WTF? Everquest... 3?

Siliconemelons · Aug 21, 2019

You have to have some stuff in an office - you do need to be face to face, but not always and yes a lot could be remote.

Look at deviant art, there is TONS of talent out there for art- what you need is a director that can get that talent all moving in one direction so Najena does not look stylized retro and Freeport looks realistic lotr type.

We are talking about a EQ reboot right? So there already is a guide and template... that cuts cost.

Ravishing · Aug 21, 2019

Xadion said:
You have to have some stuff in an office - you do need to be face to face, but not always and yes a lot could be remote.

Look at deviant art, there is TONS of talent out there for art- what you need is a director that can get that talent all moving in one direction so Najena does not look stylized retro and Freeport looks realistic lotr type.

We are talking about a EQ reboot right? So there already is a guide and template... that cuts cost.

The general question above was just how any AAA MMO could cost 70+ million.

I have always wondered why these studios open up shop in one of the most expensive areas in the country. Makes no sense since most of your labor force is likely to move or be remote anyway. A game studio could really be setup anywhere, I agree. It's unlike the film studios where a large unionized workforce & actor base is located in the area, or even Silicon Valley where tech companies thrive.

Not all game studios are in CA though. Epic Games is in North Carolina and ArenaNet (GuildWars) is based out of Seattle.. to name a couple.
Being near a population hub is important, but I'd definitely look for some place on the outskirts for cheap.
CA is the last place I'd consider mainly due to the cost of living.

Siliconemelons · Aug 21, 2019

Right, yeah I guess AAA WoW basher, yes 70+M just because it would be at least 3 years and yuge marketing.

But a successful? profitable? "Normal" MMO, should be able to be done in a reasonable amount of time and yeah...dont set up shop in a metro that will cost you 1M a month in rent.

Go to... Florida, its the new new texas right?

Go to a nice burb of Tampa, Orlando, Lakeland, Jacksonville...NOT in the friggen main metro.

I would go... Trinity area. You have access to great local state college grads and a state university grads all within 45min commute, go an hour and you have even more. Pinellas and Hills are DENSE with population and LOW on wages.

1M for purchase of office, most likely can house 10 employees easy with nice decent offices

Yearly:

Taxes, Power, Water, property expense: 150k, thats over 10k a month... unlikely, esp if you come in and get bids and get city/county to subsidize you there and make a big deal about bringing "jobs and awareness"

50k (and this is high) for a dedicated 1gig fiber.

10k per office for refurbishment, 100k.

Salary:

You/Us teh CEO, the big guy- lets be dumb and give ourselves 1m a year. nice.

Code Monkeys.

You will need 2 strong leads

What would get them to come? new start up, lower cost of living...

150k a year? so 300k

Associate Devs, lets say 3 per lead

50k a year - another 300k

I would put UX with Art in the same structure as above as one team

600k

I would only start with 1 creative assist. director until its time to actually launch, 75k a year and ramp job/team and salary up throughout the years.

Unity or Unreal - I dont care, we cannot nor need not to re-invent the wheel.

Software 150k a year

AWS/Azure, whatever cloud crap we need 150k a year... it should not be this much until we start doing anything that needs actual umph from outside users.

Test team: Lead @ 100k, associate tester 2x at 50k = 200k total yearly

That team would do more than "testing" at the start and really would seed some organic talent while the project grows

Misc office and other positions ~ 200k a year

There are tons of filled jobs in FL that are 35k, you can live decently for that...so finding "office" workers etc at 10-15$ and hr is easy... 50k a year jobs? dude the universities and state colleges will fill you up with placements.

Where are we at? about 4M for 1 year.

Budget it at 6M a year so you have flexibility of 50% (that's YUGE flexibility)

3 year cycle? 18M

How many subs does EQ have... EQ....yes EQ1... that has to be a baseline of minimum sub to expect for a "New EQ" and then some from the emulators...

100k people a year?

15$ a month?

18M (and I didn't even pre-calc that lulz)

Even in 1 year (paying for a 3 year dev), green beyond.

