Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime

Ehud posted:

My understanding is the AoC guy was in an MLM when he was 18 selling this stuff called Xango. My mom was in that same MLM (and every other MLM lol). It was basically all about selling fruit juice and signing up others to sell fruit juice. They had some dumb story about how it was made from berries that some tribe used to eat to make them swole and healthy or some nonsense.

He made some of his money early on doing that, but most of his money was made in stocks and real estate.

Anyways, I think this game will definitely launch and it might be kind of cool, but probably not because there hasn’t been a good MMO since EverQuest which also wasn’t a good MMO.

Wait is the mlm controversy really over him buying into an mlm when he was a kid?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Pryce
May 21, 2011

Tabletops posted:

Wait is the mlm controversy really over him buying into an mlm when he was a kid?

The initial 'drama' was all rumors that he RAN an MLM, and that seems to have never gotten let go of. Here's his direct response he made about how it was just a job he signed up for when he was 18: https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/68tk1l/comment/dh1912j/

I think the 'bigger' concern about Steven has been that he's basically just 'some guy' who likes MMOs and now runs this massive company with nearly zero experience making video games. That's not to say it can't be done (and I'd argue new blood in the industry is certainly very valuable), it does make this one of the riskier investments and Kickstarters I've seen. I'll be first in line if this game launches, but until then, my wallet's staying shut.

Draynar
Apr 22, 2008

Pryce posted:

The initial 'drama' was all rumors that he RAN an MLM, and that seems to have never gotten let go of. Here's his direct response he made about how it was just a job he signed up for when he was 18: https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/68tk1l/comment/dh1912j/

I think the 'bigger' concern about Steven has been that he's basically just 'some guy' who likes MMOs and now runs this massive company with nearly zero experience making video games. That's not to say it can't be done (and I'd argue new blood in the industry is certainly very valuable), it does make this one of the riskier investments and Kickstarters I've seen. I'll be first in line if this game launches, but until then, my wallet's staying shut.

Never give money early, but as long as they hire the right people and such they'll be fine, the OWNER doesn't need to be a tech genius. Nothing I've seen makes me think they're going route of the shadowbane/crowfall guys which had tons of ideas but you could tell the technical backend and design was just god awful and doomed the more you got to see.

Realistically this game will only do so/so even if it is done well due to the nature of seemingly be a PVP driven mmo. Personally I like them when they are designed around it but still a niche within a niche.

Loiku
Jul 10, 2007

Cardboard Fox posted:

Sounds like it's going to be a typical MMO launch then!

As long as it actually comes out and it's fun ganking people when you're leveling then it's meeting expectations for a PvP MMO. That was about the only value of playing New World but that was enough for me.

hobocrunch
Mar 11, 2008

I'm walkin' here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc7HJknNqjQ

Caravan update. Looks okay, I guess. It's still missing a lot of polish but the foundational movement of the caravans and size / speed etc look decent enough. Development still going pretty slow though..

Referral link.
https://ashesofcreation.com/r/1Z9GDANCVN6FZGTS

Kaysette
Jan 5, 2009

~*Boston makes me*~
~*feel good*~

:wrongcity:
One year later, still looks… fine? Not clear if this game will actually ever release.

hobocrunch
Mar 11, 2008

I'm walkin' here

Kaysette posted:

One year later, still looks… fine? Not clear if this game will actually ever release.

Everything they put out is seemingly okay in a vacuum, but as is almost the case with Intrepid, what they show is all they have and these other features are just falling by the wayside. Perpetually in a state of not truly finishing things, or committing. They fill their year up with these "showcases" and then time passes and you wonder how it's been 2 years since the Character creator update, and likely nobody has even worked on it since then or it's completely scrapped. I don't follow Star Citizen but I have to imagine it's similar in that game also.

bird food bathtub
Aug 9, 2003

College Slice
Who do they have developing this thing, two dogs and an intern? I had completely forgotten I even had this bookmarked and THAT is how far they've come? Think I'll keep this thread around for the lols at this point.

Kevin Bacon
Sep 22, 2010

this game is going to be the one that finally takes down wow, mark my words

Ehud
Sep 19, 2003

football.

bird food bathtub posted:

Who do they have developing this thing, two dogs and an intern? I had completely forgotten I even had this bookmarked and THAT is how far they've come? Think I'll keep this thread around for the lols at this point.

Intrepid Studios has somewhere between 50-200 employees according to LinkedIn.

As far as funding is concerned, they got $3,271,809 from kickstarter. The rest is primarily funded by their CEO Steven Sharif, who made his money doing an MLM called XanGo lol.

xZAOx
Sep 6, 2004
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
I can't wait until this game launches after 15 years of development then everyone is bored after 2 months because they've done all the content.

The MMO industry has gotta realize at some point that 7-10+ year dev cycles are stupid, and figure out some other way to handle things. Mainly fighting scope creep and figuring out the right amount of content for launch, with more frequent content updates thereafter.

Like, it's a hard challenge to solve, sure, but it's not impossible. A lot of these long delays seem to be from constant reiterating before anything is in the hands of players. Big design changes when stuff is already years in development. Also see: pantheon, lol.

Cardboard Fox
Feb 8, 2009

[Tentatively Excited]
I think the industry has figured it out, which is why the MMO genre is basically dead at this point. Too much money to build, and way more money to maintain. The amount of technical debt you are accumulating must be awful.

hobocrunch
Mar 11, 2008

I'm walkin' here

xZAOx posted:

I can't wait until this game launches after 15 years of development then everyone is bored after 2 months because they've done all the content.

The MMO industry has gotta realize at some point that 7-10+ year dev cycles are stupid, and figure out some other way to handle things. Mainly fighting scope creep and figuring out the right amount of content for launch, with more frequent content updates thereafter.

Like, it's a hard challenge to solve, sure, but it's not impossible. A lot of these long delays seem to be from constant reiterating before anything is in the hands of players. Big design changes when stuff is already years in development. Also see: pantheon, lol.

I think the issue(s) is that you need a solid framework on your company, and have secured funding on your idea before you start (And lets be real, 100mil is probably the minimum these days). Crowdfunding is not the way and is basically a hail mary into it. Even this game which can afford to pay 150 staff at this point is struggling because the company is so new (And Intrepid was basically the most lucky you could ever be).

In the West you have all these startups with decent ideas, but they can't fund it, or their companies are so fresh they don't have correct pipelines in place to go at the correct speed, and in the East it's the opposite except all their mmo ideas are poo poo they lean into gacha/mtx/p2w. The only MMO for me that has a decent amount of public information and that isn't giving off red flags over and over again is Pax Dei (So far).

There's also a new wave of MMOs coming that were announced 2021-23 by all the refugees from these companies that somehow screwed the pooch.

https://www.dreamhaven.com/ - Morhaime and CO (Believe Moonshot is doing the MMO I could be wrong).
https://fantasticpixelcastle.com/ - Ghostcrawler and CO ( This one I have the least faith in, Ghostcrawler was never a pinnacle of MMO design but w/e)
https://playpaxdei.com/en-us - Ex CCP and CO (I think it's a lot of EX Max Payne devs also).
https://www.notorious.gg/ - Chris Kaleiki and CO

hobocrunch fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Nov 3, 2023

whydirt
Apr 18, 2001


Gaz Posting Brigade :c00lbert:
I think for the most part MMOs try to marry a AAA single-player RPG campaign along with an open world/PvP live-service game and end up not doing either particularly well.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



hobocrunch posted:

I think the issue(s) is that you need a solid framework on your company, and have secured funding on your idea before you start (And lets be real, 100mil is probably the minimum these days). Crowdfunding is not the way and is basically a hail mary into it. Even this game which can afford to pay 150 staff at this point is struggling because the company is so new (And Intrepid was basically the most lucky you could ever be).

In the West you have all these startups with decent ideas, but they can't fund it, or their companies are so fresh they don't have correct pipelines in place to go at the correct speed, and in the East it's the opposite except all their mmo ideas are poo poo they lean into gacha/mtx/p2w. The only MMO for me that has a decent amount of public information and that isn't giving off red flags over and over again is Pax Dei (So far).

There's also a new wave of MMOs coming that were announced 2021-23 by all the refugees from these companies that somehow screwed the pooch.

https://www.dreamhaven.com/ - Morhaime and CO (Believe Moonshot is doing the MMO I could be wrong).
https://fantasticpixelcastle.com/ - Ghostcrawler and CO ( This one I have the least faith in, Ghostcrawler was never a pinnacle of MMO design but w/e)
https://playpaxdei.com/en-us - Ex CCP and CO (I think it's a lot of EX Max Payne devs also).
https://www.notorious.gg/ - Chris Kaleiki and CO

I honestly think there's only one MMO with any hope of releasing and being in a fun, playable state for an extended lifecycle, and that's Monsters and Memories

https://monstersandmemories.com/

PyRosflam
Aug 11, 2007
The good, The bad, Im the one with the gun.

xZAOx posted:

I can't wait until this game launches after 15 years of development then everyone is bored after 2 months because they've done all the content.

The MMO industry has gotta realize at some point that 7-10+ year dev cycles are stupid, and figure out some other way to handle things. Mainly fighting scope creep and figuring out the right amount of content for launch, with more frequent content updates thereafter.

Like, it's a hard challenge to solve, sure, but it's not impossible. A lot of these long delays seem to be from constant reiterating before anything is in the hands of players. Big design changes when stuff is already years in development. Also see: pantheon, lol.

MMO teams cant even get tooling down well anymore. EQ had 1 Dev assigned to a zone, say Unrest. He had some support for itimization, perhaps someone else did the NPC models or perhaps he could take from a bank of models even. If you think this is strange warcraft 3 did the exact same thing and Starcraft 2 used 2-3 devs per map (but 1 owned it). Even Fallout 4 cunked up its world in to neighborhoods and gave each to a single level designer with one guy creating the areas bettween neighborhoods. The ability to give the tools to a level designer and enough freedom to that designer to make something good in a few weeks is key.

Todays teams dont have generalists like this, they have one guy whos job is map design, someone else who populates it, a 3rd who does the writting, people who do Itemization, someone else for sound and on it goes. Each of these people don't get to see the big picture, just their part of the pipeline. The team leads might have to manage the vision, so they provide the D&D inspired map. The above process is many times more costly vs giving a guy who wants to tell a mostly self contained story with his map section. For MMOs you need that economey of scale of being able to let one person go nuts and make Unrest 2.0 with a few vague notes and some storyline beats to hit. Same as Warcraft 3.

Now Pipeline style is not always bad, BG3 was built with a very impressive pipeline but it took them 2 games before BG3 and a budget people would dream of to make a game that good. MMOs do not have the money today to pull this off.

Darwin_
Oct 4, 2021

Can't they dish out those things faster with ChapGDP yet?

truther
Oct 22, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT THE BEARS
I don't even see the issue? I've been casually following development and progress has always seemed fine to me.

Like, the caravan update isn't the only thing they've added. And they consistently release update videos where they talk about aspects of the game for hours. I've never once come away from that having the impression that this is all a scam, that processes are falling by the wayside, that development is failing, that things are going slow.

Progress, to me, seems far more stable and consistent than tons of other games, MMOs even. I have NFI what's going on with Wayfinder, especially concerning DE's news, whereas Intrepid talk about all manner of things and give tangible updates to them as well. Not a fan boy having a wee cry seeing negative posts, but genuinely surprised at the contrast in perspective. I can absolutely see a good release in 2-3 years at this rate.

Draynar
Apr 22, 2008

truther posted:

I don't even see the issue? I've been casually following development and progress has always seemed fine to me.

Like, the caravan update isn't the only thing they've added. And they consistently release update videos where they talk about aspects of the game for hours. I've never once come away from that having the impression that this is all a scam, that processes are falling by the wayside, that development is failing, that things are going slow.

Progress, to me, seems far more stable and consistent than tons of other games, MMOs even. I have NFI what's going on with Wayfinder, especially concerning DE's news, whereas Intrepid talk about all manner of things and give tangible updates to them as well. Not a fan boy having a wee cry seeing negative posts, but genuinely surprised at the contrast in perspective. I can absolutely see a good release in 2-3 years at this rate.


It looks like legit game to me. Now fact it seems to be very pvp focused for content means it will be much smaller then people hope as well. Combat also looks really dull.

Ehud
Sep 19, 2003

football.

haven't heard anything about this game in a minute

https://x.com/AshesofCreation/status/1737216751459332261?s=20

still not even close

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

bird food bathtub
Aug 9, 2003

College Slice
lol, "We're totally going to make progress and a year from now we'll get to the next phase, we promise!"

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply