Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => General Non-RP EVE Discussion => Topic started by: Anslol on 06 Sep 2013, 13:44
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http://themittani.com/news/ccp-soundwave-announces-departure-riot (http://themittani.com/news/ccp-soundwave-announces-departure-riot)
Well shit.
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Five years was about average for me when it comes to 'time in studio'.
In Game Development you tend to need to move to get the job you want, it's very hard to create the job you want in situ.
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Oh dear god he's coming to LoL.
Well this'll be interesting.
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Oh dear god he's coming to LoL.
Well this'll be interesting.
Inb4 first deployment after he starts there officially changes the name of the game to Rage of Legends...
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Five years was about average for me when it comes to 'time in studio'.
In Game Development you tend to need to move to get the job you want, it's very hard to create the job you want in situ.
^
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I'm not up to speed on the LOL thing, am I supposed to like DOTA2 or LOL? Which one is the one to pile derision on?
And best of luck to soundwave of course.
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Flip a coin, Silas.
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Awww... Soundwave was always the awesomes. Will be missed, bad.
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Perhaps he's realized that moving numbers in the database is the extent of development allowed for EVE for the forseeable future.
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As an Eve player, sad. As a League player, woo!
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Perhaps he's realized that moving numbers in the database is the extent of development allowed for EVE for the forseeable future.
This came up on teamspeak yesterday, good observation as always Graelyn.
It made us all very, very depressed that the last 5 or 6 years of expansions have been 90% buffing / nerfing. Buffing / nerfing. There's no new GAMEPLAY. There's nothing NEW or DIFFERENT going on, they have just been re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic for the last several years of expansion.
Wasn't Soundwave the one that pushed for the Aurum store btw?
Good luck to the man but I wan't someone new in there taking this ship in new and interesting ideas or so help me once Star Citizen is out Eve will be a ghost town.
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Perhaps he's realized that moving numbers in the database is the extent of development allowed for EVE for the forseeable future.
In the same vein, however, this is what most of DOTA and LOL's design is about as well. New content is added in the form of champions (which can introduce new mechanics), rebalancing of buffing/nerfing, and sometimes new items around the seasonal changes. New maps/game modes are pushed for, but because the balancing is so centered on the original 5v5 Summoner's Rift these modes aren't allowed to flourish. 3v3 is still in 'beta', and 5v5 Capture&Hold has no competitive support a year or two after its release.
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Perhaps he's realized that moving numbers in the database is the extent of development allowed for EVE for the forseeable future.
In the same vein, however, this is what most of DOTA and LOL's design is about as well. New content is added in the form of champions (which can introduce new mechanics), rebalancing of buffing/nerfing, and sometimes new items around the seasonal changes. New maps/game modes are pushed for, but because the balancing is so centered on the original 5v5 Summoner's Rift these modes aren't allowed to flourish. 3v3 is still in 'beta', and 5v5 Capture&Hold has no competitive support a year or two after its release.
LOL is making cash money though? Likely a pay-raise to a hugely popular and much-watched competitive game?
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Perhaps he's realized that moving numbers in the database is the extent of development allowed for EVE for the forseeable future.
This came up on teamspeak yesterday, good observation as always Graelyn.
It made us all very, very depressed that the last 5 or 6 years of expansions have been 90% buffing / nerfing. Buffing / nerfing. There's no new GAMEPLAY. There's nothing NEW or DIFFERENT going on, they have just been re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic for the last several years of expansion.
Wasn't Soundwave the one that pushed for the Aurum store btw?
Good luck to the man but I wan't someone new in there taking this ship in new and interesting ideas or so help me once Star Citizen is out Eve will be a ghost town.
I'm not sure that Soundwave had the final word on what had to be done gameplay wise anyway.
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There was a call to get back to basics after what many saw as questionable new directions explored without proper planning.
I personally think the ship rebalances were awesome. I think they should be finished but, yeah, I'd like to see some new direction now.
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If only the Incarna launch hadn't been such a complete debacle.
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If only...
Anyway, when I read the link, ccp-soundwave-announces-departure-riot, at first I thought he was organizing a Jita Protest because he had to depart CCP.
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If only it had been resembling the prototype we saw video of way back, with all the minigames and shit. Like the EVE secon genesis card game stopped making RL, they were planning to put it ingame... It'd been win.
