bobby

this article really irks me. i read something that's full of assumptions. it reads like a wikipedia article with a bunch of [citation needed] throughout it.

I don't really know where to begin to comment on this one. It depends which business men you are talking about.

I think you're putting far too much stock in the demands of the business man, instead of the failure to design, or correctly implement a design by a development team.

yes publishers (or businessmen as you put it) want to make money, but I am sure in the sense of an mmo, this most definitely is built on a basis of good game play or design, rather than "what will get us quick bucks". i'd wager that most profits in mmo's dont come from initial sales, but from sustained subscriptions or real money transactions etc. You won't get repeat buyers if you dont have a good game for them to keep playing. I think part of the game design is to get people to stay, which probably does tie into "making money".

secondly, as some have said before, you can't build a polished game without great design, great tech, great art, etc without having the skills, experience AND money behind you. sure youth has the ideas and the innovation, but we don't have the experience to make a triple A mmo. Heck, there's really only one company in the world that has the ability to truly make that game.

No one is going to throw sufficient dollars at a young company just because they have a great design. they're likely not in a position to prove that they can get the game finished. there's going to be a long process for new companies to get themselves into the game, and during that time, the old hands will gradually be able to work on their own IP because they proved they can complete a finished product.

In cases like AoC or Warhammer, I just don't think they got their design right from the outset. maybe it was the business men who forced them through that door, but who's going to pay for a game to be redesigned/tweaked for another 12 months without any subscriptions? no doubt we all want to work on our games for an extra year, but sometimes you just have to draw the line and deal with what you came up with - even if it sucks.

Spot on. On the whole, eastern and western gamers themselves have completely different tastes. For most western gamers the most noticeable aspects of these differences are the UI, controls and the levelling rate. Unfortunately some people here have called them "sucky", where really they are just different and catered to different gaming cultures and styles.

A point I thought of when originally reading the article is the possibility of splitting European MMO's off from western. Does anyone else see European games developing and establishing their own individual style over the coming years or decade?

As far as I see it, US gamers and Euro gamers play much differently as well, as shown by the arena tournaments and raiding styles in WoW to the prevalence of games like DotA in Europe as well.

Haha so you did. Skipped the hiring line.

But yeah, GDC was pretty quiet on the game front, so hopefully E3 will be bringing the goods.

Didn't you guys post about 2 weeks back that Realtime Worlds were hiring? More specifically for contract positions (9 - 12 months) on APB?

I don't think it's crazy to put 2 and 2 together and assume the game will be shipping in close to 12 months time.

Not to mention the fact that E3 is only 6 weeks a way and is far more likely to have game updates and announcements than GDC.

Activision-Blizzard is a publisher. Could have quite easily listed Blizzard as a developer, which it is to this day.

there doesn't seem to have been much support from MGM during the entire process, so that's not really the issue

IMO it's a bigger problem than it appears. As my understanding puts it, the publisher FireSky was built entirely around the SGW project at the start. As they're really one and the same company, there's no chance of a publisher bailout - and the same thing could happen to FireSky as a whole.

if you're bored with the game, use it as a wake up call (or opportunity) to go outside!

Yes I would like a little more information when someone claims to have "solved the mystery".

I find this quite interesting and am a little disappointed that all the info I got was "it's fixed".

Thankyou.

Wouldn't the mystery be solved if they said what was actually causing the bug? Not simply that they had fixed it....

grrr

it's a great time to hire when so many people are getting laid off

abundance of free talent