Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Grave said:

He said they were in the first year of a multi-year process.

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sep 6 2006 in prepro ..its on the first fuckin post. It is now April 25 2008.

that would put them at 1 year and 8 months,and that doesn"t include all the time they had working on it before they started the company. Thats long enough to post a couple of ingame screenshots, i would think.

Hop this is not another McFarlane MMO vaporware like UO was.,he had toys ready to go for that as well.

Sure, but you"re talking about the literal formation of the company and pre-production. It"s not like they started making the game right there on day 1, it was simply brainstorming. They"ve probably only actually been working on art, game assets, etc for a year or less.

It"s not surprising that they aren"t revealing much yet. I was expecting maybe some concept art, nothing more.

I"d seen the centaur concept art before, been around a while I think. I dunno, I was expecting more from the panel, at least something on the IP or a proper name for the game. 50 minutes worth of video with nothing credible being said, it was like a democrat debate with Hilary and Obama, no one dared say anything in case they offended someone. Half expected near the end one of their PR people to come in and tell people what to remember and write.

Suppose we got to see behind the scenes, and found out McFarlane has a say on the colour palette of the game, expecting many vibrant red, blacks, and greens. This is a good thing, too much brown is bad.

That interview was supposed to give a glimpse into how a gaming company is built from the ground up. Those were the first words out of their mouths and that is what they came prepared to offer. Naturally people are interested in how they"re going to tackle various obstacles when it comes to making MMOs, but there was zero chance of them revealing their IP or the game"s name (if it has one at the moment) or screenshots. The game has--atmost--a year of development under it"s belt, and no company, even one with an established IP, would reveal more than a few scraps this early on in the development cycle.

Sure, it sucks we couldn"t have gotten some more out of the panel, but things are still being decided, still changing, still being guarded from the competition so you"ll just have to learn to deal.

Cadrid said:

That interview was supposed to give a glimpse into how a gaming company is built from the ground up. Those were the first words out of their mouths and that is what they came prepared to offer. Naturally people are interested in how they"re going to tackle various obstacles when it comes to making MMOs, but there was zero chance of them revealing their IP or the game"s name (if it has one at the moment) or screenshots. The game has--atmost--a year of development under it"s belt, and no company, even one with an established IP, would reveal more than a few scraps this early on in the development cycle.

Sure, it sucks we couldn"t have gotten some more out of the panel, but things are still being decided, still changing, still being guarded from the competition so you"ll just have to learn to deal.

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They"re supposed to be revealing the IP at SD Comic Con in like 2 months. I would assume the title will be unveiled at the same time.

column said:

Most comic fans could give a rats ass about MMO"s. I"m sure Mcfarlane was the draw,not any of those other retards.

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The Comic Cons have become big video game hubs in the recent years as well, so I think you"re way off base here. That being said, those questions do sound pretty ignorant (I haven"t watched it yet).

Twobit Whore said:

The whole topic was that people would do MMO PvP if it wasn"t so harsh. Maybe you weren"t keeping up. WoW has shown that more people do like PvP under WoW circumstances than they did under say, EQ Zek cicrumstances. UOs mass exoduses to EQ"s PvE oriented gameplay showed that given the option they would rather not PvP at all than be a part of UO"s system.

We are talking about a potential competitor to WoW here. Not another EVE. Not a niche MMO. It"s about what it would take to appeal to the masses and harsh PvP penalites will not do it.. imo of course.

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To my understanding there is a strong cultural bias in statements like these.

Players from western nations generally adopted themselves to EQ style games.

Players from eastern nations seem to not mind as much the UO style of play since there seems to be a lot more games similar to UOs style, certainly a lot more than what the western market has supported.

Maybe we should look at the way westerners live their lives that make Western gamers more adverse to "harsher" style of play. If I had to make a personal guess I would say Westerners in general are less social than Easterners.

For the past four decades the number of people we could rely on as those we can share very strong bonds with his declined dramatically (atleast thats the case in the United States where I come from)


THere are more examples of this type of cultural factor but I want to conclude (and to keep things brief) this by saying it is do to these collectivistic tendencies being more prevalent among Easterners than Westerners they can form the bonds needed to deal with the miscreants and predators in pvp games like UO.

Westerners are more indivdualistic and as a result we are less capable at reaching out to other people for help because we strive to be self sufficient.

Lleauaric~EW said:

I think this is problem with alot of this generation.

