One of the interesting things about being in my position (i.e. knowing a lot about the game industry, via interacting with researchers, developers, journalists, lobbyists, administrators, future industry members etc) is that I hear so many different points of view about a game, often before I’ve had a chance to play it myself. I like to think that I can still come at a game with an open mind, ready to experience it for myself, but I don’t think that’s the case. The most recent experience that brought this home to me was when I installed and played Fury, Auran’s recent entry into the crowded MMORPG market.
Anyone who knows anything about the game industry in Brisbane will know that Auran had heavily promoted Fury as the next big thing, which would revolutionise MMORPGs and online gaming more generally (to be fair, some of that is my hyperbole, but that’s often how it felt). I knew some of the developers, I knew people on the community management team and I also knew a lot of students and other people who had heard bits and pieces and were curious about how the game would turn out. The first I heard that things were not going so well was actually from the developers, only a few months out from Fury’s planned release. Some of their concerns were related to the size and sustainability of the niche market that they had targeted with this game, which initially struck me as being somewhat overly nervous and later, I think, came back to haunt them in a completely different way than anyone had expected.
Then, with much fanfare, Fury was released. I was frantically trying to finish up my PhD in October and November last year, so I was not paying any attention to anything outside of my revisions, let alone the industry and fan response to a game that I was unlikely to play, other than out of curiosity. For the record, the reason I say this is that as much as I love to play games, I would not consider myself a hardcore, competitive gamer; I have neither the time nor the energy to devote to mastering a game to that level. I believe I am a competent gamer, and I am very good at some games, but I do not consider myself in the niche market that Auran was aiming at (and no one with a brain would consider me in that market either). It wasn’t until December when someone forwarded me a link about Auran going into administration that I realised that things were going horribly wrong. The next thing I heard was that Auran had provided 1000 copies of Fury as a prize in a competition on a gaming website, something I can’t imagine any company doing if they didn’t desperately need the extra players.
As things got worse and worse for Auran and Fury, I heard a lot of comments about how this would set the game industry in Australia back (I also heard a lot of negativity about the waste of government money … again, for the record, I think providing jobs for talented workers in the IT industry who would otherwise go overseas is not now and will never be a waste of money) and more importantly, how it would stifle innovation in the over crowded MMORPG market. All of this was making me less and less inclined to play Fury. Then maybe the most interesting thing happened, that made me really want to play, at least to see what on earth the development team had come up with.
I was at a symposium approximately a month ago, when a QUT researcher who was given access to Auran throughout the development process presented some of his research findings. Without wanting to steal his thunder before he publishes, some of what he said was fascinating. Mainly, it related to the tension between the design team and the community, members of which were encouraged to critique and provide feedback, on the understanding that what they wanted in the game would be what the designers put in the game. When that feedback was ignored and the game was “dumbed down” (according to the competitive gamers who made up the majority of the community involved in evaluating early versions of the game), the community members reacted furiously, condemning the game and walking away from the development process. This idea that the game had been “dumbed down” to appeal to the less hardcore gamers (i.e. people like me), actually made me curious to play the game, to see what the end result had been that had put so many people offside and been such a chaotic experience for so many.
So, eventually, I got my hands on a copy of Fury. I’d been hearing about it on and off for months, from developers, researchers, game journalists, students (see above list of everyone I have contact with), and I’d heard about what it was supposed to be, what it really was and what did and didn’t work. I realise now after playing it that I had so many confused pre-conceptions whirling around in my brain that there’s almost no chance I could have approached this game from a neutral standpoint, despite trying to start with an open mind. First, and perhaps unforgivably, I had to leave Fury overnight in order to download the approx. 2Gb of updates and patches that had been introduced in the first few months. I think that willingness to use up a large part of my internet quota gives me the right to be unhappy with a game from the get go.
But the thing that really got me offside was how awful the game looks. I’m not necessarily talking about the graphics (people who know my preferences in games will know just how little I care about decent graphics), but just how weird the colours were, how odd the level design was and how insane the interface was. The interface breaks nearly every single rule of human-computer interaction – first by having too much on the screen and also by having too much of it unintuitive or unexplained. But the thing that really got me, the visual thing that I could not get past, was how my avatar leant to the side when I was turning her to run. Instead of turning, like normal characters do, the character would lean to the side like a runner entering the corner in a circular running track. I realised after half an hour that I was leaning side to side with her, in some way mimicking this craziness that was on my screen.
That was the thing that really surprised me. After hearing about problems with game mechanics and community expectations, the thing that I couldn’t get past was something simple and fundamental in the graphics. It so rarely happens to me, that I realise I had mentally set myself up to completely ignore anything visually-related and focus on problems in the game mechanics. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get that far, because I was getting sea sick.
I did manage to notice, in the hour of play that I gave this game, a problem which I think is indicative of the “dumbing down” that early players complained of. There was a tutorial that you had to go through, that explained combat from the ground up, as if assuming that you had never played any sort of PvP before. This was immediately followed by asking the player to choose their class (or path or way, or whatever it was called). There seemed to be a lot of different ways of playing the game, and all of them were immediately customisable. The cognitive dissonance I experienced from going from a tutorial for dummies to one of the more advanced means of exploring skills-combined-with-armour-choices I have ever seen was extreme. To be honest, I couldn’t get much past this point, so I don’t know if it got worse or not.
All of this is to say that I think Fury was a brave, failed experiment and it saddens me to think that people will only take negatives away from it. I’m afraid that the industry conclusion will be “pure PvP MMORPGs don’t work; Fury showed us that” when what Fury really showed us was that there is absolutely scope for a hardcore PvP MMORPG, as long as people don’t monkey with it and second guess their intentions half way through.
Oh, and game designers really need to talk to the HCI people about interfaces. That shit was whack, yo.
