A Disturbing Trend

I woke up this morning, rolled over to turn off my alarm and started browsing Reddit as I usually do. Right on the front page, I was confronted with this post that linked to a video by Jim Sterling. If you are so inclined, take the time to watch it. Even just the first 2 minutes of it will give you an idea of what I'm going to be talking about.

See what I'm talking about? This game is possibly the worst thing I have ever seen. It looks like something that was made as a little fun project by a couple of mates, not something that should be sold as finished product. Today I'm not going to touch on Steam allowing something like this to even enter the Greenlight system, and I've made my position on early access games very clear (although this game is not listed as such).

I am however, going to touch on how developers react to criticism from both reviewers and customers. You see, the developers of Air Control have been in full damage control on the Steam forums. And by damage control, I mean they are attacking people leaving bad reviews. Here's some examples taken from Steam users Blancmage, MamCieNaChopsa and 0Bennyman. In case the responses are deleted in the future, here's the quotes from the developers in the order that they are linked there:

1. Problem is in your pc, that is why you cannot run the game.
2. You cannot run the game cause of problems with your pc. We tested it during a month. This game worked on all the computers of our testers.
3. At first, this review was made on weak computer. Secondly I want to say you guys that this guy who recorded review did not read about game controls and that is why airplane fell down in the end.

As someone who writes a lot, and not just on this blog, I totally understand how hard it can be to receive criticism from people, especially when they aren't creative themselves. When you have made the effort to create something for others to enjoy, it hurts when you hear that they didn't. Unlike these developers however, someone not liking my writing style or enjoying my fiction isn't something I can change. I accept that what I write about or how I write is not for everyone.

Honestly, the fact that Killjoy games thinks that responding to criticism in this fashion is acceptable shows that they aren't cut out to develop games that will be released on large distribution platforms like Steam, especially if they are going to only half finish them. The responses range from denial (the problem is your PC not our game), to flat out deflection (We tested it, and it worked fine). At the time of writing on Steam, there are only four positive reviews, and they are either sarcastic or attack all the negative reviews that were posted by people, including this gem:

Very good game 7/10, would be 9/10 with some bug fixes.

If you are an American you probably won't enjoy it because your *** is too fat from hamburgers to fit in an airplane seat LOL

The worst part of this whole situation is this is the second time this year I know of an indie company responding poorly to criticism. If you watch TotalBiscuit, you probably heard about what happened with his WTF Is... video on Guise of the Wolf, a game developed by FUN Creators. When TotalBiscuit posted a scathing, but fair opinion of their game, FUN Creators responded by placing a copyright claim on his account, denied doing so in a series of emails and then proceeded to joke around on Twitter when evidence was posted by TotalBiscuit there. They even went so far as to claim that TB had used Photoshop to change the body of the emails, and demanding he deletes his channel as they are "a lot bigger than your little YouTube channel."

Since indie development really took off with the massive success of titles like Minecraft and Day Z, everyone who knows how to code wants to make that next big hit. Unfortunately, it seems that the vast majority of these people don't understand how PR works, especially on electronic media. Everyone has a forum to express opinions, be that Twitter, Reddit or the Steam forums. The absolute worst thing that anyone can do is respond in a negative way to criticism, as the backlash that is created by this will absolutely kill any hope of the next game you make being taken seriously.

The best advice I can give? Either hire someone to do PR for you if you don't have the necessary skills to do it effectively, or don't respond to criticism if you know you cannot control yourself. If you do respond, keep it civil and be willing to accept that you may be wrong. If someone points out legitimate bugs, don't attack them. Thank them. Most of the time they are doing it because they want to help you achieve your vision of the game because it's something they would enjoy.

And for goodness sake... don't respond like FUN Creators or Killjoy. It's just not worth it.

As always folks,

GAME ON!

Wildstar: My Impressions from the open beta.

Oh Wildstar. You certainly have a good sense of humour, and that's something that I can get behind. If you haven't seen anything about Wildstar, then you've been living under a rock. The open beta ran for a 10 days, finishing yesterday for those of us in Australia. I played 3 different classes to level 10, just to get a feel for how it plays, including once with a friend questing with me. So, without any further procrastinating, let's dive into it.

The Good:

Right off the bat, Wildstar makes an impression with its art style. Now this has somewhat divided the people I talked to in the beta, including several of my real life friends. I personally like the cartoonish feel they have gone for in the design, especially the stylized characters. The animation quality and texture work is spot on, and the game really does look beautiful. At no point did I find anything that looked particularly out of place, and the effort that has gone into the game shows.

Alongside this, you have the combat. Wildstar uses a system I find very similar to Guild Wars 2's combat. You have a limited number of slots for skills to prevent ability bloat and allowing you to really customise the way your character plays compared to someone else with the same class. I do feel that eventually there will be "best builds" for whatever you are doing, but this system allows for you to change out a skill to better suit a situation you are having troubles with.

