Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Twobit Whore said:

WoW is as successful as it because it simply didn"t do what you suggest. Make a few things and make them really cool instead of making a bunch of things and being unable to polish them within the decade.

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The only limitation is time & money neither of which should be concerns for Blizzard given how much money WoW brings in.

For release it is completely warranted to limit what you do and make it great. But here 3 years later the base aspects of WoW really haven"t changed except for PvP. PvP has expanded its feature set a ton and will continue to do so in WotLK. PvE, not so much.

Plus a lot of the features they could add to broaden the appeal of the game wouldn"t exactly be major coding complexities like PvP or PvE. They"d take time to do but they shouldn"t have major reoccurring recodes since they shouldn"t be effected by systems like PvE or PvP, ie things that are routinely getting adjusted. Take housing for example, once implemented it shouldn"t require tons of maintenance to keep it functioning.

Laerazi said:

Releasing a half-finished game to the real world should be completely unacceptable regardless of what industry you"re in.

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While Brad McQuaid got much of the heat from the Vanguard fiasco (much of it deserved) it was John Smedley who made the decision to release Vanguard in an unfinished state. How he continues to be the CEO of SOE and still makes such obvious plunders is beyond me. Here we have the spectacle of a major MMO company that knows full well the success formula of Blizzard but willfully ignores it and continues to release crap to the MMO community.

Sure, Blizzard has its faults with WoW but it"s still a much needed breath of fresh air in the gaming industry.

RE: adding new horizontal features to WoW

On the other hand, you don"t start feeding the Golden Goose a new diet.

Old Man Potter said:

While Brad McQuaid got much of the heat from the Vanguard fiasco (much of it deserved) it was John Smedley who made the decision to release Vanguard in an unfinished state. How he continues to be the CEO of SOE and still makes such obvious plunders is beyond me. Here we have the spectacle of a major MMO company that knows full well the success formula of Blizzard but willfully ignores it and continues to release crap to the MMO community.

Sure, Blizzard has its faults with WoW but it"s still a much needed breath of fresh air in the gaming industry.

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Sigh, this isn"t the proper thread for such discussions, but no.. Smedley did not make that decision. Sigil did. They squandered the money given, they got a little reprieve from SOE in the form of distribution duties and the bonus of free beta servers and file distribution, and finally they failed to generate any VC to fund further development of the game.

Smed may make some bad decisions, but Vanguard was not one of them.

Campa said:

The only limitation is time & money neither of which should be concerns for Blizzard given how much money WoW brings in.

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Argh. Does no one understand the lesson of the Mythical Man Month anymore? Part of the reason Blizzard"s games are so fucking amazing is that the integration is seamless. You don"t have a jarring experience going from one section of the world to another, and you can"t look at a quest or a raid mob or an item and say "well obviously the Fort Worth team designed that one."

As far as PvE not changing so much, they"ve done some extremely cool stuff in the new encounters. Mage tanking is novel and interesting, warlock tanking was expanded. Teron is an amazingly cool fight that takes the nascent idea that was present in Razorgore and brings it to life.

Plus a lot of the features they could add to broaden the appeal of the game wouldn"t exactly be major coding complexities like PvP or PvE. They"d take time to do but they shouldn"t have major reoccurring recodes since they shouldn"t be effected by systems like PvE or PvP, ie things that are routinely getting adjusted. Take housing for example, once implemented it shouldn"t require tons of maintenance to keep it functioning.

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Again, statements like this one are just blatantly false. Remember when they twiddled the wrong bit and level 3 Judgement of the Crusader would cause a paladin to instantly summon a Black War Kodo? Shit like that happens all the time, and adding these features that you claim "wouldn"t exactly be major coding complexities" would end up causing hundreds of that "why the fuck did that happen" class of bugs. That"s a problem with any software project, not just an MMO.

But Wodin it would be so easy. Easy.

Wodin said:

Remember when they twiddled the wrong bit and level 3 Judgement of the Crusader would cause a paladin to instantly summon a Black War Kodo? Shit like that happens all the time, and adding these features that you claim "wouldn"t exactly be major coding complexities" would end up causing hundreds of that "why the fuck did that happen" class of bugs. That"s a problem with any software project, not just an MMO.

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When you don"t properly version your code, mistakes like this happen. Just because a customer relations team member tells you a simple explanation like "twiddled the wrong bit", doesn"t mean thats how it actually happened. Blizzard has reintroduced bugs that were once fixed in the passed a few times now...

In the particular case of the Level 3 Judgement of the Crusader issue, the chances of adding a feature that has NOTHING to do with player abilities causing this mistake is nearly impossible. How something like this gets passed a QA white-glove is beyond me... do you NOT test all player abilities (especially when a change has been made or a large game release is being pushed)?

infrared said:

In the particular case of the Level 3 Judgement of the Crusader issue, the chances of adding a feature that has NOTHING to do with player abilities causing this mistake is nearly impossible. How something like this gets passed a QA white-glove is beyond me... do you NOT test all player abilities (especially when a change has been made or a large game release is being pushed)?

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How does casting "Summon Black War Kodo" have nothing to do with player abilities? The bug could easily have been as simple as entering the spellid for Rank 3 JotC wrong. While it"s something that really should have been caught by QA, it"s not something that points to a critical flaw anywhere.

The significant number of bug regressions does indicate there"s something wrong with thier source control, but considering they still use CVS I don"t find that very surprising.

