Rebas Kradd, on 10 September 2014 - 03:10 PM, said:
So go defend it.
PGI has done a great job in some areas of the game, gets an incomplete grade in others. Let's not be reductive.
Every once in a while, I have to go around and remind everyone that development has not ceased and that everything in-game still stands a good chance to improve. It's odd how people keep falling into the fallacy that we reached the end of the journey at some point. People can blab all they want about the servers shutting down, but they were saying that over a year ago and it hasn't happened.
While it's important to maintain perspective and to understand things can improve, a game loses any right to use that as a defense once it has released (or arguably as soon as it starts charging people money for things, since that's a new fad in "beta" products).
An Alpha or Beta product can use the "It's still in development" excuse, and in such case it is reasonable. However MWO is a fully released title that is, despite having been in a release state for a significant amount of time, still missing important core features that were reiterated again and again in the marketing and development road map from the start, and many of these have seen multiple stated dates for implementation pass by.
If MWO, right now, was in an Open Beta state (and not years old) I would be more inclined to cut it some slack. It isn't though, and it hasn't been for quite awhile. Path of Exile, while being a different genre, is similar in that it is also an online only indie game made by a small development team (less than twenty people last I saw) and is roughly the same age as MWO, the amount of content in that game compared to this one is staggering. A comparison can also be made with Hawken, an online only mech based competitive shooter (people may think Hawken to arcady or twitch based, but that's irrelevant to this point) which also has substantially more content then MWO does. It even has a proper new player tutorial built into the game instead of using youtube videos.
Is MWO awful? no it's not, I've said as much. I enjoy playing MWO, but only for brief periods of time because there just isn't much here. More importantly, the potential of the game (and many of the promises they made) far outstrip what has been realized, and there have been numerous questionable decisions made by the developers.
I hope it gets better, I still periodically come back here to see if it has and to see whats changed, but one shouldn't be blind to the failings of the title. And, to be honest, if I had a friend interested in MWO right now I would probably advise them not to spend any money on it. Not until it moves beyond the simplistic random matchmaker shooter it's been since early closed beta and into something approaching what it was supposed to be on launch.
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