The telegraphing of attacks when combined with the ability to dodge provides a far more immersive combat experience than most tradition style MMO's. A large part of being good at the combat in Wildstar involves knowing when to dodge and attack, and where to go when dodging. Some attacks have a very narrow cone, but a long range, while others have a wide cone and short range. If your character is stunned, a prompt appears telling you to mash one of the WASD keys to lower the stun duration.

If you have been reading my ramblings for a while, you know that I generally don't like PVP in MMOs besides Eve (as it is a PVP based game). Wildstar is a massive exception to this. Because of how immersive the combat is and the nature of the telegraph system, when you win it feels like you have have a real victory and that your skill allowed it rather than just stats. Someone who is good at dodging attacks while being able to apply their damage to a target is going to do far better regardless of gear.

I mentioned at the start that I played 3 different characters to around level 10 (Wildstar's level cap at launch will be 50), so I only got a very small taste of what they were like, and a tiny sliver of the questing experience. The three classes I played, the Medic, Warrior and Engineer had reasonably unique skill sets, but similar enough that nothing felt over powered. The Warrior and Engineers can both be tank style characters, so they have a lot of threat building abilities in one of their skill trees, while the Medic can be a healer as the name implies. To get an idea of what each class can do, this site has a great tool for viewing the skills of each one.

These aren't the only good things about the game, but they are the main things I loved about Wildstar. That being said however, there are some things that do need to be discussed.

The Bad:

While in the beta, I had a number of crashes to desktop. With the release date set for the 3rd of June (or the 31st of May if you pre-order now), there is limited time for these bugs to be worked out, but I do have faith that the major crash issues will be sorted by release. There is also a fair bit of optimization to be done, with people reporting frame rates as low as 10 on current generation cards on some occasions. Hopefully this all happens before the release.

As with any MMO, latency in Australia can be an issue. Like WoW, there are "Oceanic" servers, but these are still based in the US. While I never had major issues, there were a few times where I thought I had managed to dodge out of damage, but still took the damage anyway. Time will tell as to how this plays at the high levels of both raiding and PVP with the telegraph system.

Finally, and this is more of an issue with me than the game, I just don't feel invested in the story at this point. Where World of Warcraft took an established franchise and continued its story, Wildstar is an entirely new IP. The story is all there, but most of the time, I just didn't care. Granted, this might change when it's released and I am actually paying attention, but my experience in the beta is one of apathy about the direction the lore is headed.

To conclude, Wildstar is a solid MMO that seems to deliver a great experience. I'm really looking forward to giving it a go, and hope that it doesn't turn into another Old Republic, where it dies soon after release. From all indicators, it seems that the devs have done a fantastic job of providing content for the end game, but still giving a solid leveling experience. Roll on May 31st, and I'll see you on Nexus.

GAME ON!

Sneaky edit: There was another day of beta that happened this weekend, and I'm pleased to report that in the 3 hours I played, there were no crashes to desktop and the game ran far better. Definitely pick this one up guys. It's well worth it.

Selling Early Access Games

Ever since Minecraft, developers all over the world have offered access to their games during the early stages of its development. It's actually become so normal that Steam now has an entire section of their store dedicated to Early Access games to keep them separate from the fully released games. Like everything, there are both good and bad aspects to selling early access games that are still very much in development at the time.

The Grand-daddy of Early Access

In my opinion, Minecraft's success relied largely on the unique nature of the game compared to anything on the market at the time, coupled with the ability for some very creative things to happen in the game, and the small development team (for the vast majority it was just Notch working on the game) who listened to the feedback and ideas that the community around the game had. Along with this, Notch generally delivered on the promises that he made regarding features, kept the community informed as to progress, and Minecraft was frequently updated. People felt that they money they spent was well worth it, especially considering the fun they had from both vanilla Minecraft and the later mods available for it.

Compare this to some other games. Cube World's alpha was released in June 2013 and has currently had one update since then. In October of 2013, the frustration of those who had paid money for the game came to a head and unleashed on Twitter at the developer, Wollay. He responded to say that development was still happening on Cube World. Since then however there has not been an update and any blog posts at Wollay's website stopped as of January 2014.

Towns was another game released on Steam's greenlight system, and one of the first ten to actually make it on the system. Today, it was announced that Towns was being abandoned, and this was not for the first time. The original developer for Towns, a team of three called SMP, originally decided that they were going to stop development of the game due to burnout. All of this came after a post by SMP detailing that, while they were definitely feeling less inclined to work on Towns, the project was "alive and kicking." However in the same post the following was said:

So so far Towns has sold more than 200k units and generated a gross revenue of more than 2M usd. and although we are pretty sure we can and will sell a lot more, we still see it as a huge success.

