[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Brian Hook]

Daniel Harman wrote
 
> I've always partly attributed Blizzard's success to only releasing
> a game when its thoroughly polished. All their projects seem to
> creep massively, but when they come out, they really are worth
> buying. Just look at WC3, not only did it slip, but the dynamics
> of the game changed fairly majorly several times. The 'its ready
> when its ready' philosophy seems to lie behind a lot of the great
> games. Is it possible with MMORPG style budgets?

Okay, small aside, but this just isn't true as a general rule.  A
very small handful of companies regularly release games
astronomically late and still have them not suck.  Blizzard is one
of them.  id software is another -- although they traditionally have
had some insanely short development cycles compared to the industry
at large (DOOM3 is taking the longest, by far, of any game in their
history).

"it's ready when it's ready" is 99% of the time a euphemism for
"we're clueless, poorly managed, and have no idea what we're doing,
but thankfully we have enough money to keep muddling along".  It's
possible to suffer from the latter and still deliver a great game if
you have the time to keep trying new stuff until you stumble on
something great.

But by and large, that attitude is a strong symptom of mismanagement
and poor leadership.
 
> In the dynamics of implementing network code - if so, I don't see
> a problem there, it ain't that hard.

Network code evolves significantly for each order of magnitude of
player base you have to support.  The code required for 1-vs-1
changes a lot when scaled to 10 players.  Then it changes again at
100 players, then that changes again at 1000 and then 10000 players.
Blizzard has really good code for managing lobbies and for managing
games of small amounts of people, but that knowledge is difficult to
leverage into something that works fine for 1000 simultaneous
players.

I'm not saying it's particularly difficult, just that it's not like
you can just #define MAX_PLAYERS 10000, recompile, and go.  Quake3
style networking absolutely doesn't scale to 1000 players.

> If its in balancing gameplay dynamics, I'd argue they are
> experts. Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo all show that they are
> really pretty good at balancing diverse ability sets and creating
> an interesting and rewarding game.

But once again, different styles of play with different
expectations.  They seem to have really good designers, but in the
end, it's still a different game with different expectations.
Making a great single player or limited multiplayer game doesn't
necessarily scale to larger numbers of players or new genres.

Brian


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