Success and Failure in MMOs

Failure to Launch

Of course, Vanguard and Tabula Rasa didn’t just have a bad BETA – they also had a bad launch. Another two issues come into play too: accessibility and stability. WoW might contain its fair share of grinding, but Blizzard understood the importance of making the game appealing and accessible from the outset.

The same can’t be said of all MMOs – some recent games still hit you with tedious, unimaginative tutorials (Tabula Rasa) or slow ‘fetch ten of these’ quests in unfinished starter zones (Vanguard, albeit fixed in a recent expansion).

The beginning was one area that Age of Conan did get right. "It’s extremely important to get the first few hours right. Many gamers judge a game on their experiences with it during the first few hours of playing time," says Erling Elleson. "During these hours, you get a sense of how the game plays and the mechanics behind it, and you make up your own mind on what sort of feel you get from the game, and whether or not it appeals to you. Making sure that the first 20 levels really captured the player was always important to us."


Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel agrees, and the next expansion for LOTRO brings in a streamlined new player experience designed to hook people faster. "When people get past a certain point in the game they love, they’re engaged. The problems [for us] come with the people who start to play, feel like it’s a lot more involved than they thought it would be, and give up playing before they start having fun."

The second issue for MMOs is stability. Vanguard and Age of Conan were both criticised at launch for their unreliability. The former suffered from visual glitches, poor frame rates and a range of game-breaking bugs, while the latter was afflicted by performance issues and persistent crashes.

While Vanguard was packed with innovative and sometimes brilliant features, for many people, the game was just too broken to enjoy. After Sigil’s messy demise, it became apparent that the whole game had effectively been created in the last 15 months of its five-year development cycle. This was compounded by poorly implemented tools and only one person being responsible for quality assurance during 95 per cent of that time.


This wasn’t a mistake that Blizzard made with WoW. "There are a lot of things that have made World of Warcraft successful," says Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel. "Some of it has to do with the fact that Blizzard makes great games, or that it’s really well designed, or that it receives a tremendous amount of support, but one of the other factors – maybe the primary feature of WoW – was that it was the first finished MMO to launch in the marketplace. That sounds silly, but within the industry, it was a revelation."

So can a game work its way back from a bad launch? Steefel is optimistic. "If a game is fundamentally interesting, and has some balance and design flaws in the beginning, and the developers demonstrate that they’re aware of this and are really paying attention, and continuously improving it in a responsive way, I think that there’s a lot that you can do," he states.

His colleague, Turbine’s head of PR Adam Mersky, agrees. "You can bring it back. EVE Online is a huge example of that. If you’re tied in with your community and are moving forward with them in mind in everything you do – both your existing and your potential community – you can get any game right."

This is the hope of Funcom’s Erling Elleson in the case of Age of Conan. He acknowledges that there have been problems, but believes that "the best thing we can do is make the game better – and we are. During the months following release, we’ve been putting out updates that have turned the game around completely. Stability, performance, content, features – everything has improved radically. Right now, our focus is to make sure we keep our current players entertained and reach the goals we have for Age of Conan. When we feel the time is right, we’ll launch a more aggressive campaign to bring back players."