Instead... We got gfx card frying wankfest that both discarded the original visual style of EVE that I found very appealing ( my pink translucent gallente shirt motherfuckers, I want it back). As such we will never see the caldari admiral jacket and the Zorg hairstyle we got teased with... Or any of the bloodline variant designs which were pretty epic, instead we've gotten more wank clothing -in different colour.
Shame Soundwave is moving on though, he did fine job as a lead designer. I hope the chick who gave the presentation about building stargates ( CCP seagul? Dun remember ) and such gets a shot at leaddesign. I loved her ideas and future vision.
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IIRC the deal there was that the demo'ed Incarna version ran on somebody else's proprietary engine. I'm not sure if there were issues with getting a distribution license to begin with, or the cost of getting it, or an insistence on thing being bleeding-edge tech...
Anyhow, yeah. Seagull's been bearing the bringer-of-actually-decent-ideas torch a bit lately.
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Seagull already outranked Soundwave I think, she's Exec.Producer of EVE or something.
The ship balances have been good. They've been great actually. However, I do not believe they took a company of 2-300 people to do.
I think that EVE has been running on a much smaller staff than we've been led to believe.
I think that CCP has been putting a lot more work on other projects than we've thought.
I think that, perhaps, being in charge of EVE within CCP means that you are not working on the Flagship Product.
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Seagull and Soundwave were totally different disciplines.
I'd be interested in knowing how much of our money goes to making Eve and how much of it goes to future product. Has DUST turned a profit? If it did, would any of that money be ploughed back into Eve or is Eve not going to attract that kind of investment now?
I'd also be interested in knowing how the teams stack up, numbers wise, what the projected goals are for Eve going forward. Can we look forward to iterative treatments of existing gameplay, such as Sov, Ratting, Mining, Industry and Faction Warfare? Is something new in the pipeline?
I hope these are all things that the CSM are asking and that they aren't wasting their access on campaigning for a rebalance of their favourite ships.
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There are big things in the pipeline for EVE, folks.
Even Seagull has been giddy about them. You should read the CSM minutes for the past two years. There's a LOT coming up.
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We'll see.
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We'll see.
This so much.
EVE has been on autopilot so to speak for years. Stat fixes, small changes. The main resources are obviously being spent elsewhere.
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IIRC the deal there was that the demo'ed Incarna version ran on somebody else's proprietary engine. I'm not sure if there were issues with getting a distribution license to begin with, or the cost of getting it, or an insistence on thing being bleeding-edge tech...
Usually it's a lot better to have your own tech when you can develop it and keep it up to date since you can tailor it precisely to your needs and make it evolve specifically for your game(s). And you don't have to pay for the license but that's not a big problem if you are able to afford the cost of development for your proprietary engine, to begin with. It costs a lot for very small studios that actually don't have the means to develop their own engine i'm guessing.
I think it was more the latter as a solution, imo. Don't know where they screwed though. Too ambitious and unable to make it work in the context they wanted ? Maybe.
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I've seen players speculate on the Eve-O forums that CCP's taken resources from Eve and used them to develop other products like Dust, World of Darkness or some new unannounced property. I don't know whether that's happening or not but, if it is I have no problem with it. In order to grow CCP needs to diversify. They can't continue rely solely on a 10 year old niche game that has a reputation for being extremely difficult to learn and populated by a playerbase only slightly more friendly than a pissed off hungry lion. It's simply not realistic. It's like someone who just bought a Cadillac demanding that their money remain within that division for its sole development, not to be used to fund R & D for GM's other brands.
Having said that I totally agree that CCP needs to devote more time keeping Eve relevant by delivering something new. Stat tweaking, bug fixing, and iterating on neglected content are all very much needed but, hardly the kinds of things that will get excited new subscribers throwing them money or generating buzz in the gaming media. CCP seriously needs to get past its post-Incarna risk aversion and innovate.
Dammit, I want that CQ door opened! I want to gamble, plot with corpmates, run missions, get into bar brawls, visit stores, etc. I want to get out of the pod and interact with other players in ways beyond just shooting their flashy icons or typing into a text box. I've been having fun doing just that recently in STO but, I really want to be able to do that in Eve.
