Mislaunch Dates
Back on the 25th I picked up Batman: Arkham Origins. I love Batman, and I loved the first two games, so you could say I was somewhat giddy when I got home and unwrapped the game. Mmmmmm….new game smell of chemicals. I put the game in, did the standard quick Xbox patch, and then watched the splash screens roll past. At last, after learning every engine detail I could possibly want, I was allowed to push Start. And push it I did . . . only to see a weird overlay that said “WBID Busy . . .”. It sat there for a while, then disappeared and left my game locked on Batman in a crouch, not doing anything. I had to reset the game off and on six times to get it to work, and it only finally started because I disconnected from Xbox Live. Then five hours later my Save file got corrupted.
This isn’t a review about the new Batman. Megan’s getting to that later in the week. No, this is a rant about how fucking tired I am of terrible game launches. I would think that after over ten years of game launches that fail hard enough to reach the cover of the Wall Street Journal, companies would be a little more invested in making sure their customers could actually, you know, play their damn games. Companies spend millions and millions of dollars each year emphasizing release dates and doing everything they can to build hype around a single launch date, and then just repeatedly get blown out of the water when they actually succeed in getting a lot of people to buy on day 1. These days major launch dates border on false advertising, as the chances of actually getting to play on launch day after your purchase are slim to none.
The first time I remember being frustrated with this was when I first picked up World of Warcraft. I got the game maybe a week after launch, and servers were still up and down constantly. In fact, WoW was such a critical launch failure that for the entire first year of the game you were never sure if you were going to be able to log in, and even if you did log in all of the characters in Stormwind would probably be naked. I remember very clearly thinking, “If this game wasn’t the most popular game EVER released, this level of service would have killed this company. No one will ever be this bad again.” Queue every single MMO launch since then.
Hell, even Blizzard didn’t learn their lesson from their own game. When Diablo 3 came out, the internet basically shit itself trying to compensate for the added load. So many people were pissed off about not being able to log in to Battlenet that news sites REPORTING on this were going down from so much increased traffic, probably from the people that couldn’t log in to Battlenet.
And now we are deep in the age of DRM connections and meaningless forced account creation and logins on our console games as well as our PC games. And if MMO companies repeatedly fail the bandwidth and server stability challenge, what can we expect from a sector of the industry used to creating single player or lightly networked experiences? Launch after launch of DRM checkin servers being hosed and no one being able to play, that’s what. I used to love single player console games because after I bought the game I was through needing anything else from the company to play – I could just go home and plug it in and no one would bother me. Now I needed to worry about the same bullshit I do if I get interested in an online game – it’s probably not going to work very well for at least the first month.
In short, to my peeps in the video game industry – release dates are a joke. They have become the punchline for which the joke never need be told, because everyone interested already knows it. It’s 2013, and these are solved problems. Get it together, people. Get it together.