A game still in development, no where near the final product had made more than 2 million US$ in revenue. Profits from this are obviously hard to work out, but with over 200,000 units sold, they definitely would have made decent amount of money. When SMP did finally hand over the project to the new developer, Florian, they told him that they sold a particular amount each month, but by then it was too late. The hype had ended and the money was no longer coming in as much as it had been.

Early Access has led to the death of many Kerbals

None of this is to say that early access isn't a good thing. It certainly can be. Games currently like Kerbal Space Program and Prison Architect that receive regular updates and communications from the developers have given players hours of enjoyment for gamers who dropped money on them. The money that they make when funneled back into the game can be the difference between a feature making the final release or not. That being said however, when a project goes wrong, it leaves gamers out of pocket for a product that was promised to be much better.

Early access is one of those things in gaming that requires caution, much like micro transactions and day one DLC. There are several games that I have purchased that in their current state are unplayable until further iteration is applied. I could have saved that money and spent it on other games that were more completed than those were, but the idea and concepts behind the game were so compelling that I had to try them out. Now those games probably won't get played until they are more refined and closed to release. My complete opinion? Buyer beware. No matter who it is, you might get burnt by a developer who gets burned out and drops a project. Or you might get another Minecraft style game that ends up being a staple of your gaming library. Either way, a little restraint goes a long way in preventing tears due to an early access game.

As always,

GAME ON!

The Rouge Wedding: How CCP Messed Up Again

CCP held the annual Fanfest last weekend, a celebration of all things Eve Online. Even though I no longer play Eve, I still love to watch Fanfest, as they tend to announce big new features for Eve that occasionally tempt me into playing again.

Now the vast majority of people have heard of Eve, mostly from news stories that are hilariously inaccurate about real life money getting lost (I know of no one throwing down $300,000+ into Eve). However, unless you pay attention, you might not know that CCP also have a console shooter called Dust 514 on the PS3. A free to play game, CCP were initially criticized by their fan base for releasing it on console instead of PC (myself included) as the vast majority of us don't play on consoles.

On to Fanfest. Each game that CCP is working on (currently Eve Online, Dust 514 and Eve Valkyrie) has a keynote address where the very latest and largest announcements are initially made. These are then usually expanded on throughout the weekend in other segments. This year however, CCP Rouge (the executive producer of Dust), announced that Dust was going to be ported to the PC, under the title Project Legion. 

For me, this was exciting news. To be able to play an Eve based shooter on my PC was something I had been excited about when the rumours of Dust had surfaced. However, for those who had spent time, and money, on Dust for PS3, hundreds of questions were brewing. Posts like this one started to surface on the forums, and it seems that the devs were not expecting some pretty obvious questions. Ripard Teg of Jesters Trek and CSM 8 wrote a blog post that details something disturbing: 

Afterward, I caught a DUST developer with which I have a really good relationship and asked "Is CCP going to rebrand DUST 514 to EVE Legion?" He stammered a bit and wouldn't answer the question. Then I asked "Will the existing PS3 players get to keep their skill points in the new release?" He wouldn't take that one, either.

Soon thereafter, CCP Frame posted a Dev Blog regarding the introduction of Project Legion. In it, he details some of the reasons for the branching out of the console based Dust toward a more PC orientated future. He also stated that Dust would continue, but as a more casual pick up and play based game. It seems that no amount of work could allow CCP to iterate upon Dust to the point where they could achieve their vision of an Eve style shooter, so they needed to start again.

This isn't the first time that CCP has had to put out fires regarding a development choice. The Incarna expansion resulted in protests in game, rage on the forums, and mass unsubscribing of the players due to a combination of a failed walking in stations feature and badly priced micro transactions among other things. A change to the Terms of Service that, while small, seemed to outlaw scamming in Eve was met with more rage than any other change I have seen. Finally, when it was discovered that CCP had given some rare ships to SomerBlink (a micro lottery website) to auction off for in game currency, the fires burned even hotter.

And yet it seems CCP haven't learnt from these episodes. Despite warnings from a number of the people in the CPM (Dust's version of the CSM) that they needed to announce this before Fanfest, they chose to go ahead and announce it before people who had paid real money to be there to see things about the game they loved. Smooth CCP, real smooth.

Hopefully, the fires have burnt out a little by now so that CCP can actually communicate its plans to the playerbase they way they should have before the fires started burning. Maybe this time they will learn to actually listen to the advisory bodies that they have in the CSM and CPM before putting their foot in their mouth again. I'm looking forward to Project Legion coming to PC and hope that a good result can be had for both PL and Dust.

As always folks,

GAME ON!