Anonymous Mythic employee dishes dirt on WAR and SWTOR

[Paelos]

When do we get an "F13Louse" exposing the sordid truth behind the F13 Server drive?

We all know that money keeps Schild in ramen!

[Draegan]

WAR bashing is one of my favorite past-times.

[Reg]

You guys are just upset because there was no dancing.

[Lantyssa]

Jeff is totally banging Kate.

[Lakov_Sanite]

This whole debacle...it just keeps on giving. 

[trias_e]

I've got wow, I like it but I'm ready for something different. I just want that something different to have the same level of care put into wow.

You know people keep saying this but then don't buy the games that come out.

Bullshit.  They buy the games, the games just suck.  Warhammer and AoC sold 1 million and 800k copies at release IIRC.  That's a lot of fucking copies for bad fucking games.

[Modern Angel]

The reply by that Jeff dude was absurd because of the aforementioned lack of introspection. Paul Barnett is awesome, WAR was awesome, everything was awesome, up is down, WAR is a good game.

[LC]

How do games that are complete shit keep winning awards at these conventions/shows?

[patience]

Jeff is totally banging Kate.

[Paelos]

I bought WAR. I was fully prepared to dump WoW and never look back. The entire freaking guild moved over and gave it a whirl.

And then it sucked ass. I didn't even hang around to let them bill me beyond the first month. It just missed the boat on so many areas that people have mentioned that there was no point in hanging around for the fun. Then, WoW killed the fattened calf after it waited for all it's prodigal sons to come back through the gates.

[waffel]

Jeff is an idiot. He fell victim to the main point of internet trolling; post an emotional response.

Honestly, MTV needs to start looking past Jersey Shore and maybe think about setting up cameras on a flat full of MMO devs.

[patience]

"Real World Dev House".

Has the right ring to its name.

[tmp]

Innovation? SWTOR puts voice acting in a blatant WoW-diku clone. That's it.
 

Not really -- there's objections to more of their planned features that ain't in WoW in this very thread.

Anyway, back to watching the trainwreck burn in slow-mo as the gasoline tanks keep blowing up one by one.

[tmp]

Jeff is totally banging Kate.

She’s not “Paul’s Girlfriend”. That’s not her job title. She may have that as a perk, but she was brought over from Games Workshop and is one of the most brilliant game designers I know (and I know a LOT of them due to working in this industry). She’s not some popsie who slid in to a sweet job, she’s fucking brilliant. She has a firm grasp on what it takes to work on a licensed product and keep (..) from pulling the aforesaid license. I’m offended at the insinuations regarding her because she’s actually really cool. EA Mythic is lucky to have her.

Maybe he's just entertaining the possibility; regardless, it seems to be on his mind a lot.

[Arthur_Parker]

I checked the Jeff guy out earlier, from one of his sites.

"I particularly liked the contrast you drew between the three games, which makes a lot of sense."

Yeah, I totally cannot claim that as my own. I completely paraphrased Kate Flack who aside from being one of the Primary Devs for Dark Heresy is a really cool lady.

[UnSub]

Paul Barnett's online games company (called Online Games Company) where Kate Flack also worked.

Because I was curious and would never have known those names if Jeff Preston hadn't felt the need to vent.

[Morfiend]

 

[sam, an eggplant]

WAR didn't fail due to its dark gritty setting, whether that captured the warhammer spirit or not. It didn't fail because it lacked dancing, and wouldn't have succeeded with dancing. Baking bread does not make or break a game. Design does.

Edit: Someone needs to invert the colors on that and draw ipod headphones on him.

[Morfiend]

WAR didn't fail due to its dark gritty setting, whether that captured the warhammer spirit or not. It didn't fail because it lacked dancing, and wouldn't have succeeded with dancing. Baking bread does not make or break a game. Design does.

And bugs. Massive, play crippling bugs. Oh yeah, and upping exp needed to level by 40% the day before release didnt help. I mean, no one would ever have thought that completely changing the exp curve that all the beta content testing was based on would have any negative effect, would they?

[Soln]

awesome troll is awesome

[sam, an eggplant]

If the gameplay is initially fun and (more importantly) addictive, you can stick hot pokers up your players' peckers and they won't care. MMO players welcome abuse as long as they feel they're progressing/achieving/pwning nubs. Bugs are a problem, because they stop you from playing, but really it all comes down to content quality, quantity, and most importantly design.

[patience]

RPS offers an amusing spin on all this.

[kildorn]

If the gameplay is initially fun and (more importantly) addictive, you can stick hot pokers up your players' peckers and they won't care. MMO players welcome abuse as long as they feel they're progressing/achieving/pwning nubs. Bugs are a problem, because they stop you from playing, but really it all comes down to content quality, quantity, and most importantly design.

WAR was pretty universally considered fun for tier 1. And then you hit the 11th hour XP redesign (grindy games DO NOT WORK IN THE US MARKET ANYMORE, we don't put up with that shit, sell it in asia) which completely fucked progression and left giant empty swaths of barren questless grind. And the inexplicable radiance bullshit or whatever it was called where they created an item grind at the end if you wanted to even touch pve content..

They had a FUN class system. Warrior Priests are the gold fucking standard for how melee healers should feel to play. They just completely fucked up every single other aspect of the game. And acted like none of the designers had ever played DAOC since they made every mistake in realm vs realm that DAOC made, again.

[Stabs]

Innovation arguments are silly. So many gamers are convinced that what innovation means is pre-Trammel UO or good old EQ half hour boat waits. "Why can't someone be truly innovative and bring out a game that's just like UO was in '98?"

It actually means new. Not necessarily fun, not good, just new.

Yes I do think spending most of your budget on animated quest text is innovative. I'm quite happy to retract that position if someone points out a big budget MMO that did this before.

I also think, to provide a point of comparison, that the most innovative thing to happen in MMOs in the last 5 years was DDO's free-to-play model. It came out of left field. It also worked out well but that's not required for something to be innovative.

Regarding Jeff Preston's comments they read like they were ghost-written by Serek Dmart. I'm still struggling to work out how someone in the industry could write in 2010 that they expect most old school Warhammer miniatures players who haven't bought the MMO yet to opt in once they "discover how good it is". I mean, honestly, did his brain shut down completely by that stage? I loved many aspects of Warhammer Online but it's clearly not poised for a spectacular upwards leap. And even if it were, not to that market sector.

[Stabs]

And another developer gets sucked into the vortex of angst:

http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-response-to-ea-louse.html

NSFW

[Arthur_Parker]

He was the first one to respond, got a lot of publicity out of it too, which I imagine was his intention as he started with "Knowing nothing about the company, game, or people,"

[Arthur_Parker]

http://twitter.com/teampreston/status/27359628878

Ever do something and then wonder if it is the right thing? I may have committed professional suicide last night.

No kidding, you now think that telling people that Jeff Hickman laid off family members might not have been the wisest course of action?

[Paelos]

http://twitter.com/teampreston/status/27359628878

Ever do something and then wonder if it is the right thing? I may have committed professional suicide last night.

No kidding, you now think that telling people that Jeff Hickman laid off family members might not have been the wisest course of action?

His mancrush got in the way of reason.

[LC]

You can tell Jeff and Paul are douchebags by watching their interviews on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=codPNIBFAjQ

[HaemishM]

Wow, what a collection of fucking retards. Jeff Preston takes the fucking cake. When you start at "X Game is not for everyone" you are heading over the fail cliff into the fail ocean.

[Nebu]

You can tell Jeff and Paul are douchebags by watching their interviews on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=codPNIBFAjQ

I guess I'm a glass-is-half-full guy.  I thought it looked like two guys that were excited about their product and were having some fun with it. 

I'd be happy to have this much enthusiasm out of the people working for me.  Even if it was a bit misplaced and nerdy. 

[Murgos]

Yes I do think spending most of your budget on animated quest text is innovative. I'm quite happy to retract that position if someone points out a big budget MMO that did this before.

Actually, if you want to go down this road, EQ2 started down this path and then abandoned it.  When it shipped it had massive amounts of spoken text and came on something stupid like 10 CD's.  Most of the Quest givers in Freeport, Qeynos and the original zones spoke their lines.

It was nice, but no-one cared and it still lost to WoW.

edit:  "According to SOE in October 2004, EverQuest II featured 130 hours of spoken dialog recorded by 1,700 voice actors."

[Arthur_Parker]

DDO did dungeon voice overs as well, I'm sure somebody cared.

[Murgos]

DDO did dungeon voice overs as well, I'm sure somebody cared.

No one cared enough for Sony to think it was worth spending money on after release.

[Ingmar]

The Dungeon Master narration was one of my favorite things about DDO actually. It isn't really the same thing they're doing here, though. Guild Wars campaign mission cut scenes is the closest that any existing MMO has to what they're doing afaik.