Ryan has a bold statement, a new rule of MMO development. Like many of his rules, I don’t fully agree with it:

A game is only as strong as its weakest feature. Games are more often judged by their weaknesses than their strengths, just like anything else. Any incomplete feature or complete but crappy feature will leave a bad taste in players’ mouths. Reviewers will dwell on anything that isn’t up to par in your game far more than they will dwell on all the positives. Do not be afraid to get rid of features, even if you’ve already implemented them. This goes for more than just features: If a quest sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If a zone sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If anything sucks, fix it or get rid of it. It may make you shed a tear for all that lost work, but it’s better than leaving it in.

Well, for a single-player game, sure. A reviewer will certainly see the whole game in his review experience.

But for an MMO? Let’s think back to WoW. Many, many of the classes were utterly broken at ship (a result of them jamming in talent trees a month before ship). Many of their zones and quests were (and still are) pretty lame (I’m looking at you, everything between levels 45 and 58). The LFG tool is a full-fledged game design travesty – but it’s better than what they had at ship, which was nothing.

MMOs are simply too big and too complicated to get everything right at launch. Part of the problem is that ‘fun’ is an elusive concept, plenty ideas turn out to not be so great on implementation. Another part of the problem is that many things that test well in solo or small group internal testing falls apart on contact with the player base (warlocks – remember life before soulwells?).

Often times, broken things can’t be removed by ship. What, you think the guys at Blizzard didn’t know that Dustwallow Marsh was a worthless zone at ship? But you can’t just remove it – not only would it put a huge void on the world map, DM has a crucial flight point, as well as an important harbor point for the Alliance.

So how to choose what to fix? Same way that doctors approach patients in the hospital – we triage. We try to identify what needs fixing the most, and prioritize it first. Stuff that can wait a while is lower in the triage list. As an example, Dustwallow Marsh isn’t a great zone, but there are other good zones at that level, and so fixing it has always been a lower priority to the WoW team (Blizzard is just now getting to giving it a facelift in their next patch – 3 years after launch).

So what’s the problem? The problem is that most MMO developers do a shitty job at triage. Most significantly, not enough emphasis is put on early quests and zones, or features that are core to the experience. Dustwallow Marsh may be lackluster, but all of the zones from 1-20 in WoW are polished to a reflective sheen. A crappy LFG tool isn’t a highly visible feature – easy and intuitive combat is. By the time players get to the features that aren’t done as well, hopefully, they are invested in your game experience.

My top pet peeve in this area is jump animations. Literally, the first thing that players do in any MMO experience is run, and the second is jump. Yet, a frightening number of MMOs have utterly banal or craptastic run and/or jump animations. As in, one step above programmer art. By comparison, every game that is a blockbuster success has motion and camera control that is a joy to experience on its own.

The thing about these early features is that players extrapolate them to the rest of the game experience. Players know that these games take a serious time commitment, and hitting 500 hours of gameplay isn’t uncommon. If players encounter bad animations, dull quests, and buggy behavior in the first five minutes of the game, they mentally extrapolate that to the next 500 hours. If your first five minutes is bad, the average player will never allow himself to get emotionally invested enough to get to 500 hours.

It doesn’t matter if the best feature in your game kicks in later (Diplomacy in Vanguard, City Sieging in Shadowbane, etc) if people don’t stick around long enough to get there. Do not rest until people around your office are calling your newbie experience ‘candy coated’.

And for god’s sake, fix your jump animations.

Original comments thread is here.