imho, finished game can be seen as done only from developer point of view. Gamers will always keep crying, add cloak, add raids, more pvp! Fix this, Fix that!

Though I gotta say ESO is still missing some TES and MMO features.

But then again, people will cry how ESO is not finished, even after every single corner of Tamriel gets added.

I think a lot of the charges of ESO being "unfinished" stem from a few things. Primarily because the game launched WITHOUT such TES staples as The Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Housing. Then there's the fact that already they are doing away with the Vet system and replacing it with the Champion system in the very first year which tells us they weren't able to get the system they WANTED to use in place in time for launch. Then there's the slow phase in of the Justice System which has staple features from the previous TES games that people really expected to be part of the game at launch, at least on the PvE side of things. We're also still waiting on Spellcrafting, yet another thing they "didn't have time" to implement before launch. There's also the half baked vampires and werewolves we got that just scream "last minute, poorly thought out, addition." Starting to see a trend yet?

As games mature what you WANT to see are expansions that open up new parts of the world, maybe that introduce new playable races, new quests, new rewards, new gear. You want to see things get added like dueling, arenas, guild cities, and lots of fluff. New mounts, new pets, social clothes, a barber with lots of new hairstyles, tats, scars and makeup. Things like new fun emotes. THAT'S the stuff that SHOULD be coming in as an MMO matures. You don't want them continually drastically changing the mechanics of the game because THAT should have been settled at launch. The meat and potatoes of the game should already be firmly in place. What should come AFTER launch is the gravy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm REALLY glad they are adding the Justice System and Spellcrafting (I'm very ambivalent about the Champion system at this point) but IMHO those things should have already been part of the game at launch. Hence the charge of "unfinished."

I think a finished game in the context of an MMO, where content will be added for many years if things work out, is one where the framework is solid, functional and robust enough to take new content with minimal pain to devs or users.

So the skills and progression systems should be well defined and implemented - they might have room for tweaks, addition of skill trees or additional progression options but the system itself that underpins it should be solid.

The same should be true of things like mob stats and loot tables, items that are dropped or created.

Most content should be able to be dropped into the existing framework unless it is adding fundamentally new features.

If the features are new then they should be designed not to clash with the existing framework and should add their own elements to the framework so that further content can contain the relevant additional elements.

All of this should be clearly documented, all devs should work to that documentation standard so that when tweaks are being made they are made to the right numbers and the wrong thing is not accidentally doubled instead of halved etc.
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You see a lot of this sort of sort of development in physical games, offline games and other types of software - the 'core' is always there and tends to be relatively unchanged and content is bolted on and must meet the requirements of the core to work properly.

ESO seem to have two main areas where they are struggling on this:

- The core is not mature because they built an engine for this and that engine, while very promising, still has some bugs. As the engine bugs are fixed it is probably going to have unexpected impacts on content.
- They have decided they don't like their original design framework and are trying to implement a different system on the fly. Apart from the obvious PR issues this is liable to cause major issues with game play and balance as people work their way through the content and discover exciting new synergies and exploits that will not be discovered or fixed with a few weeks of PTS testing.

Lava_Croft wrote: »

An MMO is a 'living' product that's only finished when the developers quit developing.

Agreed, an MMO is only finished when it's either dead or dying. This one was a bit less polished than most MMOs at launch, but it's improved vastly.

A finished game is one that is no longer in production, and is closed down. See Star Wars Galaxies.