Schilling's Green Monster Games

[schild]

Grimwell, I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that. But then, you're in San Diego. Other places people would be happy to move to include San Fran and Austin. Hell, some people are willing to move to LA or Seattle (weird as they are), I can at least see the draw there. But Boston? Attracting real talent there permanently has got to be tough, and expensive. I think I'd rather live in Topeka.

[Grimwell]

Please note that nothing in what I wrote indicated that I have feelings either way about Boston. I was merely supporting the point that a CM who works in the shop is at an advantage over one that works remotely.

I've never been to Boston in the fall...

I do have friends up that way though, and would love to visit. In the summer. I'm done with shovels.

[Ghambit]

I'm of the opinion the environment (intellectually) in Boston is more than worth the increase in price(s) and frustration.  Just being there increases ones mental capacity, especially if you spend a lot of time in Cambridge.  And what we're talking about here is Software/GameDesign.  Comp.Sci has its roots in Boston (sorry Cali, but true).  Some of the best minds in the world are there and always have been (unlike Austin which is merely today's latest trend; largely due to server farmage).  Therefore it's natural to deduce it'd be a pretty damned good place to try and develop some software, let alone a game, especially if you're a believer of someone's environment having an effect on their minds, which I am.

"You live in a shithole you end up smelling like shit."  That's just a fact.  You surround yourself with dumbasses, you're likely to become dumb yourself.  And vice versa.

And in an industry that suffers from lack of Intelligence but has plenty of lengthy resumes, I count it as a positive that a game be developed in the intellectual seat of the world....  Lord knows MMOs need it right now.
Then again, some might count that as a slight to common sense, which is also important.   

Anyways, Schilling's studio is probably nicer than my apartment, so if you gave me a cot there, some Sox season tix, and the CM job I'd probably take it. (if i had the skillz)

[UnSub]

Being on these forums opens me up the same as it does you guys, I'm cool with that.

Feel free to post in threads that aren't about your game. It's all well and good to say you're on these forums, but all I've seen is you pimping your unannounced title by not announcing anything.

  Movies dont do this (they announce the moment there's an idea), Music doesnt do this,  virtually every other form of entertainment usually fesses up as soon as the intention is made and the money is there.  The latter only being a factor due to personal pride if the money dries up.

Your comparisons suck. Both movies and music want you to buy them once, maybe twice - not a sub fee / ongoing fee - and generally don't announce that they'll be 5 hour long artistic experiences that will redefine your very soul, only to release a 45 minute EP of cover songs / an 80 minute action fizzer you forget about before you leave the cinema. Hype gets people through the door in the first week, but it does nothing for long term sustainability - which MMOs depend on - if you can't meet that hype. If a movie or music release can shift enough units in the first few weeks they can be very profitable, but MMOs are meant to operate for years. Short-term pre-launch hype doesn't matter - unless the studio is so finely balanced that they will close if they don't shift X boxes in the first month - over the space of 4 or 5 years.

Also: pre-open beta forums, maybe even all pre-release forums, aren't worth the effort. If you are pure indie studio who needs to show that someone is interested in your game in order to maintain some sort of funding, then you probably need them. Otherwise, if your money is secure (as it gets, anyway) there isn't much point in announcing you plan to include feature X that gets the fans all excited, only to cut feature X prior to release.

So, on that front, it's better for nothing at all to be said about Copernic until it is 90% or more nailed down. I can guarantee you that if Schilling popped up tomorrow and announced closed beta, there would be 100k+ players signing up for it within 24 hours, no additional hype required.

[chargerrich]

It's Tuesday, I'm pissier than normal and I'm pretty sure Schilling just told me he can take it. He might also have told me to go fuck myself subtly. 

If he's dropped 20 mill into this and it's crap I don't think any amount of sass from us is gonna sting as much as him having to pull a Gaylord Perry and go back to pitching till he's 50.

Warhammer proved that you cannot brute force your way to a good game with deep pockets.

100 million gave us in Warhammer...

Some novel ideas (public quests, queing BGs from anywhere, decent art, awesome IP), excellent tier 1 and good 2 experience followed by a mind numbing grind, far less polish than WoW, quirky animations and the single dumbest/myopic vision for a game ever via a warped or sadistic sense of what fun is (read: PVE cockblock for a PVP game).

