SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

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TomServo

<Bronze Donator>
6,953
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Lyr I remember those days of DCUO right after the hack. Fucking struggling to field 6 people in my guild to clear a raid.
 

Convo

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
8,766
617
I'm sure. I know exactly what McQuaid has done, all his failings, alleged drug use, borrowed ideas, mismanaging games and character flaws. I'm tired of faggots running around acting like they have some hidden wisdom that demands we continue bashing this dude like everything about him isnt front row center.

I just want people who remember the things that made enjoyable mmos and muds to make them. I don't care if he is developing them in a pedobear costume with kidnapped children sitting in his lap.
Brad set us back man. Plain and simple.
 

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
<Nazi Janitors>
28,431
44,760
I'd venture to say not more than 15% of the playerbase had completed all the content in classic-velious before another expansion was dropping.
You think that was good design? Do you think that was because there justso muchcontent to do? Dude...
 

Dullahan

Golden Knight of the Realm
259
256
funny revisionist BS. Were you alive back when work was being done on EQ? you know the days of BBS chatrooms, AOL, Dialup, and MUDs ...before every computer had a 3D card. Your rant reeks of jealousy. I suppose you also have an axe to grind with Zuckerberg, Anderson, Musk, and those dude who made Candy Crush. I appreciate the fact you refer to us as worker bees, mindless drones who did not realize EQ had heavy roots in MUDs. you have exposed yourself as not living in those times. and if you were alive then, you were most certainly were not cognizant of the technology and the gaming industry of that day. your "third of mouth" recollection of what happened at 989, Verant and SOE is just that. 3rd party BS.
Exactly.

Were talking about a time where a fraction of the people in even first world countries had internet connections, then comparing the success of a niche game to that of a casual friendly game marketed to children of all ages SIX YEARS later. What is there to compare?
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
595
Isn't it the CEO's job to sort through all ideas, and bring them to fruition? You get all sorts of divergent ideas, some great, some good, some bad. A good CEO only surrounds himself with people smarter than he is. In the end, he gets the credit, because he's the guy that greenlit the idea(s).

Also, in your opinion, do you think the dead weight is gone from DB? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future for DB? Honestly, if we are to believe that EQN has been in development for seven years and hundreds of millions have been spent, someone needed to cut through the bloat.
Ut blames everything on not-Smed, however the reality is SOE and EQ's demise rests solely with Smed for some of the reasons above. I really don't get why Ut likes to make excuses for him. As to the industry as a whole, an indie studio with kickstarter funding is not going to make the next great MMO. While making a good MMO is not the multi-billion dollar cost of building a new plane or new spaceship, it's pretty freaking expensive. Yeah, Roberts got umpteen million funding for his game, which would have been sufficient for a new MMO, but nobody is getting Robert's money funding for an MMO.

So though the time is over-ripe for a new MMO, the genre is dead because of CEO's like Smed not having a clue what the fuck they're doing so they're blowing money on random projects that get blown up (e.g EQIII, Agency both blown up after X millions invested).
 

Vitality

HUSTLE
5,808
30
funny revisionist BS. Were you alive back when work was being done on EQ? you know the days of BBS chatrooms, AOL, Dialup, and MUDs ...before every computer had a 3D card. Your rant reeks of jealousy. I suppose you also have an axe to grind with Zuckerberg, Anderson, Musk, and those dude who made Candy Crush. I appreciate the fact you refer to us as worker bees, mindless drones who did not realize EQ had heavy roots in MUDs. you have exposed yourself as not living in those times. and if you were alive then, you were most certainly were not cognizant of the technology and the gaming industry of that day. your "third of mouth" recollection of what happened at 989, Verant and SOE is just that. 3rd party BS.
This ought to be a treat.
 