So, finding investors? There I am sure are investors that are in the medium risk market- because always and only wanting to bet on going full AAA+ is a high risk... when targeting something that is achievable and targeting a decent normal following and saying success is giving out investors a decent return, providing a well paying job for a decent amount of local and remote users and producing a game for a small market... because 100k users just in the USA? that is a small market.

Pharone · Aug 21, 2019

ID Software has the right idea when it comes to location; Dallas, Texas. Austin may be the technology hub of Texas, but Dallas is the less expensive to live in technology mecca of the state.

taebin · Aug 21, 2019

Lol, we're in the same office as ID. They are on 5 & 6, we're on 9 & 10. Easy to spot them on the elevator: cargo shorts, hoody, flip flops.

pharmakos · Aug 21, 2019

Ravishing said:
An indie team could do an MMO, for sure.
The tech is there and accessible.

Couple big problems: Art is expensive. Unless you plan to use Marketplace assets, a major cost will be creating art assets. Characters alone are expensive and time consuming. There really isn't a streamlined method to do well-done characters. Heck, Epic spent $12 million to create 26 characters for Paragon, scrapped the game and released them to the Unreal community. Imagine an MMO where you have TONS more assets... since the point is customizing characters & having a lot of variations. So either you skimp on cost and use characters that are quickly generated or you spend $$$ developing unique AAA characters.

Also keep in mind how many AI Characters/Mobs need to be created. Though with less detail, and can be more generic, but still.

THEN, you have World design/art. Do you purchase marketplace assets or do you create everything from scratch? For performance you'll want to stay away from the Marketplace, IMO. Also everything needs to fit the same art style, so generally you need to create it all to do that. Again, an indie team has no problem leveraging marketplaces, but a AAA studio will look foolish doing so.

You still need a team that can take the art assets and create engaging content, write quests, loot, etc etc etc. An MMO has a TON of systems compared to most other games.

But yea, an indie team CAN do an MMO... it would be very bare-bones / scaled back. Probably lacking some systems you've become accustomed to and you'll easily see a lot of buggy behavior, because simple fact is huge worlds are hard to do right without a lot of development time.

Lets look at some Avg salaries for game development, ranges vary a lot but this seems reasonable for an AAA studio that provides benefits, a lot of overhead costs at a AAA studio:

Artists: $75k/yr
Designer: $75k/yr
Developer: 100k/yr
Programmer: $100k/yr

Now how many do you need of each? Pantheon has a dev team of around 35 based on their "team page". A team of 35 seems small, and Pantheon is already on year 6 or 7 of development.

Add in office/hardware/software.
Voice actors, Motion Cap team/actors.
Music & Sound design
Servers... AWS adds up quickly.

What did Schilling spend with little to show? $50M?
I'd say 50M is bare-bones to get a AAA out the door with all the expected bells & whistles.

Also the biggest expense: Advertising. A Triple-A game is going to need to spend more on Advertising then game development.
At best I'd wager it's a 1:1 ratio: spend 50M making the game, spend 50M to advertise it.

just my 2c.

basically, an indie MMO needs to go the Minecraft route and use stylized low poly character models, i guess? hell maybe the world's first decent 2D MMO needs to happen, with SNES style sprites!

MazeEq · Aug 21, 2019

pharmakos said:
basically, an indie MMO needs to go the Minecraft route and use stylized low poly character models, i guess? hell maybe the world's first decent 2D MMO needs to happen, with SNES style sprites!

NexusTK mayne. NexusTK

pharmakos · Aug 21, 2019

MazeEq said:
NexusTK mayne. NexusTK

haha yeah i almost name dropped Graal Online haha, i hadn't heard of this game but i bet they were often mentioned in the same breath back in the day

Ravishing · Aug 21, 2019

pharmakos said:
basically, an indie MMO needs to go the Minecraft route and use stylized low poly character models, i guess? hell maybe the world's first decent 2D MMO needs to happen, with SNES style sprites!

Well......... no. An Indie MMO can do better, but these are the crappy Steam MMOs you see.

We found the worst MMO on Steam

A journey into the dark underbelly of Steam delivers us to the nightmarish world of Otherland.

www.pcgamer.com

Unreal & Unity Marketplaces sell characters, and Unreal has the Paragon characters you could use even (won't be able to change outfits/weapons easily though on those).
There are character creator programs that make passable characters, especially for use as NPCs / non-playable characters.

