Keeping reviews up to date

Arkimet asked me to write about the validity of reviews over time. He said: "MMO games are constantly being updated and patched. Non-MMOs too. How valid are reviews made today for the game that exists tomorrow? Is there a better way? Prima guides out-dated in 3 months; should they sell periodicals instead? And all 3 of your metrics, Design, Cohesion, and Execution are mutable. When I purchase a game on release day and have to download a 400MB patch to play, it makes it very difficult to form a lasting opinion. Example: EQ2 looks nothing like it did on release. All 3 metrics have substantially changed. There has to be a better way to take a pulse for an MMO. Maybe blogs are the only way since they are snapshots in time."

Good point. I had a look back at what I wrote in 2004 about World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. And I agree that EQ2 has changed a lot since then, from all what I hear. But curiously World of Warcraft didn't change that much in two-and-a-half years. Sure, lots of content got added, the user interface improved, and the classes reviewed. But the design is still the same, cohesion only changed on the PvP side, and the execution of WoW was always up to a very high standard. Everquest 2 on the other hand definitely suffered from the "released too early" syndrome, which is common in MMORPGs, and of course much of the lacking content and missing features have been added since. Even the hardware of most people has caught up with the requirements of the game. So if I would play and re-review EQ2 now, the result would be much changed.

On the other hand I don't think that blogs are a good way to get a current review of a game. Blogs often are a journal of the adventures of one or several characters in the game, and not a constant evaluation of that game. The subject is often interaction with other players, for example a guild drama, which tells you nothing about the quality of the game. Frequently comments on the quality of the game are written from the point of view of somebody who has played that game for many hundreds of hours, and is a bit burned out. If I say something negative about WoW's end-game grind, that isn't really relevant for somebody new to that game. The best I can offer is the occasional re-review of a game.

Most of the time the design part of a MMORPG doesn't change over time. If it does, for example the Star Wars Galaxies NGE complete revamp, it is usually a declaration of bankruptcy, and often just drives away the few remaining fans. Cohesion of a game is more likely to change. If developers notice that players behave in undesired ways, they sometimes change the risk/reward structure to steer the players back to where the developers want them. For example in Everquest too few people did dungeons, because it was too dangerous to lose your corpse there, so Verant added a dungeon zone experience modifier, increasing the reward of going there. Blizzard is constantly fiddling with their PvP system (and never get it right). But of course the thing most likely to change over time is execution. Especially lack of content at release is something which is likely to be remedied with time. Bugs get fixed, and server hardware updated. The current stability of World of Warcraft servers beat my expectations, there aren't any queues on my server, the crashes from right after the BC release have gone, and there isn't any server-side lag.

On the other side games do age. The graphics of Everquest were great at the time, but now they would be considered very bad, in spite of some upgrades. Even gameplay standards change. We could live with corpse runs in 2001, but in 2007 the possibility to lose all of your equipment isn't something that would be accepted by the players any more. Even Vanguard had to go for a "corpse run lite" version, where you can summon your corpse to the graveyard for a cost. I don't know how anyone could get hold of a current review of Everquest, that describes the game objectively from the point of view of a new player in 2007. There simply aren't that many new players of old games.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:12 AM Permanent Link