Raging Douchebag Week: Day 2
Posted on
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
Today's Raging Douchebag award winner comes from the world of video games, specifically the running sore on my video game taint called Massively Multiplayer Online Games. I've written about MMOG's a good bit in the past, though the last few years has found me unable to manage much beyond incomprehensible rage at the whole medium. If ever there was a medium that had pissed away more potential and ruined more talented minds since the dawn of time, I cannot think of one. MMOG's have the capacity for fantastic, shared experiences and yet time after time we are given the same refried plate of game turd hyped with ever more disingenuous buzzwords to hide the basic principle that these games are the same grindy skinner boxes force fit into another tortured intellectual property. Today's Raging Douchebag is the purveyor of two such MMOG's, both of which frustrate with equal measures of the same rage-inducing affliction. The affliction for 2008 is Warhammer Online and the Raging Douchebag in question is Mark Jacobs, GM/VP/CEO of Mythic Entertainment, Inc.
I have in the past been guilty of giving Mark Jacobs a modicum of respect. After all, Mythic's first major release (after years of minor indie releases), Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC), was a blueprint for success in the MMOG industry. It took middleware tools like the Gamebryo graphics engine, melded with Mythic's in-house networking tools and created a real alternative MMOG to the reigning game of the day, Everquest (EQ). It was even fun at times. Its flaws were many, but in a time when it seemed nothing could challenge Everquest's grindtastic grip on the MMOG market, seeing an indie house challenge the likes of Sony Online Entertainment and last year's video game Raging Douchebag Brad McQuaid was refreshing. Adding a successful PVP aspect to the game pushed the genre forward. Yes, it eventually degenerated into a different sort of treadmill gameplay as EQ, and its PVE gameplay was never as good, it was still an alternative to endless planes raids with mouthy, arrogant cockmunchers. At least in DAoC, one could kill the mouthy fuckers if the opportunity presented itself.
The release of Warhammer Online should have been a triumph. After all, Mythic and Jacobs specifically had learned many lessons of building an RVR game from DAoC, how could they possibly repeat those mistakes? Quite easily. Though the Warhammer IP probably wasn't well-suited to a two-faction RVR game, they did somehow manage to make an entertaining game out of it... initially. As I've said before, once the player reaches level 20, the game goes to hell in a handbasket, as the player is sucked into the worst, most mundane grind in existence. Whether one chooses to do the same PVP scenario 100 times a night or the pedestrian PVE with its dearth of rewarding quests, or attempts to level based on the horribly scant RVR action going on, a-grinding you will go.
During the first few months of release, the game's problems were blindingly apparent. Open RVR needed much greater rewards to balance out the ease of use and guaranteed experience that scenarios provided. PVE was and is just plain boring, but high-level PVE was always a weak point of Mythic's games. Regardless of how good it was, competing with World of Warcraft on the PVE front is fruitless. The reigning champion just does it better and has four years of content over a just-released game. Quests just dried up post-20, and in like all other aspects of the game, the response from Mythic was myopic.
RvR doesn't reward enough? We'll give a measly 10-20% experience boost. Not enough quests? Here's some quests you can REPEAT, as if the repetition of content wasn't the problem. Nerfing scenario rewards? Can't do that, people are actually playing the scenarios as opposed to RVR. And the final straw, the final indignity? The end game, which is supposed to be a PVP, PLAYER-VS.-PLAYER experience, was predicated on a steep ward gear grind - a gear grind which required multiple PVE raids against an ever-escalating series of overpowered NPC's. The PVP endgame was cockblocked by PVE.
All of this can blamed on multiple designers, coders and producers at Mythic, so why name Mark Jacobs? I name Mark Jacobs because he's the guy in charge, and more importantly, he's the guy who insisted on repeating the idea that the game's problems, the problems the customers are continually complaining about, are not that significant. Yes, Mark, they are. The customer isn't always right, I will give you that. But when discussing MMOG's, one has to admit that they are SERVICES, and when a customer is not enjoying the given service, he stops paying for the service. The talk of the solutions to the game's problems reminded me all too much of last year's Raging Douchebag Brad McQuaid and his ridiculous Vision™. And then there was this.
The preceding link is a video of Paul Barnett, Warhammer's Creative Director, dressing down one of the head coders over a bug that slipped into the game's code. Now, this video was in jest, that much is obvious. When people responded negatively to the video, he posted another that allowed the coder to pie him in the face. Regardless of whether the dressing down was in jest or a thinly-veiled peen-waving by Mr. Burnett is irrelevant. The main point is that this type of behaviour is barely acceptable when running an Internet startup out of your fucking garage. On a multimillion dollar project that is floundering while its high-level creators are merrily fiddling their way to the bottom of the goddamn ocean, it is unprofessional to the extreme. I got the joke, it's just not very funny when I am paying money to be entertained - and am consequently, NOT BEING ENTERTAINED. As GM/CEO/whatever at Mythic, Mark Jacobs should have dickslapped every moron involved in the production of the first video and apologized to the paying customers, much less allowed a second video to be filmed. My sense of humor ends when my money gets pissed away. The fact that the ward gear kerfuffle announcement came one day after I had renewed my subscription only added to the stinging sense of being rear-ended.