News page has moved | www.makehumancommunity.org

makehumancommunity.org

Content by Epic+Games - UE Marketplace

Discover content created by the team at Epic Games provided for free.

www.unrealengine.com

Reallusion - 3D Character Production & 2D Cartoon Animation

Reallusion is a platform for 3D character creation and animation across Media Entertainment, Metaverse, Digital Twinning, ArchViz and AI Simulation.

www.reallusion.com

Daz 3D - 3D Models and 3D Software | Daz 3D

At Daz 3D, download our free 3D software and shop free and premium 3D models, animations, and more to create your realistic universe.

www.daz3d.com

Free 3D Human Models | TurboSquid

Free 3D human models for download, files in 3ds, max, c4d, maya, blend, obj, fbx with low poly, animated, rigged, game, and VR options.

www.turbosquid.com

You can even get a base of animations for free from Mixamo (by Adobe): Mixamo (also has characters).

There are some big issues with using any of these.

1.) Creating styles/outfits/armor/hairstyles/custom animations :

Doing any of these really requires having the source file. Assets on the Unreal Marketplace are not source. And characters from most of the other places won't be rigged up, so there's a bunch of work depending what avenue you take.
Rigging up a character is a ton of work. Getting the mesh is the easy part. If you stick with Unreal characters you can buy animations that work with most of those rigs, since they standardize things. Mixamo animations use a different rig. Unreal has "retargeting" tools to try and make things work together, but it's never perfect. It's just a lot of work to make it all gel.
Your characters are going to look the same as every other indie MMO.
Every mesh that goes on a character needs to have animation data as well. Typically the same animation as the character, if it's clothing.
Without the source files, creating new clothing is impossible without building the 3d character model out yourself. The Paragon assets for example contain no extra geometry other then what you see. So if you remove the clothes, it's just blank space. Which is why if you use those assets you're basically stuck with what they are. The only customization are colors.

2.) Weapons

Weapons need to "socket" into hand slots, it's a lot of work making the hands "hold" weapons properly. Especially if both hands are suppose to hold a weapon (2h sword, rifle, etc). And make it all work with the animations playing.

3.) Non-Standard body types.

If your MMO has other races... you might be able to find some assets out there, but the selections will be slimmer or non-existent.. and probably lack a good rig and may lack source files.. so... yea.

4.) Customizable body shapes.

Most MMOs allow you to change body shapes a bit. You absolutely need the source files for the character meshes to do this. You need to create shape keys which need to be done in a 3d modeling program. Practically no assets will come equipped with this.
Mouth movement/blinking/etc: some characters may have these built in... but not always (shape keys again)

An indie MMO can have decent characters, just don't expect the customization that an AAA MMO would offer. Indie MMO might stick with Unreal or Mixamo or whatever else offers mesh+animation files ready-to-go, which will save a lot of work, but severely hamper customization.

Fucker · Aug 21, 2019

It sounds like some of you are gearing up to make Vanguard 2.0.

pharmakos · Aug 21, 2019

Ravishing said:
Well......... no. An Indie MMO can do better, but these are the crappy Steam MMOs you see.

We found the worst MMO on Steam

A journey into the dark underbelly of Steam delivers us to the nightmarish world of Otherland.

www.pcgamer.com

Unreal & Unity Marketplaces sell characters, and Unreal has the Paragon characters you could use even (won't be able to change outfits/weapons easily though on those).
There are character creator programs that make passable characters, especially for use as NPCs / non-playable characters.

News page has moved | www.makehumancommunity.org

makehumancommunity.org

Content by Epic+Games - UE Marketplace

Discover content created by the team at Epic Games provided for free.

www.unrealengine.com

Reallusion - 3D Character Production & 2D Cartoon Animation

Reallusion is a platform for 3D character creation and animation across Media Entertainment, Metaverse, Digital Twinning, ArchViz and AI Simulation.

www.reallusion.com

Daz 3D - 3D Models and 3D Software | Daz 3D

At Daz 3D, download our free 3D software and shop free and premium 3D models, animations, and more to create your realistic universe.

www.daz3d.com

Free 3D Human Models | TurboSquid

Free 3D human models for download, files in 3ds, max, c4d, maya, blend, obj, fbx with low poly, animated, rigged, game, and VR options.

www.turbosquid.com

You can even get a base of animations for free from Mixamo (by Adobe): Mixamo (also has characters).

