Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

8 Comments so far »

1. 

   Bravo, Mr. Jacobs « Clockwork Gamer said

   July 11 2008 @ 9:34 am

   […] That’s the real sin here, if at all - that expectations were already set. Even though the game has not even released, we’re already feeling the frustrations of a perceived “nerf”, when the reality is that had such content never been announced in the first place, would we really miss it? […]

2. 

   Cuppytalk » Blog Archive » Mumbo Jumbo said

   July 11 2008 @ 10:07 am

   […] like Scott said, this will be gone and forgotten when the game launches.  As long as the content that made it […]

3. 

   Brad B said

   July 11 2008 @ 4:56 pm

   Scott, is there any precedent in your experience or knowledge of this type of large removal of features presumably only a few months from the release?

   I understand that features are removed all the time and especially as it gets closer to the release, but this seems like a rather large change this late in the game.

4. 

   Scott Hartsman said

   July 12 2008 @ 8:03 am

   @Brad: That’s a fair question. It very definitely is large, and it’s not a sign of the best of times.

   That said, if that’s the call that gets made, it’s guaranteed that the alternative is far worse.

   Off the top of my head I can’t think of doing so for *announced* features, which is an admittedly less than subtle difference. (I won’t go for the obvious WoW : Hero Classes comparison, partially because it’s overdone, but also partially because I don’t think large numbers of people were counting on their presence as part of the core experience.)

   EQ2 was originally supposed to launch with a newbie island-type experience for each race - as well as a full blown city for each race, instead of one newbie experience split good and evil, and 2 main cities.

   The remainder were cut within the last year of development for the obvious reason of there not being any chance in hell of getting them developed, much less having them be fun. (Early EQ2 beta people would likely remember that the zone filename for the tutorial_island was originally newbie_human - the current isle was the Human starting area.) Far too ambitious for reality.

   On the flip side of the coin, there are plenty of examples of what happens when you fail to cut deeply when you need to, and I don’t know of any cases where that failure has ended well.

   Vanguard stands out here with their racially-unique starting experiences. How much of that effort could have gone into ensuring the existing content in the game was functional and fun? That the art elsewhere was better optimized? That any other number of things were completed? How about having multiple continents, each bigger than some entire MMOs? Necessary for launch? Of course not - Especially not when many end up empty or unpolished.

   One of my biggest regrets with EQ2 was from when I was still technical director - Early in our time on the team, Rich Waters very smartly suggested that we might want to consider cutting some races and/or classes. In a weird bout of naive optimism mixed with a healthy dislike for negative reactions, I opined that I thought we could squeak them all in and be just fine — what was actually driving the thought was that it just plain wouldn’t be an EverQuest title without all of them helping fill up the kitchen sink.

   In retrospect, there’s zero doubt in my mind that the game as a whole wouldn’t have been far more successful with 10-12 classes instead of the 24 it launched with.

   So, I’d suggest this - Look around at all the other games that haven’t fully lived up to their potential, and think about how much better off they’d be if only they’d lopped off a few features that ended up going out in less than AAA condition, and instead invested that effort making what *did* ship, unarguably awesome.

   For my own play, I’ll take Smaller and Awesome just fine. They can always add more Awesome later.

5. 

   Babs said

   July 12 2008 @ 11:17 am

   I agree. Smaller and Awesome means fun gaming time. Bigger and Suck means I don’t subscribe.

   There are also whole games out there that don’t ship because they don’t live up to expectations; we should count it as a blessing that Warhammer is only delaying a part of itself instead of the whole shebang, since it means there’s something viable going on after all.

6. 

   Ferrel said

   July 14 2008 @ 4:58 am

   I was a bit surprised to see this myself but honestly I’m not upset. When it comes to the logic behind it, I understand.

   Scott made a very good point: “That said, if that’s the call that gets made, it’s guaranteed that the alternative is far worse.”

   One of the primary strengths I see in World of Warcraft is the lack of classes. Everyone likes variety for sure but each additional class adds exponentially to balance issues.

   I was always of the opinion that one of the worst features in EQ2 was the sheer volume of classes. As much as I hated it, there were times when we were leading the pack that I just didn’t allow certain classes on the raid because they weren’t worthwhile.

   That said, however, to have that many different roles to balance, the team did very well at it with only a few missteps.

   In the long run this seems only a positive for me. If a player never gets to play a class it is easier to fix than letting a player be a really awful one.

7. 

   Da Newz - July 17 « Waaagh! A Warhammer Online Blog said

   July 17 2008 @ 3:53 am

   […] & Wenches (part 1 and part 2), Boathammer, Chappo’s Corner, Classy Gamer, NecroRogIcon, Scott Hartsman, Cogworks pt 2, Ten Ton Hammer, The Geek Media, Deadgod, Tobold, Book of Grudges (part 2 and part […]

8. 

   Tom said

   July 26 2008 @ 6:16 am

   THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

   For once someone said it right “Customers are orders of magnitude more forgiving about absent than they are about suck.”

   You have made me a very happy person right now.

   Thanks.

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