I haven’t posted much about Tera, despite the potential of a political end-game in an otherwise standard theme park offering. No, I will not conceed that the much vaunted ‘action combat’ is revolutionary, DDO has had active combat for years and Vindictus even has the aim-to-target style combat. Also the styling is so extreme, giant swords and all, that it just doesn’t interest me.

The game has raised some controversy while I’ve been /afk, both because of the child-like and highly sexualised Elin race, and because of the stealth nerf to gore that European publishers Frogster introduced before launch.

This has made me ponder the role of publishers in bringing MMOs to a playerbase outside the game’s home region. There is no clear trend in the industry where such outsourcing deals go; some companies such as Turbine (DDO and LoTRO) and Mythos (Warhammer) have tried outsourcing and decided in the long run to bring the games back in house for a global service. Others such as NCSoft (Aion) and now SoE (DCUO soon, EQ2 and others to follow) have moved towards outsource deals recently.

From my perspective the developers of these games need to be aware of cultural sensitivies themselves, *if* they want to play in the bigger globalised market. Publishers are there to market and, in some cases, deliver on hosting the game. Publishers should not be expected to provide some kind of ‘cultural filter’, after all this is the Internet age, it is very easy to track the differences between regional versions just by looking at patch notes or gameplay videos – this happened repeatedly with Allods between the US/EU versions and the Russian core region for example. The game devs keep control over content production and styling anyway, so they should make sure the game is localised both linguistically AND culturally for the relevant markets.

Having played EQ2 and now Vanguard for some time I expect the problems caused by the split between developer and publisher to become once again very evident to me. I have zero optimism that Sony/Alaplaya will be able to work together to provide an efficient service – no doubt there will be delays in content delivery, poor support and lots of confusion over the split in the cash shop and payment models. Perhaps I should seriously consider ‘voting with my wallet’ and only supporting companies that will offer a global service.