There are some big issues with using any of these.

1.) Creating styles/outfits/armor/hairstyles/custom animations :

Doing any of these really requires having the source file. Assets on the Unreal Marketplace are not source. And characters from most of the other places won't be rigged up, so there's a bunch of work depending what avenue you take.

Rigging up a character is a ton of work. Getting the mesh is the easy part. If you stick with Unreal characters you can buy animations that work with most of those rigs, since they standardize things. Mixamo animations use a different rig. Unreal has "retargeting" tools to try and make things work together, but it's never perfect. It's just a lot of work to make it all gel.

Your characters are going to look the same as every other indie MMO.

Every mesh that goes on a character needs to have animation data as well. Typically the same animation as the character, if it's clothing.

Without the source files, creating new clothing is impossible without building the 3d character model out yourself. The Paragon assets for example contain no extra geometry other then what you see. So if you remove the clothes, it's just blank space. Which is why if you use those assets you're basically stuck with what they are. The only customization are colors.

2.) Weapons

Weapons need to "socket" into hand slots, it's a lot of work making the hands "hold" weapons properly. Especially if both hands are suppose to hold a weapon (2h sword, rifle, etc). And make it all work with the animations playing.

3.) Non-Standard body types.

If your MMO has other races... you might be able to find some assets out there, but the selections will be slimmer or non-existent.. and probably lack a good rig and may lack source files.. so... yea.

4.) Customizable body shapes.

Most MMOs allow you to change body shapes a bit. You absolutely need the source files for the character meshes to do this. You need to create shape keys which need to be done in a 3d modeling program. Practically no assets will come equipped with this.

Mouth movement/blinking/etc: some characters may have these built in... but not always (shape keys again)

An indie MMO can have decent characters, just don't expect the customization that an AAA MMO would offer. Indie MMO might stick with Unreal or Mixamo or whatever else offers mesh+animation files ready-to-go, which will save a lot of work, but severely hamper customization.

Well yeah, I meant if we were talking about the presumptions for this indie studio you guys were already making, tho

so I suppose more accurately I should have said: putting out enough granularity when it comes to customizing one's character, both when it comes to character creation and to visible gear, would require so much work of an indie MMO that it would arguably be a much better use of time and money to create lower-detail models that are stylized in a way so as to still be visually appealing, rather than attempt to compete with AAA MMOs at their own styles.

Kharzette · Aug 21, 2019

Ravishing's stuff is REALLY hard. I spent a lot of time in my own projects trying to figure out how to rig stuff and get clothing modular so it is easy to swap out.

So much of the very best games to look at are eastern, and they hold on to their secrets tightly. For the west, games with mod kits are great to look at. For low res low poly stuff, you can't beat Torchlight 2. They have a modkit and some example character source files that show you how they do body, gloves, helmets, shoulders etc.

The best body I've found is the saint's row 3 character they included with some modding tools. Amazingly well detailed but reasonably low poly (I think around 10k) but LOADED with morph targets for customization. You won't find anything even remotely near this level of quality on a middleware store. Probably the best you'll find in the west, but still miles behind something like a black desert character.

Black desert while great on the base mesh doesn't do much swapped out clothing pieces. It really is easier just to do a full outfit all at once.

If you do go for swappable parts, you have to make tools to fix the inevitable seams that come from the art packages. I have a weight welding button for fixing seams in characters with swappable parts:

Kharzette/Groglibs

3D game libraries for bsp maps with static and skinned meshes and misc other stuff - Kharzette/Groglibs

github.com

And then if you do go that route, you have to worry about draw calls. A 30k poly character from a typical modern console game is much easier on the gpu than a piecemeal mmo character with lots of different gloves and earrings and hats, especially when there's a bunch of characters standing around all with their own stuff on. Then you get into building up an atlas on another thread (something you really need vulkan to do properly) etc etc etc It's all really hard.

