I’d so much rather have a company doing this in beta, before launch, and being up front about it, instead of crossing their fingers and tossing out crap and claiming that they have more content than they really do.

The beta testing has been really tight, the best beta I’ve ever participated in (and I’ve been in lots). The gameplay is tight as well, they have a really good idea what they want to accomplish, and what they want players to experience.

I think their whole development process has been a balance between *everything* they’d dream of accomplishing, and what’s actually feasible. I think the cuts are a result of being honest about exactly how much they can release, in acceptable form, in the next few months. I wish more MMO’s evaluated their game this honestly, and I wish all MMO’s also had a plan that allows them alternatives when they decide a feature isn’t yet up to snuff.

Call me a fanboy if you want…I was a huge DAoC fan, and I think they’re taking everything that worked well in DAoC and distilling it into a focused MMO experience…but WAR is one MMO that I’ll be buying on Day One because I think it’s going to be that much fun. And I’m normally someone who advocates waiting.

“If you want to compare it to a relationship then you have to compare it to having met someone who lied about who and what they really are and under those circumstances you’re not obligated to support that person because they are not the person you thought they were.”

Wow, you put it so perfectly. Very wise words – it makes a lot of sense both in and out of context.

No one wants to build crap. Most people want to feel pride in their work. I just can’t be okay with incomplete games being sold to consumers, when I’m a consumer of those games. Bug free is never an expectation but there is an appropriate and reasonable point between shipping everything as marketed and not saying what’s wrong and still shipping it. I agree that some gamers are flipping from one extreme to the other and that’s not good either. It’s more along the lines of throwing a fit over it and that’s not helpful constructive behavior.

I don’t worry so much about the avid gamer who is screaming now. They will pony up for the next big game regardless. However, if a casual gamer purchases and subs to a game like what I’m describing (incomplete, missing features on the box, serious bugs in core features) they are less likely to buy the next game. If/when that happens it doesn’t just hurt that one company it hurts the industry as a whole and that’s just not right.

I hope you’re not offended by the continued discourse. This is your blog so I want to respect that and I think this is the first time I’ve seriously disagreed with someone on their blog and bothered to comment. But since I read yours regularly I figured I’d chime in.

It’s not that the devs want to ship crap to their customers, it’s that they have no choice, they either need the money or need to make an important milestone. Even companies with infinite money, like Blizzard, have a point they cannot go beyond. They have to be able to forecast their revenue, and those dates for release can’t be “whenever”. They may say “whenever” to you and I, but internally, there is a date, count on it. And they will ship on that date.

And anyway, the whole point of the post wasn’t that games companies release buggy software. It was to trust the company’s vision, and trust them to fix their game after release and to give them the support and time they need to do that. Because all this “Oh, AoC is the best game EVER! I LOVE THE CONAN IP! EVERYONE ROCKS! GAME SO GOOD! MORE NIPPLESSSSSS!” and sudden “Oh, AoC is the worst game EVER! THEY RUINED THE CONAN IP! EVERYONE SUCKS! GAME SO AWFUL! WRU NIPPPPLLLLESSSSS!” just makes us MMO fans look like idiots, absolutely fickle people who believe that every game should cater entirely to them, and that there are vast conspiracies which are in reality just people trying to do the best game they can given the pressures of finishing a multi-year, multi-million-dollar multiuser, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of users, software development project before the company runs out of money and everyone loses their jobs.

Just think of all the MMOs Microsoft has pulled the plug on.

A quick look at the Funcom forums makes for interesting reading. It’s full of angry customers complaining about broken functionality and content, hardly the impression any game would want to give to it’s customers. And it’s not the first time that this company has released a game to such a critical mauling and any of you that were unfortunate enough to play Anarchy Online in it’s first few months probably still wake up in the night screaming :). I was one of those poor souls.

Software is complicated and the bigger games get the more likely it is that things will go wrong. No-one expects a game to be bug-free (and one of the first things I learned as a programmer was that there’s no such thing as bug-free software) but there’s a massive difference between an NPC appearing in the wrong place and whole sets of functionality missing from the final release.

Smart consumers never buy the first rev of anything. Look at, say, the iPhone. In a year they have added features and compatibility, a zillion apps and all sorts of stuff.

If people persist in wanting to be early adopters, then they should expect bugs and missing features and instead of bitching about what is inevitable, enjoy the game for what it is and support the devs as they finish making the game they wanted to make.

Every complex piece of software ships as a buggy mess, game or no game.