Mr. DeepT's Earth and Beyond Postmortem
posted at 11:00 PM on Saturday, March 20th, 2004
My professional background is that of a console game developer, although I am now unemployed. My personal background is that of a long time poster in the various forums related to MMOGs. I have finally decided to finally become a formal writer with the latest incarnation of The Corporation. My articles will focus on one of two things; the first will be an analysis of the game mechanics of a particular MMOG, and the second will be on pure game theory. The topic of this first article is Earth and Beyond.
Earth and Beyond was the second space MMOG I had played, the first being Netdevil’s Jumpgate. I got into the beta for this game about 6 months before it was released. The game itself was seemingly full of interesting areas to explore and a lot of really cool things to do and I was very much excited to explore the world of earth and beyond, , somewhere along the way, that excitement became disappointment. However, there are some positive things worth mentioning.
What went right:
Earth and Beyond had a great story, covering three factions. The Progen were very much like the Romans in their attitudes towards the other two factions. They were a very war-like culture and thought of themselves as superior because of their genetic purity. Progen ships were heavily armored and built for heavy combat and their home world, logically, was Mars. The Jenquai were spiritual race who focused on knowledge and understanding. While the sought spiritual purity, they did not think of themselves as superior nor did they harbor a grudge against the Progen who had kicked their ass in a recent war. Jenquai ships focused on high tech gadgets and high-tech abilities such as cloaking and space folding. The Jenquai didn’t have a home world; they primarily lived on space stations and space cities they constructed. The Terrans were corporate driven (“all hail the mighty credit”). Unlike the other two factions, the Terran faction consisted of several corporations, not necessarily having the same goals. The most predominate was Infini-corp that owned and controlled all the jump-gates. The Terran’s focus was on making money. They managed to stay out of the Progen-Jenquai war (after all, who would dare to attack them if they can just shut down all the jump-gates?), but made a hefty profit selling all sorts of goodies to the Progen. Their ships tended to have large cargo holds and, of course their home world was Earth. Now throw a bunch of spatial rifts opening up leading to other dimensions and a possible alien invasion into the story line. The potential for a lot of cool stuff was definitely there.
The race/class combos gave each one a unique flavor and play experience. For example, the Progen Warrior and the Jenquai warrior. The Progen Warrior is all about brute force. Their ships have the most armor, the best shields, and the most weapon mounts. Their special abilities include a combat trance that increases damage, shield inversion which turns their shields into a lightning ball of death, and a self-repair skill. Their weapons of choice were slug throwers, a medium ranged weapon that consumed little power. The Jenquai were more about finesse. While they had fewer weapon mounts then their Progen counterparts, they had more special system mounts. Special systems could range from shield boosters, auxiliary power, to increased sensor range. Their special skills included cloaking, summoning enemies, teleporting short distances, and a psi-shield which provided extra protection. The Jenquai weapons of choice were energy weapons, which consumed a lot of power and were short ranged, but recycled quickly and did a lot of damage. The end result was that playing a Progen warrior was sufficiently different then a Jenquai warrior making playing them both a somewhat unique experience. Other MMOGs should consider emulating this idea and make race as important as class, thus allowing a wider variety of experiences.
Within limits, the universe was an interesting place. There were huge asteroid fields that you could explore and many planets ranging from gas giants, to volcanic worlds, to living, Earth-like worlds. There were nebulas to get lost in, and giant space junk-yards that you could salvage equipment from. I even remember finding a hidden field of crystals in space that you could mine for special ores and golden asteroids that promised riches deep inside dangerous sectors. There were aliens that came in many different shapes and sizes. Some were technological species having different kinds of space ships, and others were organic, such as the space mushrooms. The organic aliens came in two forms, one type being nothing more than space animals that were generally non-aggressive. The other type were space monsters. Animals tended to be smaller and monsters larger, but this was not always the case. In one sector there were large animals called “Greks”, a kind a space-version of sea cows with tentacles on their heads. While quite passive, they would become aggressive if you attacked them. Unfortunatly for the Greks, ‘grek parts’ were very valuable to sell, so they were constantly hunted. All in all, Earth and Beyond had a lot of neat things to see.
