Biggest MMORPG Disappointments

Some of the MMORPG titles were eagerly anticipated, but once they came out of Beta, they caused a lot of disappointment to players. Sometimes it’s about content flaws, but sometimes game can be perfection, but developers are too busy estimating profit, so they’re often forgetting armies of devoted fans who are actually the most important source of that profit.

Here is the list of well known MMORPG titles that didn’t fulfill the expectations and that disappointed in one way or another.


Star Wars Galaxies

This game was one of the first and certainly, one of the biggest disappointments in history of MMO games. The game that should become the best MMORPG ever, actually ended up as a mediocre title. The game was released on June 20, 2003 without Jedi class and space combat that were the essence of Star Wars world.

Also, the game quests were boring with lack of real adventure content. The combat system was flawed and future changes to it, including reduction of playable professions, ruined what was so far a decent game. The game developers completely changed the game's mechanics few times causing a real mess and confusion among player base.

Some of those changes apparently came too late. In August 2005, developers reported that they had sold 1,000,000 boxed copies of the game, but in early 2006, unconfirmed reports showed that only 10,363 subscribers were playing the game. The game was in decline, losing majority of players due to many wrong decisions made during the development after the game has been released.


Matrix Online

Matrix Online is another franchise that should become outstanding MMORPG, but unfortunately it didn’t.

Reasons are many flaws that followed (following?) all players who decided to take red pill at the Matrix Online release in 2005. Game was reported to be extremely buggy, with crashes, random disconnects, being stuck in walls and falling through the world, to name only a few of them.

Besides this, game missions were painfully repetitive and the environment with similar buildings is very boring to explore. Another point is that you don’t fight machines and agents, which is equal to SWG without Jedi.



According to Gamespot, the biggest flaws of Matrix Online are:

• Very rough around the edges; runs sluggishly and filled with noticeable glitches
• Repetitive mission design–mission types all blend together after a while
• Not much diversity of content
• Quirky interface takes a while to get used to

Tabula Rasa

Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa is an MMORPG from NCsoft, designed in part by some of the creators of Ultima Online including Richard Garriott himself. Game was labeled as ‘WoW killer’ with huge budget enough to propel it in heights of the best MMORPGs. The biggest problem was conflict between developers and the direction of the game that cause a dramatic change, where 25% of the original team were replaced and 75% of the code had to be redone. This caused a major slowdown since 2001 when game development started. However, NCsoft began offering invitations to sign up for a limited beta test of Tabula Rasa on January 5, 2007 which began running on May 2, 2007.

Reception of the game was excellent. Many gaming magazines and sites, such as GameSpy or Eurogamer gave Tabula Rasa high ranks, regarding it as one of the most appealing features in MMO world. Game players however stated that the combat system is boring and the enemies you fight are either way too easy or impossible to kill.

This game never reached its potential, despite a lot of money, time and energy being invested in it. It never gained wanted attention of the broad player base. So the outcome was maybe shocking, but expected.

This is statement posted on official site few days ago.

To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while. For more details about what we are doing for Tabula Rasa players, please click here.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we're offering Tabula Rasa players.

The Tabula Rasa Team

http://www.rgtr.com/news/latest_news/message_from_the_tabula_rasa_t.html
 

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

(Un)official sequel to one of the first and one of the most popular MMO games – EverQuest. Beta Testing for the game began in August 2005 and the game was officially launched worldwide on January 30, 2007, followed by lukewarm reviews and widespread criticism. Now, almost two years after official release, it seems that only hard core EverQuest players are small base of those who still play Vanguard. Apparently, the biggest problem was that the game was released before it was ready, which has led to:

Low content for high-level players; much planned high level content was not included at launch
Large numbers of bugs and performance issues, which make gameplay difficult, and on some systems virtually unplayable
At release, performance was poor on many systems, including some high-end configurations (there was no anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering support was buggy, etc.)

These problems caused a decrease in number of players over the two years of game’s existence. At the launch Vanguard had nearly 100,000 players, currently boosting 35,000 and still declining. Four months after the game's release, Sony Online Entertainment announced they had acquired all assets of Sigil and retained much of the Vanguard development team to work for Sony and to continue developing Vanguard. Still, new developers (owners) of the game do little or nothing to attract broader fanbase to the game, or to keep the current players. Some changes could come too late, just like the case was with SWG.

Officially, Vanguard became the biggest disappointment in 2007, according to many gaming sources.

Gamespot listed major flaws:

• Bugs, bugs, and more bugs
• Forced grouping will leave solo players cold
• Stiff death penalty and lack of instanced dungeons are as frustrating now as they were in EverQuest’s early days

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

I think that many of you will now raise your eyebrow, saying: WTF? But let me finish, please. I was among of those who eagerly awaited this dream come true, but so far, I’m still dreaming.
Since the rumored development back in 2003, many Conan fans gathered around various official and unofficial web sites dedicated to upcoming title Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. More than 500,000 gamers signed up for Beta testing of the game that was the experience you could only dream of. Fantastic graphics, unique combat and content were advantages of this game. Developers were listening to what community has to say and that was the big difference between AoC and other titles.
The game was finally released in May 2008 and it received many positive reviews from gaming journalists. However, its player base feels that they have been misled by both gaming journalists and Funcom itself.

First flaw was high end graphics that requires PC ‘beast’ in order to run smoothly. That cut off many players in the very start. Maybe that was ok if developers wanted to reduce game community to more mature audience, not attracted to visible mammary glands or gallons of blood, yet to more serious and visually stunning gaming experience.
But, the bigger flaw was lack of the game updates. Funcom has disappointed players in terms of content delivery. They’ve promised new content, but they didn’t do a thing few months after release. However, there was a great share of patches, right after the launch, which greatly improved the game’s performance and polished its content, but it was followed then by weeks and months of broken promises by Funcom.
Another flaw is game engine that was impressive at the launch, but later, many players reported instability and visual glitches that were obstacles to the smooth gameplay.
Finally, what distinct this game from others was its mature content, which shortly has been removed from the game as well as bar fights as truly unique feature.

Also, disagreements in development team regarding game content updates have been noted, especially when in September 2008, Gaute Godager, the Producer and Game Director resigned from his role in Age of Conan and from Funcom, where he had been involved in for over 16 years. In his press release, he revealed that he was not happy with elements in the game's development since release.

Hopefully, Hyborian Adventures is just the first installment in the planned Age of Conan series. I honestly hope that it will manage to fix all the flaws and become the best MMORPG title as it deserves to be. But so far, it’s quite disappointment.

If you have your own list or additions to this one, you can place them in your comments.