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Lisa Stevens being able to keep Paizo afloat despite the presence of Dancey makes her smart. I guess the other option would have been to not have Dancey in your employ at all, but there you are.
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Feb 5, 2017 09:13
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Kai Tave posted:I legitimately can't remember if it's ever been stated anywhere, was the idea of doing a Pathfinder MMO Lisa Stevens' or Dancey's? Because I wonder if Stevens isn't kicking herself at missing a chance to jump on the isometric CRPG revival that's happened in the years since what with Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, the upcoming Numenera game, Wasteland 2, etc, and now she's stuck trying to spin poo poo into gold because if she simply washed her hands of the whole affair it would cause the suckers who bought into it to revolt. There's no way it wasn't Dancey's idea.
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Feb 5, 2017 16:35
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It was absolutely Dancey's baby. Having paid attention to his posts and quoting them during the halcyon days of grog.txt, I got to be very familiar with his pitch and his plan, such as it was. Lisa Stevens is generally a very smart businesswoman, and her letting Dancey do his thing feels like an anomaly likely based on old friendship and his seeming expertise.
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Feb 5, 2017 16:45
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Ryan Dancey is the Steve Jobs of terrible ideas.
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Feb 5, 2017 17:51
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Fuego Fish posted:Ryan Dancey is the Steve Jobs of terrible ideas. So he's just Steve Jobs.
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Feb 5, 2017 18:10
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Remember when one of the creator bio things in the Kickstarter pitch for a Pathfinder product literally image leeched from Wizards for its profile picture? That was my favorite.
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Feb 5, 2017 18:12
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That Old Tree posted:Remember when one of the creator bio things in the Kickstarter pitch for a Pathfinder product literally image leeched from Wizards for its profile picture?
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Feb 5, 2017 18:38
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Didn't Stevens pretty wisely cordon off Goblinworks so that nothing bad that happens to them affects Paizo? I don't know if Dancey was even on Paizo's payroll.Kwyndig posted:Last I heard there was an angel investor going to save the game any day now but they can't manage to scrounge up the capital. I can't believe any company would actually buy Goblinworks or PFO unless they got the video game rights to all of Golarion in the package though, and I doubt Lisa Stevens is willing to give those away just to get this pile of poo poo off of her desk. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Feb 5, 2017 |
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Feb 5, 2017 19:01
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Waffleman_ posted:So he's just Steve Jobs. he knows less about fonts than jobs tho
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Feb 5, 2017 19:13
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Halloween Jack posted:Didn't Stevens pretty wisely cordon off Goblinworks so that nothing bad that happens to them affects Paizo? I don't know if Dancey was even on Paizo's payroll. Nah, it's not a WCW thing with Newcorp. Supposedly Newcorp is a current player of PFO.. they just can't get together the money needed to actually buy it. I'm guessing Paizo is at least expecting market value for the server hardware and software licenses, but who knows how much they paid for hardware. I can't imagine they just rented their hardware from a third-party datacenter, if that was the case they'd have certainly been shut down by now from operating costs.
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Feb 5, 2017 19:29
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That's even more WCW, because if people knew Vince McMahon was going to buy the company for under $3 million, a lot more people would've made a play for it, including people who were basically fans. The tape library alone was worth far more than the purchase price.
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Feb 5, 2017 19:42
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Leeching off old friends and overblowing his own ability to accomplish things is sorta Dancey's MO. He's a con-man. The funniest thing about PFO to me is how much Stevens tried to split Goblinworks away from Paizo and make it it's own thing, only to be left holding on to it and all it's shadiness once Dancey bailed.
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Feb 5, 2017 22:56
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ProfessorCirno posted:Leeching off old friends and overblowing his own ability to accomplish things is sorta Dancey's MO. He's a con-man. Yeah I was gonna say, if the idea was that Goblinworks could be jettisoned if/when it failed spectacularly that doesn't seem to have worked out too well since now Stevens is the one holding the bag. People do still pay for the privilege of playing an alpha but I can't imagine it has much of a population.
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Feb 6, 2017 01:47
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I picture a conversation that starts something like this: "So how screwed are we if we just let it go" "There are like 20 people still playing who could afford to throw away 5000 dollars to own a pretend inn on a game that wasn't even made yet" "So what you're saying is 'Very".
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Feb 6, 2017 02:11
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Have there actually been people who paid upwards of three figures for anything in PFO?
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Feb 6, 2017 02:34
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Feb 6, 2017 03:18
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Evil Mastermind posted:Have there actually been people who paid upwards of three figures for anything in PFO? I know there are people who bought in huge on the promise of owning their own imaginary inn, not just the $10,000 but like $5,000 pledge levels as well. The thing is that I don't know that there's been an ongoing effort to milk those whales for much more beyond the $15/month subscription fee, so I genuinely have no idea what Lisa Stevens plans to do since all the money Dancey bilked people out of years ago has to be long gone by now.
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Feb 6, 2017 03:34
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My favourite thing about PFO is still the fans who projected onto it all their completely unrealistic-to-the-point-of-insanity dreams about what a video game could be. Like the people who insisted that every single 3e spell needed to be included, including Time Stop and Divination spells. Or the guy who wanted to spend his entire in-game experience running a stable, demanding gameplay deep enough to make taking care of horses a rewarding experience.
