I read the whole message, then glanced up to see who wrote it so I"d know who to compliment in a reply.Dymus said:
Now that I notice where it came from, I am thoroughly not surprised. Well said.
Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling
- Thread starter Lord Thanos_foh
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Now that I notice where it came from, I am thoroughly not surprised. Well said.
Zehnpai
Molten Core Raider
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This is really the only part I disagree with, in a fashion that is. Story has been told. The problem isn"t the content in this regard, it"s always been the delivery. We"ve gone over this point pretty extensively but in game cinematics and realizing the potential of a visual medium is going to go a long way towards pushing this.Dymus said:
You could hire the best writing minds in the galaxy to create a personalized story for every character and nobody is going to give two shits if we just click through it to find out how many bear asses we need to collect.
Between phasing and cinematics I agree we"ll see a great leap forward in this regard.
The problem hasn"t been the setting. The problem is that everytime someone tries to make a non-fantasy MMO they try to incorporate FPS elements or RTS elements that don"t translate quite as well to the high-ping/casual MMO environment.
If you just reskinned WoW and renamed Hunters -> Marines and Arthas -> Kerrigan then yes, I imagine it would still have ridiculous numbers. That wouldn"t to me say that Sci-Fi is a successful genre. It would say that the adventure/RPG model is succesful.
These two points seem to contradict each other. Massively single player rpg sounds like a Dumar-ism to justify another rant about how WoW isn"t really an MMO and how Ultima is the only true MMO that ever existed. My guess is you"re looking at the bioware SW rpg and assuming that the lack of an end game means this will be a new classificatio. We"ll see how that turns out.
The second sentance kinda bucks the entire trend of the second generation of MMO"s. But this isn"t exactly a place where you need to reinvent the wheel. Having a game that isn"t tedious and unfun and is in fact engaging and entertaining is going to do more to promote socialization inside the game then anything else you could possibly intentionally design.
Jason Roberts. Design Director at 38S and long time "disciple"/friend of Brett Close.Tyen said:
Their qualifications, responsibilities and history mirror mine to a ridiculous degree, except I worked at IBM and in the merchant banking industry, until it ate my soul, () while they had the privilege of driving the gaming industry, which is why I find them so interesting. So alike that I have degrees in Management, Electronic Engineering and a 1st (honors) in IT, started my career in Electronic Engineering and even spent a few years living and working in Dortmund, Germany (as did Brett - actually he studied there).
While most of you, on the forum, would love to spend time with Curt, I"d give my left nut to have a few beers with Dymus and talk shop.
This is, of course, the "truth" that we are discussing. The "foundational", in a nutshell, lesson underlying my that will lead to revolution in the industry.Dymus said:
In regard to that, quite sadly, the following reply to the post alluded to above kept me awake last night :
Yes, it"s revolutionary. Absolutely so. It requires the total transformation of how the vast majority of development houses operate. That includes documentation, project planning, communication (internally, between teams and externally), process management, personnel management and personal development.....et al. As I"ve preached, endlessly, it is the highest level of management that has consistently failed this industry and its creative talent. This is what I mean, what is "under the bonnet", when I say, 1. Don"t suck.
All of that is built on the implementation and adaption of a (I believe) unique development methodology, which is why I mentioned I would like to hear from Dymus on how agile is working out for them and how much they have adapated it to 38S.
Once those things are in place as they, largely, most certainly are at 38S then we are looking at 30-36 month development cycles, instead of 48-60 (here I could be wrong and it will be interesting to see what the future holds).
Another attractive element of 38S methodology is identifying objectives and zeroing in on them, which also builds into development times. Techies and creative folk are very difficult to focus and keep on track. They like shiny new toys and shiny new ideas to play with. Of course, this is a part of originality and development, but in this industry that has never been balanced against there being "a time and a place for all things under the sun". There is a time to fly off and try and add 15% of additional features and there is a time to fulfil requirements and no more.This couldn"t happen without the operational excellence in place that is mentioned above. This is why a start up company like 38S can achieve a four year development cycle for their first launch.
A quite separate discussion is whether it would have happened without WoW purely because of financial considerations. Blizzard have made everyone reconsider revenue streams. Of course, Square Enix have always adopted these principals - no surprise, as they are Japanese and a Deming driven mentality is prevalent in anything their corporations are involved in. And they have already been in development for over six years (it didn"t escape my attention that FFXIV was missing from your Gen 3 list, Dymus, possibly in a Freudian manner ? ).
