So the next update for Warframe is a couple of weeks away, and I have to say, the promise of Duviri but with my Warframe instead of the current system is not in and of itself all that charming. I know that I still need to do the work required to get Kullervo and maybe my perspective will be different, I don’t know what I will need to do for Oraxia, and it could all be fun. I do like this development team. But my first thought on “go do Duviri with your full arsenal” is not “oh, that sounds great.”
However, I also don’t know how I’ll feel about it when I play it. Neither does the development team.
Every so often I go back and I look through some of my old columns and I get reminded that there are some concepts that have somehow gone underappreciated or ignored, and this is one of them. I see a lot of people who have very confident ideas about what a developer should be doing, which is always what said developer is not doing, and that doesn’t inherently mean that the people in question are wrong. But it is important to remember that development is a guessing game. Always.
For example, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is at this point reviled as what amounts to a biotoxin. And it is, to be fair, a terrible expansion. It makes all of the same mistakes as Battle for Azeroth and several new bespoke ones, tells an atrocious story, and isn’t fun to play on multiple levels. But I think it’s also important to remember that development on the expansion didn’t start when it was announced; it probably started around the same time as Battle for Azeroth was announced. Another bad expansion, yes, but one that had been getting developed while the last expansion was releasing.
The development team had to make a guess based on early feedback on what the players liked and what would be well-received. Sure, some things can be pretty easily tweaked and planned around and changed. If it turns out that everyone hates a certain mechanic, you can probably excise it if it’s small enough. But stuff like Azerite Armor makes a lot more sense when you realize that it was being developed in a direct response to player feedback before players had really gotten a chance to play around with it.
William Goldman has a great quote that people misuse all the time: “Nobody knows anything […] Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” The point that he was making was that as much as there are people who have spent a huge amount of time and effort learning how to make hit movies, there isn’t any formula. There is no certainty. Everyone is trying to make a guess based on what has worked before, where people are at in a given moment, and so forth.
But you also know that sometimes those guesses are not just wrong due to basic assumptions but because of coincidences. The terrible film Morbius was always going to be a bad film, but did you know it was originally going to release in July 2020? Films just take that long to get made, and it wasn’t the fault of anyone behind the scenes that it turns out “guy gets sick and gets bit by a million bats” would hit different in July 2020. And you know, that terrible Venom film did all right!
Obviously, I speak with confidence when it comes to talking about development decisions that are going on in the MMOs I cover closely. I spent last week talking about bad decisions that were being made with regards to the balance in City of Heroes, for example. But I also speak with the understanding that the developers in question are not Bad Idea Robots who just cannot get excited enough for implementing bad ideas in a video game. The developers in question are making their best guesses about how to improve balance and make the game better. That those changes might be bad is just the result of mistakes, not malice – it’s Hanlon’s razor in action.
Games like WoW have a long and demonstrated history of leadership making bad decisions that endorse gatekeeping and make the game worse. These are not oblique goals that cannot be inferred based on obvious evidence. But even then, there are guesses involved. The guess may be a bad one, but it is still a matter of guesswork. The fact that I do not think that the benefit of credulous doubt should be extended to developers who could, at any time, implement a more deterministic gear system does not mean that the developers or I know with absolute certainty what would happen. It’s educated guesses all the way down.
The point here is not to extend a shield or to claim that no one knows more than other people; quite the opposite. It’s a reminder that if you speak with absolute certainty, you’re more likely to be wrong. If you cannot keep the thought in your head that all development is guesswork and there’s a difference between “making wrong guesses” and “just not giving a hoot,” you might not actually be as sharp around this material as you want to think.
I personally make a point of saying that my predictions of what will happen tend to be right around 60-65% of the time. I know that I am making educated guesses that are still guesses. I can point to a lot of evidence to back up the things I say because I do a lot of research outside of my writing as that’s kind of the point. But I am still guessing, and sometimes my guesses are wrong. You take that information and use it to learn and be less wrong in the future.
Just as importantly, the developers of every MMO – including your favorite one – are making guesses. Final Fantasy XIV is being developed based on a consistent content schedule that works and balance principles that have worked, and it is an intensely polished operation, but it is also still guesswork. The Elder Scrolls Online is making guesses about what players want for content and how it can best fulfill those desires based on the game’s development budget. No one has The Answer; devs have history, their personal preferences, and a big ol’ pile of guesses about what is going to work next.
If you’re lucky, those guesses are educated and are made by people who know how to play the hand well. If you’re unlucky, none of that is true. No matter what happens, it’s important to always remember that whatever content you are playing today is the product of someone’s best guess that was probably made a couple of years ago, and if you think steering a ship is hard anyway, imagine trying to steer one with a lag time measured in months at minimum.
That doesn’t mean you can’t call people out when they guess wrong. It just means that you shouldn’t forget that it was a guess from a while back.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
