Making it work

Over the past couple of months I’ve reviewed quite a few MMOs. Some of them were brilliant, some were passable (but not exactly original), a few were a bit boring (mainly the strategy MMOs) and at least one was so terrible that it pained me to put in the time and effort needed for the review. There’s always going to be a variety in the amount of titles out there and, let’s be honest, that’s not a bad thing. Even a terrible game can give birth to an idea that will be put to better use in other titles. For the most part though, even the least interesting games managed to work when I tried them.

Not about perfection

I’m not expecting a hit in every title I come across, nor am I expecting perfection, but if you want me to play any game you create, you’re going to need to make it at the very least playable. This week’s article is going to be about making it work, about that feeling you get when you download a new game and are met with an error message. It’s something that is sometimes completely unavoidable and, honestly, as a collection of PC gamers, your potential customer understands that it’s not always going to be easy to make your game work on every single piece of hardware when there are so many variations out there. When met with constant problems in a single title, however, that’s when somebody’s view on the problem goes from understanding to anger.

I spent quite a bit of time during my review of Eudemons explaining how I spent my first few hours after installation trying to fix problems that shouldn’t be there. It’s not the first time I’ve had issues with MMO downloads, it happens relatively frequently in fact and I can’t say I have an unusual computer. My graphics card is fairly standard, I’m using Windows 7 (not a rare spin-off of Linux or something, an operating system that comes with all new computers) and I can’t imagine why any developer that continues to support a title would fail to update for newer, shinier operating systems.

Misguided decisions

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems that since the success of World of Warcraft, almost every publisher and developer in the world that can boast an employee with knowledge of online systems has created an MMO in the hope of it becoming just as profitable as Blizzard’s effort. Some of these games turn out to be good, others turn out to be less good, but you can always tell the difference between an MMO with a few misguided decisions from the top and an MMO that has been created with the sole purpose of being a cheap way of bringing in a profit.

Installation of a game: How annoying can it be?

It starts with the installation, the section of a game that’s not only incredibly dull, but mandatory. The first part of almost any PC game is waiting for something to happen and, let’s be completely fair here, it’s not a terrible thing. It’s annoying, but it’s something we need to deal with. It doesn’t take a huge chunk of our lives and there’s no way around that. For an MMO game, add in patches. Patches are one of the most annoying things I think I’ve ever come across because after downloading a multi-GB game, there’s nothing more annoying than knowing you’re probably going to have to download more than a few GBs more instantly.

There’s probably a very good reason patches can’t be added to that initial download, although the cynic in me suspects that the real reason all comes down to people being put off by TOO big an initial download. If you’ve already sat and waited a few hours to even get access to the installer, you probably feel justified in waiting another few hours while the patch downloads and installs as well. While putting the patch data in the initial installer would take the same amount of time to download, it would be in one large block and look bigger as a result.

My beloved error message!

Whatever the reason, it’s one of those things that come with the territory. We sit around, we wait for the game to completely fill your hard drive and then you’re done. You boot up the client and- what’s this? After trying to access the files you’ve patiently installed onto your computer, an error message jumps up to spoil all your fun. It might say something along the lines of “I’m sorry, your computer hates you and wants to ruin your day by making you perform meaningless tasks,” or even “your stress levels are worryingly low, let me help you with that.” That leaves you with a fairly short list of things to do: you can give up entirely, delete everything linked with the game and play something else or you can start tinkering.

Tinkering comprises of two wholly separate segments: the first involves a Google search and hours of time spent reading threads on message boards, usually which end rather quickly, without conclusion. When you DO find an explanation for your problem, it’s usually followed by two or three people saying “wow, you’ve fixed my problem” and another 20 insulting the person who failed to address their concerns. You’ll spend quite some time exploring the lowest depths of the internet trying to get your game to work and, as you get deeper, you end up getting linked back to posts you’ve already seen, “some people said this would work!” It inevitably turns into a massive circle of frustration.

Hope is all you got

Then, after hours of searching, you finally come across something that gives you hope: a new solution. This is where the second part comes in. You get incredibly excited; finally you’re ready to start playing. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but it’s the first time in ages that you’ve actually managed to try something you haven’t tried before. You go through settings, you run the game as an administrator – and the game works.

You log-in and suddenly it’s your favourite game, just because you’ve managed to get it to work. And then the slowdown starts; it doesn’t matter that you have a computer that can run the latest games in HD, this five year old MMO doesn’t want to work and it’s time to start playing with settings all over again. After several hours downloading installers and patches, years spent checking message boards, decades spent tinkering, you play the game for thirty minutes and decide it’s not really worth your time and effort.

Expecting a level of workability, is that too much?

You can’t expect AAA polish from a mid-tier level developer, but you should expect a level of workability. The lack of quality, you would think, should be in the content of the software, not in the software itself. And I only write this article because it seems, at least to me, that far too many developers are overstepping what they’re capable of and making the game a chore for the end user.

© 2012 - DevilsMMO.com
by M. Growcott