What went wrong:
We have all played Elite, Privateer or some other fast action space simulation game. You know the kind, where you’re zipping around in 3 dimensions trying to keep the enemy in your sights while you shoot hot plasma bolts at them. Unfortunately this was completely lacking in Earth and Beyond. Combat was like this: Click on target, Click on Auto-follow, Turn weapons on, Get a Coke and enjoy while the alien dies. Hardly the excitement of the dog fight we might expect. In some genres, pure character based combat might be ok, but I think we have been all condition to expect ‘more’ from a space sim. This was a major detriment to the fun-factor of the game. Combat was boring as hell, and it was one of the main activities. This could have easily been fixed, by replacing the combat system with something a bit more action oriented. This was suggested in beta by me and the response was along the lines of it being to hard core for the general public and would not suit the mass market well enough. I guess the lesson here is that the marketing department has no business dictating game play to the developers.
The universe was a big, empty place. You got around by use of nav-points and the content of the game was along or in between the nav-points. You could fly around all over each sector, but nearly always your efforts were rewarded by finding absolutely nothing. I remember being in the asteroid belts of Saturn in a HUGE sector and spending at least an hour moving about off the beaten path. I found absolutely nothing of interest, not even mine able asteroids. I was playing an explorer at the time so it seemed logical to go off and explore. Exploration XP only came from reaching nav points or points of interest such as jump-gates, planets, and star bases, not by actually, you know, EXPLORING. I also explored planets, and nothing interesting. One of the most important things in any MMOG, is content. Unfortunately, Earth and Beyond is not unique in this. AC2 and SWG are great examples of nearly content free games. . The solution is relatively simple: hire more people to create content for your games, make it a very important priority prior to launch.
Two of the three classes’ major goal was making money, or at least that was what all their skills focused upon. The Trader made trade goods (like weapons, shields, engines, etc…) and did trade runs for profit. The explorer would have been better named the Miner class, since their main activity was prospecting for ore in asteroids. Ore could be quite valuable and make you very rich. On the combat front, however, both suffered greatly because their ships had significantly less gun mounts than warriors had. In a game where level 150 was the cap, by the time you were fighting level 50 monsters it was very difficult for the non-warriors and virtually impossible by level 75. Now here is the problem with having classes whose sole focus is making money: there was nothing to spend money on except on tools to make even more money, or equipment for fighting things. A rich terrain trader could never compete with a monster of equivalent level simply because he didn’t have enough gun mounts. The best that money could buy for traders and explorers was sorely lacking. So, we had a game where there was nothing really to spend money on besides combat gear, and two of the classes with the best gear completely sucked in combat. This was a major design flaw that I pointed out during the beta test, and quite a large portion of the testers to agree with me. Needless to say, this issue was never addressed and E&B suffered because of it. A somewhat simple fix would be to allow the players to buy a large variety of ships. A warrior might be vastly more efficient with lower-classed ships, while the Trader would have to buy the SS. Daisy Stomper to be on equal footing with warriors. At least in this case, a trader could say, “after I am a zillionaire, I am going buy a Galactic super destroyer and go beat down those pirates that caused me all sorts of trouble in the past.”
Finally, the last thing that went wrong is something that plagues many other MMOGs out there, and that is broken developer promises. One prime example was the fact that E&B didn’t ship with a full complement of classes for each race. Each faction only had two classes available to it. The Progen and Jenquai had Explorers and Warriors. The Terrains had Traders and Warriors. The pretense was that these classes needed to be tested a bit more before they went in, but they went ahead and released with missing classes for each faction. Well, nearly two years after launch, those classes never materialized. There was also supposed to be a prominent story based around factional PvP that was never implemented, along with many other minor features that I won’t list here. While I know its futile to suggest this, I’ll suggest it anyway. Do not promise anything that isn’t in at ship time will ever be in the game. Even if the players are screaming about Necromancy not being in for the release, do not turn around and say “We plain on putting that in when Wind opens, which should be in a few months.” Just say nothing, even if you’re absolutely, positively 100% certain Dark Jedi will in before anyone can actually become one.
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