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

[Surlyboi]

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.

[schild]

Shows you what I know.

I blamed Jor-El.

[bhodikhan]

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


Oh the love for F13.net!

[CharlieMopps]

Why do people keep blaming SOE?

Man, the internet is full of fucking tin foil.

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.

[Jobu]

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

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."

[Soln]

Once more, like evolution, capitalism works. 

[AcidCat]

Interesting Words

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

[schild]

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

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."

There are no bosses at SOE. Learn to read.

[Lum]

There are no bosses at SOE.

It's an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

[UnSub]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

[Vinadil]

Interesting Words

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

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

This could have something to do with it (lol)

[Ubiq]

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.

[tazelbain]

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

[Mrbloodworth]

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?

[schild]

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

Who cares. Go play Orange box.

[CharlieMopps]

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.

hrm... this reminds me of that Xwing that dude built last week. Rocket Xwing
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.

[WayAbvPar]

There are no bosses at SOE.

It's an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

[Murgos]

hrm... this reminds me of that Xwing that dude built last week. Rocket Xwing
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.

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

[Trippy]

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.

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

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[UnSub]

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

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.

[QforQ]

Where's the beef?(interviews?)

[schild]

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

[Yoru]

Not everything can be as as Vanguard/Sigil.

[HaemishM]

Not everything can be as as Vanguard/Sigil.

If only Vanguard had been as beefless as this game.

[UnSub]

Not everything can be as as Vanguard/Sigil.

If only Vanguard had been as beefless as this game.

But then what would we have to talk about?

[Trippy]

SWG?

[Sky]

SWG?

Hello, thanks for calling SOE support!

[UnSub]

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 and also has an article from one of the now-unemployed-by-PE writers.

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