News on Breaking From WAR Devs

For a few days now, it’s been all quiet on the WAR front. Speculation abounded for a little bit, until we saw a post from Community Coordinator Andy Belford explaining that the upcoming holiday meant the Mythic offices were taking a bit of a break, leaving to spend time with families and loved ones. This, of course, sparked some discussion and even a few jabs at the developers for daring to take a breather from not just post-Land of the Dead but also post-Mythic/Bioware announcements.

This is going to sound completely cliche, but developers are people too. Don’t get me wrong – WAR has a lot of work ahead of it and there’s still so much for Mythic to do in order to get the game to where it is running in a place with which they are satisfied. But every time I see posts that rage out over developer priorities when “they should be working on the game 24/7 or it’ll die”, I have to scratch my head, because these are people that clearly have let their frustrations get the best of them on an emotional level.

In my travels through the world of geekery and gaming, I’ve had a healthy respect for the folks at Mythic because they’ve been the most “human” out of the developers I’ve had the pleasure to meet in person. There’s a tendancy to put developers in an ivory tower at times, and let’s be honest – some developers like it up there and never come down. But the ones that do, that take the time to talk to players and testers and show them their product, those are the ones who deserve just a little bit of latitude when things don’t go right, because they clearly care enough about what they built to want to fix it. If a break to re-charge the batteries is what is needed, then so be it. This is especially true when things have taken a rocky road, as WAR has since its release.

A good analogy to use here is a simple story. Say you build a sandcastle on the beach. You make sure the structure looks good, the sand is well-packed, the towers look realistic, and the castle doesn’t collapse on itself. You spend a ton of hours out of your stay on the beach for a week, perfecting the look and feel. Then you finally invite other people to play with the sandcastle. You watch proudly, as people take an initial look at the sandcastle and appreciate it before starting to mess with it.

Then you watch as some people destroy whole towers in anger, stomp around the castle, put holes in the wall in the places where you thought you’d packed in the right amount of sand, and generally call it a complete failure of a castle. You wince as people who look disdainfully at the holes in the castle and leave even though you’re hard at work fixing them. How do you think you’d feel? Bet you’d feel like taking a break, too. Walking away from the beach might seem like you’re unwilling to face the problem, but you’d be surprised at how staying away from something will rejuvenate you, making you more determined to build a bigger and better sandcastle for people to play in.

I’ve been blessed with actually seeing the passion and dedication that WAR’s developers exude when talking about their game to an audience, or to an interview with me. This is why I think that while Mythic may be taking a small bit of a pause to gather their thoughts during the holiday weekend, that they will come back with a vengeance to fix the things that are wrong and concentrate on building a better game for people. The people currently taking a break are people with families, wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, and children – just like most of us. Give them a chance to stop running in the MMO marathon to catch their breath, and you never know how fast they’ll be sprinting later.