Cautionary Tales
Scott Jennings made an excellent post in response to a former NCsoft executive’s examination of what went wrong with Tabula Rasa. Both are hefty reads (especially the Martin link) but provide excellent perspectives on how one mega-budget MMOG went wrong and how another title never got off the ground.
So if these guys are so smart, and if making a AAA epic fantasy MMO is a solved problem, then why did so many games have a rough year in 2008? Keep reading and I’ll be so bold as to give you my perspective.
Here’s the thing. If making a great game was just a matter of having a few brilliant ideas, it would be a piece of cake. But brilliant ideas and a quarter will get you a moderately sized gumball.
Brilliant ideas are cheap. Everybody gets them. Brilliant ideas alone won’t lead you to make a great MMOG.
The reason these damned things are so hard to make (especially to make well) is that they require sustained focus on a mass scale throughout years of development.
That sounds easy to say, but it’s a Herculean undertaking. Not only do you need a clear vision and a firm direction, but you need leaders who can keep every single member of your team zeroed in on making sure every single thing they do is of the highest quality possible.
The success or failure of an MMOG doesn’t lie in its basic premise. The genre and feature set may attract eyeballs, but it is the details of gameplay and quality of content that will keep people playing–or, conversely, the lack thereof which will cause them to leave. All this talk of “too many fantasy games” or “too many upcoming sci fi games” is bullshit. Good games will get played regardless of genre, and bad ones won’t.
Until I had to do the nuts-and-bolts work of game design, I had no idea how much effort and focus it took to do well. Coming up with ideas for a zone or quest is easy–pretty much anyone can come up with cool ideas for them. What isn’t easy is sitting down and implementing those ideas in a fun, clear, and polished manner. The reason poor content makes it into big-budget games comes down to one thing: a loss of focus. Whether it was the designer who was supposed to implement fun content, the artist who was supposed to build a great asset, or the lead who didn’t hold the work to high standards, somewhere along the line the focus on quality was lost. And it’s so easy to let things slip, especially in an environment where people are more concerned about pride or job preservation instead of being honest about the work and making results the top priority.
Sometimes this loss of focus happens on a team-wide scale. Other times it’s more subtle, holding together 90% of the way only to fall apart in the final details. In some cases, focus goes out the window when you have bosses forcing a deadline down your throat.
Thus far, Blizzard has done the best job of maintaining focus and releasing quality products–though even they haven’t gotten it perfect. Most developers, of course, don’t have the same luxury of budget and time that Blizzard currently enjoys. But let’s not use that as an excuse; you don’t need hundred million dollar budgets to make great games. You can do it on a fraction of that budget, provided you maintain your focus and don’t make any huge blunders that bleed you dry of money and time.
The real formula for success in the MMO space: start with a clear and brilliant vision, make the right technology choices, bring in producers who can keep a project on track with razor precision, hire leads who know how to nurture excellence, build a team of ultra-talented artists and designers who can make brilliant content consistently and efficiently, and keep all those people focused on their objectives every single day through several years of development. Oh, and make sure you have enough money to pay the bills until the revenue starts coming in.
The more weak spots you have in that formula, the greater the odds that your project will fail, or at the very least won’t be what it could have been. If I haven’t been clear so far, let me be so now: that formula for success is extraordinarily tough!
Most games fail–or at least aren’t the mega-hits the creators and publishers are hoping for. The same is true of most books, records, paintings, TV shows, and other creative endeavors which someone attempts to commercialize. But companies and individuals continue to take chances on all those things because, like that ever-elusive jackpot on a Vegas slot machine, when they pay out, they can pay out big.
The faults of an MMOG are easy to snark about and dismiss on a blog or message board. What you don’t see are the many people behind the scenes who poured their hearts and souls into those projects only to see them fall apart because somebody else lost focus. The stories behind the Vanguards and Tabula Rasas of the world, as well as those could-have-beens yet to be born, may inspire epic drama on the interwebs, but the true stories of how things went wrong are infinitely more subtle and often much more tragic.
While I totally agree with your post, I have to snark about one of your links. The gist of the “fantasy MMOs are a solved problem” was that there are already enough AAA fantasy MMos to satisfy the needs of the market, and that there isn’t really any room for new ones. Not that “we know how to make AAA fabtasy MMOs.”