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Feb 6, 2017 04:04
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Halloween Jack posted:My favourite thing about PFO is still the fans who projected onto it all their completely unrealistic-to-the-point-of-insanity dreams about what a video game could be. Like the people who insisted that every single 3e spell needed to be included, including Time Stop and Divination spells. Or the guy who wanted to spend his entire in-game experience running a stable, demanding gameplay deep enough to make taking care of horses a rewarding experience. Let me tell you about a game called Star Citizen...
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Feb 6, 2017 04:39
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Halloween Jack posted:My favourite thing about PFO is still the fans who projected onto it all their completely unrealistic-to-the-point-of-insanity dreams about what a video game could be. Like the people who insisted that every single 3e spell needed to be included, including Time Stop and Divination spells. Or the guy who wanted to spend his entire in-game experience running a stable, demanding gameplay deep enough to make taking care of horses a rewarding experience. Of the two, the latter seems much closer to Dancey's intent. He would talk about how if you just want to sit around and serve beer or make swords all day, you'd have a valid place in the game. So horses is just one step away from that (they'd just have to hahaha implement haha horses ahahahahahahaha-) I remember his intent to make factions basically centered around alignment, but also alignment would be based on specific in-game actions, and his long explanations about being chaotic would be punishing because you couldn't be a part of a group, and how chaotic evil characters would basically be hunted like serial killers might be... trying to use it as a means of policing the community and encouraging faction building. He's great at spinning convincing theories for fans without ever having to worry about how the gently caress poo poo might actually be implemented sanely. What's more, of all the things being kept from Pathfinder, it's not like, dungeons or the magic system or even the races but alignment is what he fixated on. Alignment. Ugh.
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Feb 6, 2017 05:22
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I did some reading about PFO during Dancey's ignoble reign, and apparently people discovered that due to the way item deterioration worked, if you didn't give a poo poo about advancing your character for a few weeks (alignment), you could keep murdering another player until they were essentially naked (every time you died there was a chance some of your equipment was just gone, and the rest of it took a durability hit. There was no way to repair items, and once they hit 0 durability, they were destroyed). This was relatively simple to do, as all you had to was gank someone, run over to the respawn point for the area, and then repeat, because the only no-PVP areas were the towns and you didn't respawn in town unless you were really close to one. Instead of actually changing any of this (random item loss on death, durability able to hit zero from dying, objects being destroyed upon hitting zero durability, no repair system, no PVP grace period, respawn zones not protected) Dancey merely made a post on the forums that amounted to "Please don't do that" with zero threat of enforcement behind it.
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Feb 6, 2017 05:32
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Major features of the game were just Dancey scrambling to come up with an explanation for how the game was going to be a WoW Killer with pitifully few resources behind the development.
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Feb 6, 2017 05:37
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Alien Rope Burn posted:What's more, of all the things being kept from Pathfinder, it's not like, dungeons or the magic system or even the races but alignment is what he fixated on. Alignment. Ugh.
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Feb 6, 2017 05:45
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Kwyndig posted:Dancey merely made a post on the forums that amounted to "Please don't do that" with zero threat of enforcement behind it. Hell, I remember with those thousand-dollar properties people had deeds, which I presume where there so if you want to sell or trade your property, you can go into your inventory and hand it over. Thankfully, they can't be destroyed and people can't loot them from you. But they can still be dropped or misplaced and lost. You can still be conned out of them, too. There was a post that was basically "make sure to leave your deed at home in a safe place and don't go losing it with a misclick while out in the field". 
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Feb 6, 2017 05:53
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The game Dancey continually pitched required double the money he managed to gather if not more just to reach a feature complete state, let alone optimized or playable. This is assuming he had somehow managed to hire a game development team for peanuts that knew what they were doing, an art team that knew how to work within the limitations of the engine, and a lead designer who could make loving miracles happen because the list of features included things that just plain weren't possible using middleware alone.
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Feb 6, 2017 05:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Hell, I remember with those thousand-dollar properties people had deeds, which I presume where there so if you want to sell or trade your property, you can go into your inventory and hand it over. Thankfully, they can't be destroyed and people can't loot them from you. Except don't put it in the safe in your $5000 inn, because if someone burns it down (they're destructible), we would like you to still be able to retrieve items from your safe, but we don't know how our game works. We think the item database would have it somewhere, so we could confirm it was yours and respawn it, but we don't know how to do that.
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Feb 6, 2017 06:31
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It's kind of incredible how much of a gently caress up PFO was. The game is tailor made for the staid, procedural interpretation of a computer game. Like, wasn't there someone that made a roguelike based on the OGL?
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Feb 6, 2017 06:39
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The object lesson is that when you have a team that can barely design tabletop games this does not count as qualification to design video games. Especially the genre of video games that has arguably the hardest and most elaborate coding, hardware, and network requirements from the business end. If they measured their expectations and did a Neverwinter Nights clone it... okay probably would have still sucked, but at least have been doable and much easier to expand. But that wouldn't have gotten the fabulous WOW-level subscription gravy train Dancey was clearly envisioning.
