I’ve heard lots of comments lately (especially pertaining to Age of Conan’s open beta) about the amount of content going into this game at launch. One particular comment was from the thread on FoH:
I think theres enough content in the game to keep peoples interest until they can add more content…. They have a solid month of gameplay for casuals that has a reasonable level of polish.. if they fix up the 50+ zones that will turn into 2-3 months of content and with cities and crafting if they are good and worthwhile thats content for the forseeable future.
So you’re a new game on the scene. You’re releasing your game at a time that is a relatively good time to launch – the big boy is still between expansion cycles (WoW), some newer games have launched within the past 6-8 months and haven’t made much of a dent in your audience (PotBS, Hellgate:London, Tabula Rasa, etc.), some games are sort of chugging along but not doing anything terribly exciting right now (LotRO, EQ2). People are waiting for ‘the next big thing’ and you hope to capture those people.
How do you balance the amount of content you’re providing vs. how polished your game is? We’ve seen games that have provided a decent amount of content but have been low on the polish (EQ2 at launch. We’ve seen lots of games that were high on polish but low on content at launch that have grown substantially (Lord of the Rings Online comes to mind most of all). And we’ve seen games that provided a good amount of both (WoW). We’ve also seen games that failed to provide much of either (Vanguard, Hellgate:London).
How much content do you think is the bare minimum to launch your game? Where would you place the bar for how poor your polish can be as long as you have plenty of ’stuff’ for people to do? Where do you think Age of Conan fits in the spectrum? How little polished content is acceptable, and how fast do you need to put out new content to satiate the appetites of your new subscribers? Do you subscribe to a game in hopes that eventually there will be a lot of things to do, or do you wait until they’re in and be "behind the times" a bit while you catch up?
As someone mentioned in the previous thread, here is the latest patch release notes just about the Demonologist class alone:
Demonologist
» Updated numerous names and descriptions on spells and feats for the demonoloist.
» Demon Heart of Chatha should now increase both mana and health regeneration.
» Cursed by Hell should now have a more consistent effect.
» Cursed by Heaven should now have a more consistent debuff and effect.
» Chaotic Blast should now deal area damage if Cursed by the Heavens or Hell are active.
» Consume Flames now has the proper cooldown.
» Demonic Frenzy now correctly adds splash damage to pet spells.
» Demonic Heart now correctly lowers the caster’s Holy Invulnerability.
» Some issues with Detonation should now be resolved.
» Diabolic Insight has been converted to a single rank spell. Ranks 2-4 have been removed from the game.
» Earth Recharge should now trigger off all ranks of the spell lines affected.
» Fires of Gehenna (Rank 6) should now have the correct fatality chance.
» Gates of Hell should now deal damage upon expiring if the target is a Demon.
» Gates of Hell should now have the appropriate visual effects.
» Greater Flames should now properly increase the damage and casting time of Fires of Gehenna. Spells granted by feats should no longer persist in the spellbook after untraining the feat. Spells granted by feats should now have manacosts based on a percentage of base mana at the character level instead of a static amount.
» Hell’s Pavise Rank 3 should now grant the correct increase to the damage shield granted by the Demon Avenger.
» Infernal Knowledge has been converted to a single rank spell. Ranks 2-4 have been removed from the game.
» Let Them Burn should now have the correct cooldown. It will also now properly increase in damage the longer it is channeled.
» Living Thunderstorm should now correctly disappear after exploding.
» Overload should now trigger from and affect the Fires of Gehenna, Shockstrike, Inferno of Amher, Shockblast, Hellfire Stream, Shock and Wicked Bolt spells.
» Planar Shift will now correctly reduce the aggro of targets in the vicinity. Planar Shift no longer mistakenly decreases the caster’s miss chance.
» Set’s Chosen should now correctly decrease the periodic damage dealt by Pact with Set and Bloody Pact with Set.
» The secondary splash damage from Shockblast is now limited to 3 targets per splash.
» Thunderclap now has the correct 40 second cooldown.
» Unholy Hate should now have the correct description.
» The Whispers of War spell no longer exists. (Note: If you already had this spell trained, you may have issues in your spellbook if you attempt to use the spell.) The Demonic War feat now grants the Demonic War spell.