For all the missteps, mishaps and repeated mistakes of Warhammer Online, I name Mark Jacobs the Raging Douchebag of Video Games for 2008. Fix the fucking game, Mark, kill the grind and we'll talk for 2009. The good news is I'm sure someone in the video game industry is waiting in the wings to be an even bigger douche than you've been this year.
I have in the past been guilty of giving Mark Jacobs a modicum of respect. After all, Mythic's first major release (after years of minor indie releases), Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC), was a blueprint for success in the MMOG industry. It took middleware tools like the Gamebryo graphics engine, melded with Mythic's in-house networking tools and created a real alternative MMOG to the reigning game of the day, Everquest (EQ). It was even fun at times. Its flaws were many, but in a time when it seemed nothing could challenge Everquest's grindtastic grip on the MMOG market, seeing an indie house challenge the likes of Sony Online Entertainment and last year's video game Raging Douchebag Brad McQuaid was refreshing. Adding a successful PVP aspect to the game pushed the genre forward. Yes, it eventually degenerated into a different sort of treadmill gameplay as EQ, and its PVE gameplay was never as good, it was still an alternative to endless planes raids with mouthy, arrogant cockmunchers. At least in DAoC, one could kill the mouthy fuckers if the opportunity presented itself.The release of Warhammer Online should have been a triumph. After all, Mythic and Jacobs specifically had learned many lessons of building an RVR game from DAoC, how could they possibly repeat those mistakes? Quite easily. Though the Warhammer IP probably wasn't well-suited to a two-faction RVR game, they did somehow manage to make an entertaining game out of it... initially. As I've said before, once the player reaches level 20, the game goes to hell in a handbasket, as the player is sucked into the worst, most mundane grind in existence. Whether one chooses to do the same PVP scenario 100 times a night or the pedestrian PVE with its dearth of rewarding quests, or attempts to level based on the horribly scant RVR action going on, a-grinding you will go.
During the first few months of release, the game's problems were blindingly apparent. Open RVR needed much greater rewards to balance out the ease of use and guaranteed experience that scenarios provided. PVE was and is just plain boring, but high-level PVE was always a weak point of Mythic's games. Regardless of how good it was, competing with World of Warcraft on the PVE front is fruitless. The reigning champion just does it better and has four years of content over a just-released game. Quests just dried up post-20, and in like all other aspects of the game, the response from Mythic was myopic.
RvR doesn't reward enough? We'll give a measly 10-20% experience boost. Not enough quests? Here's some quests you can REPEAT, as if the repetition of content wasn't the problem. Nerfing scenario rewards? Can't do that, people are actually playing the scenarios as opposed to RVR. And the final straw, the final indignity? The end game, which is supposed to be a PVP, PLAYER-VS.-PLAYER experience, was predicated on a steep ward gear grind - a gear grind which required multiple PVE raids against an ever-escalating series of overpowered NPC's. The PVP endgame was cockblocked by PVE.
All of this can blamed on multiple designers, coders and producers at Mythic, so why name Mark Jacobs? I name Mark Jacobs because he's the guy in charge, and more importantly, he's the guy who insisted on repeating the idea that the game's problems, the problems the customers are continually complaining about, are not that significant. Yes, Mark, they are. The customer isn't always right, I will give you that. But when discussing MMOG's, one has to admit that they are SERVICES, and when a customer is not enjoying the given service, he stops paying for the service. The talk of the solutions to the game's problems reminded me all too much of last year's Raging Douchebag Brad McQuaid and his ridiculous Vision™. And then there was this.
The preceding link is a video of Paul Barnett, Warhammer's Creative Director, dressing down one of the head coders over a bug that slipped into the game's code. Now, this video was in jest, that much is obvious. When people responded negatively to the video, he posted another that allowed the coder to pie him in the face. Regardless of whether the dressing down was in jest or a thinly-veiled peen-waving by Mr. Burnett is irrelevant. The main point is that this type of behaviour is barely acceptable when running an Internet startup out of your fucking garage. On a multimillion dollar project that is floundering while its high-level creators are merrily fiddling their way to the bottom of the goddamn ocean, it is unprofessional to the extreme. I got the joke, it's just not very funny when I am paying money to be entertained - and am consequently, NOT BEING ENTERTAINED. As GM/CEO/whatever at Mythic, Mark Jacobs should have dickslapped every moron involved in the production of the first video and apologized to the paying customers, much less allowed a second video to be filmed. My sense of humor ends when my money gets pissed away. The fact that the ward gear kerfuffle announcement came one day after I had renewed my subscription only added to the stinging sense of being rear-ended.
For all the missteps, mishaps and repeated mistakes of Warhammer Online, I name Mark Jacobs the Raging Douchebag of Video Games for 2008. Fix the fucking game, Mark, kill the grind and we'll talk for 2009. The good news is I'm sure someone in the video game industry is waiting in the wings to be an even bigger douche than you've been this year.
Labels: Raging Douchebag Week, Video Games, Warhammer, Warhammer Online
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 2:26 PM
0 Comments
|
|
Save This Page
| 
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home