John Smedley hired by Amazon to produce MMOs

Elidroth said:

I'm hopeful Smed and company can turn out some great games.

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There's a line between hopeful and expectant. I'm hopeful they put out good games. I hope anyone can put out a good game. If Brad McQuaid, Uwe Boll and Curt Schilling joined forces to create a scrabble-based MMO with a movie franchise tie in and it was a good game I'd play it.

Am I ~expecting~ quality though? Of course not. You can say "It's not Smed's fault really!" all you want but he's been at or near the helm of a lot of projects that started out promising but shit themselves over and over again.

His real problem is hubris. He simply cannot accept that he isn't right about everything.

Working in the Boardgame/CCG sphere, this is pretty much a problem with any "vision" guy.

The best is when they become convinced their design is flawless, and delude themselves into thinking it's just people with personal vendettas trying to personally harm him/her that's causing everything to fail.

One thing you can't fault Dave for is his enthusiasm for a project.. It's just while at SOE it seemed mostly misguided. SOEmote is a perfect example. Utterly useless in a game, yet pushed hard by him. I think he was genuinely shocked that people didn't care, plus he had way too many people blowing smoke up his ass saying how cool it was, even though it wasn't.

Aka, the George Lucas effect. Too many ass-kissing yes men.

Elidroth said:

One thing you can't fault Dave for is his enthusiasm for a project.. It's just while at SOE it seemed mostly misguided. SOEmote is a perfect example. Utterly useless in a game, yet pushed hard by him. I think he was genuinely shocked that people didn't care, plus he had way too many people blowing smoke up his ass saying how cool it was, even though it wasn't.

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The problem is that the idea IS cool. It just has little to nothing to do with the development of an MMO. Frivolous use of resources in a company that direly needed to refocus itself to save some of the games in its stable.

It was cool only in that it was interesting tech, but usefulness was absolute zero for in-game stuff. MAYBE the only practical use would be for creating dialogue visuals in a cutscene or something, but I'm fairly certain there is good tech already available for that.

Not surprising to hear that Smedley doesn't really like MMO's, he just picks passionate people and let's them do their thing. It worked for the original EQ but failed for EQ Next.

Lunis said:

Not surprising to hear that Smedley doesn't really like MMO's, he just picks passionate people and let's them do their thing. It worked for the original EQ but failed for EQ Next.

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I still want to know what happened to the first iteration of Everquest Next that they showed us screenshots for at one of the SoE Live conferences. It looked damn good, and Smedley said we would be able to play the beta at the next year's conference.

Then the next year came, and he said they scrapped it and started over. Next thing you know we got that Lion King looking pile of crap demo shown at the next conference.

I mean wtf. What happened to the first Everquest Next that they claimed was not fun and scrapped?

I'm tired of these idiots in the industry telling me what is fun and what isn't. Let me decide damn it!

All I want is an Everquest circa 2001 clone with modern day graphics. Is that too God damn much to ask for?

We've got a thousand and one WoW clones, but not one single EQ clone.

Wasn't he the douchebag who hated monks? Fuck him.

Should've been a instead.

Zapatta said:

Asks millionaire friend for financial help, millionaire says 'sure, i'll make a facebook post.'

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I'm cool with that. Being rich doesn't make you an ATM for people that make shitty life choices

Mick said:

John Smedley rallies the MMO community to help former EverQuest associate producer

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Lol top comment:



edit: just read the GoFundMe.

after 15 years of alcoholism, body finally decided that it was time to die. I developed a bleeding ulcer, my 5th actually, and in addition to losing nearly half of my blood volume, my liver decided to shut down as well.

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All of my family members are either deceased, in prison, or a hermit somewhere on a mountain in Wyoming.

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After 4 or so bleeding ulcers the guy couldn't cut down on beer?

Zapatta said:

Agreed, but a millionaire asking me to fund it is a big go fuck both yourselves.

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They can each fist fuck each other with fresh fried mozzarella sticks.