Interview with Mark Jacobs

Mythic Entertainment’s co-founder Mark Jacobs gives an insightful interview at Gamasutra. It results in four pages of straight talk about online gaming past, present, and future. Mythic was recently acquired by giant Electronic Arts.

Disturbing Trend in the Gaming Industry

Many games are released before they're finished. The shocking part is that consumers have learned to embrace this faulty business practice. Games and gaming communities live and die by the patch. There is a paucity of honest game reviews and they seem to ignore technical issues as policy. Hey, you don’t want the game company to stop sending those freebies! Personally, I don’t want to be high jacked into the extended beta testing team after the commercial release. It’s wrong and it’s a standard that has to change.

Customers do not tolerate faulty products from other companies. Lemon laws apply to cars, if a CD fails to play music it may be returned, if food is inedible it goes back to the store, and if a television spontaneously shuts off you get a new one. Gateway once gave me a free computer, better than the original lemon they sold me, but I went to great lengths to get their attention. It was too difficult to get a replacement for a machine even they could not fix. In the end they did the right thing. There are good reasons for not returning software - piracy, for example. Nonetheless, the gaming industry has belly-surfed on the top of this wave of low expectation and piracy long enough.

When a game is released there is often tweaking to be done. Fine. More serious problems are those which detract from the gaming experience, albiet lesser quirks can also do this. Problematic games come in many forms. In my mind you can divide most problems into two categories.

Level 1) “Buggy” problems such as stuttering, freezing, blue screen crashes, CTD’s (Crash to Desktop), audio problems, memory leaks, connectivity instability for online play, and other GUI issues impede game play. These often prevent you from playing the game the way it was intended. You may miss out on a quest or be unable to combine two items that go together. Some buggy problems work to the players advantage; giving more health points than one should have or “dupping” (duplicating) valuable items or gold. These problems amount to a glitch and are usually patched by the developer at a later date.

Level 2) Serious problems include those issues which prevent one from playing the game. This is qualitatively different because, unlike a bug, you either a) can not play the game at all (install issues or constant crashing), or b) game play results in catastrophic errors which destroy/delete your work/saved game/character, damage windows, crash so frequently that its too difficult to invest one’s time, or force one to start over. This is severe if it is a game built around character development but it applies to all games. Character development, as seen in MMOs and RPGs, require you to put time into a character. Problems of this nature may prevent, alter, or destroy that character. If it is an internet only game, or you purchased it for that reason, it is debatably a serious problem if you can not log on or move once logged on.

What prompted me to address this long standing issue at this time? I recently purchased the new game by THQ and IronLore - Titan Quest. Buy Titan Quest at your own risk. See the TQ technical forums for some examples of this. TQ is replete with buggy problems and is fast becoming infamous for serious problems. No one will argue that category 1, buggy problems, abound. We can live with these especially with a good game. To their credit IronLore released a patch within two weeks of release. This is commendable but belies inherent problems that threaten to tarnish the name of the new developer. Online polls show minimal improvement since the patch. The patch addresses many level 1 problems but did nothing for the level 2 issues. In fact, I did not loose my character (multiple times) until after the patch. A savvy forum member helped some of us restore lost characters with a program he wrote but in my case I have to reinstall the game each time I want to get her back. She was restored with missing items. I did this once but lost the character again. Such inane instability has desolved my trust in the game’s ability to save my characters when it crashes. In fact, it can not handle this basic function.

As many people have done, I visit the forums to find answers and vent. Sadly, there we find trolls, fanboys, and illogical individuals who frequent the forums to argue with the victims of such faulty games and blame them for, well anything they can think of. These people often claim to be “in the industry” and some times demonstrate immaturity. They typically re-victimize the same people who are frustrated at wasting $50 on a game that did not deliver. Their message is always the same, “You don’t understand the industry,” or, “It’s not the producer but the developer,” and the all too common, “You should not complain, other games are worse.” These trolls join a discussion to give some banal form of reality check that was usually common knowledge anyway. Or worse, they are there to gloat because their version of the game works. Rarely do they have anything to add. You do not have to be a certified electrician to enjoy a light bulb. Isolating the exact culprit does not solve the problem. In a democracy consumers have a responsibility to speak up. Gloating is for children. They get confused between level 1 and level 2 problems, idiosyncratic categories aside. They tend to believe that if other games are also bad then it reframes the consumer’s disapproval as unwarranted. This is actually irrelevant unless you are trying to prove that the practice is too established am subsequently accepted.

There are many good companies and games out there. If a developer has a strong history of successful games it’s worth picking it up when it comes out. If it's a new developer, be careful. The short version of my list of solid companies that have my business, possibly for life are as follows; Id (Quake series & more), Blizzard (Diablo series & WoW), Bungie (Myth series), Firaxis (Civilization series), and Valve (HalfLife series). No game has deleted characters…except TQ.

Titan Quest is not without merit. If you can actually play the game you will see that its top-shelf. Unfortunately, IronLore could not pull it off technically. Many people can play the game and that’s wonderful but for those of us who can not, the fun is just beyond reach and doubly frustrating. Over time they may get it together but until then many of us have lost hours of character development, will have to put the game on the back burner, or simply move on.

How can you avoid similar situations? Weather it is a level 1 or level 2 problem always speak up on the forums. Developers some times frequent these. Be polite, not because you are ingratiating your self upon them, but because kindness is more powerful and so easy. We live in a democracy and our scrutiny will ultimately improve a game. Contact tech support. Information you provide them might actually help. Write the developer – on paper! It may get more attention but it might also make you feel better.

If you have a level 2 problem that prevents you from playing contact the Better Business Bureau. People don’t think of this for the smaller purchases but the monetary cutoff applies to almost all computer games. File a complaint in the area the developer and producer have offices (in this case IronLore and THQ). Do not preorder games unless they are coming from an established and trusted company. No matter how good the hype – wait and see how the first month goes.

Computer/Game Diagnostic

The System Requirements Lab is highly useful diagnostic tool if you are a gamer who's subject to the ravages of time - and who isn't! As technology advances and games become more cumbersome our systems struggle to keep up. The System Requirements Lab tells you exactly how your system will perform with a specific game. It also provides recommendations for those under par parts. Bookmark this one folks.