CCP is unmerging with White Wolf, get your beards out

[Venkman]

I didn't even realize there was a tabletop RPG for it. I agree it'd be hard to balance just on principal though. Dresden is like the quintessential EQ1-era Wizard glass cannon: big flashy booms and then completely depleted. Until later books, but then so much of that stuff is props-based.

As a Skyrim-style RPG though, it'd rock *

* Assuming all the usual qualifications of "done right", "fun", "high quality"...

[Morat20]

I didn't even realize there was a tabletop RPG for it. I agree it'd be hard to balance just on principal though. Dresden is like the quintessential EQ1-era Wizard glass cannon: big flashy booms and then completely depleted. Until later books, but then so much of that stuff is props-based.

As a Skyrim-style RPG though, it'd rock *

* Assuming all the usual qualifications of "done right", "fun", "high quality"...

The RPG is..solid. (Then again, I'm a huge fan of FATE and FUDGE). The books are quite well done (including a lot of faux 'comments' from Dresden and Bob. I think the schtick is that Billy was creating an RPG based on the 'real world' so he could clue in some people on how the less visible side of life works.

I'm sure you could do it with a D20 or D100 system (you can do anything in Rolemaster if you hate your GM and yourself enough), but FATE just has the right...feel.

[Modern Angel]

The RPG is fucking great and I find the novels absolute drivel. Well worth a purchase.

[calapine]

This is all pretty much true, but is missing a piece of the bigger picture. That project is basically a welfare program for a handful of CCP's founders who want to live in America. That's it. Period. These folks who are super-high on their own supply - they think they're infallible geniuses, but they have no concrete idea what to do beyond "man, a vampire MMO would be super cool; job done, pass that handle of Jack."

I think you may be on to something:

The World of Darkness family table is missing a few fanged faces, but Pétursson was adamant that it’s not a signal of dark (light?) times ahead. Instead, it was a structural team. The game is still evolving rapidly, and a larger team size was simply causing too many bottlenecks.

“What we’ve seen is, increasing focus for teams also comes from the size of the team,” he explained to RPS. “And when you’re still innovating and figuring out how you’re game’s going to work, a bigger team takes longer to do that. So again, the layoffs were more about focus and creating an environment where teams can be successful with their priorities.”

So much bullshit!  

[ajax34i]

Too many people in the team had too many ideas, so we laid them off so we could brainstorm with fewer ideas.  But we're still rapidly coming up with ideas (none workable) so maybe we'll fire some more.  Erm, I mean, rapidly innovating still, yeah.

[Ghambit]

They dont have to innovate shite.  Just copy the EVE model (with a splash of MxO) and be done with it.  And all the lore and mechanics are already in place for you (I would just stick with storyteller, stuff like FATE wont work).
Corps are akin to covens/havens/domains, factions akin to type (mage, were, vamp), race akin to subtype (nosferatu, brujah, etc.)  Break the traditions and be hunted by the Camarilla possibly.  Fight the other political powers over space/turf w/o disrupting the balance or normalcy in the controlled areas.  Extend your influence via progeny and live forever through them (or clones).  Improve your skill through use over time and have every ability available to you if willing to learn.

It'd be a slower type of 3rd-person MMO.  More plotting.  More evil and deceptive.  At least it should be.   

[calapine]

They dont have to innovate shite.  Just copy the EVE model (with a splash of MxO) and be done with it.

They can't get anything done. Look at Walking in Stations. In 2007(!) they showed a tech demo. Four years later they released a single, single-player room with no social interaction (or any functions). With unbelievably bad performance. Now three years later it's still in the same stage. 6+ years of development resulted in less than the Star Citizen hangar. Which didn't stop them from selling a monocle for 70$.

Nothing is ever going to come out of that studio.

[Ginaz]

They dont have to innovate shite.  Just copy the EVE model (with a splash of MxO) and be done with it.

They can't get anything done. Look at Walking in Stations. In 2007(!) they showed a tech demo. Four years later they released a single, single-player room with no social interaction (or any functions). With unbelievably bad performance. Now three years later it's still in the same stage. 6+ years of development resulted in less than the Star Citizen hangar. Which didn't stop them from selling a monocle for 70$.