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I heard rumours that their engine is unable to handle anything properly beyond a single avatar on screen. And that's also why they completely changed their minds and finally chose to use a commercial one for WoD... If Incarna was really the beta test for the engine before WoD, then it says nothing good about the possibility to see it expanded.
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I've been having fun doing just that recently in STO but, I really want to be able to do that in Eve.
Me too. :cube:
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They are missing a huge opportunity.
All of these other 'games' need to be the -same- game.
One client portal, one subscription.
Valkrie, walking in stations, planetary fighting, dust, Eve that we know, etc.
One client portal, log in, and to be able to do all of those things. That is the thing to sell and the brand to push. One universe, one game, infinite possibilities.
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Programming says no, sadly. I work with a lot of IT people. I actually brought it up once in a convo and they basically said 'nope.' It MIGHT be possible, but the amount of work needed to put into it, the complicated coding, the amount of servers, etc...you'd see sub rates rise higher just to support the project before ever even seeing its first live implementations.
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Programming says no, sadly. I work with a lot of IT people. I actually brought it up once in a convo and they basically said 'nope.' It MIGHT be possible, but the amount of work needed to put into it, the complicated coding, the amount of servers, etc...you'd see sub rates rise higher just to support the project before ever even seeing its first live implementations.
Not one game engine sharing space, but the illusion of such. IE you are actually loading a different engine when doing the different things, but say they share the chat and market systems. When I dock up my ship, exit my pod, and want to enter the station and walk around, it closes the eve client and loads the in-station client. They don't have to be the same set of software, but they need to be able to be -accessed- easily.
Just like you can have your STEAM window open, and it takes all of 20 seconds to switch games if you wanted to.
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Different thing with Steam. Steam is an organizing client, a launch pad to play separate games. Just a glorified filing cabinet with a forum and a store.
Doing that with Eve would be...difficult. It's basically taking 4 different types of car engines, sticking them into one car, and having a button to switch between engines. You can guess the complications that might happen.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see that happen. But they have problems just keeping the client for Eve stable and bug free after simple patches. Imagine what would happen with client wide patches with four different clients on there? They couldn't do separate patches for separate engines or games or whatever. If it's all consolidated under one thingy like that, it'd have to be updated across the board, same patch...imagine the bugs man. Starship Troopers would look like Disney World.
I know updates in Steam happen separately per game, but Steam is still a launch pad for games, not a game in it self that is also a hub for other iterations of the game.
...does that make sense? It sort of did in my mind...>_>
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If it's true that Carbon is such a dog that it can't handle multi-avatar gameplay then Eve is pretty much at a deed end. I don't see hordes of subscribers signing up to play spreadsheets in space no matter how much ship tweaking, POS revamping and the like gets done.
I hope that the bosses at CCP will wake up and stop listening to the pitchfork wielding forum haters. The way to keep Eve relevant is to give players more options to immerse themselves in the game universe by developing engaging new content and innovative features.
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If it's true that Carbon is such a dog that it can't handle multi-avatar gameplay then Eve is pretty much at a deed end. I don't see hordes of subscribers signing up to play spreadsheets in space no matter how much ship tweaking, POS revamping and the like gets done.
I hope that the bosses at CCP will wake up and stop listening to the pitchfork wielding forum haters. The way to keep Eve relevant is to give players more options to immerse themselves in the game universe by developing engaging new content and innovative features.
MMO's have had third-person multi-user experiences for what, 15 years now?
Their lack of progress on this is laughable.
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If it's true that Carbon is such a dog that it can't handle multi-avatar gameplay then Eve is pretty much at a deed end.
If that's true, then WoD is completely doomed as well. I think it's more a "we can't have more avatars without reducing the pretty images we have now, so instead of compromise the art we're compromising on gameplay". Which means avatars are pretty much a dead end not from a tech perspective, but from a "We're artists" perspective.
As for the various EVE games being separate, that goes back to the whole "FEARLESS" motto and "We're taking over the world" mentality. It's an attempt at diversification, but instead of actually diversifying and going in a new direction, they played it far too safe and kept the DUST/EVE connection, and using the IP they acquired from White Wolf for their new MMO. Could they go toe-to-toe with games like HALO, WoW, etc? Hell no. They could, however, leverage their existing IP to create a spinoff franchise.
