Open to the public

[Slamz]

I'm opening this forum section to the public.

We'll see how that goes. I doubt many members of the public visit us, but ideally I see this section as a sort of "steal our ideas...PLEASE!" section.

[Diggles]

heh, i doubt anyone would steal our ideas, because it would actually take a dedicated team to program and design around it.

Most of these current games are just bad hack jobs. Bioware takes the time to create real shit though. Holy mother fuck, their trailer @ e3 looked better than most action movies

[Dustie]

I personally would hold off on opening this up to the public. If someone came and looked at it now, they'd probably never come back and look at it again, it's just a jumble of ideas. I would wait until we gave it at least a small amount of structure and coalesced some of the ideas into digestible form.

Kind of like going to a nasty restaurant with food all over the floor, you probably won't go back. It's best to keep the doors closed until you've cleaned the floor.

My 2 cents

[amins]

I'm against public vewing...

If this actually becomes something, finding start up funding isn't difficult. This kind of venture has always appealed to me (along with developing a sat or sun morning computer animated sci-fi/fantasy 30 min show on the net).

[Jakensama]

heh, i doubt anyone would steal our ideas, because it would actually take a dedicated team to program and design around it.

Most of these current games are just bad hack jobs. Bioware takes the time to create real shit though. Holy mother fuck, their trailer @ e3 looked better than most action movies

Which bioware trailer?

[Slamz]

I'm against public vewing...

If this actually becomes something, finding start up funding isn't difficult. This kind of venture has always appealed to me (along with developing a sat or sun morning computer animated sci-fi/fantasy 30 min show on the net).

I dunno. I don't have a lot of faith in small ventures for MMORPGs.
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The Fallout MMORPG was looking for $75 million to produce the game. I was thinking more along the lines of $30 million, but maybe $75 million is what it takes these days.

You really need top notch programmers. I think Shadowbane's #1 flaw was that they were simply in over their heads on technical implementation. You'd also ideally like to get top notch artists. Even if you don't/can't do the game in high detail, million-polygon models where every hair is lovingly rendered, you still need good art to make the low polygon graphics look acceptable (like WOW did).

And then there's server hardware (and our "living world" idea would probably require a lot of hardware to run all of this NPC AI), network connections (which gets very expensive when you reach MMO levels), etc.


Basically I hold no hope whatsoever of ever seeing the kind of money or expertise required to try and do a game like this. And if I did have $75 million, the first thing I would try to do is wrangle a real producer who knows how to produce a game, and probably a real designer who could take our ideas and fashion them into a real design.

It would take Blizzard or Bioware or something like that to accomplish this -- all of these game companies with more money than God but really unimaginative designers who have less experience playing games than probably anyone on this forum.

[Jakensama]

I think you underestimate the designer's knowledge and how much they have to compromise to meet the realities of working for a company that can afford to produce these games. Its not like the people designing these games are the ones holding the purse strings.

Once you have shareholders who don't know shit about your industry, your great ideas get sadly watered down, as I learned at our shareholder meeting today

[Diggles]

heh, i doubt anyone would steal our ideas, because it would actually take a dedicated team to program and design around it.

Most of these current games are just bad hack jobs. Bioware takes the time to create real shit though. Holy mother fuck, their trailer @ e3 looked better than most action movies

Which bioware trailer?

I believe its called 'deception'
Sith guys attack the Jedi Temple (i think it is at least)

[Jakensama]

Oh for their MMO, I wasn't sure if it was for that or for the new single player RPG coming out in October or for Mass Effect 2.

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Between the Kotor games and this they have already done far better with the property than any of Lucas' movies.

[Slamz]

I think you underestimate the designer's knowledge and how much they have to compromise to meet the realities of working for a company that can afford to produce these games. Its not like the people designing these games are the ones holding the purse strings.

Once you have shareholders who don't know shit about your industry, your great ideas get sadly watered down, as I learned at our shareholder meeting today

I dunno. I always think back to the games (like EQ) where the designer reveals, 2 years into it, that he has a level 48 ranger and that he plays when he has time in between work, the wife, the kids, soccer practice, vacation, etc.

I think most game designers are businessmen moreso than gamers. WOW, to me, is a businessman's approach to gaming -- look at what's already out there and put all the good stuff in one box, but with very little innovation. That worked, but I don't think it's a method that can keep working.

[Vllad]

I think 75 million is a stretch and any game that cost that much has to much at stake to be any good.

I think you could do a very solid MMO for 6 to 8 million if you can put the time in to develope it. City of Hero's was done for less then 3 million. The problem with the MMO projects that are out today is to many artist play "how big is the dot".

The art has to be simple in order to compliment hundreds of players in a single area and with the projects that have been released in the last couple of years simple was not their goal.

The other thing people fail to do is they should allow for more auto generation engines. Take the catagraphy engine for Dark and Light. D&L sucked as a game. You could take the catagraphy engine and let it produce your world right off of the bat.

Cut some corners by not customizing every damn tree. Create a darker world by having more zones like the Ferrot. No need for nice looking swamps. Their are no reasons to have bright green and yellow zones when the world is a battle of control for Heaven and Hell. Grey and Brown work just fine.

That is why a Sci Fi game would be so much cheaper to design. Not much to do on the art side.


Vllad

[Jakensama]

True but keep in mind the market is far more saturated now than when CoH was released.

[Slamz]

It would be interesting to see a full breakdown of the cost of an MMO.

I mean, World War 2 Online couldn't have cost THAT much to develop, and they did their own engine. Granted they really don't have NPCs or AI (nothing mobile, anyway) but it's still an impressive game engine that does some stuff no other game engine does. And they're a small group.

Same for EVE. Granted they probably save a lot when the "map" is a big piece of black with a few planets dotted around, but they were a small company too.


And if you started small you wouldn't necessarily need a massive server farm or internet hookup. Maybe your initial rollout is only to 10,000 customers. That might be all you get anyway without an advertising campaign. Plus, like Darkfall, it would give you a chance to build up rather than trying to start big and then crashing down like most MMORPGs.

I guess the hard part would be getting that initial several-million and then bringing together the core team you need. You'd need some serious experts, especially if you needed a custom graphics engine. (If not, then part of your budget would go to lease an existing engine.)

[Vllad]

You could save a ton of money if you just took an existing engine and went small. Buy a game like Dark and Light and just start it over from scratch. At that point it would be like modding. You just have to make sure what ever engine you start with will still be supported in two years.


Vllad

[Zouji]

I'm against public vewing...

If this actually becomes something, finding start up funding isn't difficult. This kind of venture has always appealed to me (along with developing a sat or sun morning computer animated sci-fi/fantasy 30 min show on the net).

You should team up with this guy.
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[Hoofhurr]

That worked, but I don't think it's a method that can keep working.

I dunno. They keep putting naked women into dark rooms with a backdrop of music while serving alcohol and men continue to spend their money there. I don't see where that formula has changed much in the last few.... You could argue that the drive to have sex is not nearly as motivating as the drive to kill each other through virtual means but it's got to be close by virtue of accessibility.

[Slamz]

Service industries have advantages in that they can copy someone else to the T and still make money simply by doing it somewhere else. With MMORPGs, there is no where else. Basically I think WOW has cornered the market on what WOW does. They can probably do it forever, but I don't think it'll be easy to shoehorn in on their business model.