f13.net

I've been informed that Gordon Walton, aka Tyrant, who was studio manager of SOE Austin (working on SWG as well as other projects, I believe), has left Sony Online and is looking for work on a new MMOG project.  There hasn't been an official statement from Sony on this yet.  The departure seems rather sudden to me, but Gordon is always looking to pursue opportunities on the cutting edge, so I'm sure he'll land on his feet again soon, just like he did after he left EA for SOE.

Bruce

Probably not a huge surprise.  Several other members who were reported to be on his team (and whose names escape me) had been moved to projects like SWG.  With EQ2's less-than-stellar performance in the market, and rumors that SWG is bleeding subs again SOE has got to be more concerned with retaining their current customers than they are with releasing yet another game.

That's a shame. Tyrant was the best thing that ever happened to UO. He probably would have done a great job improving SWG too.

Bring him back to UO and turn him loose on scripters!   :-D

Or give him a shotgun and let him take that horse out of its misery.

I'll ask him tomorrow at GDC what his plans are. :)

Bruce

Are you serious?  I remember him starting a macro witch hunt, while his game still had fucked up advancement mechanics that required macroing at the higher skill levels.  He was also on board during the whole wasted development period where they did all the newbie enhancements(and added all sorts of [Young] exploits) and built a shitty version of UOA into the client.

Oh, should I even mention Trammel?

Or you can go die of syphilis.   :-D


Enhancing the UI and newbie experience?  Wasted development!  That time should have been spent on whatever PVP tweak was being ranted about on the boards that day!


Yeah.  Given the massive success of open-PVP in the days since then, this was clearly a mistake.   :roll:

Windup, you are an enigma to me. Excluding Raph, you are probably the most rabid advocate of virtual world mechanics around here. Yet, you have more disdain for open pvp than almost everyone else (Especially confusing considering that you have no qualms with "message board pvp" and being the all around obnoxious turd that we've come to love or hate....Though I'm guessing there's probably more hate than love).

Hey, I hate open PvP too -- in a MMORPG, that is.  Heck, I'm not really a big advocate of *closed* PvP in a MMORPG, either, because it just takes away time, attention, and resources from the PvE and "virtual world" aspects.

Now, if your game is designed solely for PvP -- WW2OL, PlanetSide, MtG:O -- then I'm all for it.

Bruce

I'm Mr. Virtual World and if I weren't such a bitter old man, I'd resub to Star Wars. It was the best example of such a thing thus far. And after looking through MMORPG release lists for the next 2 years, it looks as though there aren't going to be very many virtual worlds worth putzing around with any time soon. That makes me sad. Quite possibly sad enough to kill. And then blame Jack Thomson for my actions.

I like games designed solely for competition as well, but they're on the flipside of things. By going that route, they cease to be virtual worlds.

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

You know... following Arnold's post here I had made a reply that basically stated that Trammel should be filtered on this site because invoking it never turns out well. Then I decided not to hit post because I thought that MAYBE PVE vs PVP wouldn't become the focal point of the thread. I was wrong, and I appolagize. I should have known better.

Any thread with Arnold and WUA in it will eventually become about PvP vs PvE.

Since no-one else is bothering being relevant :

SWG sucks.

Thanks.

And this is why I haven't bothered with being "relevant"  :roll:

Back on topic, is anyone surprised Tyrant left? I think a relevant news item would be "Good designer with a mind of his own stays with borging fuckfaced conglomerate SOE who saps all the life out of good games in the name of repetitive timesinks that lengthen subscriptions." Just post that weekly as long as Calantus and Raph are still there.

As for the virtual world/open PVP discussion, virtual worlds are full of the same drudgeries that play games to escape from. SWG may be the best virtual world, but it sounds to me like the actual play isn't fun. Until virtual worlds are sold not as games but as "you pay to be someone's social experiement," I'll take the games plzkthx.

I agree that virtual worlds to date have been that way.  But I'm optimistic.  I think it's possible to make a virtual world that's fun and engaging, but possibly not mass-marketable.  I personally find the idea of virtual worlds incredibly appealing.

However, the current set of designers is most of the problem.  Raph is a typical example:  his ideas just don't work well and refuse to acknowledge screwed-up human behavior in the real world.  He is also completely uninterested in changing his views in spite of what people who actually play his games say, and gets to push ahead with his designs because his previous games have made money.  A profitable game doesn't equal a good game, but try getting a suit to understand that.  This current crop of developer is going to have to exit the stage, I think, before decent virtual worlds begin to emerge.

Honestly, I'm not sure where else the MMOG genre can go if not in a virtual world direction.  More combat with the usual melange of casual and hardcore gamers, albeit with a different milieu or graphic tileset, is losing steam (at least for me).

That's because I don't want a "true" virtual world.  A genuinely unrestricted gameworld isn't going to give birth to fledgling virtual civlizations, it's going to descend into Lord of the Flies madness until most of the players either get fed up, or just plain run out of victims.  Anyone paying attention should have realized this years ago.