Burn in MMO purgatory MJ...

[Musashi]

Comp.Sci has its roots in Boston (sorry Cali, but true). 

:Cough:  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  oh man...  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA



Love, The Bay Area 

Also

WTF is snow?  The stuff on the mountains, you mean?

[Khaldun]

Look, in terms of what might be interesting? A MMO developer that was pursuing some kind of genuine "thinking aloud" about game designs (unlikely, potential and plausible) at an early stage, and then stuck with being transparent about the specifics of the design process as the game went along, that might be interesting. E.g., not using forums/the Internet to hype a largely hypothetical process, but using them to extend the range of the design process. There are a lot of legal reasons not to do that, so I don't expect it to happen--and yes, that kind of approach, if you didn't have some controls or constraints, would mostly be mouthbreathing starfucking.

But at the same time, I think the design process for MMOs (and digital games generally) has congealed into an implicit industry standard that is often preventing important questions or inputs from entering into the process at key moments, which is what drives most designs towards a kind of World-of-Warcraft/EQ/Diku architecture. Questions like, "What classes should we have, and how do we implement game mechanics around them?" drive the process and so we don't get a question like, "If the key thing about a gameworld is its persistence, what do we want players to be doing that will change either their characters or the gameworld itself in a persistent way? What would be fun? Interesting?", which I think leads to, "Why do we need 'classes' anyway? Where did that come from?"  which leads potentially to some new design ideas.  That all gets ruled out as ridiculous blue-sky fanwankery talk about design or as impossible in the current marketplace or as too difficult to implement given the prior experience of people involved in the design process, so the process begins way downstream with attempts to modestly differentiate the end product from WoW/EQ.

I'd be very happy to see a developer genuinely opening a window into MMO design as a process with the hope of using some feedback to usefully improve that process. Not saying this is a case of that, but if it were to happen somehow, that'd be a good thing.

[Engels]

Comp.Sci has its roots in Boston (sorry Cali, but true). 

:Cough:  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  oh man...  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


Love, The Bay Area 

Cough

[Mrbloodworth]

So, whats this game about?

[Lantyssa]

Astronomy.

[Pennilenko]

So, whats this game about?

Pretty sure it is about character advancement and leveling up while searching for the best gear to give you an edge........same as it ever was.

[Pennilenko]

Astronomy.

I would play that.

[Stormwaltz]

Astronomy.

I would play that.

Let us know how it is.

[WayAbvPar]

I don't have a problem with devs hyping their game... when there's something to hype. If you don't have in-game footage you can show to the public, I DON'T CARE, because nothing you talk about is going to appear in the game. It's also probably going to be years away from me seeing it. Hyping concept art that's 3 years out from having an in-game version? 3D Model renders that are higher res than they will ever appear in the game? Cinematic trailers that tell me nothing about the gameplay?

Leave it. Give me solid, game-specific information about the game or please talk about something else on a community forum that is not a knobslobbering fansite. Like Politics, or other games, or movies or ANYTHING but your game.

Or in other words, don't be a Mark Jacobs.

In Schilling's defense, he has talked about other subjects, but mostly in this thread. As opposed to MJ, who wouldn't talk about anything that wouldn't directly make him money if his soul was at steak. I have been pleasantly surprised at what this thread has been over the years (see my first reply ITT to see how far I have come). I wholeheartedly agree that hit and run crap to only talk about your title is pretty weak, but I am giving CS the benefit of the doubt here. We might not agree on politics or fantasy literature, but I can respect his passion as a long time gamer.

Now don't fuck this up and make me look even dumber than I normal do, Curt.  

[Ghambit]

I'd be very happy to see a developer genuinely opening a window into MMO design as a process with the hope of using some feedback to usefully improve that process. Not saying this is a case of that, but if it were to happen somehow, that'd be a good thing.

This has happened many times before.  It's just not happening with Curt's title.   
I remember "sitting in" on focus-groups in the VERY early stages of MxO development and PotBS development (the only games I ever really tried to, but there were more).  Both games ultimately flopped, but I would definitely say not because of the fanbase input, although I know some here would disagree (a topic for another thread perhaps).  This whole tight-lipped thing is a recent cookie-cutter phenomenon that studios have some misguided notion of them needing to follow, just as you say.