I'll say it right here, right now, and people won't like it; WoD is doomed if it is going to be subscription based. A niche tabletop game becoming a popular subscription MMO? I don't see it happening. DUST gaining momentum after this long, with as many problems as they've had, and on a console that in two months will be "last gen"? Slim to null.
I don't blame CCP though. The only fault they have is that they really aren't agile enough a business, and don't have the manpower for their freakin' awesome ideas. The reasoning looks simple from the outside; why take such a risk with a new game, with new servers, etc. when they could potentially use the same exact server resources for two games? Number crunchers nod, penny pinchers nod, and the marketing team goes "Great!" The problem is, with limited resources (and years of development) DUST is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be a money maker even after launch, and is about 7 years too late to really take advantage of the console it's on.
Unless CCP makes the big move to PS4 (Valkyrie, maybe?) they might as well bow out of the console business and refocus on PC. Personally, if Valkyrie doesn't launch for PS4 then they're wasting dev resources. If DUST doesn't transition over to PS4, it's as good as dead. If they switch DUST over to PC they might as well just have it as an expansion for EVE (Easy PF fix; new tech is developed to allow Capsuleers to Jump Clone into a soldier, problem solved).
Long and the short of it, CCP is on the edge of a very steep dive if they don't make harsh decisions right now. Looking at the past few years, I'm afraid the "FEARLESS" habit might be too hard to break. I don't blame people for leaving for greener pastures. I enjoy EVE (and I'd be playing right now if my apartment hadn't flooded and my computer wasn't out of commission for another week or two), but I kind of wish they'd take more long term risks without worrying about short term benefit. They're shooting themselves in the foot from a purely business perspective. "FEARLESS" doesn't mean "stupidly following bad plans and making the best out of those plans regardless of how stupid they are because we kind of screwed up and overextended".
Now, on the whole "different games, one client" issue, CCP has the server architecture that runs DUST and EVE. EVE and DUST, however, have different coding. One game uses Unreal, the other uses Carbon. Both share database and servers, as well as a chat client. They are two separate games. Now, once WoD development advances a bit, I'm sure they could transfer over the avatar tech to allow EVE avatars on PC to run just as good as DUST avatars do on PS3. Will they transfer everything on DUST over to PC, an d allow EVE players to fight alongside Dusters? Probably not, because they'd have to build everything in Carbon not just port everything over from Unreal. I'm fairly certain they can get Carbon to work on PS4, since it's PC architecture. If they want to do the full DUST to PC conversion, the PS4 would be their first target (realistically), and if they wanted to port EVE over to PS4 in some way, Valkyrie looks like a good initial testing of the waters.
So it's not just a matter of technology, but business strategy that has to be taken into account. What's the best for the company, what takes less resources, and what has the most potential to see a return on investment? Looking at the current state of DUST (without looking at the metrics), I'd say there has to be some serious questions being asked at the upper management level as to what exactly they need to do to salvage anything past next year (just speaking of DUST, not EVE).
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WoD is not doomed at the contrary. They are developping it with Unreal, not Carbon. They chose to redo it all with Unreal.
That's the thing that makes me say that Carbon is... put in standby, at best.
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WoD is not doomed at the contrary. They are developping it with Unreal, not Carbon. They chose to redo it all with Unreal.
That's the thing that makes me say that Carbon is... put in standby, at best.
Oh, awesome! I didn't know that.
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Ah... so what did they develop Carbon for, again? To show off that they ca do a sota graphics engine?
Epic fail.
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Ah... so what did they develop Carbon for, again? To show off that they ca do a sota graphics engine?
They can sort of do a state of the art graphics engine. Making it work in practical applications is the real litmus test, and so far single avatar graphics is all it seems capable of (while using a top end gaming rig, no less). The Captain's Quarters are all well and good, but honestly what's the point when CCP can do the same thing, for less resources (and looking just as good) on PS3 using Unreal (Merc Quarters)?
Again, it goes back to the whole "FEARLESS" thing. Going into a development project looking at long term application without realizing cheaper short-term solutions could have produced as good - if not better - results without wasting money. Those decisions were made years ago though, and hopefully moving forward CCP will make better decisions.
