The Business: Josh Strife Hayes Talks "Vindictus" & Why It's A Bad Game

As Geek Gab is off through the holidays, we'll not be hearing from Daddy Warpig or Dorrinail on Saturdays for the rest of the year. Fortunately Josh Strife Hayes steps up, and he's got a video about the MMO Vindictus.

We're back talking about How To Fail At Game Design (MMO Edition), but some of this is applicable to other media and genres.

• Technical bugs. Seriously, this is not acceptable anymore and players are correct to hammer developers for letting these things out into the wild. The audience is spoiled for choice in their leisure activities; polish is not a premium anymore- it's baseline. You'd be surprised how many people quit as soon as they hit jank like this.
• Deceptive presentation. You don't need the village to do anything; it's nothing more than a lobby/hub for downtime stuff, like Destiny has. But you're deceived into thinking it's more than that, until (in theory) Sunk Cost sets in and you're unwilling to quit over it.
• Pay To Win. Unarguable; throw money at the already-very-easy game and you can win with an autoclicker and a scriptbot while you watch.
• Nonsensical Encounter Design. Pure Cargo Cult at work here. You climb because it's expected in this sort of thing, not because it's something you actually need; same with jumping down or other odd encounter decisions. Strip away the trappings, and it's Babby First Adventure Game (PS1 Edition) For Game Journalists, but done by retards.
• Inconsistent Presentation. The dissonant seasonal and lewd cosmetics are there because beancounters demanded it to extract money from stupid whales who already bought all the powerups. There is no attempt whatsoever to communicate by means of aesthetics what the fictional culture of this world is or how the people therein act on what they believe, which is necessary for verisimlitude.

Combined, you have what Josh says: a very amateur hour production. There's a creeping contempt for the player in the game's presentation, confirmed by the Cash Shop, and it is no surprise now that this contributed to the game's decline to its present sad state.

What can we learn from this?

First, consistency matters. For all its faults, WOW does do this correctly (and this is despite the same dissonant seasonal events); the same is true of FF14. Consistency of presentation--aesthetics, encounters, etc.--is that invisible something that nonetheless noticable factor that makes games succeed when they otherwise would not.

Second, encounter design matters. It's not enough to make some corridors, fight trash mobs, and then go into a boss arena. The encounters should require the player to exercise some skill at the game, not merely have big enough numbers to trivialize the encounter; this is where execution of encounter mechanics comes into play, and why so many suck players hate games like FF14 where it's mechanical execution that matters most (especially since you're often unable to overlevel or overgear the encounter).

Third, honest presentation matters. There is no need to deceive the player; if your game is structured so that actual gameplay is instanced, be up front about it. Sure, some will balk and go away; you don't want to retain them, so let them go. "Numbers Must Go UP!" is cancerous to long-term MMO business, and it is the source of the pressure for dishonesty in presentation (along with other known issues, like the Cash Shop).

We can conclude, therefore, that an incompetently-developed game coupled with an incompetent management regime will reliably result in games being janky cash grabs.

We can also conclude, therefore, that a lack of these flaws increases the odds that both the technical team and the management regime is competent; by extension, the rise or fall of these flaws maps to the rise or fall of the competency of the people behind it in a rather direct manner.

For other videogame media, this is similarly mapable. For tabletop games, what you're looking for is the sort of insanity like you see out of Wankers By The Beach, Baizuo, or Stupid British Toy Company; you want to see if they virtue-signal for the Death Cult, antagonize their customers, and produce products directly at odds with the core gameplay loop of the game in question. In all respects, the correlation of incompetence to product quality can be deduced and mapped along those lines.

Turns out that hating your audience, and holding them in contempt, reliably means that you don't serve their needs and pass of shit product that can be readily replaced with better alternatives. If it weren't for all that Blackrock/Vanguard EGS funding, we'd be wondering why they're flipping burgers at McDonald's right now.

Well, maybe not for Vindictus. In the East, that may not yet be a thing. We'll see.

In any event, now that we know that bad games reliably map to bad people it's just a matter of narrowing down who's guilty of what so we can blacklist them as bad hires to gatekeep from future projects- one of many forms of gatekeeping we need to do if we're ever going to have entertainment that is fit for purpose once more.