Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

As we draw ever nearer to the eventual closure of NCsoft’s Tabula Rasa, the MMO community continues to gesticulate over the details of the closure, what prompted the sudden about-face, and what the developers at Destination Games will be doing after the inevitable shut down of the game’s servers. Last week, I posted the first portion of my extensive interview with NetDevil’s Scott Brown, an individual who has been there, done that, and lived to tell about it in terms of MMO closures. His own game, Auto Assault, received a similar sort of reception to Tabula Rasa, and so we thought he would be the most appropriate person to shed some light on the trials and tribulations that those developers are currently facing.

In the final section of our two part interview, Scott and I discuss the true meaning of beta (not to be confused with the true meaning of Christmas), the chances of reviving a game after it has launched, and the notion of creating an amazing MMOG. If you haven’t checked out part one, go and do it now then hop over to our forums and weigh in on Scott’s thoughts!

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Ten Ton Hammer: Is there any way a game can be saved once the game underperforms at launch? Is there a way to resurrect the game?

According to Scott, a game really can't be saved if it underperforms at launch. Tabula Rasa was one of those games.

Scott Brown: I don’t think so.

In my opinion, if you launch dead, you’re dead. You can always keep those few fans that you have, and there will always be a small percentage that is into what you built, but changing public perception is almost impossible.

A great example of this is Windows Vista. People have decided that Vista is terrible, and it doesn’t matter what Microsoft does: Vista will always be terrible to the people.

Have you seen those Mojave commercials?

Ten Ton Hammer: No….

Scott:  Basically a team from Microsoft goes in and demos there new operating system, which they called “Windows Mojave”. They show off everything that it does, and people are really excited about all the features. At the end of the commercial they tell people that they’ve just been looking at Windows Vista. People just automatically assume that Windows Vista is bad.

That’s where I get my opinion that you can only launch once. However, you can do stuff like how Runescape is really Runescape 2, and Jumpgate Evolution is really Jumpgate 2. There’s lots of stuff you can do like that.

That’s how you pull something like that off; but I don’t think you can do it inside of an existing game. You don’t have that much time during the day for entertainment, so if you’ve tried something once and didn’t enjoy it, what can a developer do to bring you back? It’s REALLY hard, especially if the game is big.

Ten Ton Hammer: That’s a really interesting take on public perception. How do you really control that? Is it just marketing?

Scott: It’s marketing and it’s beta. I no longer believe that beta’s purpose is to find bugs. I think beta’s purpose is to market your game.

I mean it is the only way you can find things like huge balance issues and what happens when a bunch of players do something you never expected. It’s certainly there to find those things, but if you’re running beta for a game and you have crashes and bad frame rates, it’s not good.

To me, the kiss of death is when you go to a forum for a developer and it says something like, “Next we’re going to go fix the latency issues that we have in the game.” They’re already dead. If you don’t do those things first and you’re going to wait until the end when your game is ridiculously complex with a bunch of systems and try to solve it then, it’s a bad thing.

It’s the same thing with “beta” graphics. When has that EVER been true? Once you’ve gone in and seen a game, most developers launch something that looks pretty much the same.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s like differences between the beta for Lord of the Rings Online and the beta for Age of Conan. I mean, the LOTRO developers dropped their NDA in the middle of closed beta. That’s almost unheard of.

Scott: It just shows you that those guys are expert developers and they made a really, really great game. I think Warhammer Online is another example of this.

The point is would you buy the beta or not? I remember thinking that same sort of thing in World of Warcraft too. City of Heroes is another one. All four of those games were such that if you were in the beta, you were ready to play.

Ten Ton Hammer: I don’t want my character to be wiped!

Scott: That beta idea might not be true for the early, early builds of the game – the friends and family sort of time period – but if you get later into the beta and people love it, you’re good to go. If people don’t, you’re probably in big trouble.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s not like the NDA has ever stopped any fans from going onto YouTube and posting something.

Scott: Exactly. Especially now since YouTube has gotten so prominent.

We have a bunch of meters that we use to monitor buzz and interest in the game, and when we went out with our first Auto Assault beta and realized that we had a ton more work to do, we shut the beta down for awhile. We did a great big polish patch, and everything played way better, but when we reopened the game again we never had the same number of people visiting the web page or downloading the client ever again.

After they opened with a poor initial beta, Auto Assault never regained its footing.

Ten Ton Hammer: Really?

Scott: Nope. Never again. Never even came close. So many things about the game played so much better after that polish patch, but the numbers were never even close. That fact killed that game.

But it wasn’t closing the beta that caused the problem, it was starting the beta too soon. We fooled ourselves into thinking it was ready to go.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think that was something that happened to Tabula Rasa too? Was it a beta fallacy on their part?