Me, all I want is a little bit more "world" sprinkled onto my game.  Just because you're not allowing free-for-all ganking doesn't mean you have to make the game totally linear.  There can be a happy medium between just riding the hamster-wheel, and having your hamster-wheel kicked over by a kill-crazed Rasix in an antler-hat.  Give me multiple paths of advancement, quests that can be completed in more than one way, visual fluff to define my character, and a faction system with a little depth to it for starters.

I don't want a world so realistic that I get mugged and left in a gutter on the way to virtual work, but I do want a world that notices things I do and reacts in some fashion.  Is this too much to ask?


Yeah, but when they flame me, I don't have to spend fifteen minutes trying to get my corpse back.   :-D

Virtual worlds will never be mass market. Ever. Because normal, non-OCD people don't play games to play a virtual simulation of the drudgery that is their lives. They want to be entertained, and most don't care to create their own entertainment.

Now games with some worldliness to them, that's certainly possible as a mass market vehicle.

As for this:


There's the problem with the virtual world. A profitable game IS a good game to the people whose money is needed to make the games we want. Turning a virtual world into a profit center requires more time, patience and effort than money people have shown themself willing to exert.

You also need accountability and personal responsibility for a vibrant virtual world: to date, the USA just ain't so good with that in much of any department. That's really why I gave up on the 'mmorpg dream' I had in 1996, human nature has killed it, permanently. Barring a sudden outbreak in responsibility and maturity, naturally. Which I'm sure will happen the day after next.

True, virtual worlds will never be mass market.  But I still think it's possible to create virtual worlds that appeal to "normal, non-OCD" people.  We've just not explored it enough.  Not enough people have worked on the problem long enough to call it a deadend.  There've been only a handful of games that even tried, and innovative, mainline development on them dropped off after they became cashcows (hi, UO).  Although I certainly found much of UO to be drudgery after a while, I still don't think the dream is dead!  But I admit to being an optimist.

However, current MMO developers are showing signs of becoming (1) too afraid of attempting development on virtual worlds (or games with more worldliness),  or (2) too cynical with the very concept.  That's why I think we'll need big turnover to really see any progress.  What we have now is Attack of the EQ Clones.


That's what we've settled for lo these many years, though there's been a decrease in the worldliness in them with each major title.  Heck, I surprised myself with how much I liked City of Heroes, and that's probably the most nonvirtual world of the current MMO's.  But in the end that kind of game experience only takes me so far.  I want my fishing, mining, blacksmithing, fletching, ad nauseum.  I just don't want it to take me thousands of whack-a-mole clicks or generally suck in other ways.

My mention of Trammel wasn't specifically about PvP.  It was more about how Tyrant was around when the dev team decided to radically change what UO was all about.  And that was for the worse, IMO.

Oh, I forgot another stinger... TSO.

It wasn't a go at you, was just a comment on what that word does here. Looks like the thread has survived the initial assault though.

Hey, when City of Villains hits, are you going to select villain at character creation?  Or will actions in-game brand you either villain or hero?  Because that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Probably.  From what I understand, it will operate somewhat like DAOC.  Heros will be in heroland, killing bad guys, and villains will be in villain land killing good guys.  You can be a villain and never have to face another, living, player.

What's PvP?

You start as a villain in another city altogether, completely segregated from other player heroes. If you want to, you can choose to never face off against another player as a hero. You CHOOSE when you can get decimated by another player. There is also an indication that heroes may complete a quest to make themselves into a villain, at which point they get banished to the villain city.

In order for actions in-game to brand you as a villain in a non-structured way (i.e. without a specific quest), you would have to have the ability to negatively affect another player without his consent. Avoiding that sort of thing is why Trammel was born. You can't have it both ways.

Or, to put it succintly with one of my laws of Internet Gaming: "We can't have nice things."

So?  Add lots of "good" and "evil" quests that affect an overall reputation rating, and have that rating dictate how the world reacts to the character in certain regards.  Plenty of single-player games do this.


I don't want a virtual world, I just want MMO Morrowind instead of MMO Diablo.

Well, it had to happen eventually. WUA finally said something I agree with  :-P

MMO Morrowind would be hella boring without a ton of work. MMO Diablo still hasn't been done right.

Is the consensus that you can't?  I think that the problem is balancing open pvp is just too difficult for the current crop of devs.  At least I sure hope thats the problem.

Not if you could kill other players!  :-D

Playing Morrowind is the video game equivilent of playing a Stanley Kubrick movie. Lots to do for a very short time. Then nothing for 1/3 of the movie. Sure, it's art. But it's extremely snobby art.

Depends on the PvE focus. In a quest-driven game like WoW for instance, PvP only means it takes twice as long to do the "real" game there. But in a whack-a-rat game (like 99% of the Asian entrees in the genre), it fits better since ytou're basking things for fun anyway.

PvP still belongs in games designed around it, not games with a non-PvP focus as well.

We already have that. It's called EQ1. There's an overarching story that is hidden so well, only 1% of the players ever have the perseverence to see it. There's tons of mobs you can bash over and over again to level up. There's quests everywhere, many of which have nothing to do with each other. There are long travel times full of nothing in between them (or there used to be before the Nexus and POK).

