Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

This is going to turn it around for 38?

If memory holds isn"t Bigworld used in some Korean MMO"s? Would be nice if 38 Studios could get some of their art people since they seem to be able to make graphically excellent games even if the rest of the game is a grind fest.

You know what sucks about this? I"m a little excited that the game is moving on, however I"ll be over 30 before this game comes out.

Fog said:

I strongly disagree. In many games of all sorts, limited information adds a layer of skill and decision-making to the game that isn"t present otherwise.

You could say the same thing about poker; your opponent"s cards aren"t visible unless you cheat. However, your opponents" cards are a hugely important unknown, and if you don"t consider what they might be, you will lose consistently. Is that "inexcusable?" It certainly doesn"t make poker less interesting.

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Completely agree with this. How much of a game would poker be if the cards were turned face up so that everyone could see each others hand? How much skill would it take to fold that straight when you know for a fact that the guy 2 seats down has a flush without even needing to look back at his betting history in that hand and the play he has exihibited in previous hands that clues you in to what he likely has at this time?

The last thing these games need is a dumbing down hand holding experience such as a threat monitor offers. Experience fighting a mob will in time give people that choose to learn the "feel" for how much DPS they can do without getting agro from a mob, and the tanks in time learn what they need to do in order to hold enough agro from the mob. This is one key area where skill still means something in these games instead of the further degredation of MMORPG"s to a "time in = success out" formula. Skill should still count for something, and learning how to deal with mobs without a breakdown of every concievable bit of information that could lend an advantage is a large area where that skill can be realized.

I agree totally with the above poster and disagree 100% with the orginal poster in wanting the entirety of information relayed as number data. The mobs reactions caused by your actions in game and the number of times you screw up and die are your interface to the information you seek and that is what you need to learn from. To ask for more is asking for a hand holding experience that these games have too much of already.

Fog said:

I don"t understand. How could you make that argument? In WoW, you know quite a lot without the threat meter (more than you know about your opponent"s cards in poker!) You see about how much damage you"re doing, you have experience fighting with your tank so you know vaguely how much threat he produces, and you know who"s on top of the threat list right now because they"re getting attacked.

Anyway, I"m not trying to make some complicated analogy. I"m just pointing out one example of a game -- and there are many -- where limited information is used as an important component of the gameplay.

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Well, in much the same way that you don"t know when that next AE will trigger or how much damage the next swing is going to hit for. Even with threat there are X factors such as threat wipes and fixations and stuff thrown in there. To use your poker analogy, even though you don"t know exactly what cards he has, you know what cards he -doesn"t- have. He doesn"t have any of the cards you have, nor does he have the old maid.

So yeah...

Zehn - Vhex said:

Well, in much the same way that you don"t know when that next AE will trigger or how much damage the next swing is going to hit for. Even with threat there are X factors such as threat wipes and fixations and stuff thrown in there. To use your poker analogy, even though you don"t know exactly what cards he has, you know what cards he -doesn"t- have. He doesn"t have any of the cards you have, nor does he have the old maid.

So yeah...

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Dear God, did you just use... an analogy??? Stop the presses! Satan is getting frostbite.

And it was a pretty bad one too.

Tyen said:

too brown?

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too green?

Draegan said:

And it was a pretty bad one too.

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I work with what I"m given. 8(

yay for the aussies!

Faille said:

yay for the aussies!

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And yet, you poor croc-wrestlers will still be stuck with 500ms latency and 20% packet loss.

Well good choice imho going with that graphics engine. Seems pretty low system-spec friendly from the screenies. The U3 engine would have been a huge mistake if they are looking for a large player base.

Froofy-D said:

Well good choice imho going with that graphics engine. Seems pretty low system-spec friendly from the screenies. The U3 engine would have been a huge mistake if they are looking for a large player base.

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Source:Blue"s News - All the carnage that"s fit to post!

38 Studios Gets Unreal for their "OEE?" [March 05, 2008, 11:16 am ET]
38 Studios announces they have licensed the Unreal Engine 3 to power the client end of their upcoming MMORPG, not long after announcing BigWorld Technology middleware will be used on the server end (story). Thus the body of knowledge about the tech being used by Curt Schilling"s development studio continues to grow in the absence of details about the game itself. There is a blurb in the announcement about the game, which will apparently be enough of an "Online Entertainment Experience" that they"ve trademarked the term OEE:

Led with the artistic vision of Todd McFarlane and the enthralling storytelling of R. A. Salvatore, 38 Studios is developing an original IP made up of fantastical elements, settings, characters, creatures, rules, and experiences. The IP will encompass multiple media forms including a massively multiplayer online game that is currently scheduled for release in late 2010. The company is utilizing a combination of Epic?s Unreal Engine 3 toolset and BigWorld?s server-side technologies to meet its requirements for achieving an unparalleled OEE?, the premier Online Entertainment Experience.

Here"s a thought....

what engine does WoW use? Is it their own built-from-nothing engine? I really have no clue about such things.

And what engine does a game like, say, LOTRO use?

Zhakran said:

Here"s a thought....

what engine does WoW use? Is it their own built-from-nothing engine? I really have no clue about such things.

And what engine does a game like, say, LOTRO use?

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WoW their own

Lotro Modified AC2 engine.

At least that is what I have seen said here.

I seriously hope this project is breaking away from the usual open-world structure of MMOs.

Because if it isn"t they just signed THE WORST POSSIBLE choice of engine for their game, IMHO.

I think WoW"s engine was derived from WCIII.

Tancred said:

I seriously hope this project is breaking away from the usual open-world structure of MMOs.

Because if it isn"t they just signed THE WORST POSSIBLE choice of engine for their game, IMHO.

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What does this mean? What capabilities do either of these engines NOT have that would allow us to create this monster?

In the end this was by far the best solution(s) for many of our questions going forward. Unreal allows for rapid prototyping, which has to happen to drive out risk as fast as humanly possibly.

There is so much to the core game that we must validate now, today, before we even approach the "cool" stuff. This core game stuff has to be the end all be all regardless of how "mundane" or "simple" it might be. Being able to get these things up and running will allow us to spend YEARS vetting. If it stops being fun, and part of it, a year or two from now, we"re negligent if we think it will be fun for you. Unreal allows this to happen, not to mention they are some pretty cool people.

Bigworld was a no brainer. It"s shipped games (which you may find it hard to believe is rarer than you might think) and it"s so deep and thorough in it"s server side solutions and tech that I think we all knew from day 1 we"d go that route.

What we did after that was spend literally a year seeing every other possible solution, from Crytek to Hero and more. I am pretty confident we saw and got into every solution being offered.

Might seem trivial but this was a huge step for us. Oh and the fact that in doing this we now have a world you can actually log into, and run around in!!
(And I may be biased but it"s stunningly gorgeous!)