Genjiro
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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The AL/LoS/Triton rimjob arena subforum needs to really be retired for good and replaced by the Official Game Developer/Groupie Rimjob Thunderdome, with this thread as the proverbial "cherry buster" to get the ball rolling. I"m sure the nerd in most of us would love to work on our favorite games for a living and be rich with dragons on our ferraris while doing lines of coke off of Antonia Bayles ass, but the slurpslurp going on in here is reaching epic levels.
I pray at night that one day HE will return, and wash away the unclean masses. So say we all.
I pray at night that one day HE will return, and wash away the unclean masses. So say we all.
What do you mean by this ? How does this correlate tothe process SoE used, which you discussed here?Dymus said:
edit : Quote for clarification of the exact part of the discussion I was alluding to :
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Star Wars Galaxies - mission generating content where the majority of the content and population of mobs was filled by random spawned POI"s which served no purpose or logical reason to be there, or coming across someone"s mission which looked exactly the same as 15 other ones on the way to yours which was highlighted by a giant light in the sky to differentiate.Flight said:
Dynamic design does not equal computer generated.
Genjiro said:
You"ll have to forgive me for getting excited about issues which will revolutionize the games that we play. And you"ll see me having posted exactly the same things and getting "involved" over them in many threads over the last few years, largely ones that haven"t involved anyone in the industry
As it is, they are accepting CVs/Resumes at[email protected]for anyone who wants to work there.
Utnayan said:
Do you mean after the space release or before it, Ut ? I didn"t play after vanilla, although I did the Bounty Hunter grind. How did it compare after vanilla to the Mission Generation system in Anarchy Online ?
For what it"s worth, I don"t think Dymus meant a mission generating system in game, but the methodology by which content is devised.
The Space Expansion, while its mechanics were fun, came out well after the game was a steaming crater.
The mission terminal crap was in from release. Go to mission terminal, accept mission, follow GIANT BEAM OF LIGHT through utterly barren world. Kill 5 wombats that only exist due to the generative powers of GIANT BEAM OF LIGHT. Return to town, watch manginas play cyberhookers and get a hit from the local digital crack peddler.
It was like Anarchy Online... if Anarchy Online had had no relevant overland content. At least there were *things* wandering around on the planet"s surface in AO, and wierd locales that were seperate from mission entrances
The mission terminal crap was in from release. Go to mission terminal, accept mission, follow GIANT BEAM OF LIGHT through utterly barren world. Kill 5 wombats that only exist due to the generative powers of GIANT BEAM OF LIGHT. Return to town, watch manginas play cyberhookers and get a hit from the local digital crack peddler.
It was like Anarchy Online... if Anarchy Online had had no relevant overland content. At least there were *things* wandering around on the planet"s surface in AO, and wierd locales that were seperate from mission entrances
Zehnpai
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tl;dr version: You can"t just be as good or simply better then WoW. You have to be -more- then WoW. Also, jrpg"s suck.
Anyways...
I"ll believe the revolution when it actually comes. People have been saying a new era will be ushered in for quite some time now and it always ends with thousands of butthurt "Waiting for Nextbigmmo" feeling betrayed. We"re being told that Blizzard is creating the next best thing. Great, we were told the exact same shit about Vanguard. And by reliable people no less in the early days.
The only "revolution" going on here is companies may start realizing soon that they can"t rely on the "Bored of X" crowd like they could back in the 90"s/00"s like you could with console/offline games. In the past you could rely on all the quake players beating the game and shelving it to buy your clone/knockoff so they"d have something to play until ID pushed out Quake2. And then the process would repeat.
That"s what RPG"s have been doing for literally ages. Occasionally a game would come along and add a new twist. More party members, synthesis, jobs vs. classes, round robin to ATB to action hybrid and so forth. But for the most part it"s been the same game slowly evolving over the years.
What companies are asked to do now is evolve rapidly since you can"t rely on the people bored of WoW as much as you could rely on the people who finished God of War to sell them all the GoW clones that have come since.
You can"t do that with MMO"s. DAoc/shadowbane/AC/AO all failed to learn that lesson during the EQ era. VG/War/AoC/LOTR/etc... all failed to learn it during the WoW era as well.
Anyways...
FFxiv scares me. I hope it"ll be good because the premise of not grinding XP to fill up ding levels is something I"ve wanted for a good long goddamn time. But I fear it may be replaced with a "repeatidly use skill to level it up lol!" style system instead which is just as bad.
On top of that, there"s a massive gap between being able to tell a story, and having a good story to tell. Square has been absolutely amazing at telling their stories for a good long time now. It"s just they"ve all been...uninteresting since FF:T. I"d like to imagine that"s a cultural gap thing because a JRPG with a solid, interesting story is about as rare as friendly lesbians.
Anyways...
I"ll believe the revolution when it actually comes. People have been saying a new era will be ushered in for quite some time now and it always ends with thousands of butthurt "Waiting for Nextbigmmo" feeling betrayed. We"re being told that Blizzard is creating the next best thing. Great, we were told the exact same shit about Vanguard. And by reliable people no less in the early days.
The only "revolution" going on here is companies may start realizing soon that they can"t rely on the "Bored of X" crowd like they could back in the 90"s/00"s like you could with console/offline games. In the past you could rely on all the quake players beating the game and shelving it to buy your clone/knockoff so they"d have something to play until ID pushed out Quake2. And then the process would repeat.
That"s what RPG"s have been doing for literally ages. Occasionally a game would come along and add a new twist. More party members, synthesis, jobs vs. classes, round robin to ATB to action hybrid and so forth. But for the most part it"s been the same game slowly evolving over the years.
What companies are asked to do now is evolve rapidly since you can"t rely on the people bored of WoW as much as you could rely on the people who finished God of War to sell them all the GoW clones that have come since.
You can"t do that with MMO"s. DAoc/shadowbane/AC/AO all failed to learn that lesson during the EQ era. VG/War/AoC/LOTR/etc... all failed to learn it during the WoW era as well.
Anyways...
FFxiv scares me. I hope it"ll be good because the premise of not grinding XP to fill up ding levels is something I"ve wanted for a good long goddamn time. But I fear it may be replaced with a "repeatidly use skill to level it up lol!" style system instead which is just as bad.
On top of that, there"s a massive gap between being able to tell a story, and having a good story to tell. Square has been absolutely amazing at telling their stories for a good long time now. It"s just they"ve all been...uninteresting since FF:T. I"d like to imagine that"s a cultural gap thing because a JRPG with a solid, interesting story is about as rare as friendly lesbians.
Generated content is any means in which you relinquish control over placement, layout, and/or aesthetics to the game systems. Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and Matrix Online all used this. There are times where it is okay, but overall, hand crafted content is often better but also far more expensive and time consuming to produce. There is a tradeoff for everything.Flight said:
It really didn"t have anything to do with that article and to be clear what is in that article is the process EQ2 used, not necessarily the process SOE used. Each game team often works independent of the others, for better or worse.
Yep, that was the point. For whatever reason MMOs that creep away from the fantasy genre have often also tried to incorporate some other feature(s) which seem to undermine the gameplay in some manner. There will be someone somewhere that picks up on this and uses the classic models of action/rpg to make a non fantasy MMO and it"ll catch the people who would like variety in the setting but enjoy the current gameplay.Zehn - Vhex said:
It was a bit of that I"ll admit. To clarify I think we"re going to see a new branch of MMOs that appeal to a different set of people and thus will be successful (more in the short term than the long term) but they are also going to be incredibly expensive to make and very hard to maintain. They literally are going to be multiple single player games wired together with areas where you can take your character and participate in group activities when you want to, but largely are going to be built around offering a single player experience.Zehn - Vhex said:
This prediction comes as more of a focus. I"m assuming that successful games in the 3rd generation will have accessibility and polish the next step is making that socialization easier. More means of staying in contact. Easier methods of incorporating your MMO play with your social life. Better means of finding others who have similar playstyles or game goals. There are the beginnings of it in existing MMO"s: Quest sharing, group quest updates, looking for group and looking for guild features, guild management, social networking being built in, etc. This is going to get refined and expanded and retention will increase because of it for the games that embrace it.Zehn - Vhex said:
It goes back to the Baldur"s Gate argument. Everyone who"s ever owned a computer and interested in fantasy RPGs love BG and BG2.Dymus said:
If you could incorporate the fun-factor of the single player aspects of that game, i.e. your main character and his story into an MMO overlay, you"d pretty much have the golden goose of games. Maybe that"s what they"re doing with SW:TOR. Who knows.
tyen
EQ in a browser wait time: ____
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My dad was just talking about how he can"t stand raiding and large scale grouping in EQ2 since he is max level.
Him and my brother are both the casual types that usually join the lower end guilds just so they can enjoy high end content since that"s all there really is to do. Dymus seems like he pretty much understands the problem and how to make it fun again for not only us hardcore players, but also the casual.
This new crew of developers actually make me feel like I know little to nothing, and I like it.
Him and my brother are both the casual types that usually join the lower end guilds just so they can enjoy high end content since that"s all there really is to do. Dymus seems like he pretty much understands the problem and how to make it fun again for not only us hardcore players, but also the casual.
This new crew of developers actually make me feel like I know little to nothing, and I like it.
