Quite possibly the worst MMORPG launch ever!
***For the record - I have probably participated in the alpha/beta/launch of every MMORPG since Asheron's Call. I alpha tested Eve Online/Neocron, Beta tested Asheron's Call 1/2, Eve, Neocron, Everquest and various expansions, Everquest 2, WWII Online, Planetside, SWG, WoW, DAoC, and countless more I can't be arsed to recall right now. I think the only MMORPG I havent been at launch for was Neocron because I hated it with a passion but still saw out my obligations as a beta tester. I know MMORPG's are big projects, they don't run smoothly, launches are notorious and the challenges are immense. So please don't take this as an inexperienced gamer's whine... just statement of facts as I know them and opinion - take it or leave it the choice is yours.
For those with little inclination to read up on it let me give a brief rundown of the abomination that is Settlers of Ganareth (the 'free' prelude to Dark and Light).
First the reasons why many got excited about this MMORPG:
Discover the first unique MMORPG world: No zones, no loading time, all Dark and Light players within the same world
A complete, original and easy-to-use automated transportation and warp system
A medieval world of 15 000-square-mile of land (not including seas)
A strong emphasis on immersion thanks to a horizon view up to a distance of 30 miles away.
Fly in the air without restrictions with your own dragon, glider and parachute
Choose to explore whenever you want, no need to fight on a daily basis.
Hot spot management system: wherever you are in the huge world of DnL? , you can call for or be asked for help to conquest, fight, defend.
Experience an unprecedented immersive environment :
Dynamic and unique weather management: a DnL? day is 84 minutes...take time to watch sunrises, sunsets, the Milky Way and constellations!
480 days per year, with 4 seasons: real-time weather changes from snow to rain, to beautiful sunshine.
One sun, two moons and a constellation management system that changes according to the time of the year, and has influences upon crafting!
Global ecosystem: some monsters feed upon others, crop fields grow according to the seasons?
Original soundtrack : more than 12 music tracks, 1h30 of captivating music
A new medieval fantasy MMORPG where game design led to strong requirements:
a game with a long lifespan, and advanced management options
An immediate sensation of freedom thanks to the unique world
Entirely dedicated to evolve according to gamers in-game decisions and strategies: DnL? game rules will allow gamers to manage their own DnL? storyline, create their own events to set their plans of conquest or fortresses attacks.
Six main game-play systems devoted to perpetual evolution through gamers? actions
Fortress attacks governed by an open time-line per realm
Warrior NPCs you may hire to fight for you
Choose the Bandit Mode; become a soldier of fortune with an enhanced experience, but many risks at hand!
A deep storyline that allows rich and varied game options and opportunities
A Game-mastering team in five languages entirely dedicated to enhancing the role of players in a truly interactive scenario: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian
Master DnL? while experiencing two evolving axies for every character: combat and social:
Choose whether you wish to specialize or not, in harmony with skill trees for every character
Rich career paths: choose between specialization and versatility
A political organization that allows you to become a lord, baron, count, duke, and even the king, by bargaining, negotiating? and being smart!
Trade skills and jobs are set up to allow you to develop your character without having to fight on a daily basis
A new resource discovery process
The combat system allows you to assault a fortress or to besiege sources of mana
Introducing a deep and addictive storyline 13 realms:
three non-PvP kingdoms, ten kingdoms to conquer (PvP allowed)
12 races, 14 classes, 27 equipment slots per character and many specific slots per skill
The Gods? history and characteristics are the roots of the Dark and Light universe. They create their race?s respective background and, according to Human beliefs, they influence races actions and choices, both in combat and craft Technical features
300 000 polygons rendered per frame for the landscape, thanks to the exclusive Mafate? 2.0 engine EAX? support and 7.1 compatible
Tree rendering enhanced by Bionatics? technology
Impressive huh? Well as it turns out, no it's certainly not. But the game itself aside, I have never seen such an unprofessional developer as NP3 and such poor community relations as that offered by AD, all overseen by Farlan Entertainment as the publisher.
Let me give you a brief rundown of the failures. The game has been in development for 4 years and the last 2 of those have been closed beta. The game's (Dark and Light) launch has been delayed 3 times by 6 months each time.
Finally in October a statement was released announcing a free 'prelude' to the full Dark and Light game called Settlers of Ganareth. This would be available to 10,000 free users and 8881 'pioneers' who fork out £40 to pre-order Dark and Light which is now slated for April 06 release (yeah right!!).
Anyway...SoG was supposed to launch last week 8/12/05. In emails and forums posts by the devilspawn known as NP3/AD there were numerous claims that:
a) No SoG is not a Beta - it is a full game offered for free, and would provide the basis for the lore and content of the full D&L when it launched
b) That manuals and skilltrees would be published 2 days in advance
Now I joined the fun probably around august when I registered for beta, though I never got accepted as it seems the game is still only being beta'd by a very small group with very tight NDA - fair enough.
So I loitered around the forums and after about a month or so, I realised that I still knew virtually nothing about this game. Apart from a couple of less than impressive movies and some screenshots, noone had actually seen anything of the content of the game. We knew even less about the classes and the basics such as combat.
As time wore on, I got more and more concerned about the companies involved. The website is as basic as you can get with php-nuke. The forum perfomance is poor whenever it has more than 3-400 people online. Hmmmm a company that cant run a website expects to run a full MMORPG cluster supporting 100,000 people on the same shard. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Then I realised a bit more about the company set-up. Apparently only about 25 people are employed on the project and they work from some off-shore island...Ah well perhaps its some sort of tax break reason or something. A mmorpg of even the smallest scale generally employs a lot more than 25 people. I mean taking into account bean counters, marketing person or people, some other management bod's, artists, testers, some kind of game mechanics/rule-set guy, hardware architects, and the other essential roles I have no doubt forgotten, that must mean at most 3-4 developers? Strange.. to say the least.
October came and an announcement about SoG, and my almost wained interest was piqued once more. The day was named that people could pre-order one of the 8881 accounts that also guaranteed them a place in SoG... so STUPIDLY I aimed to order one for me and one for my girlfriend. The big day came and the pre-orders were available from 6pm GMT and... the whole site collapsed. Not unheard of by any means (WoW account setup on launch day anyone?).
Still I was perplexed that it seemed like the same bandwidth seem to be used for the Main Website, the Forums, The Account Registration, the actual purchasing was done via BT Click and Pay integrated with bits of the website.
Anyhoo after 7 almost continuous hours of refreshing and progressing by one page of the process (which was so convoluted people felt they needed to write a tutorial for it on the forums!) every hour or so... eventually I got them ordered.... I think... maybe... See I wasn?t really sure as apparently I was supposed to wait for 1 email or maybe 2 or maybe 3 possibly 4 different emails to see that I had got through the process and to actually have a tangible cd-key. Crazy!!
Anyway about 2-3 days later I finally received a CD-Key and was slightly more convinced.
So to summarise it so far - the community was in a total state of confusion because the hired company (Alchemic Dream) for community management actually gave out zero information about the process and the forums had descended into a chaotic bitch-fest about rumour and counter-rumour about what the hell was going on! Sadly this pattern continues to the present, but let me flesh that out a little.
So eventually after the typical begging and screaming in the forums, everything is confirmed and we expect SoG to launch 8/12/05, with manual/skill-list on 6/12/05, and some time before the launch the free-registrations will open for 10,000 people. The confirmation emails received by the pioneers boldly states 'Make sure you download the client before the 8th to ensure you are ready for Launchday on the 8th'
Time ticks on and before you know it it's mid-afternoon on the 8th. There is still no manual, there is no skill-list, there is no client download, there is no word on whether the game is still starting in a couple of hours time! This is the point at which my patience snapped and I was now fully aware of what a shoddy set-up this was. Alchemic Dream are totally and utterly f**king useless. They provide absolutely zero communication. The fanboy groups rally to their defence with stuff such as 'But if the developers don't tell them anything what can they tell us?' Ummmm that's precisely the frickin point!! Their sole job is to get information from developers and present it to the community and vice versa.
Anyway it turns out the launch is delayed again until 13/12/05 with rumour that pioneers will be able to login a day earlier. The most ridiculous part is the complete and utter bullshit coming from AD (several hours afterwards) that the reason was to 'give everyone a fair chance to download the game.' What kind of idiotic numbskulls are they taking us for??? Giving time to download to make it fair?? Are we going to have to wait 15 weeks whilst Bob Nodosh downloads the full 1.2gb on his 28.8 baud modem? Is this the same download they haven't released to anybody yet? Please - seriously just ****** off you condescending bunch of incompetent retards!
On the subject of the manual/skill list.... on the day of release the 'manual' is pushed back and back because 'It is undergoing extensive proofreading and translations.' Hmmm why when the game has been under development for 4 years has it only been completed (one can presume) in the last 24 hours or so, and WOW it must be this big meaty extensive manual if it is taking so long to proof etc... right?? Behold the mighty SoG Manual!!!
There was still no word on the download until the 9th (bittorrent only so unlucky if your ISP throttles that traffic). Once downloaded and installed (using possibly the worst installer ever) with again zero information or instruction from AD meaning a lot of users didnt read between the lines and guess that the sog.exe and launcher.exe have to be installed in the same directory.
Then the great day came... the 12th where at 10am GMT the pioneers would descend on the awesome world described to conquer the land and reclaim it.
Well... of course it didnt happen. Again the launch was put back. In a stunning change of behaviour the players WERE actually informed and were told it would be 2pm. That time came and went and AD returned to type by remaining stubbornly silent as players hung around for many more hours with no information apart from rumour from those in an IRC channel.
Having chuckled at the calamity all day at work, I took my girl out for a meal and when returning at 10.30pm decided to try once before heading for the xbox 360.
Whaddya know!!! Server up! I launch the launcher, fiddle with such meaningless settings as 'Game Engine 1-8' and finally launch the game. Now I was fortunate enough to have installed other games with the indeo codec, but many others hadn?t so couldn?t even get past the intro video. BUT - I still crashed after the video. Some research on the forums tells me to delete my dnl.ini file and it works!
I am into what has to be the shoddiest and crappiest looking Character creation screen. None of the options for appearance of my Brave work, thus I enter the world looking like every other Brave.
Oh and what a woeful world it is. The rivers float in the sky, buildings hang off the land either 3 feet above it, or auto-magically dangling off the ends of gentle slopes. After eventually working my way round the worst in game interface I have ever seen, I get my pioneer's dragon out and mount it.
Now you would thing a brave riding on top of a dragon would look pretty cool right? No way Jose! I look like I am having a particularly difficult crap on top of a razor blade, suspended in my squatting position some distance off the top of my crippled (I can only assume the way it limps and waddles) creature. I am sure when I looked into his eyes he said to me ?Kill me please? just kill me. You can log off from this crap and I am stuck here forever!?
Sure I could see the horizon as promised.... shame I wasn't particularly interested in it as I can only describe the graphics as looking something akin to Outcast (if any of you remember that). I have an AMD 64 3500+, 3 gig of Crucial RAM, Gefore 7800GTX, 2 x WD Raptor 10krpm Harddrives in a RAID Stripe, and yet this awful engine has brought the system to its knees (yes even out on a remote mountain with no-one else around).
Players had lost their pioneer dragons within 10 minutes due to them ending up 500km away. Looking through my chat log I can count well over 50 people saying they were stuck somewhere, and after about 15 minutes the login server crashes taking everyone with it and that was the end of that.
Absolutely ****** awful is the only way I can describe this game as it stands... just plain AWFUL
The funny bit today is that they have closed the forums - Definitely absolutely NOT due to the number of complaints!!! Ohh no - it's to help the 'Game Performance
'WHAT KIND OF RETARDED MONKEY'S HAVE THEIR WEBSITE AND A MMORPG ON THE SAME BANDWIDTH
Case Closed.