For me, I'm happy with how the game has progressed over the past couple years. The game runs good on my computer, it looks good on my computer, and ship balance seems to be coming along nicely. Everything else is absolutely secondary to having a fun core game experience. I can mine and have fun, I can blow up rats and have fun, I can PvP and have fun.
Why else would someone play the game, if not to have fun? I hope Soundwave has fun in his new job.
'Nuff said.
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Mhh, now you all make me doubt on that Unreal thing. Maybe I got confused with Dust ?
Will have to check again where I heared that.
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I believe that the prototype gameplay they showed off at Fanfest was done in Unreal, though it might've been Unity.
I *think* Carbon can display more than one avatar at a time (as Stitcher is oh-so-fond of pointing out, opening a full-body preview of someone while you're in your CQ counts, as might standing in front of the mirror) but the real question is can it do so without toasting video cards, being laggy, etc.
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I think Reyd hit it on the head when he called CCP out on the whole "fearless" thing. I see part of that manifested in "not invented here" syndrome. At that time the company was riding high; they'd bought White Wolf for WoD, they were working on the long-promised Walking In Stations and they'd expanded their offices to 3 continents. They were seriously believing their own hype. As is the case most of the time when this attitude sets in they got arrogant. CCP decided they could develop their own graphics engine that would be superior to what was already out there to be licensed. If some tech they needed wasn't developed in house, it was crap. (To be fair they did an amazingly good job with Trinity so, this belief wasn't totally delusional) Hilmar pretty much admitted this during a mea culpa keynote presentation during the Fanfest following the Incarna protests.
My issue is that they've now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. They're ignoring the fact that playing things too safe can be just as dangerous as hubris.
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Developping a new engine costs millions. Tbh considering that they sure seemed to make some debts by doing so (I seem to recall something like 10M debt evoked once), they still made it, meaning they had the funds, and failed. To me, it's surprising and does not speak very well of the programmers that were in charge, or either their lack of recruitment of qualified engineers for that. I don't know what was the cause...
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Managers and Supervisors who did not understand that what they were asking for was a lot more than they anticipated. Happened to me as a researcher. Super would request x, y, and z with 10 hours assigned to it, when task x ALONE would take 25 hours, and putting it together to work with y and z would be even more time and resources that were not available and would not be requisitioned.
Just higher ups pushing for shit they know nothing about.
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Developping a new engine costs millions.
You know, I've seen something intriguing and consistent with game companies when they go looking for cash to help develop a game. They present a LOT of pretty pictures, maybe a video to demonstrate what the game could be. Courting money from those who know nothing about game development, polish and shine is everything.
Now, DUST and Incarna both had those awesome pictures, those nice developer videos, etc. WoD has those awesome demos of clothing and water flowing down walls. Are those destined for the game, or are they focused on getting money to develop the engine? Is it both?
I'm cynical though. I've seen quite a few games use the tactic of developing nice pictures but not having the manpower or resources to fully realize their dream. Also, human nature being what it is, I'd be more inclined to believe that it was a push to get more income than to truly develop the game engine properly.
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Managers and Supervisors who did not understand that what they were asking for was a lot more than they anticipated. Happened to me as a researcher. Super would request x, y, and z with 10 hours assigned to it, when task x ALONE would take 25 hours, and putting it together to work with y and z would be even more time and resources that were not available and would not be requisitioned.
Just higher ups pushing for shit they know nothing about.
This is normal. Personal anecdote time!
At my current job, there was one incident when I'd been there maybe about a month and a half, where I was asked to write my code to allow ANY combination of answers that were considered 'valid' for a given set of math problems. Doesn't seem like too much a big deal on the surface, right?
Well, let's look at the tool students are using in this particular step of the problem first:
- It has two areas. One with a number of circles, and another area with eight containers that circles can be dragged into.
- Circles in the first area can be chopped up into fractions of a whole (halves, thirds, fourths, etc; all the way up to eighths for this tool).
- The containers in the second area each have two slots, which can hold a whole circle each - so a total of 16 wholes can be moved over.
Simple enough so far, right? Okay, here's where it got stupid.
- Each of the sixteen slots has an ID number, between 0 and 15.
