covert.creations

Its one thing for a game to have bugs. Surely an acceptable thing, as I’m a forgiving sort. Games are hard to make. Good games – extremely hard!

So what to say when you are confronted with a game that has such incredible resources behind it? With an extremely compelling backstory and characters that are already well known and beloved in the hearts of its audience? When the producer is one of the largest media companies in the world [WB]? With a developer that has developed excellent games [Tron, No One Lives Forever] in the past? When the publisher has released some of the hottest games ever made?

I would say it would be nearly impossible to go wrong.

So when a game has bugs, has some design flaws or other problems, yet there is manifestly some serious effort and thought in it…… or when its actually fun despite the problems.. I am forgiving in the extreme.

So when a game that has this background, when its been pushed to release, amidst fireworks and wide-ranging hype (as in, the type of coverage that only a large sum of money and notoriety can achieve), and when it is thrust upon you with a message like, “You have been waiting for this from us. Here it is. Now go pay for it, play it, and enjoy what we have wrought.”. When this happens, I get riled, even a little insulted. And especially when the game sucks. And boy. Does it ever.

MxO is awkward, stuttering and buggy. And thats just the beginning.

• Dialog gets cut off by someone else during a scripted session.
• The intro tutorial sessions leave you hanging on what to do or where to go next.
• Very little explanation of features and abilities.
• Game code crashes my whole computer.
• Mind bogglingly bizarre intro quest and quest mechanism. The arrow pointers that show you the next waypoint disappear after you finish the first stage (so you can’t possibly know where to go next).
• Severe latency issues.
• Painful UI requirements. No cohesive design.
• Awkward combat system.
• Terrible keymapping system
• and on and on….

It seems to me, and forgive me if I’m reaching, that this is a product of how a large media organization thinks. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. We will release this and they will like it anyways.”
That may well be true for most forms of media. But not a game, and most certainly not a MMO.

I wanted to like it. I’m a Matrix fan. And a well-conceived, futuristic MMO is definitely ripe with possibility. I even gave it love on our gaming news page [param01].

What were the Stratics people smoking when they said,

“It’s a hyperjumping, bullet-time, ass kicking extravaganza.“??

Find my copy on E-bay.