Yay, again about the “accessibility barriers”, a theme I brought up a million of times and that I still consider the main reason of the success of WoW. This time from Ubiq.
What he writes is indeed true and precious, but it’s still something that should have been evident years ago. It’s not a topic of today, it’s a topic of yesterday.
It’s something we do extremely poorly.
No, it’s something YOU do extremely poorly.
I’m recently toying with Shadowbane thanks to the free thing. Well, this is the WORSE game out there when it comes to the accessibility barriers. There isn’t any other game, between those in the same genre, that could be compared. And definitely not because of the full PvP ruleset. To arrive at the PvP you need to go through the first 10 levels and get ported on the main land. If you arrive there you are already past *the majority* of those barriers.
When it comes to write impressions about this game there’s a side that is justifiable. The client, for example, feels really ancient, at release they had major bugs and instability, lots of crashes. That’s what the great majority of the players remember of this game. All these problems are technical and it’s not something you can solve just because you want to. There’s a degree of complexity, you need resources, things can go wrong. You can try your best but there’s always a limit about what you can possibly do.
But the design? The glaring design mistakes and shortcomings cannot be easily justified like that. It’s a part of the game that doesn’t need particular resources, it just requires common sense, observation. The very basic skills that should be mandatory for every designer. It’s unacceptable how the new players are introduced to the game and how the default UI is set. It’s three years that the game is out and nothing at all has been done to streamline it and organize the UI so that it can be usable right out of the box and without spending two hours to figure out everything.
Damion Schubert has been there from the start and I just cannot digest what he writes when his game represents the worst case out there. It’s just not believable. Working on better default options and reorganize the UI to make it more usable aren’t daunting duties that require insane technical skills. This is just the bare minimum you can do and the bare minimum that hasn’t been done for the three full years that the game has been out, plus all the years that it was in development and beta. Come on.
From the comments:
Interesting point. What seems obvious to the designer is not always obvious to the gamer.
No, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s what is absolutely obvious to the player that doesn’t seem to be obvious to the designer. You don’t need focus groups to discover why, if you cannot figure that out by yourself it means that your observation skills are extremely lacking.
It’s not a matter of founding, it’s not a matter of resources. This is pure conceptual work that should have been obvious BEFORE even writing the first line of code. Before the first proof of concept of the UI was ready, before the ruleset was being designed. Shadowbane isn’t an incredibly complex game, but it becomes overly complicated because it is badly planned and because it didn’t improve an inch along these years. Shadowbane failed not only because of the technical complexity that is required to run a mmorpg, but also because it was poorly designed.
You just cannot say what you said with a straight face. Really. Yes, we all agree with what you say. But *I* can complain about that. You cannot. We aren’t on the same side of the fence and I’n not letting you jump here.