» Base damage of Hellfire Stream has been increased
» Base damage of Shock has been increased
» The base damage of Inferno of Amher has been decreased and its benefit from bonus fire damage increased
» Inferno of Amher now has a 3 second reuse time
» The base damage of Shockblast has been decreased and its benefit from bonus electrical damage increased
» Shockblast now has a 3 second reuse time
» The base damage and benefit from bonus damage on Chaotic Blast has been significantly increased
» Pyromancer and Natural Conductor feats now grant significantly more bonus damage, to be in line with normalized bonus damage contributions.
» Fixed a problem where Fiery Torment was not doing correct damage when you have Infernal Knowledge running.
Wow. That’s a lot of class changes for right before launch. I haven’t yet played Age of Conan so I’m not going to pass any judgement – but that’s a bit scary.
Anyway, content vs. polish – the age old debate. Is content really king with a game launch? And here’s the money question:
Is it harder to recover from a launch with low polish or a launch with low content? The answer might not be as simple as it seems.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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I’d say it’s hardest to launch with both low, but I am thinking that Vanguard is doing a pretty good job. Then again, the SOE teams do have a lot of experience backing them.
At any rate, the answer is, like always, in the middle. Both low polish and low content launches are troublesome, the best launches are usually those where the game has a decent amount of content and a decent amount of polish.
EQ2 might’ve had low polish upon launch, but it was enough to keep people playing. I’d say that Vanguard did much worse on this aspect, where even after launch it was plagues with many CTDs, and you couldn’t really call it a launch as much as it was maybe a post-alpha.
What LOTRO appeared to be doing (don’t quote me on the numbers, these are entirely fictional, and only serve to prove a point), was creating about a month worth of content, and then every month expand onto the content. This allowed them to create a very polished game, and still give out enough content for people not to instantly get bored and leave.
While it does allow for a good amount of polished content, I think this very much restricts on the width of the game. In LOTRO this may not be a problem, as they are trying to tell a central story that everyone follows. However, if the game is more sand-box, free roaming and/or explorable, this concept is highly likely not going to work. You will keep having to branch out, and the cycle times are going to become larger and larger, eventually not keeping up with the player base.
All in all, if your game has something to captivate the player above the storyline, that they will enjoy in a repeatable fashion, without them feeling it as repetition, that would be best. However, the only thing currently there, is pvp. Though I must say that a dynamic dungeon system like in EQLive does come close.
Something else that might work, would be player created content. Let the players create quests and fill in parts of the world. However, this would possibly create a strain on customer service personel, or whoever you are going to have filtering these things.
For now though, I am done adding more questions than answers, ponder upon it, and have a good night!
- SG
Well, it should be obvious that you should have both polish and content. Like WoW.
Picking one or the other is probably not a good idea either way.
With that said, If I had to pick only one, I’d pick polish.
Five years ago, I would have picked content, but in today’s market you simply cannot recover from a lack of polish, no matter how much content you have. Plenty of games have died from the lack of one or the other. However, the majority of MMO deaths comes from lack of polish, not lack of content.
It might be because the people who want polish more will quit a non-polish game within the first few weeks, whereas people who want content more will quit a non-content game within a few months. No one will play a game missing both. Tons of people will play a game that has both. So have both!
I think the term polish gets overused.
The game mechanics and features that are there should work reasonably well and not annoy the player they should generally be fun. The number of annoying bugs shouls also be small and fixed soon after release.
Balance is less important at start, everyone re-balances anyway.
Content is more difficult so say, since people have different preferences and different play styles. Plus that they spend different amount of time. As long as it keeps pace with the bulk of the playerbase that is interested in the content (story arcs, lore etc) it is good enough, I think.
The most important is to avoid the bugs and game mechanics that really annoys and frustrates people. Building up enough of these and/or enough time with these and people will quit.
Without a doubt, a game that looks/feels/plays great is going to have a much bigger advantage at launch than a game that has 500 hours worth of content that’s satisfactory at best. After all, if your content is terrible, then players aren’t going to stick around for the next 490 hours of content before they quit anyway.