My theory is as I said, they dont want you or their publisher to see their steaming pile until they can at least secure enough money.  Imo, that's a pretty dickless thing to do but hey, this is America...  that's what we do here.

So basically what most companies these days are doing is taking 4+ years to develop a title using technology that prides itself (nay, REQUIRES)  iteration, brainstorming, and a sense of openness.  Yet, they're not doing this.  They enter into design with closed-doors and only open when it's too late to make any meaningful design choices.  It's totally counter-productive on multiple levels, both internally and publicly.  Personally, I wouldnt trust my own judgement or the judgement of a small clan of followers when it comes to the design of a game I decided to make... I love Me, and my followers are paid to love Me.  Therefore, it's very likely my product will suck and it'd be too late to fix it once I let the cat outta the bag.

Then again, I believe Money should be abolished and everything in the Universe should be Open Source.   

[Nebu]

If I were to be all Mr. Positive here, I'd say that it's a nice change to see a gamer design a game.  Many of the recently released titles smacked of developers that seemed disconnected from gaming from a player's perspective. 

On the flipside, I know my hopes are likely to be smashed as soon as I start reading his opinions on what made WoW great.  I've never liked WoW... so another WoW derivative would bring me no joy at all. 

[Lietgardis]

Put your money where your mouth is.

We want to make a game where the developers are a part of the community. Why? Because we want to play a game like that too.

It's not easy, though. We need to launch the game before we can have players. We need players before we can have a community. We need a community before we can listen to that community. We need to listen to that community before we can make a game based on the community's wishes. It's a bit of a Catch 22. That's why we designed Alganon to be iterative. We'll make an educated guess about our community based on existing MMO players and our forum members. We'll make a game designed for that community. We'll launch and bring in players. We'll use our tools to turn those players into a real community, and then we'll grow and expand Alganon with that community in mind, and then repeat the process.

[UnsGub]

So basically what most companies these days are doing is taking 4+ years to develop a title using technology that prides itself (nay, REQUIRES)  iteration, brainstorming, and a sense of openness.  Yet, they're not doing this.

Why do potential customer have to be involved?  All that can be done internally and with the market in mind without a direct conversation with potential customers.

There is more then enough feedback on these forums alone to work with without have to ask new questions if that is even possible in this space.  Repeat MMO discussions is the norm unfortunately.

[Ghambit]

So basically what most companies these days are doing is taking 4+ years to develop a title using technology that prides itself (nay, REQUIRES)  iteration, brainstorming, and a sense of openness.  Yet, they're not doing this.

Why do potential customer have to be involved?  All that can be done internally and with the market in mind without a direct conversation with potential customers.

There is more then enough feedback on these forums alone to work with without have to ask new questions if that is even possible in this space.  Repeat MMO discussions is the norm unfortunately.

I said nothing about potential customers, nor did I mention anything about them having to be involved.  In any case, it's up to the designer (and his/her responsibility) ultimately to glean information from every possible source (ideally from the beginning).  You cant do that when no one knows wth you're doing.
And have you ever heard of a large sum of money being spent on something w/o doing a viable market study??  How do you do a viable market study in such an industry w/o disclosure and discussion?  There's only so far you can go with small NDA-signed focus groups.

And all that can be done internally costs money.  Why pay people to come up with ideas/solutions that are already out there for free?  And who's to say those internal folks know what they're even doing?

CS's request for a crafting guru is a prime example.  We know nothing about what the game is, yet he wants advice on whom to hire to build a crafting system.  That's like drawing straws to send a random pitcher against a team's best hitter (whom you have absolutely no stats on)... makes no sense.

[HaemishM]

Put your money where your mouth is.

We want to make a game where the developers are a part of the community. Why? Because we want to play a game like that too.

It's not easy, though. We need to launch the game before we can have players. We need players before we can have a community. We need a community before we can listen to that community. We need to listen to that community before we can make a game based on the community's wishes. It's a bit of a Catch 22. That's why we designed Alganon to be iterative. We'll make an educated guess about our community based on existing MMO players and our forum members. We'll make a game designed for that community. We'll launch and bring in players. We'll use our tools to turn those players into a real community, and then we'll grow and expand Alganon with that community in mind, and then repeat the process.

BBBWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAAHHA!

/breathe


/breathe

BBBWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[UnSub]

And have you ever heard of a large sum of money being spent on something w/o doing a viable market study??  How do you do a viable market study in such an industry w/o disclosure and discussion?  There's only so far you can go with small NDA-signed focus groups.

If you are as well informed as you say you are, then you have to know that this kind of thing goes on all the time. Lots of companies start the process of development long before they involve consumers in the process, which even then can be an afterthought. I know of one food producer who spent millions of dollars refitting their production lines for a new product, but couldn't scrape up more than $4000 for a consumer taste test of the product before they launched it. That product isn't around any more.

But sometimes it is. Sometimes the vision of the developer / creator is in tune with the audience, or the audience can be persuaded to come round, such as happened for computing.

One huge, huge issue with consulting "the community" is that "the community" is made up of hundreds of different, self-interested groups. Some of those groups have aims that conflict with other aims. Although the aim of crowd sourcing design for MMOs seems like a good idea, unless the designer has a solid vision to start off with, you'll just end up with a lot of different groups screaming at each other. The crafters tend not to get on with the PvPers, especially if resources are located in PvP areas (which PvPers love and some crafters think increases rarity of certain items and goes steps towards creating a 'working economy' which economic crafters apparently love).

Besides, on top of all this, if you were to ask 100 randomly selected MMO players what they wanted, the answer would be "WoW, but better!".

I'm in three betas right now. One listens to the community on all but a few core design decisions (which players hate and claim they aren't being listened to as a result), one barely responds to the community (which the community accepts because they must be hard at work developing so don't have time to talk) and one is full of players wanting the very basic mechanics and the third has all communication dominated by the devs (although they aren't unreasonable, they are pretty much 'this is the way we are taking our title').

[Nebu]

I'm in three betas right now. One listens to the community on all but a few core design decisions (which players hate and claim they aren't being listened to as a result), one barely responds to the community (which the community accepts because they must be hard at work developing so don't have time to talk) and one is full of players wanting the very basic mechanics and the third has all communication dominated by the devs (although they aren't unreasonable, they are pretty much 'this is the way we are taking our title').

The logical question to this would be: Which of the three do you expect to be successful and did their communication with the playerbase have anything to do with this?

[Ghambit]

We musn't assume we're only talking about consumer or fanbase participation.  The process of stifling intel on your game also has the effect of shutting out the "informed public."  Which is really what I was getting at.  Appeasing the mob is one thing, but taking advantage of people in the public who know what they're talking about and who's business it is to do-so is another.  When your studio is on lock-down, you lose both unless you make a point of finding people outside the studio, making them sign NDAs, and picking their brains.

[UnSub]

We musn't assume we're only talking about consumer or fanbase participation.  The process of stifling intel on your game also has the effect of shutting out the "informed public."  Which is really what I was getting at.  Appeasing the mob is one thing, but taking advantage of people in the public who know what they're talking about and who's business it is to do-so is another.  When your studio is on lock-down, you lose both unless you make a point of finding people outside the studio, making them sign NDAs, and picking their brains.

Ahh, me public.

Who totally respect NDAs.

[tkinnun0]

Then again, I believe Money should be abolished and everything in the Universe should be Open Source.   

You can open-source the contents of my brain when you pry it out my cold dead hands.

[UnsGub]

The process of stifling intel on your game also has the effect of shutting out the "informed public."  Which is really what I was getting at. 

Consider it might be by design.  Some ideas are good and are kept secret so they can be applied first and used to maxium gain.  First to market sometimes involves not tell anyone what you are up to.  Not saying this is the case here but that does happen in business.

[HaemishM]

We musn't assume we're only talking about consumer or fanbase participation.  The process of stifling intel on your game also has the effect of shutting out the "informed public."  Which is really what I was getting at.  Appeasing the mob is one thing, but taking advantage of people in the public who know what they're talking about and who's business it is to do-so is another.  When your studio is on lock-down, you lose both unless you make a point of finding people outside the studio, making them sign NDAs, and picking their brains.

