» Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:00 am A certain development culture has arisen in response to certain issues in the past that needs to be reevaluated by any company that wants a succesfull title, beyond just focusing on good sales on day one.
Because an MMO is NOT a regular video game, its not day one sales that will actually determine the success of the franchise.
Failing to understand this has caused many MMO titles crash and burn, even after a very successfull launch.
Let me explain the issue im talking about.
During the development proccess of an MMO, more so then a regular game, the development company will be very strict on any disclosure about the game, or the development proccess, SPECIFICALLY when it comes to Game Mechanics!
Why is that? Why is it ok to sometimes leak concept art, maybe even renders of mobs or areas, or weaponry, but remains firmly tightlipped about game mechanics?
Well there are several reasons for that, and they all have to do with history.
1. The number one reason, is that everything is subject to change.
And while that is not a problem when it comes to concept designs or early models of the games NPCs, game mechanics have special rules, as if the playerbase was simply too moronic to understand that game mechanics needs to be reviewed and tweaked just like everything else.
This misconception comes from an episode in UO where a game developer, as a joke, mentioned changing some of the skills in the game in a specific way.
What happend was that the comment, meant in jest, was recorded and taken for absolute gospel.
Even to the extent of having some players reroll new characters and start to develop them specifically to take advantage of, what they thought, was upcoming changes.
When the mistake was clarified this vocal minority made enough noise to create this idea in the head of future developers that we the players simply cant handle the truth.
Nevermind that this only came from a moronic minority, and forget the fact that MMO players are a thousands times more tech savvy about MMOs today then ever before.
2. The second and equally important reason is using lack of information for marketing puroses.
The idea is psychological, and works basically like this.
The less u tell the players about game mechanics, the more they will imagine how its going to be.
In the proccess of imagining the player will ALWAYS assume what he wants and hopes for, unless faced with the clear reason not to.
So it goes to reason that the more u tell, the more potential players u will lose as the game stops living up to their idea of the perfect game.
But this is a huge mistake.
Because we as MMO players have come too far in this day and age to be lead around by the nose.
Not knowing what the game is like simply means the great majority will not buy it at launch, they will wait and see how the game turns out instead.
But worse then that, once the players start to ACTUALLY play the game they will quickly find out that the game does not meet the ideal standard they have now created in their own mind, and they will start to quit.
What many development companies will do at this point is to try to tempt the player with upcoming patches.
This is pretty much the same tactic over again.
As the devs remain equally tightlipped about their upcoming patch ,players will once again allow their imagination to run wild, and subsequtially gets closer and closer to quitting for every time the upcoming changes failed to meet their ideal version.
The MMO world is RIFE with examples of exactly this problem destroying any market potential for almost all released in the past 5 years.
So dont be like that, be open, be honest, let us know what we are getting and we will learn to love it.
And if something u wanted to do simply didnt make it in, explain urself honestly and the majority of us will not care.
And remember that even those crazy few that DO scream and rant, are not going anywhere.
U dont quit an MMO because u care too much about it, u quit an MMO because u are bored with it.
-Exo