I actually disagree with the post that you linked. Like you I think good games will get played. If nothing else, WoW (and to some extent Guild Wars) seem to have high enough churn that I think there is plenty of room for more WAR, LoTRO, and EQ II sized sucessess (though I realize that WAR was aiming higher than that). I suspect the fact of the matter is that the majority of lapsed WoW players aren’t playing another fantasy MMO. That close to a million players tried out WAR and AoC should say something. The pooch was not doomed by the potential of the market, Funcom and (to a lesser extent) Mythic screwed it.
Of all 3 of the recent blogs on this subject (I have yet to see more) this is the one I align most with. Good post, I’ll drop my own in the next day or two on this subject. It is important, because we’ve had far more could-have-beens than we’ve had successes in recent years and failures are a lot easier to avoid than most think.
[...] Es wird langsam und zögerlich über Tabula Rasa geredet. Immerhin – es lassen sich einige sehr wichtige Lektionen aus dem gescheiterten Mammutprojekt ziehen. Beispielsweise gibt Adam Martin einen Überblick von der Tribüne aus, Scott Jennings antwortet mit seiner Sichtweise der Dinge und Steve Danuser gibt auch noch mal seine Sicht der Dinge dazu. [...]
This is very insightful.
It’s sad that our society is increasingly hostile to people who do everything right, succeed, and are financially rewarded by their customers for that success. After all, it’s not fair to the people who lost focus, who didn’t show up, who phoned it in, and didn’t succeed.
When you can start a project and face all these hurdles, it’s a hard decision whether to take the risk. If you can look forward to most of the rewards being taken from you if you succeed, you’ll likely decide not to bother. Even if you’re doing it because you love it, there’s a limit to the amount of money someone will be willing to risk for an ever smaller share of the possible reward.
In order for products to be developed, the rewards for success need to go to the people who provide the money and work to develop the products. And if we want more products and more people working on creating them (instead of being unemployed), our society needs to increase the rewards for success and try to lower any artificial barriers to that success.
But things are going in the opposite direction.
It is very tough to keep your eye on the prize. Especially when you really don’t know what that prize is. Most people are caught up in the fame and fortune that a successful game may bring…but really…does that keep you motivated? Everyone on the team has to have a passion for the game. If they don’t. That’s a weak link. Getting that many people to be that passionate about one thing is a very difficult task indeed. But how are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people suppose to be jazzed about your game if people on your team aren’t? Good points. While not the most cheery of subjects, a good insight into the reality of making a game on a grand scale.
“What you don’t see are the many people behind the scenes who poured their hearts and souls into those projects only to see them fall apart because somebody else lost focus.”
Is it the focus? My answer is no.
Where is the game industry to you hear about the leadership and vision that is require to manage, direct, and motivate this huge team of many people? These recent posts are simple about management failure.
Once they realize they need to solve the management of hundreds of people, which has been solved for longer than recorded history, then they can get on with making games that require many people to make.
How many game companies have management experts verse programming, design, layout or art experts? Valve is the only one that comes to mind on how they do stuff gets similar attention to what they produce.
Wonderful post on the subject and I’m very inclined to agree. I am not “satisfied” with fantasy MMOs. If someone makes a better one, guess what? I’ll go play it. It has nothing to do with genre. My money goes to what is fun and exactly.
You also said something else that I’ve said myself:
I can think of more than one developer, by name, that created and maintained poor content because of pride. He had the “This is my content/zone” attitude and it just killed us as raiders. It ruined our experience and we lost folks because of it.
One failed link in the chain, so to speak, makes a big difference.
[...] Moorgard adds his take to the Tabula Rasa reflections. It’s a good read but I’ll pull out a specific part that caught my eye: Steve Danuser wrote: [...]
[...] while back Steve Danuser put up a post weighing in on the fate of Tabula Rasa. His was but one of many, with Scott, Damion, Eric, and Adam all putting in their two cents as [...]
[...] Mobhunter (Steve Danuser): Cautionary Tales The real formula for success in the MMO space: start with a clear and brilliant vision, make the [...]