MULLIGAN ON ‘CRAPPY LAUNCH SYNDROME’ [Author: Lum the Mad]

I’m thinking World War 2 Online is a litmus test for the basic honesty of scriveners in our little community. I mean, it’s as if Battlecruiser 3000 AD were released again this year and a large group of reviewers glossed over the whole totally unplayable and crashes after five minutes thing. Oh wait, it was. And they did.

Unlike myself, Jessica Mulligan is actually able to stay on topic for more than 3 sentences, and has a few things to say about WW2OL’s release and other signs that game companies just aren’t ready for adulthood yet.

Players found themselves in the position of having to download a mandatory 67.3 megabyte patch. That is not a misprint; players were basically forced to download the game they had just purchased. If you happen to be stuck with 56k or lower dial-up Internet access, that means several hours of download time. I don\’e2\’80\’99t know about you, but that would cause me to become mildly annoyed, in much the same way Jehovah became mildly annoyed with Sodom and Gomorrah.

She goes on to note that doing effective QA work on massively multiplayer titles is somewhat difficult, but that game companies should do it anyway.

(We won’t mention that her two last industry jobs were at Interplay and OSI, both of which have difficulty spelling QA. That would be rude.)