Most are a bunch of fucking pussies. Not just about video games, but about everything. The appeal of WoW is that there are never any losers. Nobody ever has too feel bad and everyone walks away with a big bag of goodies.

It is a very symbolic measure of the problem as a whole. This is the generation that has mommies and daddies calling Law Schools and Medical schools yelling at the board because their precious angels didnt get in. This is the generation where everyone got a trophy at the end of the season, and kids played soccer because football is too rough of a sport. This the generation who stayed inside watching TV and playing video games rather than going out in the neighborhood fighting, playing tackle football, breaking their arms on makeshift jumps for their bikes, and having to walk to school.

This is the generation where after 9/11 they weren"t ask to serve or sacrifice, they were asked to go shopping.

WoW is mirror for exactly how big of a nation of cunts we are becoming. A country of spoonfed, douchebag, Ethug, half-a-faggot bitches who are so afraid of adversity that even games cant even have challenge in them.

Im praying for tidal waves.

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This is another cultural factor that could explain why the majority of westerners fail at excelling in UO style mmos.

Maybe it"s just that Westerners enjoy leisure activities and Easterners like to play for 60 hours straight until they collapse and die?

Lonin said:

They"re supposed to be revealing the IP at SD Comic Con in like 2 months. I would assume the title will be unveiled at the same time.

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Really? Where did you read/hear that?

Twobit Whore said:

Maybe it"s just that Westerners enjoy leisure activities and Easterners like to play for 60 hours straight until they collapse and die?

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Well I know you are being facetious and sarcastic here but I can"t help it by saying, I haven"t read any studies about the working habits that even insinuates that claim as being possible

Blitzspear said:

Half expected near the end one of their PR people to come in and tell people what to remember and write.
.

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Well the head PR weenie was there Steve "the mouth of EQ2 falsehoods" Danuser is the Community relations head (read, head PR man).

Glad to see this was just another in the long ongoing line of substance less interviews that this genre is becomming more and more famous for.

I really smell more DnL and V:SoH hype here then anything else at this point in time. The same old "we are great and we will prove it one of these days" type of shit we hear over and over from the devs/CEO"s that don"t have a clue how to bring a real product to market.

I think they"re on the right track to bring thier product to market. I just have my reservations concerning it being a "smash hit" right off the bat. It"ll need to build its following through the usual channels (some of which is happening right here on some small scale), and it seems to me that its atm, a mixed up jumble of stuff they"re still in the process of fitting into a sensible presentation for multiple markets. It"ll all come together neatly as long as the individual divisions stay on the same page at key points of the overall history planned for the IP. Like comics giving substance to a line of story characters, which the first chapters of a multi-book novel are based upon. Which translate into a sensible rendition of an mmo story, giving way to a line of toys based upon the aforementioned characters.

You could vary that order some, of course. As well as introducing multiple aspects at the same time. It just has to be sensible, and form-fitting. How this will all support a focus on the players in the mmo remains to be seen. It"ll be interesting to watch unfold, thats for certain.

Lonin said:

They"re supposed to be revealing the IP at SD Comic Con in like 2 months. I would assume the title will be unveiled at the same time.

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We"ll definitely be at San Diego Comic Con, but don"t expect us to be laying the entire IP out on the table. Not to be a downer or anything, but I wouldn"t want people expecting to see a game demo or something when that"s not what we"re going for.

As for the New York show, Ten Ton Hammer came to us and offered a panel. We told them we weren"t going to reveal any specifics about the project, but that we"d talk about the first year of building a game studio. They were cool with that, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it. I had a great time (though I"m still trying to burn some rather unfortunate Slave Leia costumes from my memory).

Moorgard Mobhunter said:

We"ll definitely be at San Diego Comic Con, but don"t expect us to be laying the entire IP out on the table. Not to be a downer or anything, but I wouldn"t want people expecting to see a game demo or something when that"s not what we"re going for.

As for the New York show, Ten Ton Hammer came to us and offered a panel. We told them we weren"t going to reveal any specifics about the project, but that we"d talk about the first year of building a game studio. They were cool with that, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it. I had a great time (though I"m still trying to burn some rather unfortunate Slave Leia costumes from my memory).

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Thanks for the clarification. I was just going off what had been said in this thread by Curt. I didn"t expect a demo of course, but I could"ve sworn Curt posted awhile back stating that the IP would be unveiled at the SD Comic Con. I took that to mean that a basic storyline and possibly a title would be revealed, nothing more. If this thread wasn"t a billion pages I"d look for the original quote.