Gecko_sl

shitlord
1,482
0
I actually think Paul Sage is a fairly talented design mind - far more than Butler - but some of the design decisions at the core of TESO were just fucking absurd. You have one of the greatest open-world sandbox franchises in history and so you focus your efforts and finances on porting over the linear story aspects that were ignored in the single player installments by a massive percentage of the playerbase, break the seamlessness of the world, and incorporate a restrictive class system that was called out for being broken and ill-advised on the very first day of external alpha testing? Stupid..
See my earlier post regarding Hartsman the business guy versus the game designer. The decisions were based on selling making mad coin to suits versus what the genre needed to push forward. It's why WOW has never really evolved that much. It's milking the moneys.
 

symbelmyne_sl

shitlord
70
0
Ut blames everything on not-Smed, however the reality is SOE and EQ's demise rests solely with Smed for some of the reasons above. I really don't get why Ut likes to make excuses for him. As to the industry as a whole, an indie studio with kickstarter funding is not going to make the next great MMO. While making a good MMO is not the multi-billion dollar cost of building a new plane or new spaceship, it's pretty freaking expensive. Yeah, Roberts got umpteen million funding for his game, which would have been sufficient for a new MMO, but nobody is getting Robert's money funding for an MMO.

So though the time is over-ripe for a new MMO, the genre is dead because of CEO's like Smed not having a clue what the fuck they're doing so they're blowing money on random projects that get blown up (e.g EQIII, Agency both blown up after X millions invested).
the writing is on the wall over Smed, have much to say about him, both good and bad. but will wait for his day of reckoning. though i expect he'll look for an escape pod with a nice parachute.
 

Utnayan

F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
<Gold Donor>
16,524
12,564
funny revisionist BS. Were you alive back when work was being done on EQ? you know the days of BBS chatrooms, AOL, Dialup, and MUDs ...before every computer had a 3D card. Your rant reeks of jealousy. I suppose you also have an axe to grind with Zuckerberg, Anderson, Musk, and those dude who made Candy Crush. I appreciate the fact you refer to us as worker bees, mindless drones who did not realize EQ had heavy roots in MUDs. you have exposed yourself as not living in those times. and if you were alive then, you were most certainly were not cognizant of the technology and the gaming industry of that day. your "third of mouth" recollection of what happened at 989, Verant and SOE is just that. 3rd party BS.
Oh look here, a misfit. I hope your trip was well deserved and you are on your island safely.

Yeah let's talk of the days of yesteryear which have no bearing on the conversation because most have moved passed the days of playing Trade Wars or Operation Overkill doors on Remote Access BBS's in 1989 on 2400 baud modems. The problem with misfits like you is you live in the fucking past. Your ideas stayed in the past. And you continually tried to bring the past into the present. Over, and over, and fucking over again. Your intelligence was an ego that belongs in the past, and the only thing that is now firmly in 2015, is your unemployment check. Like Molyneux on Acid, so are the pipedreams of the inept misfits.

But yes, let's talk of the days long gone by. Text based MUDS, FidoNet, Telix and Qmodem, BiModem protocol which allowed THQ and INC to courier warez with up/down and CHAT at the same time. AOL NWN, and the days of paying $9.99 for 5 hours and $3.00 an hour after. TSN with 50 hours for $49.99 to play Red Baron online and Shadows of Yserbius. Eye of the beholder while talking on the phone...Kali and Quake and all the fun things we used to do. No one cares anymore, because those days belong dead with the 386SX-16 Packard bell you played them on.

The misfits mentioned are the ones that destroyed the management aspect of creating these games when based around a broken business model of slow paced content to artificially stall while creating content which was already sold. Yes, that's criminal. It's called fraud. But again, that's in the past.

What isn't in the past were the morons that continued to do that game after game while sinking an entire genre under their bullshit scapegoats. And you and your ilk should be proud, because as of now, not a publisher from here to Syria will touch the genre as a result of your ineptitude. Your piss poor management. Your scapegoats to save face. Your inter-office meetings stifling the creative ideas while still cherry picking a few for the sake of a political maneuver within an organization. You, shitbag, contributed to the decline of an entire genre. Be proud of yourself. While the players such as Furor, Tigole, and many other fans of the genre flew passed your geriatric diatribe and accomplished more in 3 years then you and your "Staff" could hope to accomplish with a flux capacitor and all the time you fucking wanted.