Elidroth · Aug 21, 2019

Xadion said:
You have to have some stuff in an office - you do need to be face to face, but not always and yes a lot could be remote.

Look at deviant art, there is TONS of talent out there for art- what you need is a director that can get that talent all moving in one direction so Najena does not look stylized retro and Freeport looks realistic lotr type.

We are talking about a EQ reboot right? So there already is a guide and template... that cuts cost.

No.. there isn't really a guide or template. The combat mechanics in EQ are so archaic.. and held together with bandaids and bubblegum (genius coding by Jenn Chan), but I'd never want to use them ever again in a game.

As for the remote work vs office work.. Remote can definitely be done, but there is just something about the creative flow of everyone cramming into a room to hash things out that is hard to replace. I DO agree you could get away with a lot of the mundane meetings done remotely for sure.. It doesn't work as well though (yet) for something like an artist asking you to come look at something they've been working on for input/feedback. Actually, let me rephrase.. I haven't seen it done well yet.. but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done.

Here's the thing.. Everyone who plays MMOs in a serious way will say "Gameplay is what matters", but then will whine incessantly about graphics quality. If I were building a game today, I would do what Brad is doing. Use the cheapest art you can find to build the mechanics of your game, and then fill in the art once it's done. The prettiest art assets in the world don't matter much if your gameplay is shit. Make a fun and compelling game, and THEN worry about making it visually awesome. Not only do you get to the core of things (gameplay), but you don't burn through a ton of money making pretty art that's useless. Vanguard did this unfortunately. World artists were WAY ahead of the design/coding side of things.. I know it was fun to talk shit about VG being too brown, but for a 'realistic' setting, there is just a lot of earthtones in play.. The character stuff was a disaster. We started out wanting to have unique racial armor, and then someone who I won't name decided for us all that it would be the unibody bullshit, where animal races were just humans with tails and heads.. Worse.. we still couldn't put out the character art fast enough to matter.

If DBG would put the game as the priority, and let a team of experienced designers design, test, iterate, re-design, re-test, etc until we had a solid slice of FUN gameplay, and THEN fleshed out the team to build the world, then EQ3 could be a success.. In fact, I'd 100% would LOVE to go back and be a part of it.. I KNOW for a fact that Holly would be a great leader for a team like that.. but I don't know who is at the helm of DBG anymore, and I don't know if upper management would allow that process to happen. Oh, and the other thing.. I would damn sure not want ANY press, any hype, or any news at all released about it until we had REAL gameplay and content ready for public consumption. The EQN bullshit from FanFaire should never ever happen again, and to me that's a solid reason to NEVER hire anyone who was in charge of that shitfest ever again.

Cukernaut · Aug 21, 2019

Epic quests should have a pre-quest that is standard and everyone can do for like an epic 0.5, but then the final piece of the quest and task is determined by the last person to earn the epic. Keeps the quest changing and adds an interesting social element, and based on human nature, keeps it epic.

I mean really, quests are arbitrary. Why aren’t tradeskills and masters really the arbiters and dms of the quests?

This will also prevent wikis from solving epics to recipes.

I mean let’s be honest, we need Mario maker meets Everquest not Minecraft meets Everquest (eq next attempt). Who else misses the old starcraft rpgs?

There’s perfectly possible ways to create alternate realities in an mmo and instanced player created scenarios. Call it dreams of norrath. Make all open world stuff non instanced and contested and top tier, player dreams are tier 2 and epic, and there are rifts that’s are gm created that pop up for uber items

Kharzette · Aug 21, 2019

Also if you do like Elidroth says you don't end up with debacles like attack rates tied to animation frames so females attack slower than males etc.

Siliconemelons · Aug 21, 2019

I mean a guide of EQ in such a way as thus;

All the "world building" and general "lore" IP is done and or has a foundation to spring board.

You have a scenario designer that's a good "fan fic" writer vs. Needing someone that has the creative chops to build a engaging world from blank all the way up... that saves considerable time, effort and money. It also starts EVERYONE off on the same tone and pace.

Play some EQ, play some EQ2 - give your entire team a month each, boom they got the feel, look, identities of the locations etc.

Vs. "Make a castle for Najena"
Oh what's that mean? Well it's a dark elf wizard necro lady... what's dark elf? Oh well... what aesthetic? Go ask Tom the art guy... or ask Bill the scenario guy...

As for "combat system"

No, we are not saying use the clobbered together mess that is Eq or eq2... but... DO what eq1 did.

Take a recent and well fleshed out version of D&D and put the paper to pixles - EQ is D20 3.0 I think, or the revision before it.

Heck use the same foundation!

I agree with remote v in room, but if you can get 5 Korean graphic artists to pump out the stuff they do for the price of one dude state side that needs to pay off his 500k art degree... yeah

MS teams is a great app that is going to be /the/ way of doing business. If you don't use teams, check it out... SharePoint gone! Skype, donemode - planner? Kanban/agile - in it. PM tools, boom. It's great.

Borzak · Aug 21, 2019

Ravishing said:
An indie team could do an MMO, for sure.
The tech is there and accessible.

Couple big problems: Art is expensive. Unless you plan to use Marketplace assets, a major cost will be creating art assets. Characters alone are expensive and time consuming. There really isn't a streamlined method to do well-done characters. Heck, Epic spent $12 million to create 26 characters for Paragon, scrapped the game and released them to the Unreal community. Imagine an MMO where you have TONS more assets... since the point is customizing characters & having a lot of variations. So either you skimp on cost and use characters that are quickly generated or you spend $$$ developing unique AAA characters.

Also keep in mind how many AI Characters/Mobs need to be created. Though with less detail, and can be more generic, but still.

THEN, you have World design/art. Do you purchase marketplace assets or do you create everything from scratch? For performance you'll want to stay away from the Marketplace, IMO. Also everything needs to fit the same art style, so generally you need to create it all to do that. Again, an indie team has no problem leveraging marketplaces, but a AAA studio will look foolish doing so.

You still need a team that can take the art assets and create engaging content, write quests, loot, etc etc etc. An MMO has a TON of systems compared to most other games.

But yea, an indie team CAN do an MMO... it would be very bare-bones / scaled back. Probably lacking some systems you've become accustomed to and you'll easily see a lot of buggy behavior, because simple fact is huge worlds are hard to do right without a lot of development time.

Lets look at some Avg salaries for game development, ranges vary a lot but this seems reasonable for an AAA studio that provides benefits, a lot of overhead costs at a AAA studio:

Artists: $75k/yr
Designer: $75k/yr
Developer: 100k/yr
Programmer: $100k/yr

Now how many do you need of each? Pantheon has a dev team of around 35 based on their "team page". A team of 35 seems small, and Pantheon is already on year 6 or 7 of development.

Add in office/hardware/software.
Voice actors, Motion Cap team/actors.
Music & Sound design
Servers... AWS adds up quickly.

What did Schilling spend with little to show? $50M?
I'd say 50M is bare-bones to get a AAA out the door with all the expected bells & whistles.

Also the biggest expense: Advertising. A Triple-A game is going to need to spend more on Advertising then game development.
At best I'd wager it's a 1:1 ratio: spend 50M making the game, spend 50M to advertise it.

just my 2c.

Not to mention if you hire someone at $100k it cost the company a lot more than $100k in cost. It's probably much cheaper than in some industries but I always figured 2x salary in end cost.

Pharone · Aug 22, 2019

taebin said:
Lol, we're in the same office as ID. They are on 5 & 6, we're on 9 & 10. Easy to spot them on the elevator: cargo shorts, hoody, flip flops.

Assuming they are still there in the building in Richardson, I'm pretty sure I know who you work for because I did in the past lol!

I remember going down to the little store there in the first floor around noon and seeing ID programmers dressed just like you said walking in like zombies that just rolled out of bed and barely made it to work.

Neranja · Aug 22, 2019

Xadion said:
EQ is D20 3.0 I think, or the revision before it.

TorilMUD - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Elidroth · Aug 22, 2019

Borzak said:
Not to mention if you hire someone at $100k it cost the company a lot more than $100k in cost. It's probably much cheaper than in some industries but I always figured 2x salary in end cost.

Pretty accurate.

WTF? Everquest... 3?

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