Dymus said:
Now I understand what you mean, I have to disagree (I"m assuming you mean a mission system that generates random dungeons based upon a number of defined tile sets). Because people have a vast swathe of different ways of finding fulfillment in games.Dymus said:
I suggest many people search for fulfillment in games that takes them beyond playing a game, that it become a place they live and try to evolve in. I believe that you can map Maslow"s heirarchy of needs to various elements of game play and player experience.
As people in real life achieve self actualisation so they do within their chosen game environment. Of course, we see people who just want to hang about with their friends and PvP, people who just want to craft and people who just want to play the Auction House game to make as much money as possible, just as we see gangs, people who go to art classes and people who only think about money and their career; but, they aren"t going to do that without the base Physiological level (bug free environment, game runs well), moving into safety, love, belonging/esteem.
This has been a long winded way of saying, what we and those around us want from our experience is not necessarily what everyone else wants from a persistent online world and that for many it goes beyond what we understand as fun in a game.
Of course it may just be that you only experienced mission generation in those 3 games, in which it largely sucked and haven"t played much of where most of the player base like it and it"s a mainstay of the game (see screenshot at end of the OP in the link for a plug in app that gives details of the info at the mission terminals). Mind you, people who only played for the months around launch, when it was bug ridden, will almost certainly not agree Maybe it"s that, as the industry hasn"t presented us with a reasonable story driven MMO, it also hasn"t yet devised a reasonable mission generation system ?
People don"t want to always be on a quest or story driven experience. A lot of us are tired of doing quest after quest to progress. Sometimes people just want to hang out and either do static camps with random named mobs or do a mission system, or hour after hour of loot runs a la Mephisto (Diablo 2 LoD). Note that I"m not suggesting any of this is a better experience to go through than the story driven concept, the question is can you achieve enough gameplay this way that it isn"t an issue when people have been playing excessively. Importantly, are you confident of achieving enough replayability ?
And, as you alluded to yourself, the amount of time and money it take to produce a mission system produces massively more replayability than anything else.
It"s slightly concering how much you are, from the little we know, basing Copernicus on a story driven experience, when a lot of us want the things you are saying are bad as well. I"ve been playing EQ1 again the past few months and it"s the mellowest and most fun time I"ve had in an MMO for a couple of years. Maybe here it"s just I haven"t experienced the story driven aspect of MMOs done well, so that I don"t see how you will keep my attention for 5 hours a day for two years.
Better story driven content and an evolving IP is definitely needed, this is one of the lessons of past MMO"s.But we don"t need to let the pendulum swing too far the other way and put all our eggs in one basket. We CAN have it all.
Personally I thought EQ was on the brink of "turning it around" with LDoN and then Monster Missions. If only you guys had taken the step of making them available for small groups and solo players ......
On the subject of replayability, something I believe most people on the forum will stand behind me and agree on (while there will definitely be disagreement on the above post) and would probably have at or near the top of their list of feature wish list, I am disappointed that you don"t see the attraction of using FFXI"s job system (one toon can play different classes but only one at a time) :
Dymus said:
large scale grouping being bad has been obvious, look how it has evolved:Tyen said:
EQ: 72 in raids, 6 in groups
DaoC: 40 in raids, 8 in groups
WoW vanilla: 40 in raids, 5 group
WoW BC: 25/10 man raids, different content for both
WoW WoTLK: 25 or 10, same content for both
what i see next generation is ignoring hard caps, and letting content scale based on the number in the raid/party. there is no "magic number" for every gamer and their friends. there is already plenty of information to do this now, it"s just about writing heuristics that can make guesses good enough to generate the content. what is kind of surprising to me is the lack of randomly generated content. LDoN had a good concept in this but no one since has really fleshed it out or expanded upon it.
Agree, as I"ve stated above.findar said:
Again, agree. Also, the scaling in LDoN was poor. It based the level of mobs in the adventure off of the average level of the group members. This was a reasonable method for initial implementation and development, the problem was that the only increment in difficulty as you levelled was tiers of 5 levels. One person in the group could gain a level and all of a sudden the mobs were 5 levels higher, which was a significant amount, at the time.findar said:
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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And thank God.findar said:
Randomly generated content with tile sets that randomly pattern with random boss mobs and loot with no rhyme or reason to why it is in the game world is ridiculous.
You have no lore, you have no designing, you have no thought process what so ever. All you have is a publisher after the green backs and 5 designers out of a job. And we saw what happened. And those games deserved to fail because if they hadn"t, all we would be doing is playing the same damn game over and over with differnt art for each title while the money rolls in without any fun, lore, story, or most importantly, character purpose.
Fortunately publishers listen to the dollars. And in this case, it actually panned out. The titles that had randomly generated crap were terrible games and were financial failures. In cases like Planetside, that sucks. In cases with randomly generated games, it rocks.
Guess there is a flip side to everything.