The only thing I know of that Morrowind had that EQ didn't was thieving.

It shouldn't be too much to ask.  I also want choices and uniqueness, not to follow the same path everyone else has to get the same shiney item everyone else has.  Throw some CoH character creation into an AC1 type of skill progression (no skill trees), in a world more like Mythica was going to be where quests could be completed in different ways to get to the shiney (not just one where you do x and get y).  Add to it other ways to advance in MMO's besides just killing crap (why not advance by crafting or by solving a puzzle - at least try some of these types of quests) and at least some persistance where what you do has some small impact on the "world".  That is the game I would love to play someday!

No word on Gordon yet, but this just popped up on the Dev Tracker...

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Announcements&message.id=492#M492

JustG wrote:

We would like to announce that Jon "Calandryll" Hanna has left our team and is moving back to the east coast to be closer to his family.  As a result of Jon’s departure Diane "Tiggs" Migliaccio has assumed the role of Director of Community Relations for Star Wars Galaxies.  We wish Jon well and congratulate Tiggs on her new role!

I think Tiggs threatened to ban me once. Maybe I'm just getting her confused with someone else. I liked Calandryll. This is sad.

Tiggs has probably stepped into what is most likely a bigger shitstorm than the WoW community manager position. Best of luck, you'll need it.

Should I say something I know about Gordon here? I don't know. Maybe I should just make threatening faces to the devs so that they step up to the plate.

Damn, Jonathan Hanna too?  Although they give a "family" excuse, I can't help but wonder if it's not people fleeing a sinking ship.

Strange they'd still not mention Gordon's departure, though.

Bruce

It's not people fleeing a sinking ship.


No, it's not strange.

Thank you, John Smedley.

Bruce

Look, jackass. Sony has enough money to simply not let any of it's ships sink. Particularly SOE given they're probably the only qualified people in the company that can run those MMORPGs. Also, it's not strange Gordon wasn't mentioned, simply because maybe it was a terrible split. Maybe no one wants to mention it. Bruce, if someone wanted to tell you, they would have.

SOE posted at least 15 job openings on March 9th. Two positions they are promoting on the Planetside login are Designer for Planetside and Community Manager for Planetside and EQOA.

Er, yeah, someone did tell me, so I guess they wanted to tell me.

Usually even in a terrible split, when the person is visible in the community and has a high position, it gets announced.  Not the details, of course; just that the person is no longer with the company if nothing else.

"Ships sinking" is a metaphor, and shouldn't be taken to literally.  Of course I don't think SWG is going to close down imminently.  However, I do think this is a sign that it's on the decline and good people aren't willing to or aren't being allowed to try to make it better.

Bruce

Didn't both of them just get put on the SWG team?

Yes, they did.  Late last year I believe.

Bruce

Then I think we can officially measure the length of time a decent man will put up with being shackled to an albatross.

I've spoken to Calandryll and I guess we're the first to have the news.

He's the director of Community Relations at Turbine. F13.net will have constant contact with Turbine Entertainment now.

They are powered by fans you know.

That was terrible.

* dm^O_o was kicked by Boogaleeboo (Yeah, it's hard to have constant contact with Turbine)
* dm^O_o has joined #hate

Just can't stay away, can you?

Just give me a chance to get situated here. Between the move, getting to know all of the projects, and learning to drive in the snow again, I've got a lot on my plate. :)

The problem isn't the devs, it's the players. See my inner asshole post about open pvp

I am jealous, I want snow!

NO SNOW!  No more snow, please God, no more snow....

You will, of course, give us all the free betas on Dungeons and Dragons Online that you can. The power of Christ compels you.

Give me the Wand of Orcus now, please.

I kinda figured I had no choice in that matter. :)

Hmmm....seems like a big risk giving people here a free beta...

If even cynical, jaded  bastards like us like your game, then it should probably do well.

If it's a bomb, well....Negative reviews from a visible site are never good.

Regardless...

Yes Please, I'll take a free DDO Beta Pass....and also a MEO pass as well.

I'll test anything for a while, and I'll become a glowing fanboi if I like it. If I hate it, I'll spew piss and vinegar.

As for Haemish, if his reviews are indications he wants a sign pointing to the fun. Please add this to the game.

And just so we don't forget our past, right next to the sign for fun, put a sign that says "Monsters" on it with a big arrow. Because one can never have enough patronizing signage in an MMOG.  :evil:

If you take Haemish's good advice, you may as well rename it, "The Fable of Horizons".

I hope you're writing all this down.

Well I am not promising anything. Besides, that's what NDAs are for!

Seriously, reviews will come eventually no matter what. Personally, I'd rather hear from the cynics than the fanboys anyway.

I only charge $5 for emails saying that your game sucks.

Good luck in your new place, Cal. Glad you are working on something that still has a chance to not suck.

I'm far more interested in DDO than MEO, myself, but I'd certainly like to try them both out. :)

Bruce

Oddly I have little interest in MEO myself. DDO I'd give a shot. Well..MEO if it was free, who am I kidding?