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Gaming Industry Innovators CCP and White Wolf to Merge
Combined company to deliver next-generation gaming products online and offline
 
Reykjavik, Iceland and Atlanta, GA, USA – November 11, 2006 - CCP hf. and White Wolf Publishing, Inc. today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement to merge. The creators of the single largest persistent online role-playing world and the world's second-largest developer of offline role-playing, strategy and collectable card games will create the industry's largest independent Virtual World developer. CCP is the publisher and developer of EVE Online, the world's largest virtual gaming universe. White Wolf is the creator of some of the world's most recognized role-playing titles including: World of Darkness (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage) and Exalted. The combined company will introduce new online and offline gaming products across the science-fiction, horror, and fantasy genres.

The merged company will enable CCP to integrate White Wolf's leading expertise in offline gaming development to enhance and create physical products for its MMOG, EVE Online. Products to be introduced in 2007 will include strategy guides, enhanced collectable card games, role-playing systems, and novels all based on EVE Online. White Wolf will leverage CCP's industry-leading technologies to bring its offline role-playing titles online. Conceptualization and early development has begun to bring White Wolf's World of Darkness, one of the world's strongest gaming properties, into the online world.

"White Wolf possesses the RPG industry's leading offline gaming talent and some of the most recognizable roleplaying properties in the world," said Hilmar Petursson, CCP's Chief Executive Officer. " Virtual worlds are a new form of entertainment, separate from traditional computer games. By combining forces, we will create a company unsurpassed in quality, innovation, and scope which will keep us at the forefront of this emerging trend."

The combined company will continue to operate under their respective names. White Wolf will be operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CCP. Hilmar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer of CCP, will be CEO of the combined company. Mike Tinney, President of White Wolf, will continue as President of the independent subsidiary. Further, White Wolf will continue development and enhancement of their entire portfolio of gaming products.

"CCP brings industry-leading technical expertise and online game development experience to us," said Mike Tinney, White Wolf's President. "Together, we will create the industry's most innovative games leveraging both online and offline systems."

White Wolf will leverage CCP's industry-leading technologies to bring its offline role-playing titles online. Conceptualization and early development has begun to bring White Wolf's World of Darkness, one of the world's strongest gaming properties, into the online world.

Execpt their style of games are completely alien to each other.

There it is.

Ok how?

Ok how?

It would take a monstrous leap of faith to believe that CCP has it in them to make something other than Eve. It would take an even bigger leap of faith to believe White Wolf has any clue what they're doing. White Wolf's games are most likely going to be shoehorned into a diku setting - which is to be expected. But does CCP have the ability to make a competant diku game?

Yea, at this point it may not seem hard to make a Diku game with EQ and WoW behind us - just trace the lines. But then, we also see how many crash and burn. Unless CCP is launching vampires into a space, I just don't see this meshing well.

While Tazelbain's reasons for saying that may have been different, the point still stands. White Wolf and CCP - at no point - cross into eachothers genres. And I'll admit your question prompted me to check the WW page to see if a brand existed I didn't know about that might have the necessary flexibility to conform to a world constructed (not created) by CCP. It doesn't look that way. CCP is VERY GOOD at one thing. White Wolf is VERY GOOD at another thing. But we're not talking about chocolate and strawberries here. We're talking about chewing tobacco and key lime pie. Two completely different things.

Is the White Wolf fanbase even big enough to warrant an MMOG of any of their properties? I still have questions about D&D, Star Wars, LotRO, or Marvel & DC needing MMOGs. So uhm, consider this my hearty, pre-tech demo "meh."

Eh... and to think that before I started writing this post I thought this could actually turn out to be something cool!

Heh, yeah. You managed to traverse the entire spectrum of hope and doubt with just one post.

All the hopeful things you said had nothing to do with multiplayer though.

quite true. shall we put the stamp of destined to fail on this fodler then?

I would hope there aren't blacksmiths, resource nodes, and swords. The setting is a modern, mostly urban universe. Not fantasy.

Ok, here's....this.

A White Wolf MMOG would need a shitton of content. Like, real content.

Afaik, CCP has no clue how to do that.

Ok, here's....this.

A White Wolf MMOG would need a shitton of content. Like, real content.

Afaik, CCP has no clue how to do that.

In moderation to the well deserved CCP cynicism, I will admit that CCP does at least know how to make really pretty space graphics.

I don't know the extent of white wolf's participation in vampires. Though it plays true. If they had much involvement I would hold out hope. If they had basically a veto not so much. I have to agree I question CCPs ability to come up with an engaging story. I don't question their ability to code a story if its handed to them.

They more or less sponsor and oversee the Camarilla fan club, which organizes and/or oversees a vast number of the Vampire LARPs. They write and publish the Vampire: The Masquerade P&P RPG. It's safe to say their participation in 'vampires' runs pretty deep.

No, it's safe to say that the fact you know anything about Vampire LARPs is damned creepy.

/pointlaughlightningbolt

The stupidest hobby since dancing. Combine the geekiness of DnD with the fruitiness of improv theatre, and you're in the ball park. LARP should be discouraged in all it's forms, though LARPers are as fun to laugh at as those cosplay freaks.

While I may be looking forward to that, I don't wanna play EVE anymore, there's no point.  I'd just started a new character, after a 2 year absence, but it seems pointless now.

So they think their synergy is going to be trading MMO tech/expertise for story writing? Hmm. It's an interesting step, at least.

That said.. Angsty Vampires in Space. :|

White Wolf will be operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CCP.

That happens often. They'll announce it as a "merger" but legally and practically it's an acquisition.

Eve is really a wargame, not a "computer game" and certainly not an RPG. The WW stuff is on the far RP/story driven fringes of the RPG world. I just don't see how you bring those two things together.

I think you people are assuming incorrectly that it's the EVE team that's going to be responsible for creating WW's online game.

Isn't CCP consistent of 5 guys and a crate of vodka in Iceland? I figured the EVE programing team was the entirety of the CCP programing team. I could be wrong, of course.

I wonder if they brought in WW to develop EVE's planet-side RPG aspect. Now that would be very cool if they can tap into WW's gaming system mechanics, translate it to a workable and relatively user-friendly interface. Numtini did speak truely that the story lines in EVE have that deep brooding atmosphere that WW also does well.

Perhaps its as simple as CCP hearing the complaints that its game isn't content-driven enough, and hence, bringing in a highly creative team to work on that aspect is a good decision.

Execpt their style of games are completely alien to each other.

Eve is CCP's own world -- they made it as rich as they wanted to and let players fill in the rest.  Turn to White Wolf and I think the expectations are going to be higher.  It won't be quite the SWG fury, but if you think that Vampo fanbois won't want things just perfect... well that's the danger of taking on franchises I guess.  I doubt CCP has the content ready to cope -- this will be expensive to accomodate if they're going to invest in a building a new MMO.

Why would a World of Darkness need to generate a ton of content? That's completely counter to the entire premise of a "storytelling" game. Eve has succeeded because it lets its players generate their own content, through direct PVP, economic PVP, PVE, etc. To me, CCP is one of the best choices for this type of game, with only Linden Labs being second. I see nothing in what Eve is that makes me think CCP couldn't do the World of Darkness justice. Hell, they've already got the best netcode in the business.

EVE players do not 'generate content'. They fight over digital territory. There is no RPG element whatsoever. To get players to 'storytell', you have to get them off to a good start, and although Eve does try to provide some story arcs upon which one gets enough background to understand the nature of the game, its nowhere near enough to foment any roleplay. That is why the addition of WW makes some sense to me.

Isn't CCP consistent of 5 guys and a crate of vodka in Iceland?

EVE players do not 'generate content'. They fight over digital territory. There is no RPG element whatsoever.

I got tired of reading this about 3/4ths through because even by f13's standards this thread is full of cynicism-for-the-sake-of-being-snarky brand lameass behavior.  CCP deserves a ton of credit, they have the balls to make their own game, stick to what they think is cool and have the players who like it  come to them.  No other company has shown anywhere near that level of stones and competence since the MMOG became an established genre/medium/gametype/moneymaker.

Will this result in a cool game, who fucking knows.  But get the fuck off CCP's back because saying they suck and boohoo I wish Cryptic had the IP is so fucking stupid it makes me want to invent a way to inflict pain via text.

I should perhaps not have used the word 'content', since a more adequate term might be 'content infrastructure'. I'm sure there's an actual technical term within the industry, but what I mean is to have at the very least a framework or stage against which player-driven storytelling content can occur.

Eve is all about content, just not diku-type content.

I don't see the point of this either/or argument between Eve and Diku. Neither one is ideal for even a moderately ideal WW game.

EVE players do not 'generate content'. They fight over digital territory. There is no RPG element whatsoever. To get players to 'storytell', you have to get them off to a good start, and although Eve does try to provide some story arcs upon which one gets enough background to understand the nature of the game, its nowhere near enough to foment any roleplay. That is why the addition of WW makes some sense to me.

The ASCN/BoB war. NOT the war proper. The trash-talking on the forums, the fevered speculations about the movements of covert ops ships, haulers, and fleets and what it means. The fact that non role-players are doing this.

I don't think you know what content even means. You've been playing diku's too long and it has rotted your brain.

Eve has ~4000 player empires fighting each other for control of resources and territory. If your empire comes and invades my space and I have to drive you out that is meaningful content. Players building up space stations to secure territory is meaningful content. Unique player vs player battles are meaningful content.
In Eve you make the content. In Diku the 'content' makes you.

WW has an encyclopedic amount of lore, history, and background that EVE does not. This isn't because CCP sucks or anything; its just not been the focus of EVE. There's nothing wrong with that.

People "roleplay" in Eve more out of a sense of player politics and economics than they do lore. The same case with SB.

You are wrong. We have an expression - talking out of one's ass. It's used when a person is arguing about stuff he knows nothing about, basing his arguments on what he thinks is true. There are a lot of guilds that roleplay the lore of EVE, particularly true for all Amarr and all Minmatar corporations and even alliances. The lore is there. There are people who chose to use it to play the game. It is not as popular, outside the game, as the guys pvping out in 0.0 space, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist in the game.

A game where combat exists but is rarely used in public places because breaking the masquerade could lead to being banished from a city by a prince, or having hunters sent after you. So all the big cool ass vampire fights happen in sewers and rooftops, away from street wandering NPCs.

Mmmm yes, I want the sense of tension between yourself and some jackass in a public bar around human NPCs. The feeling of knowing that using your vampiric powers might get you banished and hunted, but you hate this little bitch so much and know that you have to keep your cool until you find the guy wandering alone in a dark alley. Or maybe you just have a non-vampiric fist fight, or even fire fight, with him. Then, when one of you comes close to dying, you're forced to decide between breaking the masquerade and winning the fight, or sucking up your pride and any penalty associated with death, and just letting your opponent win. Or maybe you kill him and every NPC in the bar so no one is left to accuse you of breaking anything, but you take a hit to your conscience pool~

Ok, here's....this.

A White Wolf MMOG would need a shitton of content. Like, real content.

Afaik, CCP has no clue how to do that.

I think he means all-Amarr as in "we only recruit Amarr characters because we roleplay religious stuff" and the same for Minmatar-only anti-slavery roleplayer corps.

Eh.

Now that would absolutely rule. I'd prefer snap-on or even old school glue and exacto knife plastic models of EVE ships. They could even market EVE paint kits, if they played their cards right. I'd regress to my glorious childhood years of modeling in a heartbeat.

“The core dynamics of being human or vampire haven’t changed, but we’ve certainly been taking inspiration from a lot of recent things,” said Pétursson. ”For example, DayZ and Rust, which have shown us the power of a sandbox when you bring it into a more recognizable context.”

“The creators of those experiences often reference EVE Online as an inspiration for their things. We’re now cross-inspired by what we’re seeing there. How the absence of all these structured game mechanics – by just allowing these natural interactions to happen – that is something we’re definitely incorporating into how we think about World of Darkness.”

A million other vampires running around would make things awkward.

This is never, ever going to happen. Friend of mine in the industry hired one of their UI artists two years ago after CCP laid him off during the last "this game is going strong really we swear ignore these layoffs" thing. UI guy said it's complete vaporware and a disaster.

...

It's a fiasco of tremendous proportions and it should be talked about more.

Dresden Files. Get your faction fighting within each supernatural group (Vampire Courts, Werewolves, Marcone's group in post Ghost Story days)  and then between the groups themselves.

I didn't even realize there was a tabletop RPG for it. I agree it'd be hard to balance just on principal though. Dresden is like the quintessential EQ1-era Wizard glass cannon: big flashy booms and then completely depleted. Until later books, but then so much of that stuff is props-based.

As a Skyrim-style RPG though, it'd rock *

* Assuming all the usual qualifications of "done right", "fun", "high quality"...

This is all pretty much true, but is missing a piece of the bigger picture. That project is basically a welfare program for a handful of CCP's founders who want to live in America. That's it. Period. These folks who are super-high on their own supply - they think they're infallible geniuses, but they have no concrete idea what to do beyond "man, a vampire MMO would be super cool; job done, pass that handle of Jack."

The World of Darkness family table is missing a few fanged faces, but Pétursson was adamant that it’s not a signal of dark (light?) times ahead. Instead, it was a structural team. The game is still evolving rapidly, and a larger team size was simply causing too many bottlenecks.

“What we’ve seen is, increasing focus for teams also comes from the size of the team,” he explained to RPS. “And when you’re still innovating and figuring out how you’re game’s going to work, a bigger team takes longer to do that. So again, the layoffs were more about focus and creating an environment where teams can be successful with their priorities.”

They dont have to innovate shite.  Just copy the EVE model (with a splash of MxO) and be done with it.

They can't get anything done. Look at Walking in Stations. In 2007(!) they showed a tech demo. Four years later they released a single, single-player room with no social interaction (or any functions). With unbelievably bad performance. Now three years later it's still in the same stage. 6+ years of development resulted in less than the Star Citizen hangar. Which didn't stop them from selling a monocle for 70$.

Nothing is ever going to come out of that studio.

As far as I remember, EVE was actually developed by someone else and CCP bought it for a song when the studio went bust. CCP hasn't developed anything worth a shit itself.

I was at Fanfest 2012 when they unveiled that flythrough at the WoD keynote. I asked the guy why it took 6 years to produce a static flythrough with no actors, no collision volumes, no final lighting or whatever. He shrugged and said that making MMOs was hard and that I probably didn't understand just how difficult that stuff was....

How is Dust 514 going anyway? Anyone know?

Not to mention that I had actually worked for two MMOs so yes, I did understand how difficult it was.

Better yet, don't show it at all because anyone with half a brain knows it's horseshit.

I was at Fanfest 2012 [...]

Is this going to be the greatest Vaporware ever?  :awesome_for_real:

I'm puzzled as to why they're not hounded about it a la Duke Nukem. We're at nine years already on this thing.

Num has it right.  As the gen-Xers get older and more responsible, WoD and its ilk (angsty vamp RP) have started to diminish, hence the abortion that is Twilight.  Kinda gets me choked up a bit actually.  #single-tear

Well, on Dust, Gamespot gave it a long review in December and gave it a whopping 4 out of 10

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dust-514-review/1900-6415604/

You can look over the comments section and they range from "Utter meh with shoddy FPS mechanics and the gameplay is crap" to "You have to remember this is a HARDCORE game that REWARDS LONG PLAY and EFFORT and you have to stick with it as it will GET BETTER WITH TIME. Look how better Eve is now that when it STARTED!! CCP FTW!!"

Cant find any info on how many people are actually still playing the thing directly, but according to this http://dustboard.com/global there are 5.4 mill "merceneries." But you can have 3 characters per account so that immediately drops it to 1.4 million players who have ever tried it. How many of those are still playing? Well the graph is confusing but it says that there were a peak of 800 "reborn Mercenaries" yesterday, which I am assuming that 800 players were killed around that time. So, given that there are 16 players a side per match, that means that there were was something around 40 - 60 matches going at their peak yesterday, unless I am misunderstanding the graph at the Dustboard site and my assumptions and maths are way off.

edit: incidentally, with the Dust thing released, does it mean they now actually have some working code that can handle multiple animated characters in one space over the intrawebs? I admit I didn't follow that one beyond the early teasers/trailers.

Worse yet, those numbers are virtually un-moving for months, which implies they've run into a hidden social scaling problem (where in some wierd way, every new player that stays effectively crowds out another player).  Those can be a stone bitch to identify and even harder to fix.

Well, they've opened a Valkyrie Information Portal sub-forum (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=5871) on their main site, so I'm guessing they're busy with that, first.  Also, eve-offline.com tracks Dust daily numbers.

Are you kidding? Twilight is all about vampire wangst, they only need a sparkle shader and it's money hats with the old/new demographics

My perspective is romance fiction, but as far as I can tell, the Vampire thing peaked with Twilight and True Blood and has been on a very steep hill heading down since then. (...)

Would they be aiming at a young-adult paranormal romance audience though? Surely the plan is to round up all the gnarly pen and paper guys with their black leather trenchcoats?

Would they be aiming at a young-adult paranormal romance audience though? Surely the plan is to round up all the gnarly pen and paper guys with their black leather trenchcoats?

CCP Games Halts Development of World of Darkness MMO

CCP Games today announced that they have cancelled the World of Darkness massively multiplayer online (MMO) game project in development in their Atlanta, GA studio.
 
As a result of the change, 56 employees of the Atlanta studio have lost their jobs.  Some team members have been offered roles on other projects inside the company, and CCP has provided severance packages and job placement assistance for those affected.  
 
The remaining team in Atlanta will focus on games in the EVE Universe, which will mark the first time since 2006 that the entirety of CCP will be working on a single universe.
 
CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
 
The decision to end the World of Darkness MMO project is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to make. I have always loved and valued the idea of a sandbox experience set in that universe, and over the years I’ve watched the team passionately strive to make that possible.
 
I would like to give special thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the World of Darkness MMO a reality, especially the team members affected by this decision.  Their considerable contribution to CCP will not be forgotten, and we wish them well.
 
To our current and former employees and fans of World of Darkness, I am truly sorry that we could not deliver the experience that we aspired to make.  We dreamed of a game that would transport you completely into the sweeping fantasy of World of Darkness, but had to admit that our efforts were falling regretfully short.  One day I hope we will make it up to you.
 
Although this was a tough decision that affects our friends and family, uniting the company behind the EVE Universe will put us in a stronger position moving forward, and we are more committed than ever to solidify EVE as the biggest gaming universe in the world.

maybe they can do a kickstarter.

Everything I've ever seen from the WoD or Exalted universe has reinforced the opinion that it is utterly foul shit.  This may have something to do with the horrible people that I know who play those games.

Everything I've ever seen from the WoD or Exalted universe has reinforced the opinion that it is utterly foul shit.  This may have something to do with the horrible people that I know who play those games.

Everything I've ever seen from the WoD or Exalted universe has reinforced the opinion that it is utterly foul shit.  This may have something to do with the horrible people that I know who play those games.