***For the record - I have probably participated in the alpha/beta/launch of every MMORPG since Asheron's Call. I alpha tested Eve Online/Neocron, Beta tested Asheron's Call 1/2, Eve, Neocron, Everquest and various expansions, Everquest 2, WWII Online, Planetside, SWG, WoW, DAoC, and countless more I can't be arsed to recall right now. I think the only MMORPG I havent been at launch for was Neocron because I hated it with a passion but still saw out my obligations as a beta tester. I know MMORPG's are big projects, they don't run smoothly, launches are notorious and the challenges are immense. So please don't take this as an inexperienced gamer's whine... just statement of facts as I know them and opinion - take it or leave it the choice is yours.
For those with little inclination to read up on it let me give a brief rundown of the abomination that is Settlers of Ganareth (the 'free' prelude to Dark and Light).
First the reasons why many got excited about this MMORPG:
Discover the first unique MMORPG world: No zones, no loading time, all Dark and Light players within the same world
A complete, original and easy-to-use automated transportation and warp system
A medieval world of 15 000-square-mile of land (not including seas)
A strong emphasis on immersion thanks to a horizon view up to a distance of 30 miles away.
Fly in the air without restrictions with your own dragon, glider and parachute
Choose to explore whenever you want, no need to fight on a daily basis.
Hot spot management system: wherever you are in the huge world of DnL? , you can call for or be asked for help to conquest, fight, defend.
Experience an unprecedented immersive environment :
Dynamic and unique weather management: a DnL? day is 84 minutes...take time to watch sunrises, sunsets, the Milky Way and constellations!
480 days per year, with 4 seasons: real-time weather changes from snow to rain, to beautiful sunshine.
One sun, two moons and a constellation management system that changes according to the time of the year, and has influences upon crafting!
Global ecosystem: some monsters feed upon others, crop fields grow according to the seasons?
Original soundtrack : more than 12 music tracks, 1h30 of captivating music
A new medieval fantasy MMORPG where game design led to strong requirements:
a game with a long lifespan, and advanced management options
An immediate sensation of freedom thanks to the unique world
Entirely dedicated to evolve according to gamers in-game decisions and strategies: DnL? game rules will allow gamers to manage their own DnL? storyline, create their own events to set their plans of conquest or fortresses attacks.
Six main game-play systems devoted to perpetual evolution through gamers? actions
Fortress attacks governed by an open time-line per realm
Warrior NPCs you may hire to fight for you
Choose the Bandit Mode; become a soldier of fortune with an enhanced experience, but many risks at hand!
A deep storyline that allows rich and varied game options and opportunities
A Game-mastering team in five languages entirely dedicated to enhancing the role of players in a truly interactive scenario: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian
Master DnL? while experiencing two evolving axies for every character: combat and social:
Choose whether you wish to specialize or not, in harmony with skill trees for every character
Rich career paths: choose between specialization and versatility
A political organization that allows you to become a lord, baron, count, duke, and even the king, by bargaining, negotiating? and being smart!
Trade skills and jobs are set up to allow you to develop your character without having to fight on a daily basis
A new resource discovery process
The combat system allows you to assault a fortress or to besiege sources of mana
Introducing a deep and addictive storyline 13 realms:
three non-PvP kingdoms, ten kingdoms to conquer (PvP allowed)
12 races, 14 classes, 27 equipment slots per character and many specific slots per skill
The Gods? history and characteristics are the roots of the Dark and Light universe. They create their race?s respective background and, according to Human beliefs, they influence races actions and choices, both in combat and craft Technical features
300 000 polygons rendered per frame for the landscape, thanks to the exclusive Mafate? 2.0 engine EAX? support and 7.1 compatible
Tree rendering enhanced by Bionatics? technology
Impressive huh? Well as it turns out, no it's certainly not. But the game itself aside, I have never seen such an unprofessional developer as NP3 and such poor community relations as that offered by AD, all overseen by Farlan Entertainment as the publisher.
Let me give you a brief rundown of the failures. The game has been in development for 4 years and the last 2 of those have been closed beta. The game's (Dark and Light) launch has been delayed 3 times by 6 months each time.
Finally in October a statement was released announcing a free 'prelude' to the full Dark and Light game called Settlers of Ganareth. This would be available to 10,000 free users and 8881 'pioneers' who fork out £40 to pre-order Dark and Light which is now slated for April 06 release (yeah right!!).
Anyway...SoG was supposed to launch last week 8/12/05. In emails and forums posts by the devilspawn known as NP3/AD there were numerous claims that:
a) No SoG is not a Beta - it is a full game offered for free, and would provide the basis for the lore and content of the full D&L when it launched
b) That manuals and skilltrees would be published 2 days in advance
Now I joined the fun probably around august when I registered for beta, though I never got accepted as it seems the game is still only being beta'd by a very small group with very tight NDA - fair enough.
So I loitered around the forums and after about a month or so, I realised that I still knew virtually nothing about this game. Apart from a couple of less than impressive movies and some screenshots, noone had actually seen anything of the content of the game. We knew even less about the classes and the basics such as combat.
As time wore on, I got more and more concerned about the companies involved. The website is as basic as you can get with php-nuke. The forum perfomance is poor whenever it has more than 3-400 people online. Hmmmm a company that cant run a website expects to run a full MMORPG cluster supporting 100,000 people on the same shard. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Then I realised a bit more about the company set-up. Apparently only about 25 people are employed on the project and they work from some off-shore island...Ah well perhaps its some sort of tax break reason or something. A mmorpg of even the smallest scale generally employs a lot more than 25 people. I mean taking into account bean counters, marketing person or people, some other management bod's, artists, testers, some kind of game mechanics/rule-set guy, hardware architects, and the other essential roles I have no doubt forgotten, that must mean at most 3-4 developers? Strange.. to say the least.
October came and an announcement about SoG, and my almost wained interest was piqued once more. The day was named that people could pre-order one of the 8881 accounts that also guaranteed them a place in SoG... so STUPIDLY I aimed to order one for me and one for my girlfriend. The big day came and the pre-orders were available from 6pm GMT and... the whole site collapsed. Not unheard of by any means (WoW account setup on launch day anyone?).
Still I was perplexed that it seemed like the same bandwidth seem to be used for the Main Website, the Forums, The Account Registration, the actual purchasing was done via BT Click and Pay integrated with bits of the website.
Anyhoo after 7 almost continuous hours of refreshing and progressing by one page of the process (which was so convoluted people felt they needed to write a tutorial for it on the forums!) every hour or so... eventually I got them ordered.... I think... maybe... See I wasn?t really sure as apparently I was supposed to wait for 1 email or maybe 2 or maybe 3 possibly 4 different emails to see that I had got through the process and to actually have a tangible cd-key. Crazy!!
Anyway about 2-3 days later I finally received a CD-Key and was slightly more convinced.
So to summarise it so far - the community was in a total state of confusion because the hired company (Alchemic Dream) for community management actually gave out zero information about the process and the forums had descended into a chaotic bitch-fest about rumour and counter-rumour about what the hell was going on! Sadly this pattern continues to the present, but let me flesh that out a little.
So eventually after the typical begging and screaming in the forums, everything is confirmed and we expect SoG to launch 8/12/05, with manual/skill-list on 6/12/05, and some time before the launch the free-registrations will open for 10,000 people. The confirmation emails received by the pioneers boldly states 'Make sure you download the client before the 8th to ensure you are ready for Launchday on the 8th'
Time ticks on and before you know it it's mid-afternoon on the 8th. There is still no manual, there is no skill-list, there is no client download, there is no word on whether the game is still starting in a couple of hours time! This is the point at which my patience snapped and I was now fully aware of what a shoddy set-up this was. Alchemic Dream are totally and utterly f**king useless. They provide absolutely zero communication. The fanboy groups rally to their defence with stuff such as 'But if the developers don't tell them anything what can they tell us?' Ummmm that's precisely the frickin point!! Their sole job is to get information from developers and present it to the community and vice versa.
Anyway it turns out the launch is delayed again until 13/12/05 with rumour that pioneers will be able to login a day earlier. The most ridiculous part is the complete and utter bullshit coming from AD (several hours afterwards) that the reason was to 'give everyone a fair chance to download the game.' What kind of idiotic numbskulls are they taking us for??? Giving time to download to make it fair?? Are we going to have to wait 15 weeks whilst Bob Nodosh downloads the full 1.2gb on his 28.8 baud modem? Is this the same download they haven't released to anybody yet? Please - seriously just ****** off you condescending bunch of incompetent retards!
On the subject of the manual/skill list.... on the day of release the 'manual' is pushed back and back because 'It is undergoing extensive proofreading and translations.' Hmmm why when the game has been under development for 4 years has it only been completed (one can presume) in the last 24 hours or so, and WOW it must be this big meaty extensive manual if it is taking so long to proof etc... right?? Behold the mighty SoG Manual!!!
There was still no word on the download until the 9th (bittorrent only so unlucky if your ISP throttles that traffic). Once downloaded and installed (using possibly the worst installer ever) with again zero information or instruction from AD meaning a lot of users didnt read between the lines and guess that the sog.exe and launcher.exe have to be installed in the same directory.
Then the great day came... the 12th where at 10am GMT the pioneers would descend on the awesome world described to conquer the land and reclaim it.
Well... of course it didnt happen. Again the launch was put back. In a stunning change of behaviour the players WERE actually informed and were told it would be 2pm. That time came and went and AD returned to type by remaining stubbornly silent as players hung around for many more hours with no information apart from rumour from those in an IRC channel.
Having chuckled at the calamity all day at work, I took my girl out for a meal and when returning at 10.30pm decided to try once before heading for the xbox 360.
Whaddya know!!! Server up! I launch the launcher, fiddle with such meaningless settings as 'Game Engine 1-8' and finally launch the game. Now I was fortunate enough to have installed other games with the indeo codec, but many others hadn?t so couldn?t even get past the intro video. BUT - I still crashed after the video. Some research on the forums tells me to delete my dnl.ini file and it works!
I am into what has to be the shoddiest and crappiest looking Character creation screen. None of the options for appearance of my Brave work, thus I enter the world looking like every other Brave.
Oh and what a woeful world it is. The rivers float in the sky, buildings hang off the land either 3 feet above it, or auto-magically dangling off the ends of gentle slopes. After eventually working my way round the worst in game interface I have ever seen, I get my pioneer's dragon out and mount it.
Now you would thing a brave riding on top of a dragon would look pretty cool right? No way Jose! I look like I am having a particularly difficult crap on top of a razor blade, suspended in my squatting position some distance off the top of my crippled (I can only assume the way it limps and waddles) creature. I am sure when I looked into his eyes he said to me ?Kill me please? just kill me. You can log off from this crap and I am stuck here forever!?
Sure I could see the horizon as promised.... shame I wasn't particularly interested in it as I can only describe the graphics as looking something akin to Outcast (if any of you remember that). I have an AMD 64 3500+, 3 gig of Crucial RAM, Gefore 7800GTX, 2 x WD Raptor 10krpm Harddrives in a RAID Stripe, and yet this awful engine has brought the system to its knees (yes even out on a remote mountain with no-one else around).
Players had lost their pioneer dragons within 10 minutes due to them ending up 500km away. Looking through my chat log I can count well over 50 people saying they were stuck somewhere, and after about 15 minutes the login server crashes taking everyone with it and that was the end of that.
Absolutely ****** awful is the only way I can describe this game as it stands... just plain AWFUL
The funny bit today is that they have closed the forums - Definitely absolutely NOT due to the number of complaints!!! Ohh no - it's to help the 'Game Performance
'WHAT KIND OF RETARDED MONKEY'S HAVE THEIR WEBSITE AND A MMORPG ON THE SAME BANDWIDTH
Case Closed.
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