Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Azrayne said:

Have any companies (other than maybe Sigil) actually come out and said this? I"ve seen a lot of fanboys for various MMO"s throw that line around, but fans will say anything.

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Blizzard did this with WoW, and I remember arguing with their lead developer on the beta boards over it. Right before release he was claiming they had tons of additional raid content ready to go (past Molten Core / Onyxia) that we hadn"t seen yet and would be on live.

WAR and AoC both said it no?

Tropics said:

If the guy actually listens to the concerns of the players on certain key issues, and then follows through with action getting the stuff actually fixed, ya I can go with someone like that. Cannot imagine the guy sucks given the tough crowd here that he has impressed, his resume freaked me out but I will go with you guys on here who seem to know what you are talking about and who I agree with a large amount of the time on MMORPG stuff.

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Well, for what it"s worth my mancrush on him is mostly due to while he was in charge of EQ2 several really annoying things were removed (starting out as a generic class for 20 levels, sub-combines for sub-combines for sub-combines, etc...). It was too little too late to draw me back in, but kudos for trying.

Secondly he"s made some really smart posts here as well. And by that I don"t mean Brad-style fluff posts about how excited he is about video games. Like his "I"d rather have the option to ignore good game mechanics then be forced into doing bad ones" posts and whatnot. Shit I can agree with.

Plus he"s got heart. Get it? Scott HARTsman. Hoho! Ah you kids.

Utnayan said:

Bullshit.

The only thing any dev was guilty of was Tigole getting excited over the Emerald Dream. And that zone WAS huge and in development but was put on hold.

Pardo never mentioned anything like this on the Beta Forums.

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Just because you apparently missed a big thread on the beta forums doesn"t it mean it didn"t happen. Rob Pardo posted it about 1 week before the game released after myself and others posted concerns that all of the content was being shown to players in the beta and that there would be nothing new for the release. Pardo responds saying they had additional raid content they were holding back for the release, which they obviously didn"t.

I like the WoW developers and have the utmost respect for what they do in terms of game design, but in this particular case you are wrong.

Pretty sure that was Katricia, and not Pardo. She also dropped the Hero Classes bomb, saying they"d be ready for release, and a number of other things that never happened. Siege vehicles were also promised, a PvP system of any kind, an LFG system, new skills for levels 40+ to get rid of the Frost Bolt Rank X syndrome, an entire set of Berserker stance Warrior abilities, uhh, what else here....

Blizzard as a company did an NY times article that had a small preview of Karazhan back in early 2005, a good two years before it would be released in BC. Metzen was picking out animal heads for the finishing touches at the time.

Utnayan said:

Bullshit.

The only thing any dev was guilty of was Tigole getting excited over the Emerald Dream. And that zone WAS huge and in development but was put on hold.

Pardo never mentioned anything like this on the Beta Forums.

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Actualy it was pretty common knowledge during beta and post release that Blizz was supposed to be releasing untested raid content beyond MC/Ony. Hell playing along with Furor and others during beta that worked for blizz at the time we new about it but it never came. So don"t go mouthing off about stuff you don"t know about.

I thought Kat =^_^= had been let go long before that. Siege vehicles and PvP I know they said had been pushed back, we just didn"t realize for how fucking long. More raid content had been promised though, I know that much.

And laaaaaaaawl at hero classes. If they ever screwed the pooch on something, that would be it. They really should have just given you an alternate class name/title when you invested 31+ points in a given ability tree and called it a day, would have been less insulting then this DK horseshit. "Being a hero class means you start at level 55 yay!"

Utnayan said:

Why the fuck would Blizzard, of any gaming company, release untested content?

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Really? And here people think I"m the Blizzard fanboy. Blizzard released a metric fuckton of untested, broken content and still does to this day. And it"s not just shit that only 1% of the user base gives a fuck about either. Though these days it feels more like monkeys throwing shit at a wall hoping it will stick then at release when it just felt like they were in over their heads.

I"m all for taking jabs at Brad, VG and sigil but c"mon. Blizzard is no unblemished bride here.

Anyways, for obvious reasons we don"t have access to the WoW beta forums anymore and those posts are long gone. The only thing we really have (unless someone has old IRC convo"s or something) is Tigole stating on these boards that there was non-instanced raid content but Kazzak/Az didn"t get patched in until several months after release.

There were other things like Paladins being viable tanks (Only took 4 years for that to happen) and whatnot. But back then Tigole was only a dungeon designer if I recall and had little to do with raid design."

Anyways...

That ultimately wasn"t my point. It was more to do with companies promising to fix a whole bunch of issues but never delivering until much later. The secret internal build that fixes all this shit. WoW I don"t recall ever saying as such. They were too busy hiding behind "Oh, try resetting your UI and deleting some folders..." to tell us what the fuck was going on with raid ID bugs and whatnot.

A lot of times it"s rabid fanboys that start the rumors as well. "Oh no worries, I"m sure they"ll fix all that shit by release. RIGHT GUYS?" Then when the cumshot they were hoping to splash across their face they spend the next 2 years swearing to god the game is going to get better, it just needs a little more time. Right Tad?

Utnayan said:

Pardo didn"t say shit about this on the beta forums. I was in Beta since phase 2 and I didn"t see any of this. Pretty common knowledge? I call that people speculating. There were plenty of things that were on their plate to add, but Pardo didn"t promise jack shit. Show me any of these quotes coming from them and I will eat my words. Tigole talking about the Emerald Dream doesn"t count, since it was put on hold. In fact, here is what Kaplan talked about. I see no mention of anything here besides MC and Ony.

WoW -> Insider -> Insider Interview

Everything else was pure speculation by players who confuse the words "Try to get into the game" with "It"s going to be in at launch".

Why the fuck would Blizzard, of any gaming company, release untested content? If that was the case, they caught themselves and corrected it before hand. (And only because they wanted to surprise players) It was always quality over quantity. We all have our little connections. I still owe Furor a bottle of liquor for grabbing a beta key for Kaubel so I could get him in Beta 2.

The biggest beef is comparing Blizzard with Sigil. Mippo compared the lack of a couple raid zones being released (And not promised) to an entire fucking game that was borked at launch with nothing resembling a full product from the ground up. There is a bit of a difference.

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Then you obviously missed the thread on the beta forums. Specifically, it was Enoyis (spelling?) that posted it. I"m not comparing various games and how much raid content was there, I was merely correcting the mistake you made. Blizzard promised to deliver content that quite obviously was never going to make it into release.

This isn"t a comparison of how much raid content the various games had, or the quality of the content etc. I was merely pointing out that just like other companies, Blizzard did promise content that was not in the release. It was a thread on the beta boards, and if there are any cached threads just search for some of Enoyis"s posts about a week before release and you"ll find it.

There are many times on these boards I"ve defended Blizzard and usually refer to them as the company that best understands game design but on this particular point you are wrong. They promised content they could not deliver, just like every other company.

I can"t find any posts from the beta forums. They did a good job wiping all of it out.

Tropics said:

Luclin is not exactly the expansion I would want a guy to first be involved with. Kunark was a tremendous expansion, Velious was very good as far as purely high end content focused expansions go, Luclin brought in the AH, space aliens, a sickening amount of model reuse from trash all the way to bosses, obscene raid level farming key quests that even a hard ass like myself makes me want to puke looking back.

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You do realize he was in charge of the team who created EverQuest"s customizable UI, right? That"s why he received credit for Shadows of Luclin.

Utnayan said:

Which content did he promise? And what were the specifics? Tigole mentioned non instanced raids that were in the works, but he never promised them for release. About a week before release Onyxia and MC were what Tigole was talking about in that interview. It"s a shame we cannot bring back the thread and see what you read, because I would love to see the wording. Especially if Pardo was writing it. Again, I provided a link to the interview with Kaplan. Which would have been the same exact time frame of the post on the beta boards.

Out of all of Google, there is no way this was said and is not out there somewhere publically. More people would have been bitching about it, and I cannot even find that.

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Mt. Hyjal post-WC3 for one, with an event where you purify the world tree. This was a Tigole interview during the summer of 2004, to be more specific.

Ut you"re pretty defensive about WoW for someone who likes to shit on almost every other MMO. WoW had a ton of buggy content at launch and nowhere near enough lvl 60 dungeons. MC was nowhere near tuned right and help from GM"s was laughable. BWL was possibly even more buggy when it was first released (and a number of guilds had Rag on farm status for a while arleady). And the door to Vaelstraz was a cockblock to prevent guilds to get to the unfinished encounters, bypassing it was considered an exploit even if you had killed Razorgore.

And let"s be real, they don"t even put out real dungeons anymore besides the raid ones. The single group dungeons are maybe 1/10th the size of previous ones. Blackrock Depths was last epic sized single group dungeon they ever did. I think Blizzard listens almost too much to their playerbase, every patch/expansion makes WoW less and less of an MMO.

BWL is still bugged to this day and you don"t even need to go any further than the first fight in the dungeon to see the bugs.

Blizz turns classes on their heads almost every patch for the sake of Blizz"s version of the "The Vision"(pvp/pve balance). Defending them is sort of laughable nowadays.

Utnayan said:

Do you have a link to that where he promises it will be in at launch?

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I don"t recall the interview saying it would be in at launch. I recall him mentioning it as the "endgame." Maybe he meant in 8 years?