- For each of these slots, in order to check the value of the contents, you have to check the numerator and the denominator of the wedges (or whole) put into that slot. Yes, separately. No, you can't just put in a numeric value (say, 0.5) and check the slot. You have to check that the numerator is 1 (or 2, or 3, etc.) and the denominator is at the same time 2 (or 4, or 6, etc.).
- You can't do this for pairs of slots (ie, the containers). Only per individual slot.
Okay. It's long-winded code, but it works... Until you have to take into account alternate answers.
The question I was using as an example for this was 6 divided by 4 - for this step, students were told to "split six wholes evenly between four containers". We were expecting the answer of a whole and two fourths, but we were also going to accept one half instead of the two fourths. This wouldn't be a problem, really, except for how answers had to be validated.
So when you're letting the student answer the question by putting either 1 1/2 or 1 2/4 into ANY four of eight containers... you end up with a lot of permutations.
1120, to be precise:
- 70 combinations (8 choose 4) of 4 containers, times
- 4 decisions per combination, one per container, whether to use 1 1/2 or 1 2/4 for that container, times
- 4 decisions per combination, one per container, whether to put the fraction or the whole into the first slot
When checking a single slot looks like "fs.circle1numerator=2 & fs.circle1denominator=4"... you can imagine how long this would get. I did the math in my head, and told my supervisor it would take several hours per problem, in a lesson of about 70 problems (each of which was different), assuming I didn't completely destroy the authoring software in the process. I was told, "do it anyway".
So I did, for one problem, just to prove my point. Turned out my estimate of "several hours" turned out to be hopelessly optimistic: it took me the entire work day, all of 7 hours (since I didn't start until after our morning scrum), to write the single if statement to validate these answers. You can actually see the code here (http://pastebin.com/Dh9QrLc7). It's over 92,000 characters long, and takes up 19 sheets of paper when printed.
When I finished, I called my supervisor over to let her see the code working when I put it into the software. She looked at the code (before I pasted it in) and could not believe that was what the code was going to look like. I put it into the tool, and broke the system in the process. Text stopped rendering properly (the line the if statement was on basically looked like a smudge of charcoal on paper), and I couldn't save the problem, or run it.
At this point she finally stopped fighting me on it and said it would be better to assign an engineer to come up with a solution rather than have me waste two months working on a single lesson. Gee, no shit, I could have told you that this morni--oh, wait. I DID.
Fast forward a month, we finally get the fix from the engineers.
Know what that if statement looks like now? This: If: fs.containerFillSet===(3/2,3/2,3/2,3/2) then "Correct"
(It's 99.96% smaller than the original version, by the way - and fixing those lessons to use that took all of an hour.)
tl;dr: People in charge rarely know what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to actual development/putting-things-together work, especially time involved. Unfortunately, words alone will not get that through to them - you'll still have to waste hours and hours of your time just to prove that their expectations are unreasonable.
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CCP Zulu now confimed as leaving as well.
Is it just me, or are a lot of the long-term high-profile veterans fleeing? :|
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Rational Guess- Career path was a dead end at CCP.
Irrational Guess- Someone plans to implement something in Eve in a future expansion and the vets are running for the hills before the company crashes and burns.
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Irrational Guess- Someone plans to implement something in Eve in a future expansion and the vets are running for the hills before the company crashes and burns.
Coming in 2015:
EVE: World of Darkness
Two universes merge, making EVE more Grimdark (tm) than EVEr!
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Irrational Guess- Someone plans to implement something in Eve in a future expansion and the vets are running for the hills before the company crashes and burns.
Coming in 2015:
EVE: World of Darkness
Two universes merge, making EVE more Grimdark (tm) than EVEr!
So...space lesbian vampires will truly be a thing???
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Irrational Guess- Someone plans to implement something in Eve in a future expansion and the vets are running for the hills before the company crashes and burns.
Coming in 2015:
EVE: World of Darkness
Two universes merge, making EVE more Grimdark (tm) than EVEr!
So...space lesbian vampires will truly be a thing???
They aren't already?
I could've sworn...
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Rational Guess - they will have worked out the musical chairs caused by Soundwaves departure about a month ago. Zulu may simply not have had the seat he wanted when the music stopped.
This may well hae persuaded him to seek greener pastures,
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Seems Zulu is also going to Riot.
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Seems Zulu is also going to Riot.
Good. He can sell $1000 pants skins there.
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It's so funny seeing all the... hell, I don't even know what to call it... let's just go with angst, on the Eve GD forums about Soundwave's and Zulu's departures. I remember a while back when Zulu (then known as Zulupark) decided to revamp carriers and all the accusations of incompetence, questioning of intelligence and unsubbing threats from the bittervets that came as a result. I also recall a lot of those same people complaining that Soundwave, an ex-Goon, was biased and went out of his way to tilt the game in favor the Goonies.
It's kind of like a mafia hit man showing up at his victim's funeral and crying while he tells stories about what a great guy the deceased was. :roll:
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Yeah well, I attribute the travesty known as 'Incarna' to both Soundwave and Zulu, so I can not say that I am very sad to see them move on.
Still, you know the evil you got.
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Yeah well, I attribute the travesty known as 'Incarna' to both Soundwave and Zulu, so I can not say that I am very sad to see them move on.
Still, you know the evil you got.
Zulu was the lead designer on that one.
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So...space lesbian vampires will truly be a thing???
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWILhrSzw5o
It's all.... part of the plan
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So...space lesbian vampires will truly be a thing???
If you can dream it, you can be it.
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On a slightly more serious note, I have been waiting for White Wolf and company to get around with doing their mmo for a very long time now. The first Vampire game came packaged with tools to create and essentially run your own game, though there were some glitches.
The second video game was well done from what I recall and everything seemed ready for their next one. At that time, they were looking to do a Werewolf game...the initial ideas seemed to indicate that it would be a first-person shooter style...that continued to go nowhere with announcements of failed attempts by different dev teams to realize the vision.
Somewhere, in all of that, there had been hints of a possible 'multiplayer' attempt based off of the second Vampire game, then that died...
Somewhere in all of this, I did see stuff about EVE; the thing I thought was neat was White Wolf originally seemed poised to do both a table-top version of the game to go inline with the online game...guess that fell through though they did release a sci-fi game that some people claimed was a tie-in...it wasn't.
Anyway, long ramble short. I'm not holding out for a Vampire MMO any time soon. I would love to see one, but I think it'll be a hard sell to get a properly adult themed MMO out without having to scale some of the themes back which may or may not work. I could keep going on why I think a Vampire MMO won't do well, but I do like to be somewhat hopeful.
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Somewhere in all of this, I did see stuff about EVE; the thing I thought was neat was White Wolf originally seemed poised to do both a table-top version of the game to go inline with the online game...guess that fell through though they did release a sci-fi game that some people claimed was a tie-in...it wasn't.
Yeah, White Wolf told CCP it was impossible for what they wanted to do, and the White Wolf people always seemed VERY annoyed when they were presenting at Fanfests.
Basically, in publishing you need to look years in advance; CCP couldn't look six months. Almost verbatim, this is what was said at a fanfest. Tony Gonzales also wanted to create his "EVE Bible" first, the all-encompassing "THIS IS EVE" sourcebook for developers and writers of the EVE universe to look to.
From what I understand, when the tabletop game idea died, Tony handed the EVE Bible project to Mercury and the project slowly died. That's just based on supposition and the timetable I saw.
:psyccp:
Anyway, long ramble short. I'm not holding out for a Vampire MMO any time soon. I would love to see one, but I think it'll be a hard sell to get a properly adult themed MMO out without having to scale some of the themes back which may or may not work. I could keep going on why I think a Vampire MMO won't do well, but I do like to be somewhat hopeful.
I'll believe it when I see multiple avatars, player controlled, walking around in the cityscape they're designing. Water running down walls is nice, but I'm not going to stare at a wall for hours on end.
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Yes, well aside from the graphical interface, I'm more concerned about what type of World of Darkness it will be. Will it be gothic horror-ery enough and mature enough to be true to the vision, or is it going to lean more towards a WoD painted with sparkles in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience?
To me, I think the success of a vampire mmo would really be more in line with a single player with very strong multiplayer tools and support. The World of Darkness, as much as I love the setting (more so the new one), it is a niche setting and will already be targeting a smaller demographics of players. Sure, there might be an influx of players bored with WoW or whatever, but they won't stay. The fans of the setting are going to be a small cross-section and to try to market it as a full mmo might be a disservice? But that's my thoughts.