- 18,859
- 67,985
Shit I didn't even know you could be a mob that high level. I was a snake or decaying skelly or orc pawn every time. If you spawned as a skelly with a weapon you could run trains on newbs.
SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown
- Thread starter Laerazi_sl
- Start date
The best part was the monsters could level up so you could end up with some high level asshole monsters making life miserable for people for as long as they survived
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 6,276
- 4,031
This was the reason they nuked Project M.
Could have just stopped the xp gain for monsters, but it was the inevitable griefers that killed the whole project.
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
- 279
- 39
During the release of WotLK there was a server event that would turn people into ghouls and you could gang up and infect others etc. Amazing emergent gameplay and in the end people were complaining because they could not do their dailies (which they needed for equipment because they wanted to raid). There are a lot of great ideas that can bring MMOs forward, just it's unclear whether they can sustain a game on the long run.
Star Wars had a similar event with a plague that you could infect people and eventually you would explode and die and infect more people etc etc. It was a really fun event and they sold a cure on the vendor for the cry babies who didn't want to participate.
Gask
Silver Baron of the Realm
- 12,000
- 45,420
That was the thing that always pissed me off about SoE and EQ; they never reinvested anything back into the game despite how much money it made them over the years, they were content to just milk the product without giving anything back. There were so many ideas and design paths freely available kicking around that would have enhanced game play any number of times and all they could bestir themselves to do was pump out treadmill expansions for a nominal fee while their players gradually got wise and left. What was so bad about project M? Put in an advancement path, penalties for death, rewards and some limitations and let people go nuts. So what if it shook things up a bit, just put in appropriate rewards on well utilized mobs and bam you have instilled some semblance of life into your otherwise completely static world. Even just hiring some aspiring writers and live devs to periodically upset the status quo would have done so much to keep the actual player base interested in something a bit more than +stats while they mindlessly poopsocked generic_raid_boss_01 for the fiftieth time.
I can recall hearing about The Overthere as a noob from someone for the first time and envisioned a zone that various factions actually fought over (overly active imagination at the time). How cool would it have been if Kunark was a giant warzone where VS, Cab, FV, Trak/Frogloks, Giants, Goblins and Sarnaks could gain and lose ground based on player interaction and if the denizens of Cabilis actually cared about their lost glory days and had aspirations to reclaim it. Sigh... EQ nerd off.
I can recall hearing about The Overthere as a noob from someone for the first time and envisioned a zone that various factions actually fought over (overly active imagination at the time). How cool would it have been if Kunark was a giant warzone where VS, Cab, FV, Trak/Frogloks, