Why did MoO3 Fail (if indeed it has)

Games
1

It seems like the general consensus among gamers who haven’t wedded their reason for existence to MoO3’s success is that the game is, at best, a disappointment.

Of course I wouldn’t know for sure as I haven’t played it.

I have no desire to spend $70 on a game and game guide and 20 hours of my free time to find out.

Maybe when it’s on sale at EB for $5.99 in the jewel case.

My question is: why did it fail?

I think it’s pretty clear the team working on the game was intelligent and creative enough.

They certainly had the wisdom gained from the successes and failures of the previous two MoO games.

They certainly had lots of fan input - what with the open development and all.

Maybe that’s it. Too many cooks.

Is creation by committee even possible?

2

All of Blizzard’s games are basically “designed by committee.” They have a “designer,” but they playtest, playtest, playtest. Everyone contributes, and everyone discusses design and possible changes. It seems to work for them. Maybe it’s better to do it this way than to have some wonderkind designer type who bites off more than they can chew.

I find it odd that everyone comes up with elaborate reasons for a game’s failure that don’t inclue a general “lack of skill” on the part of its creators. Is everyone working on games brilliant? Lord knows it’s always the fault of: the suits, marketing, the publisher, Microsoft, the platform, Tom Chick, QA, it was rushed, it was delayed, it was buggy, etc.

Why not place the blame squarely on the team working on the game? Given whatever limitations and structural problems they may have faced during the course of its development, things which every gamemaker faces in some capacity, why isn’t it possible that they didn’t have the skill to pull it off?

3

All of Blizzard’s games are basically “designed by committee.” They have a “designer,” but they playtest, playtest, playtest. Everyone contributes, and everyone discusses design and possible changes. It seems to work for them. Maybe it’s better to do it this way than to have some wonderkind designer type who bites off more than they can chew.

I find it odd that everyone comes up with elaborate reasons for a game’s failure that don’t inclue a general “lack of skill” on the part of its creators. Is everyone working on games brilliant? Lord knows it’s always the fault of: the suits, marketing, the publisher, Microsoft, the platform, Tom Chick, QA, it was rushed, it was delayed, it was buggy, etc.

Why not place the blame squarely on the team working on the game? Given whatever limitations and structural problems they may have faced during the course of its development, things which every gamemaker faces in some capacity, why isn’t it possible that they didn’t have the skill to pull it off?[/quote]

It’s even possible – quite likely, in many cases – that the sum total of the talents of the individuals indicate that they could make a great game. But a random bunch of talented individuals does not a team make. Building a good, functioning team, and making them work together well, is a highly underrated skill.

As ever,

Loyd Case

4

I’d say from what I’ve read it must have been the designers’ fault more than anyone else, though no doubt development problems and business issues were involved too. They should have understood what people liked about the earlier games, but apparently they got it about 180 degrees backward.

5

Its confirmed the AI CANT invade your worlds. So you better ignore all what defence is and play Sim Moo3 for that’s what this game is now.

Makes we wonder what the hell did the beta testers do?, they sure didnt play. Why did they ruin a game that could have been great?.

How hard can it be to notice?, iv’e noticed it now after playing a couple of days and the beta testers been playing for MONTHS!!.

This is bad very bad indeed, and Quicksilver been braging about how much time they went into coding the AI to be good. And it cant even ATTACK. That must be really hard to code indeed since they failed.

I did this test:

Size: Small Cluster
Diff: Impossible
Starting Member: Yes

Made som colony ships and colonised around 3-4 worlds. Then i pissed every member of the senate of by declaring war, threaten them to make them really hate me. Then i sat with my DEFENSELESS worlds and wating for the AI to conquer them.

By 100 it still has to do so and i guess they never will, and since the only victory condition is sole survivor i guess i can sit and press End turn for infinity.

Hurray Great Job!

just read that on a forum, if it’s true you can draw your own conclusions why moo3 failed.

6

I realize major market games will be developed by teams.

I suppose my comment about “creation by committee” referred more to the fact that the developers took fan input.

Bad Analogy Time

Wouldn’t that be like some Italian dude having a vision in his mind of a sculpture of the ideal male form… he’d call it “David”… then, upon selecting his tools and his material, he invites over his 4000 closest friends to advise him regarding how this “David” should be sculpted.

7

That assumes he actually listens to them.

The fact that a developer asks for fan input can be seen as a way to make a better game or as a marketing/PR move to make the fans seem like they’re a part of the game. In either case, I suspect few developers get more than a handful of ideas from fan input since the combination of the dev team, QA, people from the publisher, beta testers, friends, relatives, etc., probably covers most major issues.

And there’s no shortage of fan input into the design of every single game nowadays. We all know how to make a game better, don’t we?

8

It seems like they screwed the pooch in so many ways with MOO3. It makes me wonder about the beta testers, they seemed really high on the game, and yet people are beating it on the hardest difficulty w/o having to do almost anything at all. How does that happen and no one catch it?

olaf

9

Simple. The beta testers weren’t good testers. They weren’t there to test the game so much as play it. They all played it through just as they would if they’d bought it off the shelf, and none of them was primarily concerned about the product–that bugs and holes be found. They were only concerned that it satisfied their 'druthers. Once it did that, they were happy.

That guy who wrote the post about creating four defenseless systems or whatever it was and then waiting for the AI to pounce in order to see how it performed is exactly the kind of guy Quickilver needed.

10

If Quicksilver produced a game were the enemy won’t attack my defenseless worlds you really have question their competence, testers or no. Beta testing is for finding bugs and fine-tuning, not for catching completely botched AI design.

11

I’m not saying it’s the beta testers’ fault that Quicksilver wrote shitty code. I’m saying it’s their fault that they didn’t catch Quicksilver’s shitty code. That’s their job, in my view.

EDIT: Just to clarify, what I’m pointing out is the difference between a beta tester and a good beta tester.

12

I don’t mean to sound more dismissive and condescending than usual, but allow me to pass on some advice I was given in another, now departed forum:

You have to already know the answer to that question before the conversations in here will be of real value to you.

Start here:

…and don’t just stop when you say “d’oh!” Keep thinking about it.

13

At Stardock I’ve seen some of our gaming projects tank. Even before release there was a consensus that things had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.

We’ve done about a dozen games and out of that dozen, we’ve had 2 solid disasters and one near disaster. This is gong to be long (Mark if you’re reading this, maybe make this into an article? Here’s your dirt! :) )

So let me share the experiences of the 3 and see what they have in common:

Example #1: Avarice (OS/2 game)
I’ve had my share of disatrous projects. One of our OS/2 games called Avarice (http://www.stardock.com/products/avarice/) was a nightmare project. It had great talent on it. The designer, Dave Pottinger, is the lead AI guy over at Ensemble now (Age of Mythology, etc.). The “producer” was Mike Duffy who also went on to start his own game company. And I was “the suit” on that game. I…e. I wasn’t directly involved on its day to day but ultimately set the budget and scheduling.

The problem was that the game was massively ambitious. It began development in 1995. It was basically a “Super Myst” game. It supported up to 1280x1024, 24bit graphics (in 1995!). Everything you saw on the screen was a real object. Walk into the library? Every book was a real book that you could read. You could manipulate objects in all sorts of incredible ways. And it had an AI that was designed to let you truly interact with NPCs in the game who would do all sorts of different things (including move around).

I mean, heck, look at this shot:

This is 1995 time frame here. I.e. DOS games, 320x200x256.

But despite all the talent, technology, etc. Things fell apart. As the evil “suit” I had to get more and more involved as the game got later and later due to its ambitious design and frankly, un-fun gameplay. The time and cost was vastly exceeding the return that an OS/2 game could bring in.

So I had to have them axe out a lot of the AI stuff because it just wasn’t fun. You had NPC’s that could (and did) kill each other which in turn could cause the game to be not able to be completed. You had all sorts of other situations that because of the dynamic nature of the game would cause it to be unwinnable. And of course, the bugs.

