John Smedley hired by Amazon to produce MMOs

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Dandai

Dandai

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BoozeCube said:
Were does one apply for these failing upwards jobs? Is it mostly the gaming industry these days?
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Nepotism withstanding, you don't need to "find" a fail upward job. It's actually really simple (in corporate jobs, anyway).

First you must excel in your current position(s) and receive continual promotions based on your exceptional performance. Eventually you'll be promoted past your ability to excel. Then, if you're lucky, you'll find yourself in a position that is beyond your competency. You'll fuck up a lot of stuff, cause a lot of problems, and one day management will come to the conclusion that it's more cost effective for the company to "promote" you than to keep you in that key position and under-perform.

Next thing you know you'll be surrounded by other incompetent people and you'll all live in a shared alternate reality in which you feel you've earned and deserve the authority and prestige of your positions.
 
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Ambiturner

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Can't wait for some long time lurker, first time poster to come in and shit talk everyone with a reality based viewpoint on Vanguard
 
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Palum

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qwlol.jpg


Why hello fellow posters, long time lurker here. Would you care to discuss our lord and savior, Vanguard?
 
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Jysin

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intelligentleman said:
Can't find any citation. I read it somewhere and it was from a reliable source, like Brad.
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Skanda said:
lol.

E Elidroth can you please settle this? Was EQ 1 developed on the Unreal engine?
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Elidroth said:
LOL... First off.. EQ was built off the modified Tanarus engine, not Unreal. Tanarus was a tank game that Verant developed back in the late 1990s. BigWorld was not only available to the VG team, it was offered to us, and considered by the team as a possible choice. Unreal 2 was chosen as the base because our lead coder was good friends with Tim Sweeney, and they felt we could get better support from the Unreal team. SGO never had 300 people working on anything. The most we ever had at the company was around 130-ish. I worked at SGO for over 2 years before VG was bought out by SOE.
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Jesus, you don't even need Elidroth to confirm this. Most oldschool EQ'ers knew the game engine came from Tanarus. Hell, I think it came on the EQ disk. I never heard of Tanarus until I started playing EQ. I fired it up at some point because of EQ.

Tanarus (video game) - Wikipedia
 
Dandai

Dandai

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Yeah, it's common knowledge for anyone who played EQ and was even modestly interested in game development that it was built on a modified Tanarus engine. I have no idea where qwerty came up with Unreal lol. In 1999 Unreal didn't look like a 10 year old game like EQ did.
 
zero_name

zero_name

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I think it's a nice reminder of how stupid and pointless and horrible the entire EQN project was.
 
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zero_name

zero_name

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Froglok Georgeson is forever burned into my memory and it's just the worst.
 
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Kuro

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/pizza was just ahead of it's time. We didn't have the technology for /openthedoor and /shoveitinmyfoodfunnel yet
 
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Opimo

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zero_name said:
I think it's a nice reminder of how stupid and pointless and horrible the entire EQN project was.
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The stylized graphics would have been fine (and I could argue a smart choice for performance reasons). A lot of their other design decisions on the other hand...

Doing hyper realistic graphics in an MMO won't work due to the amount of variation and objects involved. It always makes performance awful.
 
E

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You can dislike the art direction. That's very subjective. A lot of people really liked it. I felt like it was trying too hard to be cartoonish and way too close to Free Realms' art style. Had the gameplay been amazing, I wouldn't have cared really. But the gameplay was awful. It's incredibly hard to balance 8 or 10 classes properly, and they were planning out something like 46 classes. All because the game's leadership were headstrong focused on combining Minecraft and MOBA games into an MMO.

Ponytail, and his unflinching desire for his 'game development legacy' is what killed EQN, not Smed. He wanted to be the next 'game god'. Instead he's a snakeoil salesman trying to pitch a VR company that doesn't actually exist or do anything. I'm hopeful Smed and company can turn out some great games.
 
Opimo

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Ponytail's legacy ended with Starsiege: Tribes, and it was a bug combo'ed with emergent gameplay that made Tribes successful. He tried to make it great again with PlanetSide, but his poor design choices ruined that as well. I was honestly shocked SOE brought him back and put him in charge of EverQuest.
 
Flobee

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Dandai said:
Yeah, it's common knowledge for anyone who played EQ and was even modestly interested in game development that it was built on a modified Tanarus engine. I have no idea where qwerty came up with Unreal lol. In 1999 Unreal didn't look like a 10 year old game like EQ did.
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I forget the name, but SOE had this isometric class based shooter game that launched around the same time as Tanarus. It was pvp with like capture the flag maps etc. It was fucking awesome. I used to play the stealth class (infiltrator?) and flag cap while dodging shots from offscreen. Fuck I can barely remember anything about the game other than it was a blast at the time. It also had an xp progression system where you could level up the classes, buy gear etc.

My nostalgia boner is fully erect

EDIT: Guess it was just called infantry. Infantry Online « Massive Multiplayer Online Isometric Shooter
 
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Palum

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Flobee said:
I forget the name, but SOE had this isometric class based shooter game that launched around the same time as Tanarus. It was pvp with like capture the flag maps etc. It was fucking awesome. I used to play the stealth class (infiltrator?) and flag cap while dodging shots from offscreen. Fuck I can barely remember anything about the game other than it was a blast at the time. It also had an xp progression system where you could level up the classes, buy gear etc.

My nostalgia boner is fully erect

EDIT: Guess it was just called infantry. Infantry Online « Massive Multiplayer Online Isometric Shooter
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Man Infantry and Silent Death Online (from Gamestorm) were my jam. I wish there was a modern interpretation of SDO.
 
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