Quote:
Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex
See, that's the crux of the issue. It isn't the fact that there are minor bugs here and there. That's to be expected. It's the sheer volume of them and the fact that many people are experiencing them in significant quantities.

WoW has he problem too to a lesser degree. I've encountered no less then a dozen nodes in outlands that are un-harvestable because the geometry changed during beta and nobody bothered to update the z-axis on the node (hai2u floating mana thistle). It took nearly a month for them to finally fix the last of the quests. Mages can -still- blink through the barrier in Eye of the Storm and begin capping towers prior to the battleground actually starting, etc..etc...

The problem, and this isn't specific to WoW, EQ2, VG or any individual MMO, it applies to them all. They can get away with all these bugs because of the huge draw of the social aspect of these games. We play them because we can chat with our friends while we play. Bugs be damned if I can tell fart jokes and have people laugh at them.

And it should be unacceptable. If normal PC games shipped in the state that most MMO's do nobody would buy shit. Several great single player PC games have been crippled into obscurity due to bugs that would go excused in a second in any MMO.

We try to pawn it off as "Oh but MMO's are so much more vast and complex!" and to a degree that has merit. But bugs/broken content that persist for months are just unexcusable.

Anyways...more regurgitating of shit we all already know anyways. Post count ++


I agree that MMOGs often launch with more issues and problems than single player games. And it is usually because MMOGs are that much more complex. Vanguard is also a very ambitious game. One could argue we could have made a simpler game and launched it either sooner and/or with less bugs and issues. But our philosophy, which goes back to EQ 1, is to go for it and be ambitious and try some crazy things. Yes, there is a downside to this (for example, performance issues because we used the latest tech and made a seamless world as opposed to going lower tech like WoW). But the upsides we feel outweigh the downsides, especially long term. As I've posted we have probably 5+ years of new game mechanics, lore, areas, dungeons, themes, features, etc. planned out for expansions and to be patched in over time by the live team. To that end we put a lot of hooks in the engine to make this doable without having to re-write as many things in the future. Also by using the latest tech, it will be MUCH easier to take advantage of future tech (new versions of shader languages, taking advantage of tech that is just now becoming available in graphics cards or tech that we know is coming but doesn't exist yet, DX10, physics cards, and much more).

One example are environment shadows. EQ 2 put them in but they take a huge performance hit and the environment art assets had to be made so the shadow tech they used would work right. I don't play a lot of EQ 2, and I'm certainly not trying to bash it by any means, but don't most people turn environment shadows off? You can turn them on to make a cool screenshot, but how many people actually play with them on?

Our plan for shadows, to keep using this example, is to wait for graphics cards that can do them in hardware so they don't slam the framerate and we also don't have to worry about building art assets that work with stencil shadows, etc.

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