Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown
- Thread starter Laerazi_sl
- Start date
Terry is still Senior Producer, meaning he creates the roadmap and is in charge of all of the various development tasks coming to fruition. He's EQN's Matt Firor.
Darrin McPherson is the Lead Designer, so all major aspects of gameplay and content fall under his direction - combat, classes, itemization, etc. He's EQN's Paul Sage.
Rosie Rappaport is still the Art Lead.
Steve Klug is still the Technical Lead/Head Programmer.
good stuff, but what gaming studio was out there on the level of SOE for online gaming for them to model? nobody. everything that was done was new. were there mistakes? yes. were improvements made? yes. and you see some of those improvements were carried over to Blizzard. and you saw the results as WoW. remember when Brad and the rest bailed out of SOE? think they didn't see how bloated everything had become, how stifling to innovation it had become. you have heard MMO's compared to Blockbuster Movies, both in terms of budget, and direction. Its true. technology is starting to catch up to ideas and dreams. but it isn't there yet. while we wait, expect your suffering to continue.
And here's what's amusing: Warcraft's design and code is far more differentiated from EverQuest, than EverQuest's from Sojourn MUD. Keep that in mind the next time you hear the argument that EverQuest was the truly innovative game and Warcraft just took their ideas and made them more casual friendly.
The only people who should truly be respected for EverQuest are the programmers that created its 3D Graphics Engine - which was fairly revolutionary at the time. And maybe Bill Trost too, for translating his D&D campaign to a virtual world. The rest did a really good job Ctrl-C/Ctrl-Ping.
Though Brad McQuaid does havesomegood ideas. I hear in Pantheon you can be a WarWizard!!!!!!11111!!!!
Speaking of Pantheon, Smedley is friends with Lorraine "Sparkles" JesusLove on Facebook. I find that hilarious.
Speaking of Pantheon, Smedley is friends with Lorraine "Sparkles" JesusLove on Facebook. I find that hilarious.
Good lord, I did not need to be reminded about that shitfest. In before Miracle Build.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Ultima Online, Meridian 59, The Realm to name a couple off the top of my head. A few games where the process behind it wasn't creating a 3D world out of a fucking tank simulator.
Mistakes? Ineptitude. Lack of Fore sight in design. Fraudulent business model. Artificial stalling of the player base to finish what was already sold with a complete mishandling of resources and money. You call that a mistake? I call it a bunch of pot heads who used to play D&D not knowing what the fuck they were doing, but knew well enough that a slow content consumption model was ideal for generating revenue months before even 50% of the product was complete.
The results of WoW were easily in the grips of SOE with a sequel to EQ and a Star Wars license. When you stop start 3 times and launch an MMORPG within 18 months, shit in a box tends to happen when one thinks you can continue to run over a consumer and they'll keep coming back for more.
Yeah that was hilarious. He formed Sigil Games, suckered Microsoft into a raw deal when they didn't know the real story behind his fa?ade, they held his ass to the fire once, laughed at his tech demo, and wondered where their millions of dollars had gone. And while Butler was more concerned about boning someone other than his wife, and McQuaid shooting needles, we saw how well they did with the final product when their "Creativity" was "Bloaded and stifled" over in San Diego. What planet do you live on?
Actually right about now I am living the life of Riley watching the egotistical blow hards that pulled the wool over the eyes of their superiors and consumers get their walking papers to the Number 9.
Shadows of Yserbius was my first online game ever. Because it was so expensive, it led me to finding BBS's and Tele-Arena 3.0. Which led me to SojournMUD back in 1993?4?
Who played SojournMUD? I was Tykre. Wasup
WoW was also greatly influenced by EQ2 which had been in development since Kunark. I think what UT is trying to say is EQ couldnt help but be innovative. and that extends to the business side. innovative does not necessarily = great, efficient. you would think with all that Japanese money SOE would have been the model of Lean.
Vitality
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tad10
Elisha Dushku
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I'm sure it'll be golden.
And before I get the "You wouldn't have done any better than Smed comment" from some jackass; with respect to EQNext (if nothing else), let me preemptively reply that, yes, I would have done better than Smed, as would a couple of others on this forum or on fohguild.
EQIII would have been a small smash if was basically EQ/WoW with better graphics, but with dynamic or semi-dynamic mobs and interactive terrain (far, far different from destructible terrain) - think Prince of Persia ability for Rogues to actually, you know, climb walls or WTF - DCUO had this a bit with the acrobatic guys. No Rocket Science involved: just understanding the limits of technology and your budget and using tech and designs that already existed and understanding your market. All of which was discussed ad nauseam post-Vanguard on fohguild and here as well, and leading up to the EQN reveal.
Smed was and is a bandwagon jumper: he jumped on the super-graphics bandwagon (EQII), Freemium bandwagon (Everything), and EQNext was jumping on the "it's-like-Minecraft" bandwagon and the "gotta let the kids be everything" bandwagon.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Nothing makes me chuckle more than when the misfits can no longer bullshit themselves out of a shitty situation and will now pump gas for the rest of their lives as a result of all the good ol boys being... gone.
SOE Misfits on the island... in Space. No one can hear you scream. The ride is over. Time to go bye bye.
dude is at the least a survivor. its fun to speculate how he lasted so long. Smed was pushing ideas on F2P back in 1999. thats the kind of mind he has.
I had a few characters in various iterations of the game (Sojourn, the Duris split, the TorilMUD era, etc). A bard, Lyrith, was my primary.
Played several other MUDs as well, including Faerun MUD which was far superior in implementation and used a pretty remarkable Circle-derived codebase that was modeled on AD&D 2nd Edition. Generally speaking, I preferred the LPs to the DIKU-derivatives. DarkeMUD and Xyllomer were both phenomenal in their heydays.
Also, fun fact: Guild Wars 2's Living Story was modeled after the system of storyarcs created by Wes Platt, who ran OtherSpace MUSH and was hired on later as the Creative Director for Fallen Earth - a game that didn't go anywhere because of funding, but had some strong design choices behind it.