Edit -

Ngruk said:

We are targeting Comic-Con this year as our first "unveiling of our IP to the public.

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I probably took it a bit too literally, but at least I wasn"t completely insane.

gnomad said:

Well the head PR weenie was there Steve "the mouth of EQ2 falsehoods" Danuser is the Community relations head (read, head PR man).

Glad to see this was just another in the long ongoing line of substance less interviews that this genre is becomming more and more famous for.

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The guy who just posted then, the one who seemed to like cake so much.

Anyway, what did people think about what Salvatore said, about making your character feel like a hero in an MMO? Anyone actually ever felt heroic while playing a game, apart from in PVP.

Blitzspear said:

The guy who just posted then, the one who seemed to like cake so much.

Anyway, what did people think about what Salvatore said, about making your character feel like a hero in an MMO? Anyone actually ever felt heroic while playing a game, apart from in PVP.

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I"ve heard it before.

Bottomline I want to see a new MMO with something other than diku/EQ/WoW/VG type mechanics (tank, dps, heal, cc).

I don"t want to hear "your character will be a hero" I want to hear "instead of just tanking/dpsing/healing/ccing like every other fucking MMO you"ll be doing X or Y or Z.
And X or Y or Z is a fuckton more fun than tanking/dps/healing because it"s new."

And before CS fans come in and defend diku-type MMOs as the only MMOs that can exist -- I assure you that I, sitting here can come up with fun alternate mechanics (as can, other fohposters out there). Mine are only available under an NDA of course

Making someone feel like a Hero means (to me) not having any collect ten bear asses quest instead having quests that tie into the lore of the game.

But really, I don"t give a fuck about that right now. I"d just be happy with quests that don"t make you go back to the same area five different times to accomplish five different things (hi2u LOTRO) or fed-ex quests where you keep having to go back to one guy and he keeps sending you out (hi2u VG, WoW) or multi-tiered quests that won"t let you complete the final stage (say getting the head of a dragon) without completing the earlier stages so you end up spending thousands of hours backflagging and never really going forward (hi2u too many MMOs to mention).

Lore matters to me -- it"s the biggest hole in VG -- but I figured out last year that mechanics matter more. LOTRO crushes VG lore-wise, but the fucking quest system, and weird UI killed me so I went back to VG (better mechanics, slightly better quests, shit lore). I can"t feel like a hero if I"m fighting the UI/mechanics/idiots creating fifteen different kill wolf for wolf asses quests.

rant off.

Gotta disagree with the first part of your post. I think tank/dps/heal/cc is just what MMO combat is about and getting away from that would more than likely actually dumb the game down more rather than enhance it. Classes have to have a role and combat has to have some measure of strategy. Maybe as technology advances we could start seeing more realistic combat with advanced AI, use of environment, multiple ways of defeating an encounter, etc. But for now, that"s not really feasible.

I will say, however, that the old roles could be made more fun than they have been in the past. Vanguard certainly made some headway into making formerly dull archetypes like healers quite enjoyable to play. I"d like to see this trend continue, and maybe you"ll get your "different" gameplay without realizing it.

Secondly, I totally agree with your comments on questing. I mentioned it before in this thread when we were talking about heroism in MMOs. After about level 10, I don"t want to see another quest to kill some random animalever again.
There"s nothing that makes you feel less heroic than being told to go kill some wolves at level 67. "Oh, you there, you"re one of the warriors who slew the black terror, Nefarian, right? Perhaps you could help me with this squirrel infestation?" It"s just garbage.

I also agree that the going back and forth deal should be used less often. If it"s literally some kind of fetch quest where they want the head of something, it makes a little more sense. If it"s just a kill X quest, or explore this or that - have that quest update automatically, and even give you the next step. Maybe when you explored the area you were told about you see something that makes you want to go further to find out more, or maybe while killing X creatures you find something on them that leads you into the next step without having to go back. Still makes perfect sense, and it"s a lot less tedious.

Pains me to say this, but I kind of agree with Tad ;p It becomes rather tiresome in all these MMOs that you always NEED certain classes to do the good stuff. And that always boils down to tank/healer. I"ve wasted more time looking for either one of those than anything. And I submit what caused this problem was the advent of raiding first begun in EQ and carried over into WOW (h2u Tigole from Legacy of Steel).

EQ didn"t start it. But you knew that.

MMOs need to create interdependency.

Otherwise what is the point of playing an MMO?

Now I agree to an extent that.. "We cant do this because we need X amount of Y class" is teh suck, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule.