f13.net

G&H Postponed Indefinitely. Perpetual Riding Doom Train. Darwin Does Standup.

So. Let's break this down easy:

1. Gods & Heroes postponed indefinitely, for being a piece of shit.
2. New company forming immediately to make STO. Future Uncertain.
3. Most of G&H team Getting Shitcanned. Some going to STO.
4. Interviews forthcoming. People are packing their bags now.

Holy shit, I can't wait for the interviews.

So- the team fucked up one game, and are now being moved over to fuck up another one?

No, they already had 2 teams going. Some talent is just being moved over.

Looking forward to the interviews as well, also curious what point five is referring to.

I was poking fun at other sites that had the story and were waiting for a go ahead. Nothing special. Just fucking with people.

Edit: There, edited out 5 to avoid confusion.

10 bucks says Smed buys the POS and throws it on the Station Pass.

Here's the article on Warcry which provides some more indepth insight.

http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/breakingnews/2324-Breaking-News-Perpetual-Acquired-Gods-and-Heroes-Likely-Canceled

Nothing better than some DOOoooM stuff before I jump to bed (3.05am over here).

You left out the link.

Doesn't matter, post has no more insight than mine. It's just longer and padded.

My bad, I thought I posted it :/  Its there now

Guess so. (http://community.godsandheroes.com/)

I just can't imagine doing all that work only to have everything flushed down the toilet.  All those levels, music, sounds, characters and systems gone... holy crap.  Maybe STO will have an extremely large mission where you go back in time :|.

Yup, it's very sad.

Pretty much my thoughts.  I mean, ouch, it was pretty close to release.  Ouch.

Their forums is doing something weird and I can't post in their eulogy thread*. Given the 'indefinite hiatus' status of this game (it's dead, Jim!) I feel strongly tempted to make some comments about my G&H experiences. Ethically I don't feel bound by an NDA to a dead game, but I don't want to have schild edit my post so f13 keeps it dev-safe certification either. If I get a greenlight from a mod, I'll post up some commentary.

However, without the  :nda:, I can say that it now seems pretty obvious why SOE pulled back from G&H and what that meant to the game. It sure wasn't PE willingly breaking free of EEEEvil SOE's grasp, that's for sure.

*Just rechecked - the CM, Binky, has purged all but his replies to the eulogy thread and locked it.

Damn was the game that bad? I mean SOE has Matrix Online and Vanguard as part of the station pass. It seems like such a waste of developer money not to at least do a crappy release and then sell it to SOE for pennies on the dollar to add to their station pass. I mean if SOE will not bail out your crappy game, I can't imagine how bad it really is. I look forward to comments from the beta testers on this one.

PotBS is next, I guess.

Only thing I know about this game is that a friend with an impeccable CS pedigree got offered a job there.  A dream for him, to build an MMO, he took one look at the place and ran like hell.

That is a lot of work to just walk away from. The states that Wish and Imperator were in when cancelled politically-correct-indefinitely-held, those you can walk away from. But G&H seemed a heck of a lot further along, near launch, no? Did they realize the cost for distribution was not going to be defrayed by box sales at all? And this is after they made a very near-angry and pointed clarification about just how much involvement SOE had on the project, probably thinking separately PE from SOE was a good thing.

I don't agree PotBS is next.

Nah, it'll be Warhammer.
No, hang on....

Isnt aoc "still" around ? :)

Try sentences and the spellchecker, newfish.

I keep trying to figure out why in the world it is so hard to release a MMO these days.  People try to say that the market is still young... like it is in an experimental stage where spending Millions of dollars on ideas that don't work is natural.  Maybe I am just naive to the life-cycle of a market, but I have been playing games in this one for almost a decade now, and it just does not "feel" that young anymore.

Is there any other market that mirrors the absolute failures we see in MMOs?  I mean it seems like 80-90% of all projects either die before release or release so poorly that a company like SOE can just pick em up for pennies and even then struggle to make a decent profit on them.  Perhaps I am too Western-thinking and just missing all of the money being made by Eastern games and Browser games.

Most likely the same thing that is hard about any collaborative development. People.

True, but I have to think that someone has managed to get people to collaborate in other venues... and so we are not talking about creating something completely new here.  I am just having a hard time figuring out why skilled people (I assume some of the people making MMOs actually have the skill to work on other types of projects and just Chose an MMO) given a LOT of money (yea I still see 10's of millions as a lot) cannot get through a successful design/production phase.  It seems that there is something inherent in the MMO beast itself that kills the process.

What stands out to me for MMO's is risk, scale, and commitment. It's difficult enough to produce a good video game (see all the shite that's released every year), then add in the scale involved for any MMO worthy of the name and all that investment money represents a lot of risk. Then once the game is released that company is locked in to providing patches, customer service, expansions, server maintenance, etc.

Where in the single-game world if a company makes a stinker it's easy to say "Alright, the game sucks. Let's polish this turd the best we can, sell some boxes, make back some of our sunk costs and move on", it's not possible to do that with an MMO. It doesn't help that Blizzard has set the bar extremely high (which overall is a good thing, IMO)

(Disclaimers: Personal opinions here only, unrelated to SOE.  I haven't even remotely been involved with G&H or Perpetual in any capacity and don't know a thing about their game.  My comments are speaking entirely in generalities.  Dealerships negotiate their own prices.  Beware of falling rock.)

A few observations from past MMOs:

#1: MMOs are still really young.  To a lot of the people working on them, it very much is creating something entirely new.  Compare to movies or single player games, for instance.  It's less of a challenge to staff those types of projects up with people who've worked on them before, in all of the right positions.  Doing the same on a high-budget MMO remains next to impossible. 

I don't mean "key management" or "leads" like you see in studio announcements and press releases all the time.  I mean everyone other than a small number of entry-level folks.  Until you've done it once, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. 

I don't know of a single high-budget MMO that's been staffed with that kind of experience throughout, simply because those people just plain don't exist yet in sufficient numbers.  We're just now at the point where it's starting to become possible to build teams like that.

Just a guess, but I'm betting that you don't hear from the $100m movie set: "Yeah, Bob the Key Grip has done this once before, and he picked out some really sharp guys from a construction site downtown to do the rest.  He'll teach 'em what to do." 

Leading to...

#2: The things that make for a great demo and pitch that get you funding, publishing deals, et al, are a much smaller part of making a great MMO than they are of making any other kind of game, and it's easy to lose sight of that. 

This is painful for MMOs in particular because of the unique (huge) number of critical, non-sexy things that you have to succeed at, where failing at any one of them can entirely sink your game:

- Pipelines
- Tools
- Infrastructure
- Stability   (again, doubling the work - the client and all the servers)
- Scalability
- Stability
- Performance  (optimize both that client and all those server processes)
- Oh, and..Stability

In any development effort that has a finite set of resources ($$$ + time), the more you invest in the flash elements, the less you can invest in the far less sexy parts. (Core files aren't sexy.)

Which, in turn, leads to...

#3: Wild misscoping.  It's a common newbie (and overly-optimistic-veteran) mistake to scope far too optimistically, as the schedules end up based mostly on the flash elements and end user features. 

If a person is new at making one of these (especially noted with people from non-MMO games backgrounds), they tend to be more likely to focus on scoping dev time out with more of an emphasis on the visible features than the budget will end up allowing, and not enough on the critical, non-visible features.  Those, coincidentally, end up taking far longer than anyone ever predicts.

The team who scopes 80% of their time on the visible features and 20% on the rest is going to make a far different game than the one who scopes 25% features, 25% tools/pipelines, and 50% stability/scalability/infrastructure.

If your timeline has some elasticity, you can make up for misscoping by stretching the schedule, and still go on to make a great game.  If you can't, Bad Things happen.


There are plenty more things that go wrong, and from all different angles, but from the production "why can't people seem to get these out the door?" angle, these are the ones that've been the first to jump out at me.

- Scott

I assume in "Infrastructure", you include to be able to run the service. That is something that a ton of studios don't take into account for, or "the publisher will take care of that". Fact of the matter is, unless you are integrating into an existing already-running-service (e.g. Station or NCSoft), this is a big puzzle to solve and not something people think about. It's true that you need a good product regardless, but if you can't even bill people right (and there are many titles out there that can't right now, or at launch), you can't be successful. Not to mention all the e-Commerce elements, alpha/beta management, reporting on player metrics/behavior to continuous tweak the game. Add into CS and Ops tools, the snowball just gets bigger and bigger.

These are all, non-sexy work. The service platform (everything that surronds the game itself) of which the game stands on must be as solid as the game design/code itself. This is not something a single player game needs to think about at all.

And guess what, stability and performance apply there as well. So try quadrupling your work :)

I think another factor is that there is so much good stuff out there at the moment accross all platforms and all genres (not just mmos) the people are overloaded with choice and the reality is that people can invest only so much time sampling and playing what electronic gaming has to offer.

You now have HD consoles and games that look fantastic and cutting edge computer hardware that is starting to blur the line between what is reality and what is rendered.  Games aren't for just geeks and kids anymore and are starting appeal to the mass market with record setting sales for both old an new franchises.

I think WoW introduced the masses to the joys of gaming in general, not just mmo gaming so eventual spill-off from that monster won't necesserily be scooped up soley by other mmos but by other popular genres as well.  So Bob in the next cubicle who you raided with over the last year may just pick up a 360 and Halo 3 so he can frag with you over Live because that is what everyone is talking about at work, and he has seen all the attention it has been getting in the main stream media. I think that part of the success with WoW wasn't just  that  it was a mmo, but it had the social components in place that made it both an ongoing shared expericence and a constant source of chatter around the water cooler.

I used to be of the mind to try every mmo I could, at least for the free month but with Halo 3 and the Orange Box released,   and Mass Effect, GHIII , Jericho and Hellgate London (etc etc etc etc etc) on the horizon  I can't even imagine  at this point investing another minute in a tradtional mmo.

XBox Live, Bungie.net and the new Steam Community  with their stats and social tools are making it fun to network  and game with both  real life and virtual friends and you don't have to be a floppy eared elf to do so or put up with all the exclusivity (sp), and nonsensical time sinks to try to find the fun. It's not even that I am jaded or burnt out on mmos it's just that there is just so much quality choice these days with both single and multiplayer games  I simply don't want to invest the time.

Tabla what?  WAR? Pirates of the Burning Sphincter? meh.  Conan is on my radar though,  only because I have been a big fan of the comics, books and movies for years.  I think if mmo companies are developing games to collect Blizzard's backwash, they really need to rethinktheir strategy.  I think in the next 5 years we will see the failure of many games and perhaps even the shrinking of the tradtional mmo  market (at least those in the  traditonal mmo form).  I think though, the popularity and market  of online capable games  will continue to grow indefinately.

Does anyone else hate that phrase, "indefinite hold". Screw that corporate double-speak. It was cancelled by ether you (PE) or SOE, stop beating around the damn bush.

Why do people keep blaming SOE?

Man, the internet is full of fucking tin foil.

My personal guess is Perpetual came to the hard conclusion that they had too many irons in the fire. They had to ditch one of the projects, and it sure as hell wasn't going to be the one that has a fanatical and large fan base.

I do hope someone else picks up on the squad combat theme though. I was digging where that was going.

The guy who goes out of his way to bash the Wii nonstop doesn't get to talk about other people having bullshit targets for their ire imo.

IMO, I'm in the know on both subjects and have a Wii that's been sitting there and know exactly what it's capable of, not capable of, and what it's doing to the industry.

Meanwhile our boy Jobu is just throwing knives in the dark.

Don't you know it's always Smed's fault, Schild?

I hear in his spare time, he flattens midwestern towns with his SOE tornado machine.

Shows you what I know.

I blamed Jor-El.

"For a great deal more usefully cynical commentary, F13 (as always) has us covered." - Zonk, Slashdot


Oh the love for F13.net!

Hmmm... me thinks you don't understand the anti-SOE ire because you weren't personally screwed by them.
I once heard a comedian say that the last people you want to insult while doing standup are the Obsessive Compulsive... the only time they'll spend away from writing you angry letters will be to check to see if they turned the stove off.
Unfortunately for SOE, that's exactly the kind of people Everquest attracts.

No no no. Basically someone cancelled the game. Either the bosses at Perpetual, or the bosses at SOE. Doesn't really matter. I was mostly bitching about the stupid semantics of "indefinitely put on hold."

Once more, like evolution, capitalism works. 

That was really an insightful post, thanks, I really hadn't thought of the whole process in those terms before.

There are no bosses at SOE. Learn to read.

It's an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

Okay, after 24 hours in respect of the deceased, here are my impressions of G&H, which I make only because the game is dead. I agreed to an NDA during the beta testing of G&H, G&H is over, NDA is over - this is the way I see it. Should those in power disagree, I expect to see this post disappear or be edited.

SUMMARY FOR THOSE WITH ADHD: G&H was mediocre and wouldn't have been able to cut it in the MMO market of 2008.

Earlier someone asked if G&H was really that bad that it deserved cancellation. Here's the thing: it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good either. It was absolutely mediocre; 50th percentile stuff. Sure, it had some nice features and ideas, but nothing outstanding. Execution (when the servers didn't crash) was passable, but 'fun' - the kinds of driving, OMG I want to play this game fun - didn't really live in G&H.

I was in beta for 3 - 4 months, iirc. I only started playing it properly about 2 weeks ago because before then the servers were up and down like <*insert your own Paris Hilton joke here*>. The month I joined in beta had a bug where one of the Soldier's powers - one of that classes normal, everday powers - would crash the entire server (iirc - it might have been two common Soldier powers used in unison). Either way, server goes up, server goes down, damned if I can be bothered to try to play off-peak times where the server might not get reset until the morning. A few weeks ago things appeared to be stable enough to actually run through the game.

Kudos where it it due: the character creation was nice. Not great, but the facial sliders meant your chracter could be facially pretty unique. Two tone colour for hair, a reasonable number of hair styles for male and female. The body model was fixed. Appearance was dictated by the armour / items worn.

Other nice stuff: the god system, where your character picked a god at creation and got some minor face time with that god as well as extra quests and abilities from them. Every class got to pick between 2 gods which were relatively dissimilar. The squad combat system needed work (because AI healers that never, ever heal you are something that might need fixing) and the control of them was limited, but it was a reasonable idea. Of course it meant that no-one ever teamed, because they had their own little army surrounding them and few enemies were hard enough to require more than one player... but it was a nice thought. Every class being a pet class meant that (in theory) devs weren't trying to adjust difficulty levels for both individual players and those who surrounded themselves with pets.

Attack animations were nice, with some enemies able to pick you up, throw you around. It made combat a little more interesting to watch. Actual combat mechanic was still 'run in, autoattack, spam your special abiliies', but the animations were alright.

I played the Gladiator class predominantly, which had the unique weapons of Fighting Gloves and ... Rope. The idea of becoming some sort of uber-rope master who could kill all he surveyed with rope amused me greatly.

The downsides: it was pure PvE where you completed missions / fought enemies to get XP. No PvP planned for launch. No crafting planned for launch. For all the 'it's not a fantasy game', it played a lot like a standard fantasy game - just switching out dragons for sphinxs and making players run around in togas instead of tunics doesn't change this. No imagination or evolution was really on display in G&H.

Prior to the large scale beta, a number of players were part of a longer term beta program that was more focused - this was a good idea. A pseudo-regular tester diary would come out that talked about what was going on and what features were in G&H - another good idea. However, on getting into beta, I found a number of these features cut or missing. The skills system took a massive hit just before I joined beta (that's fine, but devs have to be careful when trumpeting flexible skill advancement system if they are going to cut it and replace it with a more fixed 'tree' system). It was mentioned that every class got a unique starting area by the beta diary - with the characters I played, every one of them started on the same shipwrecked beach. I respect that MMOs change, but I also think leaving outdated information floating around smacks to me of misinformation.

Graphics had an odd plasticine quality to them. It looked odd, falling closer to realistic than cartoonish, but there were certain things I'd look at and would just think looked a bit off.

Maps weren't huge (and the ones I saw contained plenty of restricted areas, so were in reality even smaller) but you had to run everywhere. CoH/V has ruined me on that part of MMOs.

From comments made by the devs, G&H was either content complete at time of cancellation OR was very close to it. Many beta players were surprised by this, since the game still felt incomplete. You fought monsters, leveled up, repeat to max level. That's it. It was suggested that prior to launch the monsters would suddenly get much tougher (or, more likely: their XP per kill would drop) but that wasn't going to really add to the game and make it fun.

So, why was G&H dropped? Purely based on my own suppositions, I think G&H still needed a lot of bug fixing. SOE cut off a supply of money for that fixing process, leaving PE to develop the game themselves. I wouldn't think that Star Trek is a cheap IP to hold onto, and PE sees a lot more money coming from that project than from a Roman Mythology game. Sure, G&H was better than Vangard (according to players of both - I stayed away from that train wreck) but it was much more limited in scope. I doubt all but the hardest core G&H fans would have lasted more than 2 months playing this MMO.

