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Telling customers that a game will be one thing, and then actually implementing something else altogether.
I remember reading a long apology from the guy heading up Vanguard's development. He was trying to explain why so many of the hyped features simply weren't in the game.
I saw something similar with Conan with feature(s) apparently printed on the box that weren't ingame at launch.
Then there's the infamous NGE scandal from StarWars. Right before deleting most of the game's professions, many were promised revamps along with new features available in an expansion . Then, suddenly so many things promised just went poof. They also promised to add collision detection to their new FPS combat style. I'm pretty sure they haven't done that yet, and this goes back to 2005 0_o.
Most recently we have pages and pages of posts about STO's new playable races available only in the online store. What's wrong with these? Well Cryptic said that anything in the store that affected gameplay would also be available ingame. The RMT races have unique racial stat combinations that no other starting race has. I don't care how people want to spin this, the races in the store affect gameplay, and you can't get 'em ingame.
People may be inclined to jump in here and defend their game of choice: Vanguard, Conan, SWG or STO. If you do, I think you're missing the point. These are just a few examples that come to mind. The point is that MMO companies seem to shoot themselves in the foot everytime they advertise certain features in their game, but then fail to deliver, or change the plan after taking people's cash. When are they gonna learn that this is a bad idea?
P.S. What other games have done this, and how? How widespread is this problem?
Comments
It all comes down to the money. Warhammer is the best example. The game wasn't ready to launch at all but EA wanted the money back that they had invested and so they hyped the game hugely, made the cost of development plus some profit back on box sales alone and now the game has a very small dev team and barely scraping by. BUT, it made profit. So, I guess that's all that matters...money is everything in this business and when a developer doesn't feel like spending anymore (or is out), they basically say "well we gotta launch it and at least make back the money we spent developing it!" and they usually do.
There are retards running these companies. Any person with a brain could bring back Warhammer and make it hugely popular again. Simply letting people play tier 1 for free is not the way to do it. And I'm sorry for talking about Warhammer so much here, but it's just a great example.
proof? Im fairly sure that WAR is still in the red
Its wide spread but believe me that eventually this will strike back at those developers customers will see light one day and say NO MORE decieving or we wont play your game anymore or leave game to die slow death hehe.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.