Ekim's Gamer View: Lagging Behind
Ekim, 2003-06-20

Great Expectations

Even before you get to really experience an online game, you have to discover it. Almost everyone of them have different interfaces and features alone. A good part of the first month - that proverbial "free month" that you actually pay for by buying the box - is used to find out the intricacies of playing this particular game. Most often, you'll try out many different characters before you finally get the hang of things, before you're comfortable enough to continue with one character for the long haul. You have to go through that even before you can even really know if the game you're playing is any good. Before that you're blinded by the "newness" of it, by the wonderful discoveries and the rush of figuring out things on your own. Afterwards things usually fall back down to ground level.

But now what if this first month is wrought with technical problems so crippling that the game is almost unplayable half the time you log on? That is, IF you can log on at all, of course… I had expected this from Shadowbane. From all early reports I had heard, the game was nowhere near finished when it came out, and technical problems already plagued the last few days of BETA. So of course I stayed away. But almost 3 months after its release I figured that things must have been smoothed out. And so having an itch for playing a new MMORPG I decided to try it.

No MMORPG to date has ever launched without any bugs. But there are bugs and bugs, if you get my drift. Some bugs you would expect. Those little issues that are irritating but excusable. Things like character animations uselessly looping, or loot not dropping at the correct rates when hunting in dungeons. Then there are the devastating kinds of bugs. These ones everyone could do without, and they are generally not a nuisance, but rather a plague. Crashes to desktop and unbearable lag come to mind as the worst examples. So bugs are acceptable in this genre, I think they are part of it as much as patches are. But some bugs are also undesirable, and should be fixed as soon as possible, especially the more devastating ones.

ShadowLag…

Three months after an MMORPG is out on the market, it should be free of those devastating bugs I mentioned. Lag and desktop crashes should be gone. Actually, they should be gone by the end of its first month of life! Lag spikes, the small kind, are an occasional plague we're willing to bear with from time to time. But what I've seen in the past two weeks is enough to make me want to poke my eyes out instead of staring at my monitor. Three months after release, SB feels like a game that was not only rushed out way too early, but can't even support what it wants to be. Never mind that there's actually a game underneath all these problems. Never mind that the leveling system is running on speed (and everyone likes it that way). You can't appreciate these things when you have to wait one or two whole minutes after hitting the attack key before you finally see your character connect with his foe.

I went back and read all the reviews for the game and was baffled. Almost all of them said that SB is a good game if you get past the early stage. But the real question is: can you pass this early stage? Do you even want to? Not because the game is not fun, or because the graphics are dull. Because the game is so plagued with problems that it just doesn't seem worth it. And those who did get past this initial stage of the game complain about lag and system performances keeping them from performing well in PvP, the very heart of the game. Those reviews almost never mentioned SB's terrible technical problems. Is that because they think that they don't detract from the game? I beg to differ… How can they not detract from your enjoyment of the game? How can it not affect the score?

Next!

Well, this seems to come off as a big rant, and maybe it is. In all fairness SB's last patch cured most of the lag problems by the time it was finally released. But consider what the players had to go through to finally get their fix: the servers were completely down for a whole day because that patch seemed to introduce some new terrible bug again… But the point remains that these "bugs" and the lag problem should have been fixed a long time ago already. And with the imminent - and surprisingly early - release of SW:G, one can wonder what will happen to SB's already thin player base.

Believe me when I say that if the players leave SB it won't necessarily be because they don't like the game. And this experience now makes me wonder if SW:G is ready. And by "ready" I mean really ready. Not bug free, I would never expect that, of course. But ready to welcome the tens of thousand players that will rush to get the game. I know that many players - myself included - will be expecting more out of SW:G simply because the subscription price is higher than other games of its genre (more on that next week). And we all know that by "expecting more" we certainly don't mean more bugs…