Plorkyeran said:

How does casting "Summon Black War Kodo" have nothing to do with player abilities? The bug could easily have been as simple as entering the spellid for Rank 3 JotC wrong. While it"s something that really should have been caught by QA, it"s not something that points to a critical flaw anywhere.

The significant number of bug regressions does indicate there"s something wrong with thier source control, but considering they still use CVS I don"t find that very surprising.

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I didn"t say casting "Summon Black War Kodo" had nothing to do with player abilities. I was referring to additional features being added to the game, such as housing in this example, as being something that wouldn"t affect something like player abilities.

But it could. Even something as simple as opening your door may be a "player ability" on their end, it just doesn"t look like it on yours. Not to mention placing items, moving items, deleting items. Storage and etc.

Everything can affect something else.

Twobit Whore said:

But it could. Even something as simple as opening your door may be a "player ability" on their end, it just doesn"t look like it on yours. Not to mention placing items, moving items, deleting items. Storage and etc.

Everything can affect something else.

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Opening your door would spawn an instance, not cast a spell. If you are going to try and call everything a "player ability" and assume Blizzard would have tied any in game action to a player"s ability table, that is just foolishness.

There would be absolutely no reason to relate housing and Level 3 paladin skills together (if we want to be this literal). If a player ability were to be involved in housing, the only action that comes to mind would be to purchase a plot of land or performing specific ownership actions on your plot of land.

infrared said:

Opening your door would spawn an instance, not cast a spell. If you are going to try and call everything a "player ability" and assume Blizzard would have tied any in game action to a player"s ability table, that is just foolishness.

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Thottbot World of Warcraft: opening

There"s several spells there which could easily be the "open normal door" spell. The fact that you can"t open doors when the server dies indicates that it hits the server for something in the process. If you look at the spell lists on Thottbot, a huge number of things which you may not expect to be spells ARE implemented as spells in WoW.

Spawning an instance probably doesn"t involve casting a spell (unless it"s accessed some way other than a portal -- the BWL orb casts a spell), but we already know that the infrastructure does not support spawning a large number of instances. The 5 instances per hour limit wasn"t implemented to stop farming, it was implemented because 2-3 people rapidly resetting an instance would literally kill the servers. Prior to the hardware upgrades we had BWL die on us with no other raids in the instance and under 5 people in Dire Maul several times. Most servers probably have more capacity than they need now, but do they have enough more to support several hundred people hanging out in thier own instances?

So Curt, remember 2 things regarding Bond"s lawsuit against you: 1)Truth is a defense (and man does he open the door here against himself) and 2) he has to prove damages (good luck for him there since nearly the entire world believes he used steroids).

There is no lawsuit, so I won"t even bite on that one.

Things are rolling along here. We are into two more engine evaluations as well as working with some major companies on potential partnerships. The IP continues to grow by leaps and bounds. R.A. has done some really extraordinary stuff with regards to creating a foundation and backstory that will, I think, put together something unforgettable.

As far as details, claim you heard it hear first, even though we"ve already said it here and other places.

We gain literally nothing by revealing anything about the IP right now. So much of the process right now is ebb and flow and give and take as it relates to game design that revealing anything right now would open us up to the same problem many others have. Things most likely would change and expectations for things would be created that are unfair to you guys/gals, and our design team.

I would guess that it will be well into next year before we even consider releasing the first details of anything related to the IP creativity wise. Comicon would be my best guess but that"s certainly subject to change. We continue to evaluate the marketplace both here and abroad and use that with other things to see what is going to fit best 3-4 years from now.

Please don"t stop the creative ideas coming if you have them. This board has the potential to give significantly positive input when you guys aren"t slamming each other for stupid posts

My only suggestion would be not to have a spammy combat system like EQ2 has.

Ya, usually the "simple yet deep" is the best way to go.

As for the IP, I have it on good authority that we will be seeing Mansquito: Online shortly from them.

Locithon said:

My only suggestion would be not to have a spammy combat system like EQ2 has.

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If nothing else, make combat abilities meaningful. EQ2 is a pretty good example of how it shouldn"t be done.

I won"t talk about game mechanics, that has been talked about ad naseum, and I would expect you folks are pretty smart to know what works and what doesn"t. However since you"re looking into game engines right now and that can lead to what you"re capable as far as graphics, here"s my opinion. I"d like to see EQ2 and VG"s art style be the last game that uses them. The plastic, unreal, shiny and awful texturing be gone.

Best enviroments to date, in my opinion, have been LOTRO"s. All character modeling in most of the MMOs have been average, however I"ve always liked GW"s for some reason.

Draegan said:

I won"t talk about game mechanics, that has been talked about ad naseum, and I would expect you folks are pretty smart to know what works and what doesn"t. However since you"re looking into game engines right now and that can lead to what you"re capable as far as graphics, here"s my opinion. I"d like to see EQ2 and VG"s art style be the last game that uses them. The plastic, unreal, shiny and awful texturing be gone.

Best enviroments to date, in my opinion, have been LOTRO"s. All character modeling in most of the MMOs have been average, however I"ve always liked GW"s for some reason.

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I liked GW"s too. I mean, it was unbelievably simple, but yet the overall presentation was nice. GW managed to look beautiful without the insane graphics or the wow-style crap graphics.

Yeah...the shiny, realistic stuff has to go. Bring beautiful, artistic, and stylish to the table and while some of the realism asshats would whine, most will thumb up.