Now go get your unemployment check, and relish the fact that your legacy was gone back when I was riding in the way-back in a 1976 station wagon with some groceries from Byerly's.

Oh and in case you forgot, most everyone in the EQ target market had, at a minimum, a 28.8k modem and a fucking phone line. EQ and it's code ran in a 2400 baud model in Vanilla and throughout Kunark and Velious. More scapegoat shit for the scapegoat professional. Keep climbing that tree of ineptitude. You have almost reached the top of the Sycamore.

One last thing: The entire engine was based off a fucking tank simulator. So you talk about 3D cards? People were able to run the thing with onboard video because it was being chewed by CPU cycles. The only thing that a Voodoo 3DFX Monster (Or II) did at the time was smooth out the textures and add a few frames because like the Z-Axis problems in zone building, the main power of the game was coming from compute power based on what it was SUPPOSED to do before modification.
 

Shonuff

Mr. Poopybutthole
5,538
791
Lyr I remember those days of DCUO right after the hack. Fucking struggling to field 6 people in my guild to clear a raid.
I can remember before the hack, being on what was supposed to be one of the busiest servers (Zero Hour) and not seeing a dot on my radar for three to four hours in Metropolis, Gotham or the Watchtower. I haven't seen a game that dead since Asheron's Call 2. I remember, back when AC2 posted server pops, and there 18 people on my server in primetime. The fact that DCUO is now bustling is amazing. The game still has issues, but is much better.
 

TomServo

<Bronze Donator>
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yeah it was bad before, but when we got back it was crippling. glad you stuck with it. tried coming back but god instant old man "to much has changed" vibe.
 

bwuceli_sl

shitlord
142
0
I can remember before the hack, being on what was supposed to be one of the busiest servers (Zero Hour) and not seeing a dot on my radar for three to four hours in Metropolis, Gotham or the Watchtower. I haven't seen a game that dead since Asheron's Call 2. I remember, back when AC2 posted server pops, and there 18 people on my server in primetime. The fact that DCUO is now bustling is amazing. The game still has issues, but is much better.
I saw a "deader" game once, it was called Horizons heh
 

Kuro

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
8,932
23,476
How could Horizons fail, YOU COULD PLAY A DRAGON

AS A PREORDER BONUS (Fuck the MMO industry)

AND WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING REALLY DRAGONY

Logging into that game for the first time and doing crafting tutorials... as a dragon... was mildly ridiculous.
 

Utnayan

F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
<Gold Donor>
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Also, in your opinion, do you think the dead weight is gone from DB? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future for DB?
I do not think the acquisition has anything to do with developing further titles. It's an IP play to bring EQ and PS to the mobile device vertical. Right now the Russians are probably piecing through the minimal efforts of the EQ Next team and seeing if there is anything they can salvage for an actual game. They now own the Forgelight engine, which was also an asset they wanted. The magical nature of the business side here is that all these products that have been bought were all labeled early access with clauses that the games don't actually have to ship, so whether something ships in free to play or not, it doesn't matter. They could shut everything down and start their own IP sale off or start to make free to play microtransactional pay to win games on these IP's. So, for the future of DB, a Russian company who uses AK-47's to storm oil producers, I would say they are more concerned about making money than anything related to the video game industry.

If that is something they are serious about getting in, I would say these IP's are heading straight for the app store.
 

McCheese

SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
6,918
4,315
How could Horizons fail, YOU COULD PLAY A DRAGON

AS A PREORDER BONUS (Fuck the MMO industry)

AND WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING REALLY DRAGONY

Logging into that game for the first time and doing crafting tutorials... as a dragon... was mildly ridiculous.
The funniest thing to me about Horizons was how their engine couldn't do doors. So you have an entire world of towns/cities without a single door. Just empty doorways. How can you stop a massive undead invasion when you can't close the door?!
 

ili_sl

shitlord
188
0
I thought it was Sony that wants to move into mobile games which is why they sold off SoE? Why would a company buy SoE and try to turn it into a mobile game company when Sony didn't even think it was worth the effort.