It's too bad CCP will never admit even to themselves that their success with EVE was completely accidental. They still believe that they're talented game developers.

I've seen some calls on their forums to sell the WoD intellectual property, but I'd surmise it's not worth much at this point and they don't want to sell for pennies.

There was another problem. Several members of the WoD development team told the Guardian that this early bump in the road was exacerbated by extreme disorganisation on the part of CCP’s Icelandic management. Very shortly after initial development began, the company started blurring the lines between the World of Darkness and Eve projects.

Repeatedly, staff were shifted over from the former to work on expansion projects for the latter. At times, our sources say, the entire WoD staff was put onto Eve, particularly during the development of 2009 add-on Apocrypha.

Sources report that, over the nine-year period, the game effectively reached alpha – the stage at which all the major features have been implemented - three times, only for each version to be scrapped.

“I tested it myself, on two different occasions out of those three,” says Blood. “With the first playtest, I was amazed at how little of the core game was there – at this point the game had been in development for over half a decade. I mean, there was just nothing, literally nothing, for someone like me, a complete outsider to the WoD IP, to appreciate.

Design meetings were decidedly robust affairs. Lead designers piled into what was known as “The Sweaty Room” and yelled at one another. “It was very alpha-male, whoever shouted longest and hardest would dominate the meetings,” recalls one developer. “This didn't seem to spill out into the rest of the project until later.”

Eventually CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson issued an apology to the players. But even this short appeasement wasn’t what it seemed; according to Blood, Petursson didn’t actually write it.

“He had members of our storyline team – a group responsible for writing in-game content and fiction – put it together,” he says. “He was either so out of touch, so arrogant, or perhaps both, that he couldn’t find the words to say himself. They bailed him out big time.”

As part of our strategy to focus on the EVE Universe, today CCP conducted a restructuring that resulted in the layoff of 49 people in our publishing organization. Though it is hard to say goodbye to our friends and family, this action concludes the process we started several months ago.

What all were they publishing?  I know there's EVE novels, but I can't imagine those comprised 49 non-exec positions.  Even a content, lore and story portion of the website shouldn't require more than 2-4 people.

I think CCP and Funcom both were companies that were willing to execute ideas because they sounded inspiring and interesting.

CCP was founded by a bunch of former UO azz-rape players that wanted to recreate that space, with themselves having all the advantages.

Once again: CCP are a bunch of rotten-shark-eaters who got insanely lucky and also have approximately zero idea why their game does as well as it does.
Monocle, anyone?

Problem is that the game IS getting stale, and they don't seem to know how to fix a number of issues, including the state of 0.0.  They're also revamping the industry, and to me it looks like an NGE type patch for it.  So we'll see.

...killed by a) CCP chronic inability to produce more than a character creator after YEARS of development b) the loud part of the player base that wants 'everything to stay as it is' and which is leads the company by the nose.

I think it's more fair to say that B is a direct result of A. Tons of development resources were thrown at Incarna (for virtually no return), while the part of the game that people were actually playing was left stagnant and buggy.

Indeed, if I could walk around in station at VFK Mittanigrad station, and see people and play hookers and pay blackjack, it would be somewhat entertaining to see who was doing what.

What we go instead was a bad game. If it had good gameplay and was more interesting that spinning your ship, it would be a good thing. That was not what we got.

Not really. It's more like the old game is just really stale and people are losing interest because technology has evolved.  Eve is still the same old game about turning on modules and watching to see if you won a game of rock paper scissors.

And still, there is literally nothing like it. That's why plenty are dreaming about Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous, but from what I've gathered they will still fall short of the ambition and achievements of a 11 years old game.

And with Paradox behind it, I'm sure it'll be mostly working and have DLC released daily.

not realistic but you can always dream...

And with Paradox behind it, I'm sure it'll be mostly working and have DLC released daily.