If you have a solid product with a solid team behind it, I think you should provide somewhere between 200 and 300 really solid hours of gameplay, and then be prepared to add more content within the next four to six months or so (for free.) There is always going to be a group of players who eat through the content much faster than the majority of players, but you can’t cater to them and do a crappy job on the content that the most players will be spending the most time with. Obviously, you need to update/upgrade all of the content as you go, while also adding content for players to progress. For launch, though, there is only so much content you can provide before you spread yourself too thin. It’s just a matter of knowing what to focus on and what can wait. The six-letter-word-I-won’t-name will always win, though. For better or worse, we have World of Warcraft to thank for this.
Polish over content, without question. If the game sucks at launch (hi, Hellgate: London), players won’t stick around to play the content you have.
Of course, I just finished writing a free re-trial weekend review of LOTRO that could be summed up “they ran out of content, so I quit”, so it’s not exactly like my standards are low in that department. I’m just saying, the customers who are going to use up the content you have and then cancel (sorry Turbine) are gone anyway. The customers who aren’t going to be dissatisfied with the pace at which you add content will stick around (unless the game is buggy and non-fun to play), and the folks who liked the game but ran out will come back to visit every so often to use up the new stuff before leaving again.
On that topic, IMO Turbine might have been better off launching with a lower level cap and patching in the higher level caps as they actually had content to fill those levels. It would have been much easier to find groups for level 30 content if that was the level cap, and I might actually have completed some of the deeds in the mid 30’s. But I’m guessing they felt that the level cap was too large of a feature to leave to a patch, so they decided to pretend the game was complete instead.
I vote for polish. While I believe myself to be more forgiving of launch issues then others, there’s a limit to how much technical grief I’ll accept. It’s not the “we’re paying for beta” complaint, but if the problems are SO BAD that I am unable to play PERIOD, then my subscription dollars would be best spent elsewhere.
In terms of content, though, it seems that most devs skimp on the higher level, which makes sense: ideally, players shouldn’t be getting to the higher levels for some time, although there are those professional whiners who must power-level JUST so they can complain about the lack of higher level content. I believe that this is forgivable, since if we have to have smooth launch or massive content, more devs would be working on getting the “polish” on.
And really, games which suffer from terrible launches (AO, VG) may improve over time, but the collection of potential players after that is still poisoned by word of mouth, conjecture and hearsay.
I am just going to comment about what i have read and seen so far:
First off, i think the idea of letting some people play 10 days before launch (but have to pay $5 just to dl games) as being really stupid. If you’re going to have an open/closed beta, have a real one that’s longer than 10 days. If you’re going to let pre-orderers have some priviledges, don’t make downloading the game a premium itself.
Secondly, the class change and various other aspects of the initial launch content reminds me of lineage 2. While i don’t know how much xp it requires for levelling and what not at the moment, i can tell you right now the whole affair with lineage 2 was painful and unpleasant.
I love lineage 2 though, and the content did weed out alot of potential bad players, albeit the influx of botters later on pretty much ended the game for some of us.
I would still like to try AoC though, because it still looks and sound great and i am fine with hardcore levelling anyways.
Well… I’m definitely not a hardcore leveller, I prefer to gobble up any content I find at a leisurely pace.
I quit SWG because, well the game felt empty and the content was not really there.
I semi-quit WoW because they actually outpaced me too much. I got in quite late, and just as I was about to ding 60, the level cap went to 70, there was a paid expansion and all the stuff I never did because I hadn’t hit 60 yte, just became obsolete. It would have been fun to raid MC no doubt. And just as I got close to the point where I would have been able to try that, noone did it any more…
Now Lotro is my game of choice these days, where I’m just about to hit 50 after almost a year with lots of RP (and the music system!). I like how polished everything I did was, and how the content is being added just fast enough for me to always have plenty of stuff to do. Just as I hit the right levels for it, Evendim came along. I won’t be in Forochel for a couple months yet I think, I’m still in no rush. In fact, seeing how there are no MUST DO instances about to go obsolete I can chug along happily spending a week without gaining a single experience point sometimes.
Anyway, as long as I don’t run out of things to do that interest me, I’m happy. But I’ll sooner get out of a game that feels wrong than one where the options are somewhat limited. Content will be added, but once a game has irritated me enough with things that just don’t work, they won’t see me back. Vanguard.. Heh.