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Feb 6, 2017 08:45
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All this Pathfinder Online keeps reminding me of the fact that there hasn't been a good video game using a tabletop RPG licence in ages. I had high hopes for the latest D&D video game (Sword Coast Adventures or something?) but apparently that was a bug-riddled mess and also a bad game. The very idea of a co-op game where one player is sort of playing the DM appeals to me. Hell, an asymmetric MOBA where you have Team Heroes vs. Team Monsters where Team Monsters is a single player controlling a large amount of monsters using a more traditional RTS-style interface would be cool as hell IMO. There's that new Torment game based on Numenera, but I don't know how good it's supposed to be. One would hope that they took most of their Torment cues from the narrative and not from the mechanics and also that they didn't simply try and copypaste the mechanics of the tabletop RPG into a video game haphazardly.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:04
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It's my understanding that the Numenera video game is going to use a modified version of the Eternity engine - the main draw is going to be that it's going to be in the Numenera setting. From a "faithful to the source material" perspective, it really seems like a lot of these games are hamstrung by the need to ... not be turn-based. D&D Online and Neverwinter Online are both only paying lip service to the mechanics, and even the Infinity Engine games and the Neverwinter Nights games are on this pausable-real-time thingamajigger which only gets it mostly right because even if they're getting the rounds and turns right, they're still not operating on a grid. Temple of Elemental Evil got it right, so did the Gold Box games, but besides that, it's really slim pickings. Which is a shame because something built like, say, the Avadon: The Black Fortress games could be a faithful recreation of the rules, be fairly cheap in art assets, and still be an engaging game.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:19
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Like many other posters here I'm eternally salty about the fact that we didn't get a turn-based tactical RPG in the style of X-Com during the D&D 4e era. It needn't have even been a 100% direct port of D&D 4e's rules into a video game, but a tactical RPG utilizing the trappings of 4e, like the four roles, every class having something to do beyond choosing "attack," and so on. The closest thing we've got to something like that is Card Hunter, which is actually pretty fun.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:31
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The Harebrained Shadowrun games have their flaws but they're still some of the better CRPGs to come out in recent days and they go on sale all the time, if you haven't picked them up I'd recommend them. You can skip Returns and just go straight into Dragonfall and/or Hong Kong. Their Battletech tactics game is also looking like it's shaping up to be pretty decent too. In theory Paradox owning the World of Darkness means that a WoD computer game is in the works, theoretically.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:41
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Doesn't Obsidian have access to the Pathfinder license?
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Feb 6, 2017 10:43
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Kai Tave posted:In theory Paradox owning the World of Darkness means that a WoD computer game is in the works, theoretically.
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Feb 6, 2017 11:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's kind of incredible how much of a gently caress up PFO was. The game is tailor made for the staid, procedural interpretation of a computer game. Yes, there's a 3e roguelike and another 3e based game. However, the OGL actually prohibits using it to make computer games, so PFO is based off of Pathfinder's not OGL creative property, not the rules. Edit: also it should be noted that DDO is a very faithful translation of 3e. It's impenetrable to new users because it requires builds and all the usual 3e stuff.
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Feb 6, 2017 11:33
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Arivia posted:Edit: also it should be noted that DDO is a very faithful translation of 3e. It's impenetrable to new users because it requires builds and all the usual 3e stuff. Doesn't the number scaling in DDO go up to eclipsing the tabletop's math by a couple degrees of magnitude?
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Feb 6, 2017 11:41
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DDO also did that weird thing where, to match the level cap to something that people are actually used to in MMOs, they divided each level into 3 sub-levels or something, so between getting from level 1 to level 2 you'd actually get two minor incremental advances. Then of course 13th Age decided to do something similar but oddly enough 13th Age never got called out for being an MMO in tabletop form. Come to think of it, 13th Age could make for an interesting CRPG. Make it as aggressively by-the-numbers fantasy RPG as possible in the style of Dragon Age and the Infinity engine games without actually using any d20 mechanics, then make 13th Age's one unique thing that separates it from standard D&D, the icon system, the focus of the game, probably as some type of elaborate moral choice/faction system.
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Feb 6, 2017 11:58
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Asimo posted:The object lesson is that when you have a team that can barely design tabletop games this does not count as qualification to design video games. I think the more important takeaway is "Don't listen to Ryan Dancey."
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Feb 6, 2017 12:02
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Arivia posted:Yes, there's a 3e roguelike and another 3e based game. However, the OGL actually prohibits using it to make computer games, so PFO is based off of Pathfinder's not OGL creative property, not the rules. Incursion. There's even an update on the site about how the license is unsuitable for the game. Also I played this years ago and it doesn' seem to have updated much since. Darth Various fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 12:09
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Darth Various posted:Incursion. There's even an update on the site about how the license is unsuitable for the game. Well see there's deciding you need to rewrite the game to fix your old bad coding. Not great, but understandable. Then there's deciding you need to write new libraries. Ehhhh. Then there's deciding you need to write a new language to code it all in. I think there might be a fan fork but not sure.
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Feb 6, 2017 12:26
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