansions), that can be maxed out in under a month, shows that it's not levels or quests that the majority want. It's the importance they feel when they have all the leet gear that takes 25 trips through the same dungeon to get.
But for on topic response. I looked at hellgat london and thought, I really enjoyed diablo as simple as a game it was, I didn't enjoy diablo 2 very much though. And finally I decided I'd wait for the next interesting mmorg release to put my money towards. Glad to see I made the right choice, bugs kill interest in a game for me faster then any other problem.
| Ross Pawley (Nov 12, 2007 at 23:08 GMT) |
Unfortunately, I personally don't consider that much of a game at all ;) You may as well sit at a table and roll dice with yourself.
| Johnathon (Nov 13, 2007 at 02:56 GMT) |
I agree with you that there are those out there that do not buy EA games due to their bugs. I too am one of them, I have not purchased an EA game since Battlefield 2 came out and they removed the LAN option for multiplay. There where other games I had bought that they goofed on with bugs or missing features, but the removal of LAN games was the final straw for me and EA Games. We contacted them asking if it would be put back in, and we pretty much got a 'Go eat dirt' email back. 2 months later, it was added back into the game with a patch.
I guess what I should have said is your teenager kids that want to have the 'cool' games (EA does a fantastic job of advertising a cool game, only to find out it's crap), and so the kids go and buy it. The older more experiance adults and/or gamers(including teenagers) have lived and learned with EA.
Edited on Nov 13, 2007 02:59 GMT
| Brian Wilson (Nov 14, 2007 at 14:51 GMT) |
Like it or not, the business model will continue to exist, and continue to thrive. And those of us with a mind to know better will continue to scatter to the dark corners of the industry and complain about it.
Certainly there will be the diamonds in the rough to cling to, and our praises of said diamonds will hopefully inspire the continued development of those oh-so-few gems, but we'll still continue to wade through the rubbish to find them...
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