SOE to Publish Vanguard

[Tale]

Yoru is correct. Anyone remember this?
http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

Brings back memories of trying to log on to Blackrock after launch (I later moved to Proudmoore, which wasn't much different). I saw a 2000 queue, went out for a 90-minute bicycle ride and when I returned, I was still deep in the queue.

And Franz Ferdinand does an awesome cover of that song if you can find it.

[HaemishM]

Not to repeat myself, but fuggit: open betas work if the developers can push out a quality product that basically treats open beta as the marketing exercise it is supposed to be. Who but Blizzard has the ability to pull that off?

ANYONE can pull that off, so long as they deassify their head and don't fucking release it until it's ready. That's really not a hard thing if you have any sort of competence. I mean, no offense to Raph or anyone else out here, but it doesn't take a fucking genius to look at the last betas of Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, Horizons, or Anarchy Online and know that releasing them in the state they did was a bad fucking idea (much less offering some kind of open beta). Yet they did it anyway.

So maybe you're right, maybe only Blizzard has the ability to pull that off. But I don't buy it. It's a cheap fucking excuse and the consumers for MMOG's have put up with it for too long. Open betas are a good thing for consumers because they warn us off of shittastic releases. If developers would grow a clue, they'd hold off on release until an open beta ISN'T a fucking embarrassment.

[Lantyssa]

I agree with the comments about Co...

<Disconnected from Mapserver>

Ah the wonderful mapserver.

I will take credit for finding a bug when loading bind files that were too long which caused a mapserver disconnect shortly afterwards.  Death to disconnects and latency!

(Well, not Latency.  I like my villain.  Lag can go though.)

[Trouble]

Not to repeat myself, but fuggit: open betas work if the developers can push out a quality product that basically treats open beta as the marketing exercise it is supposed to be. Who but Blizzard has the ability to pull that off?

ANYONE can pull that off, so long as they deassify their head and don't fucking release it until it's ready. That's really not a hard thing if you have any sort of competence. I mean, no offense to Raph or anyone else out here, but it doesn't take a fucking genius to look at the last betas of Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, Horizons, or Anarchy Online and know that releasing them in the state they did was a bad fucking idea (much less offering some kind of open beta). Yet they did it anyway.

So maybe you're right, maybe only Blizzard has the ability to pull that off. But I don't buy it. It's a cheap fucking excuse and the consumers for MMOG's have put up with it for too long. Open betas are a good thing for consumers because they warn us off of shittastic releases. If developers would grow a clue, they'd hold off on release until an open beta ISN'T a fucking embarrassment.

The problem here of course is that it's usually not people like Raph in charge of the decision on when to release something. I'm sure he fought tooth and nail for SWG to not be released but in the end when you have the suits at Sony behind the scenes dictating decisions like that, you're bound for a world of pain. The problem is that the people making the decisions don't know enough about the actual market they're selling to and the product they're selling. They make these calculations that delaying X months will result in loss of Y dollars without being able to see the forest for the trees.

[Venkman]

Exactly.

MMORPGs are not driven by one person. They're driven by a cross-functional committee with the resultant redux in collective capacity. And make no mistake about it: nobody sits around and says "we're going to launch the crappiest game the world has ever seen!" No, there's never a point in a project like this when people say "it sucks, we're launching, fuck everyone."

Decisions are cumulative, but always minor in the moment. It's a process an old boss called "death by paper cuts". People sit in a room, read the data, spin the data, try and interpret what everyone else is saying, and make a decision about one minor thing the impact of which isn't felt for a year. And by the time the damage is felt, there's a good chance it's being felt by some future team that wasn't there when the original decision was made.

If developers would grow a clue, they'd hold off on release until an open beta ISN'T a fucking embarrassment.

Yea yea, that's got about the as much real-world value as "make it fun goddammit!" The goals are never in question. It's the process that fucks things up.

[Morat20]

I can't imagine the sheer amount of books, lectures, papers and post-mortems done on the software design process and it's associated flaws, problems, pitfalls, traps and other ways of having the alligator bite you on the ass.

I spent more time in school nodding off to lectures on software engineering than I care to remember. (And yes, I remember all that shit. And yes, we actually use some of it -- but we have a small shop of perhaps 10 developers and it's a luxury for us, not the stone-cold ass requirement it is for bigger shops). Hell, I'm even stuck taking the big-boy version of it as my required Software Engineering class for my Masters. (IE: Not the undergrad "Here's the terms your boss is gonna use and what they mean" version).

It doesn't really work all that well. It's some good guidelines, some decent rules of thumb -- but mostly it comes down to how good everyone involved is at estimating the time. And all it takes is one guy with a dependency to blow his estimate and fuck everyone up and down the line. It's a decent process for large scale design -- but the time and effort estimates? It's better than darts, but....it doesn't take much to screw it.

I suspect the game industry is even more prone to this sort of thing, due to the nature of the product. I suspect that games would attract both coders and managers who might be individually brilliant, but perhaps less skilled at the more grindy process side. I suspect it's a lot easier to feel your work is "art" not "engineering" when you're making games.

Artists aren't known for hitting deadlines.

[HaemishM]

By developers, I don't just mean Raph and 'artists.' I mean everyone from the top down and back up in the development company. It's easy for the devs to point to the suits and go "HE DID IT!" but I'm not fucking buying it anymore. From John Smedley to Raph to the CSR to the programmers to Vogel to everyone involved in any small way with the release of a program like SWG in the state it was released in, YOU ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE.

Either you missed your deadline, you overpromised, you didn't pay attention, or you played it (or had reports from people who played it) and didn't think there was enough wrong with it to delay release. Whatever your role, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. Don't deflect, don't dissemble. It's a big shit sandwich and everyone's going to have to take a bite. The same goes for the disastrous WWII Online team, the Anarchy Online team, all of them. You released a shitty, broken product and it didn't do as well as it should have. You failed at a no-brainer project, a project that SHOULD HAVE sold a million boxes AND subscriptions. And it didn't. Own up to it.

Whether the final decision rested with a suit or a programmer, if they are in the game industry, they are a dev. Stop giving guys free passes. It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't.

[Sky]

I like when things get pushed out because 'it's so expensive to make games today'. Hey, maybe your salaries are too inflated? Maybe too much money is wasted, can your office be redesigned to save money? Fuck that, let's just ship a pile of shit and maybe patch it fixed. Or not.

The 'gaming industry' is a joke. Maybe I can try telling the public it's too expensive to have books in the library instead of cutting my technology budget next year.

[Triforcer]

By developers, I don't just mean Raph and 'artists.' I mean everyone from the top down and back up in the development company. It's easy for the devs to point to the suits and go "HE DID IT!" but I'm not fucking buying it anymore. From John Smedley to Raph to the CSR to the programmers to Vogel to everyone involved in any small way with the release of a program like SWG in the state it was released in, YOU ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE.

Either you missed your deadline, you overpromised, you didn't pay attention, or you played it (or had reports from people who played it) and didn't think there was enough wrong with it to delay release. Whatever your role, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. Don't deflect, don't dissemble. It's a big shit sandwich and everyone's going to have to take a bite. The same goes for the disastrous WWII Online team, the Anarchy Online team, all of them. You released a shitty, broken product and it didn't do as well as it should have. You failed at a no-brainer project, a project that SHOULD HAVE sold a million boxes AND subscriptions. And it didn't. Own up to it.

Whether the final decision rested with a suit or a programmer, if they are in the game industry, they are a dev. Stop giving guys free passes. It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't.

Why the fuck should anyone who isn't the CEO (or upper management with a lot of stock options) fucking care about the quality of the product (beyond, of course, the minimal point of enough quality to not be fired and/or work in the industry again)?  To th artist/programmer/whatever, their salary is their salary.   People will work hard enough to not get fired/work again/not singlehandedly drive the company under, and beyond that, why should they care what you think?  Just cause they are in "gaming", so they are magically supposed to work harder for no apparent reason?

In the end gamemaking is no different than making dog food or pickle canning.  If I'm on the line at the pickle factory and I could work twice as many hours for no more pay and virtually no individual effect on the bottom line, I'm not going to do it cause of my passion for pickles.  Why should people working on games think any differently?

[Engels]

I don't think that was the thrust of Haemish' post, Triforcer. He's tired of finger pointing within any game company, when the truth of the matter is that its a collective effort to fuck up as badly as SWG did.

Your approach to game development won't work either, because making a good entertainment product isn't like making a good toilet seat; you need to have a sense of passion and focus that will allow the creation of an engaging world, be it a television series or an mmorpg. It's one of the few industries where only paying attention to the bottom line is a guarantee of failure.

[Trouble]

Of course everyone has responsibility and no doubt everyone makes mistakes. There's a few key things here though that make me not hate on Raph and people in similar positions. First off, as said before, coming up with accurate timelines is a bitch. It's a bitch in every type of development project imaginable, and it's got to be even more of a bitch in the gaming industry. Therefore it should be expected that any sort of timeline needs to be used as a very rough estimate and not set in stone. Second, we definitely know that it IS the suits holding people to these timelines like it's the spoken word of jesus. They dangle their X amount of dollars and X amount of days to finish the project in front of everyone, then slam the book down on that holy day regardless of what the situation is. SWG could have been a good game. A lot of people have said this. They needed another year and they needed to retain more of their dev team to work on their live team, even if it costed more money. But those aren't decisions that the developers and creative people and all that BS make. Those are decisions that the suits and only the suits make. The suits at Sony suck and the suits at Blizzard and maybe Vivendi (I don't really know the intimates of their relationship) don't suck. I really think that's what it comes down to in the end.

[Morat20]

Speaking personally -- I hate estimating time for tasks. I've learned to pad my estimates (the more people involved, the more I pad), but even then...that's reliably my biggest flaw on each evaluation. I've gotten, after several years, to the point where I'm accurate enough that I'm not screwing anyone or even seriously inconviencing them, but I'm still bad at it.

Sometimes it's just 10 times the work you thought it was. Sometimes -- too damn rarely -- it's a tenth the work you thought it would be, or you had one of those really great workdays when everything is just crystal clear and simple and the only thing holding you back is how fast you can type. I like those days. They still play hell with the schedule, though.

[Endie]

Why the fuck should anyone who isn't the CEO (or upper management with a lot of stock options) fucking care about the quality of the product (beyond, of course, the minimal point of enough quality to not be fired and/or work in the industry again)?  To th artist/programmer/whatever, their salary is their salary.   People will work hard enough to not get fired/work again/not singlehandedly drive the company under, and beyond that, why should they care what you think?  Just cause they are in "gaming", so they are magically supposed to work harder for no apparent reason?

In the end gamemaking is no different than making dog food or pickle canning.  If I'm on the line at the pickle factory and I could work twice as many hours for no more pay and virtually no individual effect on the bottom line, I'm not going to do it cause of my passion for pickles.  Why should people working on games think any differently?

I don't know what you do.  Maybe you work with computers.  Maybe you even write code.  But you'll never be a programmer: not a real one.  I don't code for pay.  I code because I love it and because I can make extraordinary things.  And yes, I do it as a job because companies will pay me a very large amount of money to do so.  But that's not why I'm doing it: it's just why I do it in the daytime as well as the nighttime (when I do it for free, either for me or with others).

You sound like you hate your job.  I admit that most people do.  But a decent games developer can make more money for shorter hours.  He's already made a choice that dismantles your argument.

[DataGod]

Why the fuck should anyone who isn't the CEO (or upper management with a lot of stock options) fucking care about the quality of the product (beyond, of course, the minimal point of enough quality to not be fired and/or work in the industry again)?  To th artist/programmer/whatever, their salary is their salary.   People will work hard enough to not get fired/work again/not singlehandedly drive the company under, and beyond that, why should they care what you think?  Just cause they are in "gaming", so they are magically supposed to work harder for no apparent reason?

In the end gamemaking is no different than making dog food or pickle canning.  If I'm on the line at the pickle factory and I could work twice as many hours for no more pay and virtually no individual effect on the bottom line, I'm not going to do it cause of my passion for pickles.  Why should people working on games think any differently?

I don't know what you do.  Maybe you work with computers.  Maybe you even write code.  But you'll never be a programmer: not a real one.  I don't code for pay.  I code because I love it and because I can make extraordinary things.  And yes, I do it as a job because companies will pay me a very large amount of money to do so.  But that's not why I'm doing it: it's just why I do it in the daytime as well as the nighttime (when I do it for free, either for me or with others).

You sound like you hate your job.  I admit that most people do.  But a decent games developer can make more money for shorter hours.  He's already made a choice that dismantles your argument.

@Triforce:

1. You are assuming that executive manaagement or "suits" are themselves not creative. Thats not only inaccurate but an idiotic stereotype.
2. If you create something or are charged with creating something you have a vested interest in its success, creation is not a matter of: Im going to make the best kickass pickles I can because I want to make 5b dollars and be the pickle king. Its a matter of: I love creating things, I want to see if it'll work, I want to create it because I'm passionate about it.

I'm going to tell you a little secret about money and how to make it: Money flows from and is created by loving what you do.

When you care passionately about what you do you'll work 7 days straight for 16 hours a day and if your just starting out, likely live on maxxed out credit cards and empty bank accounts until what your striving for is successful. And if its not you'll take those lessons you learned and try again. But at the end of the day you've tried which is more than 99% of the people standing on the line making pickles will ever do.

Its easy and convienient to criticise from the sidelines, ignorant of what others have had to endure to succeed. And its even easier to point out the difficiancies in the outcomes of those efforts. Until you get out on the field and play ball yourself  (for whatever reason, even a misguided one like making tons of cash) your opinion about the work efforts of others will remain incorrect.

@Endie

Spot on! Good programmers do it because they love it, or because they are into the eventual outcome...the good ones anyhow.

[Oban]

Speaking as a suit, I would never push a product and/or service out the door before it was ready to go simply because the negative impact on my stock options would outweigh any potential short term benefit.  This is why management receives stock as an incentive to make sure the company does well.

Generally there is a three year vesting period attached to any option grant, which is a way to prevent the management from pushing through items that will have a short term positive bump at the expense of the long term financial stability of the company.

...and then there is Sony.

[Morat20]

Speaking as a suit, I would never push a product and/or service out the door before it was ready to go simply because the negative impact on my stock options would outweigh any potential short term benefit.  This is why management receives stock as an incentive to make sure the company does well.

Generally there is a three year vesting period attached to any option grant, which is a way to prevent the management from pushing through items that will have a short term positive bump at the expense of the long term financial stability of the company.

...and then there is Sony.

*snort*. Stock options suck as incentive to manage a business well. They are incentives to drive your stock price up -- by whatever means necessary. Of course, with the recent trend of backdating options, they're not even that.

[Engels]

I used to work for Amazon, and sure enough, 3 years after IPO, mass fireings occurred, outsourcing took over like a prairie fire and quality assurance departments were slashed in what can only be called a culling. Not because profits were down; even during the .com bubble burst, Amazon was well within the predicted parameters outlined by Bezos himself and in fact was out performing all expectations, realizing profits years ahead of schedule.

So what brought about the sheer level of corporate carnage? A wave of departures from the top ranks, all running off with their options. Amazon.com need not perform as it had been doing anymore, since those within the company that kept it afloat had gotten their cake. It was time to trim the company down to the bare management essentials. New management was hired, inexperienced hand-me-down management from all sorts of nooks and crannies of corporate America, all hired at slash rate salaries. This meant that the overall experience to the customer would suffer and the brand would itself be coasting on its past victories.

By the time the damage was done, and Amazon was a shadow of its former glories, the stock prices had fallen to before IPO offerings.

[El Gallo]

Why the fuck should anyone who isn't the CEO (or upper management with a lot of stock options) fucking care about the quality of the product (beyond, of course, the minimal point of enough quality to not be fired and/or work in the industry again)?  To th artist/programmer/whatever, their salary is their salary.   People will work hard enough to not get fired/work again/not singlehandedly drive the company under, and beyond that, why should they care what you think?  Just cause they are in "gaming", so they are magically supposed to work harder for no apparent reason?

I see someone had a great summer associate experience  

[hal]

After 35 years in industry I have got to tell you that the goal of keeping the stock price up is not the holy grail. Its causing more problems than it solves. Pollution? energy effencenty? These are a negative hit on the bottom line. So, they don't get done. I personally am becoming more socialist (the good of the people or the good of the planet) but even so I am not convinced thats right either. What I am sure of is what we have evolved into  ( I am speaking as an American about American corporate culture) is broken.

[Morat20]

After 35 years in industry I have got to tell you that the goal of keeping the stock price up is not the holy grail. Its causing more problems than it solves. Pollution? energy effencenty? These are a negative hit on the bottom line. So, they don't get done. I personally am becoming more socialist (the good of the people or the good of the planet) but even so I am not convinced thats right either. What I am sure of is what we have evolved into  ( I am speaking as an American about American corporate culture) is broken.

Just as an example: Say a company forsees higher than expected profits for the next 2 years. They are faced with a choice -- shuffle the bulk of the profit into modernizing equipment and handling overdue infrastructure changes (IE: Invest it back in the business) OR shove it out as dividends and expect a sharp uptick in stock prices for quarter or two.

Businessman interested in long-term company growth will reinvest it -- it'll make the business stronger and more competitive in the long-run. Businessman interested in exercising his options will fuck the company for a two-quarter uptick, cash in, get hailed as a fucking genius and move to another company to repeat the damn thing.

Personally, I love it when CEO's get hundred million + golden parachutes while presiding over massive declines in market share and negative profits. "We paid you 25 million a year, you fucked us good, here's 250 million as a goodbye gift! Don't forget to lay off 1200 workers on your way out the door!"

[shiznitz]

the stock prices had fallen to before IPO offerings.

I doubt that since there was no stock price before the IPO.

Leaving that nitpicking aside, three years is actually a reasonably long time for pre-IPO management to stick around.

[Trippy]

the stock prices had fallen to before IPO offerings.

I doubt that since there was no stock price before the IPO.

Of course there is, it's just not a price at which the "public" can buy them at.

[Engels]

the stock prices had fallen to before IPO offerings.

I doubt that since there was no stock price before the IPO.

Of course there is, it's just not a price at which the "public" can buy them at.

Althought Trippy is correct, I did mispeak. The price never dropped below IPO, but it did drop below the level at which options were initially offered to a vast vast majority of Amazon employees. Those that got their options to vet earlier while the prices were still in the .com bubble world cashed out and got out of dodge. I don't blame them; the atmosphere in the .com corporate culture was a strange mixture of orwell and monty python.

[Margalis]

Before API they have an option price and valuation.

[UnSub]

I can only imagine what this thread will evolve into once Vangard actually comes out.

[Trouble]

I can only imagine what this thread will evolve into once Vangard actually comes out.

Carnival ride.

[UnSub]

I can only imagine what this thread will evolve into once Vangard actually comes out.

Carnival ride.

WHEEEE!!!

[Margalis]

LOL @ myself, I said API. I meant IPO.

This is what happens when I post at work. API? WTF? Attempt at multitasking failed miserably.

[Falconeer]

From latest "first look impressions" by Jon Wood at MMORPG.com:

MMORPG.com wrote:
The first thing that struck me about this game when I sat down to play was the general look of it. I don't just mean graphics, either. I find the overall art style of this game to be very appealing. Vanguard does a pretty good job of skirting the line between realism and fantasy. Often companies make a decision about the look of their game and take it so far in one direction that takes away from the other. The cartoony style of a game like World of Warcraft sacrifices realism for the sake of having a "fantasy" feel, while I have also played games that tried to look ultra-realistic and in that effort, took the fantasy feel out of their game. Vanguard doesn't succumb to either extreme, looking real enough to satisfy me, while still free enough to be fantasy.

Did he get paid, did he get drugs or did he really mean it?

[Margalis]

He spelled Final Fantasy XI wrong obviously.

[Falconeer]

Just as I am on topic, I watched the new tutorial movie by Butler and McQuaid on Gamespot (Official Movie 2).

Honestly, I liked it.
But what it's really depressing is the fact that the engine was clearly struggling even in the Character Creation screen and the frame rate dramatically kept dropping with every zoom in/out or simple camera rotation, and that was on a major public presentation! (Can't Butler get himself a decent enough computer or VG simply can't run good even on Nasa's supercomputers?)

I can't wait anymore to put my hands on the beta and see for myself how troublesome this whole Vanguard thing is. Darn. (Am I the only one left out of beta, right? I know I am.. you can tell me.. I won't cry..)


EDIT: Mmh.. not sure the "Official Movie 2" is the latest one, so it could be my usual doublepost. Actually, it looks exactly like the one from E3... Anyway, old video maybe but my fresh comment still stands

[Simond]

Ignoring the point that Sigil have been saying all along that they are aiming for realism above all and this sudden lurch towards 'skirting the line between realism & fantasy' is an interesting change in stance for SOE/Sigil to try and push out there a couple of months before launch - "Balance between realism & fantasy" = "Sigil's artists aren't good enough to do realism well or creative enough to do fantasy well"

I wonder if Jonny-boy there got an all-expenses-paid trip to SOE for this preview? ;)

[Falconeer]

Is it only me or some of their menus looks completely like the backdrops of Magic the Gathering® cards?

I like that. As much as the ripoff of the WoW UI.

[Oban]

After 35 years in industry I have got to tell you that the goal of keeping the stock price up is not the holy grail. Its causing more problems than it solves. Pollution? energy effencenty? These are a negative hit on the bottom line. So, they don't get done. I personally am becoming more socialist (the good of the people or the good of the planet) but even so I am not convinced thats right either. What I am sure of is what we have evolved into  ( I am speaking as an American about American corporate culture) is broken.

Just as an example: Say a company forsees higher than expected profits for the next 2 years. They are faced with a choice -- shuffle the bulk of the profit into modernizing equipment and handling overdue infrastructure changes (IE: Invest it back in the business) OR shove it out as dividends and expect a sharp uptick in stock prices for quarter or two.

Businessman interested in long-term company growth will reinvest it -- it'll make the business stronger and more competitive in the long-run. Businessman interested in exercising his options will fuck the company for a two-quarter uptick, cash in, get hailed as a fucking genius and move to another company to repeat the damn thing.

Personally, I love it when CEO's get hundred million + golden parachutes while presiding over massive declines in market share and negative profits. "We paid you 25 million a year, you fucked us good, here's 250 million as a goodbye gift! Don't forget to lay off 1200 workers on your way out the door!"

Options are not a panacea, but at least they force the exceutives to keep the company running well for up to <insert grant schedule here> years.  Now, I am just a simple man without one of those fancy pants Ohio public school diplomas, but making sure that employees, managers and board members have an incentive to not release SWG:NGE or Vanguard:SagaOfTheMushroomHarvester seems like a good thing to me.

[shiznitz]

From latest "first look impressions" by Jon Wood at MMORPG.com:

MMORPG.com wrote:
The first thing that struck me about this game when I sat down to play was the general look of it. I don't just mean graphics, either. I find the overall art style of this game to be very appealing. Vanguard does a pretty good job of skirting the line between realism and fantasy. Often companies make a decision about the look of their game and take it so far in one direction that takes away from the other. The cartoony style of a game like World of Warcraft sacrifices realism for the sake of having a "fantasy" feel, while I have also played games that tried to look ultra-realistic and in that effort, took the fantasy feel out of their game. Vanguard doesn't succumb to either extreme, looking real enough to satisfy me, while still free enough to be fantasy.

Did he get paid, did he get drugs or did he really mean it?

The world of Vanguard is striking and impressive. It shows that these are the guys that designed the original Norrath. The game has good race and class variety. The game has the now-standard quest system we have come to expect, even if it isn't system that one can ride from 1-50 (or whatever the level cap is in Vanguard.) The caravan system is well-intentioned but probably falls short in serving the need it is intended to serve.

None of the above issues, though, are going to make this game a hit or a miss. We have discussed those success-impacting variables quite a bit so I won't rehash here. Vanguard is a gameworld I would love to explore, but the progression path will likely prevent any but the 20+ hour a week MMOGer from seeing much.