Despite the incredible talent on the game, the final result was not what anyone wanted (myself included). It was still a pretty neat game. Most people did like it, but it lost a lot of money and was ultimately a pretty obscure footnote in the “various clones of Myst” saga.

The start-up, Continuous Software Systems, died as a result (hence how Dave ended up at Ensemble putting his considerable AI skills to work on Age of Empires I/II/and Age of Mythology).

Net result: Game failed despite having an extremely talented team at all levels.

My conclusion was that the game was simply too ambitious and as a result a lot of the technology and such was untested and the “fun factor” had not been tested.

Example #2: LightWeight Ninja

This game was not ambitious at all. In fact, it was a training project that became a train wreck. The team that made it actually got merged itno the GalCiv project once LightWeight Ninja was finsihed.

The game isn’t terrible. It just has no market. The full game at 200 megabytes is too big for a download but too simple of a game for retail. It also, as a side scroller, has a lot of other games to compete with and 2 interns just couldn’t compete with that. And they weren’t supposed to. It was an internal project meant to show them how to use our various internally developed game technologies.

But we all learned a lot from it. In this case, the problem was a lack of a directive force. There was no one to sit on it day by day and say “This in, this out. By the end of the week have this, this, and this done.”

Example #3: Entrepreneur
This game wasn’t a disaster at all. It ended up selling 75,000 copies and its lowest review was 3.5 stars (thanks Tom Chick! I’m glad I did what I did to your car. YOU know what I’m talking about).

But it was a near-disaster. I lost friends over this project and Stardock nearly collapsed completely. I.e. if it had come out 2 months later, there’d be no Stardock today. No Object Desktop, no WindowBlinds, no GalCiv, etc. Everyone working on the game pretty much hated it. As late as 4 months before going gold the team signed a petition asking that we abandon the game and start making a totally new game.

1 month before going gold we began the final playtesting of it and the game sucked. It was no fun. It was a boring, dreary, painful experience.

Desperate, we tried to think of a quick way to make the game not suck. The result was to add in cards. Direct Action cards. We’d been Magic the Gathering fanatics for awhile. So we basically threw this in. Put “mana” on the different RISK like regions in the game that if you controlled you got mana from them each game year and then could use your direct action cards.

It saved the game and was probably the best feature.

But that was luck. What went wrong there wasn’t lack of management but losing the overall focus – is this game fun.

Summary

So 3 examples.

The first one was a hyper-ambitious design with 3 people who, on their own, became part of very successful companies/games (Dave at Ensemble, Mike one of the big guys now working on Jimmy Neutron, and well me the loser at starduck or whatever the hell we’re called).

The second a case of no controlling legal authority pushing a specific focus.

The third a case where no one had stepped back and asked whether the game was “fun” until it was almost too late (well we all knew the game sucked but we didn’t really try to do anything about it until near the end when we all concluded that the problem was the game and not just that it wasn’t finished yet).

Is MOO3 a failure? It would be very inappropriate of me to comment either way on that. But if it does fail, you have 3 possible and different reasons or a combination of that could lead to it.

Phew. Glad I type 120WPM!
[/b]

14

Most larger projects are designed “by committee”.

I can’t say this often or loudly enough:
A DESIGNER DOES NOT TO “MAKE UP THE GAME”!

The more talented folks you have on a project the more good ideas and input they’re going to have.

If you ignore them you get Daikatana.

The designer holds the vision of the project, taking in information and using their skill, knowledge, and common sense, to steer that vision so that what is produced at the end of the production process is cohesive, and focused.

[Your Power Pill](http://www. levelupdesign.com/gamelog)

15

Not like I’m qualified to talk about this stuff, but my experience is that well run companies produce better products on average than poorly run companies do. This seems like common sense, and yet I’m reminded of this every time I hear a producer ramble on about improved technology or better design when what they really should focus on is better workflow.

