By Emma S

In late 2014, to help a friend, I joined the team of Wander, the non-combat, exploration MMO, volunteering to help with mundane things like filling out paperwork and maybe playing the game a little to check out a few features. Nothing serious, I thought. I didn't know that I'd soon be called in to help more often, to be company during work periods that would run late into the night, to be the in-house tester for the game, and to manage its growing player community.

I also didn't know, then, that Wander would soon (and I hoped briefly) be made notorious by players calling it "the worst game on PS4 ever."

I don't have a background in game development or even public relations, but I am a gamer. I have a long history of playing MMOs, from World of Warcraft to really obscure Korean MMORPGs, and I'm not bad with a sniper rifle in an FPS. But at the time Wander launched, after spending six years at university on multiple science degrees, I was looking to embark on a PhD or medical school. A lot of the other team members weren't from a games background either, which has made the development of Wander more of an adventure, but also at times incredibly tough.

Wander is definitely a niche game: it's an MMO without fighting, XP, money, or a quest system, where your task is simply to wander through the landscape and discover the game's world and story at your leisure. My first impression was that it was most definitely beautiful, and also different—not for everyone, but something I believed would find a place in the heart of a certain kind of gamer. Even in extremely early development, when we were still using the Unity engine, Wander was enchanting and incredibly immersive, especially on the Oculus Rift. I helped push for the decision to move Wander to CryEngine, which I think benefited the game immeasurably.

I worked side-by-side with the incredibly small, Melbourne-based Wander team (a core team of less than 10 people, three of whom were full-time) though long nights, getting excited when we made something work, and annoyed when it seemed like we failed Sony's TRC (technical requirements checklist) for silly things like bugs we thought we'd fixed but had appeared again. I often wrangled two or three of our four PS4 devkits simultaneously for testing, and seldom had anyone to help me.

As the release date approached, nerves kicked in. Having to pass the TRC to meet the release deadline put us under considerable pressure. I started to doubt whether we'd make our deadline. I stressed about how our latest build was going to perform and, more generally, what the future would hold for the game. We were working towards bold, even ludicrous goals. How, I wondered, would a tiny indie studio made up of such a motley crew make a game on par with a AAA title from studios with hundreds of people and money we couldn't even dream of? But I believed in Wander and its principles, so I tried to stay optimistic. I grit my teeth and kept working.

The Release-Day Hatestorm

Then came release day. At that point, I took over looking after social media, as the person dealing with it was already multitasking like a goddamned boss. Jesus Christ. It was beyond stressful. As I'd never done social media management or PR before, this was insanity for me.

It always went without saying that Wander would never be a mainstream hit like the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, or Witcher series. What we didn't anticipate was that its idiosyncrasy would combine with a host of unforeseen launch-day bugs to bring down a storm of hate on the game, and thus the team.

Never underestimate the tremendous wrath of an immeasurable horde of irate gamers. Within half an hour of launch, Facebook and Twitter had exploded with incredibly nasty comments. Though they were horrible, they were also honest. I hit the ground running. I read and answered every single post and comment as it came though. My stomach sank further with each passing notification. I felt was like I was being punched from the inside with every new comment.

We had an incredible number of error and bug reports, particularly for the PS4 version. We would soon discover that 97% of the crashes players were experiencing on that platform were due to a single line of code that was responsible for logging, which hadn't been seen during the testing phase.

I was shocked by the volume of feedback. My anxiety levels would surge every five minutes as new complaints emerged. On one hand I had disappointed fans, who had been eagerly awaiting Wander's release for months, and on the other, new players (justifiably) demanding refunds or venting their outrage. All were messaging me at once while I tried to troubleshoot for them and respond to as many