Scott: I don’t know, because I didn’t follow Tabula Rasa as much as I should have. But I think that it probably was that fact that caused it.

The other thing that developers always blame is marketing. “If it weren’t for bad marketing, we would have succeeded,” people always say. That’s obviously never true. Marketing can help and build you buzz and do a lot of great things to make a game sell more copies, but marketing can’t fix bad beta.

The point is is that as soon as people play and start posting their opinions, whatever that initial reaction is, it is incredibly difficult to change. I’m trying to think of games that were awesome right away then dwindled later into the game, and I can’t really think of any.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think science fiction games can really succeed in this market? Obviously you think that your game can make it, but is it really so much harder to make a successful science fiction MMOG?

Scott: I don’t really know. There are a lot of good excuses out there: fantasy comes with a built in knowledgebase and players think it’s more accessible. However, I think it’s probably one of those trends that people are creating out of thin air. I remember when they announced that someone was making a Lord of the Rings movie, and people said that it couldn’t be done and fantasy movies don’t succeed.

Well, it turns out that great ones do.

Ten Ton Hammer: And amazing ones do amazingly well!

Scott: If Blizzard had done "World of Starcraft" instead of World of Warcraft, would the articles be: Are fantasy MMOGs dead? I think that game would have been just as successful as World of Warcraft.

I think the reality is that good games just succeed. Unless you can think of one that I can’t….

Every game that I’ve played and thought the game was fantastic, almost all of them did very well. That’s kind of our take on it. We don’t live with the illusion that Jumpgate is the next World of Warcraft… but it doesn’t have to be to succeed.

It’s a game that we desperately want to make, and we feel like there’s at least a decently sized community out there. Does EVE Online represent the size of that community potential? It might, but it’s such a different game from us that it’s almost not even related.

But then again, would the people that play EVE even be interested at all in what we’re doing? We’ve tried to run scenarios to figure out what the market is for Jumpgate Evolution and how big it might be, and we don’t have any idea.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’ve gotten people’s attention, anyway.

Scott: It seems like it! And we’ve done so much work to make the game experience enjoyable enough so that people stick around and get to the more interesting parts of the game like PvP, capturing sectors and fighting capital ships. I believe we’ve really created the game in such a way to make people stick around and see those experiences.

On top of that, the system specs for playing Jumpgate Evolution should be low enough that the game should play on whatever type of computer people would like to play on. That’s what we’re hoping anyway.

I do believe there’s enough people out in the world to make our game successful, but I really don’t know what kind of number that amount of people represents.

Ten Ton Hammer: I think if you guys found an optimum launch window for the game, I think JGE could do really well.

Scott: I agree. I definitely wouldn’t want to launch opposite a WoW expansion or something like that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Absolutely not. I think this November was crazy with four expansions coming out at the same time.

Scott: We couldn’t survive something like that. But, that said, all of my hopes lie in beta, which is why it’s taking us longer to get to beta. We’re demanding that it be a polished game before it gets into the hands of the users. Now it doesn’t necessarily need to have all the content or all the features in place, but everything that’s there needs to be awesome.

We’re doing more and more testing, and ramping up with more and more users, but we’re not going to go until it’s great. We’re such a small unknown IP and, frankly, I think there’s more NetDevil haters than there are fans out there. People are going to jump to conclusions really quick with us, and we need to make sure our game is awesome before it hits beta. That’s something we definitely have to overcome.

Ten Ton Hammer: That always bothers me when people act like NetDevil is synonymous with the result of Auto Assault.

Scott: To be fair, I think Auto Assault was what it was. I don’t know what its Metacritic score was [Editor’s Note: It’s a 72%] but it definitely is what it is. It certainly wasn’t as good as Warhammer Online or Warcraft or any of those other games. I'm actually going to look that up right now.

The problem with entertainment is that I worry that people don’t play 70% games.

The Jumpgate Evolution team is looking for the optimum launch window to release JGE.

Ten Ton Hammer: No, they don’t.

Scott: You only have so much time on your hands to play games these days. So on Metacritic, Auto Assault is a 72%. I think it probably is a 72 sort of game.

While that’s not crap, it’s also not awesome. I don’t know about you, but when you’re not working you’re probably not going to play a 72% game. You only play games that are awesome.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’re absolutely right. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time, Scott. Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

Scott: I’d like to ask people to hang in there. Don’t judge us until you’ve seen our next few products. I feel like we’ve learned so much and employed so many processes. I’m so proud of the way we build games now – our groups and our focus testing – and I think we finally get it.

Trust me, I’m probably more excited than anyone else to get our next round of stuff out there for people to play and beta and see if people agree or if we’ve just been talking a bunch of B.S. for awhile.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s been a real pleasure. Talk to you soon!