G&H may have been exciting when the project was announced, but the MMO market has passed it by. SOE is likely to be that party to have given up on it (rather than PE walking away from SOE), forcing PE to make a decision to either spend a bit of money in order to get a meager income from it, or save that money and invest it all into STO. Although the hardest of decisions, G&H would have sunk very quickly if released, so canning the project now and maybe coming back to it later (which is unlikely) probably wasn't the dumbest of ideas.

On a side note: this just further confirms to me that you can't try to develop a game and build middleware at the same time. At least one project suffers as a result.

As a clarification, SOE never put money into Gods & Heroes. Ever. Not a dollar. Your suppositions about who pulled out of what are specious. They were responsible for printing boxes, mailing stuff to EBStop and managing the ad campaigns.

Before you cite the whole big flap about the "change of relationship" from few months back, that amounted to internet retards not being able to read English. What happened there is that SOE's "Platform Publishing" logo got removed from the box and the intro movie. No funding deals changed (as there were essentially none), nor did the distribution/marketing deals.

Just another "thanks", I suppose the industry really is younger than I thought... or some combination of youth and small-size still afflicts it.  The movie-making analogy really made sense.

This could have something to do with it (lol) (http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/194/limonf2.jpg)

MMOs are unbelievably hard to build.  As an example, engineering diagrams for MMOs typically include an order of magnitude more systems than those of standalone games.  Before you get into the infrastructure that was previously mentioned.

And this is to make a 'clone'.  Do what G&H was trying to do (effectively building a new squad-based gameplay paradigm) and you increase the complexity even more - improved AI, improved UI to control everyone, improved server infrastructure to handle the additional number of units, improved renderer to draw it all... in many respects, they took on an unbelievably challenging and ambitious project to try to build, but at the same time, technical and gameplay innovation is necessary to compete in a market with a clear market dominator, such as WoW.

How was what G&H doing any more involved than what Guild Wars is doing today with their minions?

Nothing.


So when are we going to make a thread talking about possible impacts on STO development?

Who cares. Go play Orange box.

hrm... this reminds me of that Xwing that dude built last week. Rocket Xwing (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/star-wars/video-the-rocket+powered-x+wings-flightand-death-308288.php)
You're telling me to give them credit for building a rocket powered Xwing... but I can't but think their achievement is eclipsed by what happened on the launch pad... which, in the end, is all anyone will ever remember.

(http://www.killenglish.homestead.com/files/lotf4boys.jpg)

I think the X-Wing did exactly what they planned for it to do on the launch pad.

City of Villains did all of that with Masterminds almost 2 years ago.

You're right - I did oversimplify that bit. I should have said something like "Why did SOE reduce the scope of its relationship with G&H?" instead of using the word 'dropped'.

However, I did believe that SOE put some money into G&H, even if it wasn't a lot. My sources on that could very well be wrong, given the amount of mis-information that went around when the announcement of the relationship change between SOE and G&H went out. Perhaps the change was thought about from the wrong side - that SOE's stepping back meant that PE faced an increased barrier to get G&H launched in another way other than a direct cash investment stream.

What I'll stand by (since I'm never going to see the contract between SOE and PE regarding G&H) is that G&H needed a lot more bug fixing and polishing to be launch ready and they needed a cash stream to do it just to get the game over the line. Instead, they've decided to focus on STO and their middleware instead of launching a mediocre game they claim is almost complete.

There are already plenty of them elsewhere, already filled with nerd rage over some of the STO design decisions.

In reality, it should actually help STO, because they can just focus on getting that done and released (along with that middleware platform or whatever) while also bringing on some more devs they like from G&H. PE can afford to dump G&H and maybe pick it up later on better than they can afford to lose the STO license, since G&H is their IP, whereas most work they would do on an ST MMO would have to be scrapped if they lost the ST IP rights.

Where's the beef?(interviews?)

There doesn't seem to be any beef. Badly designed game they decided to scrap.

Not everything can be as :popcorn: as Vanguard/Sigil.

If only Vanguard had been as beefless as this game.

But then what would we have to talk about?

SWG?

Hello, thanks for calling SOE support!

(http://caffeine.worldmagblog.com/caffeine/archives/stuimages/darth-vader-heidi1.jpg)

G&H apparently generates more interest in death than it ever did in life.

MMORPG.com interviewed senior PE people about the death of G&H (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/187/setView/features/loadFeature/1518) and also has an article from one of the now-unemployed-by-PE writers. (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/loadFeature/1520/gameID/187/page/1)

Nothing earth-shattering in those articles, but they serve as reasonable footnotes to the story.