My Life As A Gamer: What A Lack Of Care Looks Like

Josh Strife Hayes cut a new MMO video yesterday, this one on Secret World.

What's good to take note of here is the following:

1. They saw that their original vision wasn't working, so they changed course.
2. They still failed to stick the landing on the revision.

Credit to the team for cutting their losses on the pure MMO version of the game as soon as that was apparent. "Fail faster" has a prequesite, and that's the ability to recover from failure, which can be easier to do if you notice it early and move swiftly to ameliorate losses, which is why that catchphrase became a thing. The thing that trips people up, however, is that failing faster is not just about avoiding self-inflicted harm.

The full expression of using failure as a teacher is that you have to learn from the failure, and that means being able to accurately identify what went wrong, how it went wrong, and then correctly rectify that error before trying again. This is where they screwed up.

Sure, leaning into the reality that most MMOs other than the biggest one is going to be a mostly-single player experience is good. Not taking the time to ensure that this shift in player experience plays out properly is a sign that the core reason for the original failure--the inability to address the full matter of the project properly, checking off every last detail to ensure that the machine worked as intended--which is what led this company to abandon this game for all intents and purposes.

Yes, this is an abandoned game. It may be available on Steam, but that's some long-tail bullshit; you're never getting the proper attention that games like this require to thrive, and this lack of care will gnaw at you until you crash one time too many and decide "Fuck this for a game of Soldiers" and go play a game made by people that care- like Final Fantasy XIV.

Care matters. Show and it be rewarded.

And you'll see this in every game that disappoints you. The publisher does not care. Maybe the designer doesn't care also. This lack of care translates to a lack of attention, either out of contempt directly or (for publisher-level contempt) refusing to afford the resources required to make it properly.