Ask Massively: Be careful what you ask for...

Today's question actually comes from Age of Conan's in-game chat. While the sane among you may marvel at the fact that my brain cells did not immediately shrivel and die upon coming into contact with your average chat channel ranter, I'll describe the discussion using enough creative editing to shield you, our loyal readers, from some of the more mind-numbing motes of mental malfeasance on display that night.

• "This game sucks, they only designed one class to be a main tank!"
• "No game should ever be released with bugs. Look at how Blizzard did with WoW!"
• "My class sucks. They should make it more powerful and nerf everyone else. There is no balance in this game."

I think you get the idea. To the valiant souls who tried to answer these criticisms intelligently and thoughtfully, I salute you. When faced with intelligent responses to their rants, one of our misguided miscreants fired back with a very good question.

What do you know about designing an MMO? If you know so much, how come you don't write games?

As a former game developer myself, and as someone with several years of experience in the commercial software development industry, allow me a chance to use my bully pulpit in order to answer their points.

First off, I would like to quickly dispatch the criticisms mentioned previously, then I'd like to try and provide you with the perspective from which I make these comments.

To the folks who think that every other class is overpowered except for theirs, I would ask you "Why are you still playing that class?" Every class in every game has something that they are good at balanced by something that they don't do so well. If you are looking for a class that does everything well then you will be looking forever, unless of course you play a Warlock in World of Warcraft.

A properly balanced game should make every class slightly envious of the capabilities of other classes that they don't have. Using Age of Conan as an example, Guardians should envy the melee DPS skills of an Assassin while Assassins, in turn, envy the Dark Templar's ability to heal while in combat, while Dark Templars admire the ability of a Tempest of Set to kill large groups of monsters at once, and so on.

If I were an MMO developer and saw that every class envied every other class, I'd think to myself that I had things balanced just about perfectly. If I saw an overwhelming shift towards one or two particular classes, then I'd think about breaking out the nerf bat. (buffing other classes is also a possibility, but as a developer, what would you rather test, changes to one class? or eleven?) In fact, as a developer, I'd be very interested in tracking the number of posts on the forums that show which classes are envied by other classes. If the "flow" is well distributed, then I'd say that the game has achieved balance. If there is a lopsided distribution, then I'd say that there are balance issues that need to be addressed.

Next up, stability and bugs. Age of Conan's launch was light years ahead of WoW's launch in terms of server stability. That shouldn't be a surprise given Funcom's notoriously bad launch of Anarchy Online. What is surprising is the large number of obvious bugs that made it into the released version of the game.

Whatever else can be said about Blizzard, their philosophy of "We'll ship when it's damn good and ready and not a moment before" means that their games arrive polished and ready to play. That doesn't mean it is bug-free. That's not a realistic goal for any piece of computer software, but it means that the bugs that exist are either difficult to encounter, or easy to work around. A more realistic goal for any computer software, and one that strikes the best compromise between getting a product to market quickly and making sure it is the best possible product is the concept of "good enough to ship"

Having distilled the multi-hour chat session to three bullet points, let us distill that even further into forces that affect every software product. We will call these forces "Time to market", "Quality", and "Development costs". There is an old axiom in our business that is loosely paraphrased "Time, Quality, or Cost. Pick any two."

• You can develop quality software quickly, but it's going to cost a lot of money.
• You can develop software quickly and on a tight budget, but it's going to suck.
• You can develop quality software on a tight budget, but it's going to take a long time.

Combine these three possible scenarios with the pressures faced by any development company.

• Software that takes too long to release will face competition from companies that can develop their competing products more quickly.
  
• Software that costs too much to make will be too expensive to buy or will not be profitable.
• Software that doesn't work properly, or has a bad reputation in the market will not sell enough copies to make money.

Blizzard was particularly blessed in that it had a large development budget, very little competition in the marketplace, and a reputation for producing quality games. Their reputation resulted in many gamers giving them the benefit of the doubt while World of Warcraft was shaking off bugs after it's release. Not all companies have that luxury, and Blizzard has made the most of it. Let's take a look at how Age of Conan and World of Warcraft fit into this framework.

Age of Conan:

• Budget: 25 million dollars.
• Time to develop: 5 years.
• Quality: Stable and successful launch, but numerous bugs in release version.

World of Warcraft:

• Budget: 60-80 million dollars (source claims 50 million euros ~= 79.3 million dollars as of July, 2008. I'd do adjustments for inflation, but math is hard.)
• Time to develop: 4.5 years (same source as budget figures)
• Quality: Rocky launch in terms of server stability, but the game itself was highly polished and "ready to play"

If we extrapolate from our axiom of "Time, Quality, Cost...", we can conclude that improving the quality of a release would require either more money, more time, or a combination of the two. I have already mentioned that time to market is not a big concern with Blizzard and that they take as much time as they need to release a quality product. It is also safe to assume that Funcom spent as much money as they were able to spend in order to develop Age of Conan. Not everyone has an extra 50 million dollars lying around. The key differentiation in this equation is time. Could Funcom have taken another 6 months or even a year in order to polish the game? Would it have made a difference?

Here is where my perspective as a software developer comes into play.

Let us assume that Funcom didn't have the money to spend on more than another year of development for Age of Conan. (remember, developers cost money) What market pressures have been brought to bear on the release of Age of Conan? What does the next 12 months look like in the MMORPG market?

• Warhammer Online is coming out soon, and with EA bankrolling the project, you can assume that they are going to make an impact on the market.
• Lord of the Rings Online is coming out with an expansion in the fall.
• Cryptic is working on Champions Online and is rumored to have picked up Star Trek Online as well.
• Oh yeah... Blizzard might be releasing an expansion for WoW at the end of the year, perhaps you have heard already?

In short, the next 12 months are going to be packed with major competitors in the marketplace vying for the attention (and dollars) of gamers all over the world. So, do you take the extra time to hammer out bugs before releasing the game and risk a fight for shelf space and mind share with competitors with deep pockets and a track record of success in the gaming industry? Or do you take advantage of a space in the gaming calendar where there are no "Hot Releases" hitting the shelves and you can occupy the shelves and the headlines relatively uncontested, trusting your development team to find and fix bugs after the game is released?

Would any company in their right mind want to release a new game close to a potential release date for Wrath of the Lich King? If more than half, if you believe some estimates, of all MMO gamers are going to be occupied with the latest World of Warcraft expansion, it would be extremely foolish to release a competing title in that time frame. If you estimate the release date of Lich King to be towards the end of this year, then, in effect, you have the second half of this year as a window of opportunity to release your game.

Considering the large number of titles due to hit shelves in the fall, particularly in anticipation of the holiday season, the earlier your title can hit the shelves, the better. This is what is meant by "time to market pressure", and all commercial software products take it into account when determining a release date for their products.

While Blizzard is particularly well known for minimizing those pressures and not rushing a release to market if it isn't ready. They still take those pressures into account when determining a precise release date. As for Funcom, by the time that the holiday shopping season rolls around they should have most of their bugs ironed out and have a stable and active community of players by then. All new MMO releases have their growing pains and, hopefully, Age of Conan will have already been through the worst of theirs.

In short, given the constraints under which Funcom has been operating, it made perfect sense to release Age of Conan when they did. Bugs and all. Sure, they could have taken more time to make the game more perfect for it's release, but market pressures would have resulted in increased competition for market share and shelf space, and likely would not have reduced the number of complaints from players who, in all honesty, complain about everything.

That doesn't mean that it isn't painful to run into a bug that takes away from your fun as a gamer, but if Funcom can establish a track record of fixing issues quickly and being responsive to their players best interests (which is not the same thing as "giving players what they want"), they should do fine in the long term. If Age of Conan is still plagued by bugs and game play issues 6 months after release (or even worse, by the time Lich King comes out) then they're in for a lot of trouble.

Returning, one last time, to our axiom of "Time, Quality, Cost...", "Cost" is usually a constant. Development budgets are often set early enough in the development process that they rarely fluctuate. Sometimes a budget can be reduced which leads to significant delays in the completion of a product. Other times, and in my experience, much more rarely, additional funds are made available for a development project which usually allows for a longer development cycle. Most of the time, however, the budget allocated to a development project is fairly static.

Operating under that assumption, it is obvious that software development is a balancing act between quality and time to market. Blizzard is an example of a company that will take as much time as it needs in order to produce high quality products. However, more often, many companies elect to ship a product that is "good enough" in order to reach the marketplace more quickly. Many times, market pressures can force a product to market before it is ready from a quality standpoint. At that point, companies must rely on their support and development teams to keep things moving forward in order to ensure a successful product. Time will tell, in the case of Age of Conan, whether the product was "good enough" to be released.

That's enough for me this week. If you have any questions or topics that you would like for us to cover at Ask Massively, then feel free to stop by our tip line and leave us a note, or send email to ask AT massively DOT com. I'm too tired to come up with some witty reference to spammers this week, so feel free to make one up on your own.