Not saying this is what happened to MoO3, or that it’s confined to the game industry by any means, but I’m still annoyed that most developers overlook this when doing post-mortems. I guess it’s the whole ‘treat the illness, not the symptoms’ thing where, I dunno, someone mentions that there was too much turnover in the art department but fails to look at the business practices behind that turnover.

I guess my point (if there is one) is that knowing what’s wrong and fixing it are two different things. We now return you to your regularly scheduled ‘design by committee’ thread already in progress.

  • Alan
16

Before you say that often our loudly, you might want to translate it into English.

17

Fuck. Try to make a grammar snipe and use sloppy grammar in doing so? Bad form, old boy.

18

I don’t mean to sound more dismissive and condescending than usual, but allow me to pass on some advice I was given in another, now departed forum:

You have to already know the answer to that question before the conversations in here will be of real value to you.

Start here:

…and don’t just stop when you say “d’oh!” Keep thinking about it.[/quote]

Thank you for the link. It was a very interesting read. I found it of particular interest that the author used the term cabal rather than committee to describe the teams involved in the creation of Half Life.

Now - without letting this thread degenerate into a battle of semantics (it depends on your definition of “is” you know), I think it would be fair to declare the Valve Cabals different than your typical committee. Reading between the lines of the article, I think Valve benefitted from some visionary and influential leadership which allowed and helped the cabal process to succeed.

Yikes. I feel like I’m back in my HR Management class.

Without even having to read between the lines, I found this statement in the Valve article:

Even with all emphasis on group activity, most of the major features of Half-Life still only happened through individual initiative.

Which leads me to believe the cabal process used to create Half-Life was simply a matter of creation at the micro rather than the macro level. The creative part of the creation process was still individual.

Back to MoO3 - people raised interesting points about the apparent lack of… critical thinking… on the part of the beta testers. I think this may be a common shortfall of the beta process because beta testers tend to be enthusiastic fans. I wonder if the fanboy effect even permeated the actual development team - causing them to force themselves into the paradigm of “yeah, this game is great” despite otherwise obvious problems.

19

I don’t think Moo3 ever went through that Valve style playtesting. Sure they had rabid fans but no one was ever dropped into the game and told to just “play.” If the team at Quicksilver could have seen how convulted their design ethic had become.

20

I actually don’t think this is clear at all. Not to insult employees of Quicksilver, but everything I have read about MOO3 seems to indicate that these are precisely the areas where the game has come up lacking. Long before it went gold, people where remarking on how unappealing the UI screens were – even the font is terrible – and by all accounts it’s an uninituitive chore to navigate through them. Integrating, streamlining, and polishing these screens does not seem to have been done (i.e., extremely limited build queues, too-short ship name fields, text runoff in drop-down menus) and it is through them that the bulk of the game is “played.”

As far as intelligence goes, it looks like the AI is practically nonexistent. It’s hilarious and sad to read reviews that emphasize the multiplayer aspect as a way to compensate for this egregious failing. Ascendancy was brain-dead too, but at least it was beautiful to look at.

As individuals, the folks at QS may well be intelligent and creative, but not in the field of game design. It seems to me that MOO3 desperately needed a core concept and an old-school design approach, instead of just a really long features list. Rather than working from the inside out, they seem to have built the thing from the outside in. I am talking out my ass here, because I don’t work in the industry.

But it makes me wonder, and maybe Brad can answer this: How come more developers don’t go the prototype route like Sid Meier? It seems to me that everyone concerned – especially the money men – would be in favor of supporting a relatively cheap pre-development phase where the nuts and bolts of the game mechanics could be worked out before throwing a ton of resources at it. I’m reminded of Kevin Perry’s account of the early development of Shadow Watch, when he and other members of his team would play a tabeltop boardgame version to test the rules.

Is there active discussion of actual game design anywhere in the field? Not interface and graphics and AI, but rules systems and such? Or are the good games simply the result of the labors of a handful of people who understand that stuff already? It would be great if the GDC flew in guys like Reiner Knizia to give seminars or something.

Or maybe nobody cares because that’s not what sells games?