The End

Posted by Stropp on June 26, 2008

Have you ever noticed how important the end of something is?

• A great movie with a crappy ending leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths.
• A novel which sets up a great sequence of events, memorable characters and an epic story line, but pulls a rabbit out of the hat to tie up the plotlines, leaves the reader wholly unsatisfied.
• A First Person Shooter where the player is facing ever more difficult scenarios, but where the final boss is a complete wimp makes many a hardcore gamer cry.
• A night out at an expensive restaurant where the main meal consists of a portion less than half a budgie and is gone in a single nibble, leaves the diner still hungry.
• A MMORPG where the end game is nowhere near complete...

You'd think that by now MMORPG designers would realize that there will be a considerable portion of their subscribers who will, in the first month of release, reach the level cap. These players will do that because they either like playing the game and never leave their computer, or because they want to get to the end game, or both reasons. There's only one game I know where this doesn't happen, and that's Eve Online, and that's only because it takes a certain amount of real time to level up the skills (a single skill might take a couple of weeks or more to get to max level.)

So I gotta ask, why are game developers still neglecting the end game?

A month after release Age of Conan has had two sieges. Sieges were touted by Funcom as the big thing for PvPers. They were supposed to offer PvP battles of up to 300 players per side and the use of siege weapons and mounts to breach walls. These epic battles were supposed to be the pinnacle of Age of Conan PvP.

Problem is. They just don't work.

The first siege was a disaster. Players were experiencing frame rates of less than 3 frames per second. Walls were either exploitable, or when breached, didn't allow access as intended. Siege weapons didn't work. The siege was no where near 300 players. The second siege wasn't much better. Funcom managed to improve performance. Players are now getting 15 FPS. It's an improvement I guess, but not much of one.

The thing is. The whole siege mechanic just wasn't tested during beta. From what I've learned since release, the only part of the game that was thoroughly tested in beta was Tortage. Yep, that's right. The one to twenty area. The beginners game.

Of course Funcom isn't the only culprit here. Recently, both Lord of the Rings Online and Tabula Rasa were also released without a lot of end game content. You might remember that LotRO really got hammered for that in the months after launch. And these games weren't the only ones. Even World of Warcraft was end game incomplete at launch.

You've got to give Funcom a lot of credit for the Tortage area. It's one of the most polished and complete newbie experiences in a MMORPG that I have played, even with its downsides. It's a great hook to catch new players and get them passed the first free month. But it's not enough.

It doesn't really matter if the content in the middle game thins out a bit. Sure, players will complain, and it is important in the sense of keeping players involved, but it's the end game that will really advertise a game.

You see, the players who rush through to the level cap two weeks after release are also going to be the ones who make the most noise if the end game is not there. They'll roll another alt, and then they'll post on the official forums about how the end game sucks. And they'll keep posting. Sooner rather than later, this will get out of the official forums onto the forums of game sites, the main pages of game sites, blogs...

In no time at all, the game will be thought of as shallow. What started out as a rush of sales at release, dries up. After the free month, subscriptions start to drop off as those players who rushed to the top and now have two or three alts at the level cap don't have anything to do and don't wish to start another and go through the same content again. Without some solid intervention by the developer team, server populations drop, severs are merged, the game gets sold to SOE...

Even if the devs recover and add a whole bunch of new and end game content within a few months of release, the damage is done. Players have left and have left a preconception of an incomplete game in the minds of the public.

Look at Lord of the Rings Online, Tabula Rasa, and Vanguard. Vanguard in particular has made leaps and strides in quality and content of the last year, or so I've heard -- it might be time to have another look -- but people still think of it as the train wreck it was at release. Turbine was lucky with LotRO. It was a good, bug free launch, and managed to get a loyal following. Lord of the Rings Online's player base has even grown since launch, but how much better would it have done if it had a decent amount of end game content at launch?

There are three things the developers should do before launching a game:

1. Make sure the game is stable and works as intended. That's a no brainer, surely?
2. Have a great newbie area. Lot's of content and quests for at least twenty levels.
3. Make sure there is at least some end game content, and make sure it works -- test it before release please.

Okay. So there should also be a decent amount of middle level content. The game should also have a certain amount of polish, and a good portion of the promised features should be included. If the devs have promised ten major features, at least seven of them should be included with a promise to finish the others as soon as possible. If a feature has to be cut, do it well before launch, and tell everyone about it loudly.

Don't ignore your power levelers. They get a bum rap most of the time. Other players think they're idiots for rushing through the content, and wonder why they expect the end game content to be there anyway. Developers probably see them as an anomaly. A blip in the subscriber data, so it doesn't matter if they don't resubscribe. But, they should be thought of as the trail blazers. They're going to find the bugs first. They're going to find the crappy content before everyone else. And if you treat them badly, they'll tell everyone how much your game sucks.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an attitude that publishers and developers have where they believe that no matter what state they release their game in, players will buy it and they can add content and fix bugs later. I had hoped that Vanguard had shown how wrong that attitude was.

It seems that Funcom didn't get the point.