Z-Access: Too buggy for its own good

Beta testing gets the better of Tim Dean.

It certainly wasn’t the first time an MMO got off to a bad start. Anyone who’s been there on day one for just about any MMO will have tales of woe and server outages. However, what I experienced a few weeks ago must rate as not only the saddest MMO launch I have ever seen, but also the most pitifully ludicrous on record.

The game is called Seed, and it had me intrigued from the first moment I read about it. It’s an entirely non-combat oriented MMO set in the distant future, when Earth has sent a massive colony ship to the stars to terraform a new planet. However, as in all such tales, something goes awry on route.

The central AI, Tau, wakes the thousands of genetically engineered colonists from their ‘floatbeds’ earlier than planned. They wake to find the terraforming operation in disarray. Machinery is failing, the AI has somehow become damaged, alien microbes are beginning to infect people and the population is rising out of control.

The beauty of Seed is that the gameplay is shaped almost entirely by the players. As it states on the website: ‘Should they terraform or not? Make a habitat underground? Attempt to get off the planet? Alter their genetic structure to be more resistant to the alien environment? Time is running out?’

The prospect of such open-ended gameplay, which is all about social interaction, problem solving, and not merely killing things to earn bigger trinkets, was deeply appealing to me.

So, I signed up for the public beta, hoping to be in on the ground floor when this fascinating online anthropological experiment took off. Well, that was when the problems started.

After installing the open beta, I found I had trouble logging in. And on those rare occasions I could log in, I had trouble moving my avatar. And when I could move my avatar, I found there was nothing to actually do. And if I did actually find something to interact with, it crashed.

Now, all this is to be expected in a beta -- to a point. I was always under the impression an open beta was a stress test and bug hunt rather than an experimental platform. However, I got the distinct impression I was playing an early alpha.

Then, things got worse. One day I tried logging in to the beta, only to find the game started downloading a patch -- which said ‘Live’, no less!

I was stunned. I hadn’t even had an opportunity to compile my several pages of bugs to send to the developers, and the game was going live?!

I checked the website and the forums, and lo, it was true, the game was going live. Insanity ensued.

Needless to say, the game hadn’t improved much from the flaky beta. It crashed every few minutes; key features were not even implemented; there was no tutorial; an incomplete manual and there was very little to actually do in the game -- assuming you could stay online long enough to even lament the lack of content.

Even the dedicated (if delusional) community on the forums was shaken. A few diehards tried to roleplay their way out of the chaos by claiming the unimplemented features were problems facing the colonists and the crashes were momentary lapses of unconsciousness caused by mysterious bacteria. But they weren’t. They were just crashes.

I must say, it was a moment of great sadness when I cancelled my account after a few days. I truly had high hopes for this game. I still think, if properly implemented, it could offer a remarkable and unique gameplay experience.

Unfortunately, it has a long way to go, and I’m not willing to pay to be a beta tester, let alone an alpha tester. Sadly, at the end of the day, I think Seed is one game that will never germinate into the lofty and groundbreaking MMO it set out to be.