Its one thing for a game to have bugs. Surely an acceptable thing, as I’m a forgiving sort. Games are hard to make. Good games - extremely hard!

So what to say when you are confronted with a game that has such incredible resources behind it? With an extremely compelling backstory and characters that are already well known and beloved in the hearts of its audience? When the producer is one of the largest media companies in the world [WB]? With a developer that has developed excellent games [Tron, No One Lives Forever] in the past? When the publisher has released some of the hottest games ever made?

I would say it would be nearly impossible to go wrong.

So when a game has bugs, has some design flaws or other problems, yet there is manifestly some serious effort and thought in it…… or when its actually fun despite the problems.. I am forgiving in the extreme.

So when a game that has this background, when its been pushed to release, amidst fireworks and wide-ranging hype (as in, the type of coverage that only a large sum of money and notoriety can achieve), and when it is thrust upon you with a message like, “You have been waiting for this from us. Here it is. Now go pay for it, play it, and enjoy what we have wrought.”. When this happens, I get riled, even a little insulted. And especially when the game sucks. And boy. Does it ever.

MxO is awkward, stuttering and buggy. And thats just the beginning.

• Dialog gets cut off by someone else during a scripted session.
• The intro tutorial sessions leave you hanging on what to do or where to go next.
• Very little explanation of features and abilities.
• Game code crashes my whole computer.
• Mind bogglingly bizarre intro quest and quest mechanism. The arrow pointers that show you the next waypoint disappear after you finish the first stage (so you can’t possibly know where to go next).
• Severe latency issues.
• Painful UI requirements. No cohesive design.
• Awkward combat system.
• Terrible keymapping system
• and on and on….

It seems to me, and forgive me if I’m reaching, that this is a product of how a large media organization thinks. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. We will release this and they will like it anyways.”
That may well be true for most forms of media. But not a game, and most certainly not a MMO.

I wanted to like it. I’m a Matrix fan. And a well-conceived, futuristic MMO is definitely ripe with possibility. I even gave it love on our gaming news page [param01].

What were the Stratics people smoking when they said,

“It’s a hyperjumping, bullet-time, ass kicking extravaganza.“??

Find my copy on E-bay.

The game industry is practically aflame after the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week in San Francisco. Several luminaries from various walks of gaming life decided to rant on about the state of “big versus little” and the rising costs and Hollywoodization of the gaming industry.

Warren Spector : “I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We’re doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you’re gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make.”

The thrust of the rant is simple. Big studios are eating up the little guys, destroying the market with crap, and raising the price of entry. The rest of the discussion readily flows out of this complaint.

Matt Mihaly : “Finding ways to fund games isn’t the issue. What you seem to want to do is create Jerry Bruckenheimer movies without studio money. If you want to create games without a publisher, nothing is stopping you.”

This debate, while interesting will go essentially nowhere. I typically side with the little guys, but what exactly do they expect to change? Once everyone has said what they need to say, everyone will go home. Avid VG players would likely not pay attention to any plea from industry luminaries to switch to cheaper made games. These things exist in a market, and market forces have made it this way. It sucks, yes. But inevitable.

Mind you, I’d not dismiss any community efforts like guerrilla marketing. I’ve seen these work.

All I can lend to the topic is a reminder :

In 1993, iD Software created a kickass and unique game. It was so popular, that people passed the demo disk around, as it was that good. FTP servers went up. Positively viral, man. In this story, everybody won. The developer (they made so much money that they actually deposited million dollar cheques into drive-thru ATMs!) & the players (what gamer hasn’t played this? Hell, even my sister has played it). I think GTInteractive came in later and distributed it and its followons. I’m quite sure they made money, too.

Moral of the story : its possible.

squares!
Originally uploaded by Kafka_.

Squares! Its a game. Unique, simple and highly addictive (even uses one of my favourite Daft Punk tracks).

Red is bad, black is good. Don’t waste your time reading the manual. Just start playing!

My highscore is 19814. If you beat that in your first twenty tries, I’ll be very impressed!