Here's the thing. You don't NEED all those years of hype to get the word out when it matters, i.e. WHEN THERE IS A GAME TO SELL. Hell, all you have to do for an MMOG is advertise a beta application and people will join the beta even if they've never heard of the game simply because it's a new free MMOG. Unless your game is so boring or so bad that it should never see the light of day, getting feedback from gamers is easy. They love to talk about games, it's their lives.

As for feedback on design and development, community feedback is a complete hindrance to development until there is a working product to test. The community couldn't find its collective ass with a map, a compass and a flashlight mainly because all communities but the most tight-knit have conflicting desires. PvPers want this, raiding PVE people won't that, crafters want another thing, casuals want something else altogether. As bad as MMOG devs have been at bringing decent games to market, it would be infinitely worse if most of them listened to the community in the design phase. Build for the audience you want, release a stable fucking product, you muppet-fuckers, then evolve the game based on the audience who stays with the game after release. Once you've lost the initial surge of new users, your best bet is to concentrate on customer loyalty and retention instead of chasing new customers with anything other than free trials and paid box expansions.

[Mrbloodworth]

Under hype, over deliver.

[Morfiend]

Under hype, over deliver.

Demon's Souls?

[UnSub]

I'm in three betas right now. One listens to the community on all but a few core design decisions (which players hate and claim they aren't being listened to as a result), one barely responds to the community (which the community accepts because they must be hard at work developing so don't have time to talk) and one is full of players wanting the very basic mechanics and the third has all communication dominated by the devs (although they aren't unreasonable, they are pretty much 'this is the way we are taking our title').

The logical question to this would be: Which of the three do you expect to be successful and did their communication with the playerbase have anything to do with this?

I know from experience my preferences probably don't match up to the mainstream, so my choice probably will doom the game. 

Ultimately, listening to players doesn't necessarily have much link to what is delivered. Ask players what they want and they'll give you jargon: "meaningful PvP", "working economy", "class-less character advancement", "involving and exciting quests", "emergent gameplay experiences". Ask them HOW to they want that, you'll get a different reply from every person - including conflicting replies - and the devs are potentially left none-the-wiser. It is up to the lead developers to pull everything together into a cohesive and fun experience.

Ultimately the only way to really do it is iterative testing, but there will always be people who hate the basic design of it. Plus it is very hard to test core systems in isolation (such as trying to test character power levels and advancement if loot / items aren't working). So best practise would seem to be to build the title to content and feature complete for release, then let the players test it and get feedback, then rebuild 60 - 70% of the title (if not more) based on that feedback.

Who'd be a MMO game designer? 

[UnsGub]

Ultimately the only way to really do it is iterative testing, but there will always be people who hate the basic design of it. Plus it is very hard to test core systems in isolation (such as trying to test character power levels and advancement if loot / items aren't working). So best practise would seem to be to build the title to content and feature complete for release, then let the players test it and get feedback, then rebuild 60 - 70% of the title (if not more) based on that feedback.

How to do this is where the gaming industry will gains it greatest improvement.  Testing is really just a feedback loop, be that customers, management, development, publisher, press, testers, legal, etc.  Iterative testing from EQ1, EQ2, EQ3 has cycles at are measured in years.

There are major internet sites that a developer can fix a bug in the morning and all the customers have the fix in the afternoon.  How software systems are built is equally as important as to what is built.  MMO systems last for decades and have maintenance costs.  This cycle could be hours, day, weeks, months, years, or never.  Once games and MMOs specifically get to the hours cycle then we will see major improvements.  Design needs to have features such as code or content changes can be done and the system will deliver the bits to the customer in X hours.

Testing anything is not hard if it acknowledged, designed, and done from the start. 

[Draegan]

wtf?

UnSub and UnsGub?

[Mrbloodworth]

wtf?

UnSub and UnsGub?

You too?   

[Yegolev]

It just means we're not asking the Hard Questions that would reveal UnSub's true genius.

[naum]

wtf?

UnSub and UnsGub?

Shouldn't that be UnGsub (/* too much Ruby on the brain… */)