Nothing is ever going to come out of that studio.

I think CCP peaked with EVE and even then I think blind luck had something to do with the success of EVE.

[Sir T]

As far as I remember, EVE was actually developed by someone else and CCP bought it for a song when the studio went bust. CCP hasn't developed anything worth a shit itself.

[Fordel]

No they made EVE, they bought the game from their Publisher when the initial launch went to shit.


Calapine is absolutely correct though, CCP doesn't actually understand how to make a video game with actual gameplay in it.

[Modern Angel]

Just to illustrate how fucking dumb gamers are and why the industry will never stop cranking out horseshit, I had this conversation on at least four occasions when CCP released that "amazing" flythrough video two years ago.

Guy: Holy shit! Look at this WoD video! It's a city!
Me: Uhm, pay attention. There's not a single moving NPC. That's actually just a flythrough of a static area. It doesn't even show collision. It doesn't mean anything.
Guy: Fuck you, hater! Why can't you be positive? This looks awesome!
Me: Dude, I am telling you. This is the oldest trick in the vaporware book.
Guy: You're just being overly critical. This is going to be a fucking awesome game. I mean, that city!

Gamers deserve what they get.

[UnSub]

As far as I remember, EVE was actually developed by someone else and CCP bought it for a song when the studio went bust. CCP hasn't developed anything worth a shit itself.

IIRC: CCP developed EVE, which was then published by Simon and Schluster back when getting into video games publishing seemed like a good idea. When EVE flounded at launch, CCP were able to get the publishing rights for a song and effectively wiped out their development debts to the publisher (S&S got out of video game publishing).

Then CCP started to self publish online, bypassing physical distribution. This helped break the game among the kind of people damaged enough to find early EVE fun playable.

So they made some good early decisions and were the only game of its kind when MMOs as a genre were growing.

As for WoD being just EVE with vampires, it's not that simple. Space combat means a lot of fine detail doesn't have to be shown in combat, which isn't the case when you have humanoid characters fighting each other at close range. Plus space can be mostly empty, where dark modern worlds require a lot of building to get the details right.

How is Dust 514 going anyway? Anyone know?

[IainC]

I was at Fanfest 2012 when they unveiled that flythrough at the WoD keynote. I asked the guy why it took 6 years to produce a static flythrough with no actors, no collision volumes, no final lighting or whatever. He shrugged and said that making MMOs was hard and that I probably didn't understand just how difficult that stuff was....

[Modern Angel]

I was at Fanfest 2012 when they unveiled that flythrough at the WoD keynote. I asked the guy why it took 6 years to produce a static flythrough with no actors, no collision volumes, no final lighting or whatever. He shrugged and said that making MMOs was hard and that I probably didn't understand just how difficult that stuff was....

Perfect. Pure contempt for the audience.

[IainC]

Not to mention that I had actually worked for two MMOs so yes, I did understand how difficult it was.

[Sir T]

How is Dust 514 going anyway? Anyone know?

Well, on Dust, Gamespot gave it a long review in December and gave it a whopping 4 out of 10

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dust-514-review/1900-6415604/

You can look over the comments section and they range from "Utter meh with shoddy FPS mechanics and the gameplay is crap" to "You have to remember this is a HARDCORE game that REWARDS LONG PLAY and EFFORT and you have to stick with it as it will GET BETTER WITH TIME. Look how better Eve is now that when it STARTED!! CCP FTW!!"

Cant find any info on how many people are actually still playing the thing directly, but according to this http://dustboard.com/global there are 5.4 mill "merceneries." But you can have 3 characters per account so that immediately drops it to 1.4 million players who have ever tried it. How many of those are still playing? Well the graph is confusing but it says that there were a peak of 800 "reborn Mercenaries" yesterday, which I am assuming that 800 players were killed around that time. So, given that there are 16 players a side per match, that means that there were was something around 40 - 60 matches going at their peak yesterday, unless I am misunderstanding the graph at the Dustboard site and my assumptions and maths are way off.

[Modern Angel]

Not to mention that I had actually worked for two MMOs so yes, I did understand how difficult it was.

Yeah, I got the punchline. I got the same thing from one of the dudes excited about the flythrough. I told him I'd helped make one of those things so I know precisely how little it says about an actual game. Didn't help.

[Venkman]

Oh come on guys, what do you think they're going to say in that situation? "Gee you're right, this sucks and we're totally lying about the state of the project and hate you all"?

They're either media trained employees or they're hired presenters.

We all know this.

[Modern Angel]

Something besides a sneer plus "heh, like you know how to make an MMO?"

At least lie.

Better yet, don't show it at all because anyone with half a brain knows it's horseshit.

[Der Helm]

Better yet, don't show it at all because anyone with half a brain knows it's horseshit.

I was at Fanfest 2012 [...]

Know your audience.

[IainC]

It was very clear to me at that presentation, even though they were insisting that it wasn't cancelled, just 'being realigned', that there was zero chance of any of the development done to that point turning into a game. Especially given the overpromise and underdelivery of Walking In Stations which was trumpeted as being a core proof of concept for some of the WoD tech. The stuff in that interview up thread just makes me laugh. 8 years after starting development, should not be a time for spitballing high level concepts and defining a vision.

[ajax34i]

Well, they've opened a Valkyrie Information Portal sub-forum on their main site, so I'm guessing they're busy with that, first.  Also, eve-offline.com tracks Dust daily numbers.

[rk47]

Is this going to be the greatest Vaporware ever? 

[Modern Angel]

Is this going to be the greatest Vaporware ever? 

I'm puzzled as to why they're not hounded about it a la Duke Nukem. We're at nine years already on this thing.

[Pennilenko]

Is this going to be the greatest Vaporware ever? 

I'm puzzled as to why they're not hounded about it a la Duke Nukem. We're at nine years already on this thing.

Because unlike Duke Nukem, nobody gives a shit about their dumb game.

[Numtini]

I think the whole vampires and werewolves thing is fading quickly. In the post-Twilight world, angsty vampire RP just isn't what it used to be.

The Eve community has also been pretty strong on pushing CCP to not refocus their attention on the game. CCP was pretty hamhanded in the way they did so and invited a pretty significant backlash of what's still their only successful product.

[Ghambit]

Num has it right.  As the gen-Xers get older and more responsible, WoD and its ilk (angsty vamp RP) have started to diminish, hence the abortion that is Twilight.  Kinda gets me choked up a bit actually.  #single-tear
If CCP paid attention to it, it'd definitely have to be a slower, more artistically political type game; which is why I said it had to be more EVE then anything else.  It can't be a simple, actiony-vamp game.

[ajax34i]

Yeah, unfortunately dumbed-down (console) actiony sells.  Artistically political doesn't.

[tmp]

Num has it right.  As the gen-Xers get older and more responsible, WoD and its ilk (angsty vamp RP) have started to diminish, hence the abortion that is Twilight.  Kinda gets me choked up a bit actually.  #single-tear

Are you kidding? Twilight is all about vampire wangst, they only need a sparkle shader and it's money hats with the old/new demographics

edit: incidentally, with the Dust thing released, does it mean they now actually have some working code that can handle multiple animated characters in one space over the intrawebs? I admit I didn't follow that one beyond the early teasers/trailers.

[Venkman]

I gotta be honest. I have never understood why anyone would be excited by the developer of Excel In Space doing a Vampires vs Werewolves thing. I mean seriously, I feel like it'd be the same as Infinity Ward getting the Warcraft IP or the King.com getting the Halo IP

In other words, a big "yea, so what?"

[Morat20]

Yeah, me either. White Wolf stuff is pretty story oriented. About the only tenuous connection I could see is EVE's being a sandbox, single shard, dog-eat-dog sort of world.

Which, yeah, is sorta like World of Darkness except how are you going to turn space rocks into Vampires and Werewolves? Farming blood?

[MahrinSkel]

How is Dust 514 going anyway? Anyone know?

Well, on Dust, Gamespot gave it a long review in December and gave it a whopping 4 out of 10

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dust-514-review/1900-6415604/

You can look over the comments section and they range from "Utter meh with shoddy FPS mechanics and the gameplay is crap" to "You have to remember this is a HARDCORE game that REWARDS LONG PLAY and EFFORT and you have to stick with it as it will GET BETTER WITH TIME. Look how better Eve is now that when it STARTED!! CCP FTW!!"

Cant find any info on how many people are actually still playing the thing directly, but according to this http://dustboard.com/global there are 5.4 mill "merceneries." But you can have 3 characters per account so that immediately drops it to 1.4 million players who have ever tried it. How many of those are still playing? Well the graph is confusing but it says that there were a peak of 800 "reborn Mercenaries" yesterday, which I am assuming that 800 players were killed around that time. So, given that there are 16 players a side per match, that means that there were was something around 40 - 60 matches going at their peak yesterday, unless I am misunderstanding the graph at the Dustboard site and my assumptions and maths are way off.

Eve Offline shows a peak population for Dust of about 3750.  General industry rule of thumb is that peak is 20% of total, that doesn't really work for Eve because of the world-wide single-server thing.  Even if you apply the 10% ratio of Eve to Dust, you get numbers that are something less than impressive.

Worse yet, those numbers are virtually un-moving for months, which implies they've run into a hidden social scaling problem (where in some wierd way, every new player that stays effectively crowds out another player).  Those can be a stone bitch to identify and even harder to fix.

--Dave

[Yoru]

edit: incidentally, with the Dust thing released, does it mean they now actually have some working code that can handle multiple animated characters in one space over the intrawebs? I admit I didn't follow that one beyond the early teasers/trailers.

Nope. Dust is built in the Unreal 3 engine, whereas the in-engine walking-around bits in Eve are custom.

Worse yet, those numbers are virtually un-moving for months, which implies they've run into a hidden social scaling problem (where in some wierd way, every new player that stays effectively crowds out another player).  Those can be a stone bitch to identify and even harder to fix.

If you want something more telling, the project burned through three executive producers over a 5-year lifetime, and the one who was running it at launch was shitcanned the day it went out the door. Most of the other senior staff were either shown the door or reeled home to Iceland; a few transplants were tossed over to China to try to fix things, but they, too, have since quit, been canned or recalled to the mothership.

Well, they've opened a Valkyrie Information Portal sub-forum on their main site, so I'm guessing they're busy with that, first.  Also, eve-offline.com tracks Dust daily numbers.

Valkyrie is run out of an office in Newcastle, which CCP acquired when Midway shut down a studio there. They were originally brought in to save Dust and actually make it run on a PS3. Once Dust was released to all the fanfare of a Mexican restaurant's men's room, the satellite studio wwas in the uncomfortable position of not having a project lined up. Fortunately for them, Valkyrie came along at just that moment.

CCP's upper management is extremely press-sensitive, so when the games press (or, better yet, the New York Times) salivates publicly over their latest demo, they believe the project's got legs. When EVE-VR got a bunch of press at Fanfest, the project got greenlit. (It was originally a spare-time passion project for a handful of junior Eve developers.)

[IainC]

When I was looking for a job last year I did a design test and had a couple of Skype interviews with Craig at CCP Shanghai. Looks like I dodged a bullet there.

[Numtini]

Are you kidding? Twilight is all about vampire wangst, they only need a sparkle shader and it's money hats with the old/new demographics

My perspective is romance fiction, but as far as I can tell, the Vampire thing peaked with Twilight and True Blood and has been on a very steep hill heading down since then. The market just got saturated. Everything was sexy vampires and alpha domination fights among werewolves and then boom nothing. The Vampire Academy film just released and tanked at 4.1 million. I haven't seen a book release in ages that went anywhere.

That effects the market for the game in two ways. First, if you're a manly man gamer, you now associate vampires with Twilight and want nothing to do with them. If you're a young woman, you have had your fill of vampires and are currently reading books about angsty college students and cage fighters.