Job Posting on Gamasutra: Art Director-MMO(Warhammer 40K)

[shiznitz]

I am going to continue the PS derail just to reiterate that the Core Combat expansion killed the game. It made battles harder to find. I don't know why the fucking devs thought they needed to do that just to introduce new weapons. It would have been unprecedented, but PS should have redesigned all base maps every 6 months.

[tazelbain]

Paid Expansions and PvP don't seem go well.  DAoC and Planetside were both failed with expansions.  EvE has never had one correct?  Shadowbane was a joke.  WAR is going to have a serious problem with them.

[Johny Cee]

Paid Expansions and PvP don't seem go well.  DAoC and Planetside were both failed with expansions.  EvE has never had one correct?  Shadowbane was a joke.  WAR is going to have a serious problem with them.

DAoC's first expansion was universally praised.  The items were only marginally better than what you could get otherwise,  and not power inflationary.

ToA was the game killer.  Mostly because it added buggy raid grind for PvP necessities. 

It seemed like Mythic learned it's lessons there.  The other expansions only added horizontal level abilities that could be acquired through regular PvP or through xp grinding,  but were only minor buffs to player power.  They also tended to add a bunch of easily acquired items that helped casuals out.

I'd be really surprised if Mythic tried a ToA version 2 in WAR.

[UnSub]

I think that was the point.

I can think of a couple of MMORTS's (Ballerium, Shattered Galaxy) but it's a pretty underserved genre. Whether this is because RTS games only work well in short bursts or don't work well when up 24 / 7 and your conquest is totally open to being torn apart when you're offline or just because RTS players don't want to pay subs, I don't know.

If I was going to be developing W40K, I'd take a leaf out of G&H's book (one of the few it had) and make it a squad combat RPG - you are the commander of a squad of AI pets who you can upgrade as you progress in rank. This fits the W40K theme while still leaving it open for single players to solo. Of course, G&H's problem here was that having a squad around you made you less likely to team up with someone, so there would be one pitfall that you'd have to get around.

[Venkman]

Paid expansions don't work in general (EQ1, EQ2, WoW, and GW show otherwise) or paid expansions didn't work for those games (which would be correct)?

"PS done right" is not really PS done right. Rather, it's technology catching up to allow for truly epic-scale realtime FPS battles. PS wasn't hugely successful because it was squarely in the middle of a market that didn't exist (RPG players seeking sci-fi lite-FPS, and FPS players seeking boring/static-world lite-RPG with a monthly fee).

I'm hoping Huxley becomes closer to PS being done right, but they're heavily instanced, and I'm still somewhat skeptical about where it'll come out no matter the writeup they had recently in PC Gamer.

[Falwell]

The 40K universe is just a fantastic setting. It basically boils down to what kind of a fanatic are you?

To give you a watermark, the supposed "good guys" are the ones who are absolute religious fanatics who sacrifice tens of thousands of people a day AND an entire planet's natural resources to keep one guy alive. On top of this they're the all time definition of paranoid. If one of the emperors gents even has the slightest suspicion that you might doubt his benevolence or methods, it's a chainsword to the teeth. Add all of this onto xenophobes that shoot anything that isn't human without question.

Yeah, that's the "good guys" and it's all downhill from there.

Granted, I haven't been in the 40K game for some years now, but I've yet to find a more interesting gaming universe. It's brutal, gritty, grand of scale, well defined and has a written history more fleshed out than some countries.

Will this translate into a good MMO? Good fucking luck with that. Maybe if it's in the oven for say... 15 years and has a budget roughly that of the pentagon.

[eldaec]

If I were doing this, I'd give everyone a single 40k unit, typically half a dozen guys.

Have them do instanced missions, effectively a real time version of Laser Squad/Rebelstar/Space Hulk.

Group up with other players to do bigger missions with multiple units.

That, and have a number of RvR battlegrounds (real, daoc style battlegrounds, not that GW/WoW shit) for pvp content.


The space marine concept only really falls down when you put your marine outside his unit in the middle of a forest hunting boars to level up. If the game is set up so that you go into a combat zones on a clear mission with clear orders, you can still build the game around the IP.

[eldaec]

DAoC's first expansion was universally praised. 

Daoc's first expansion added fishmidgets to the supposedly 'human only' realm, and that was reason enough to hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

But that isn't really what you were talking about, and yeah, what you said was right.

[tazelbain]

Paid expansions don't work in general (EQ1, EQ2, WoW, and GW show otherwise) or paid expansions didn't work for those games (which would be correct)?

"Paid Expansions and PvP don't seem go well together."  is what I meant.  EQ1, EQ2, and WoW had pure PvE expansions. As for GW, the expansions were a mixed bag, pvp barely got anything.  Class/Skills were good as usual, a little mudflation, not too bad.  But very little in the way of content.  The latest expansion doesn't have any PvP content, so A.net seems to agree.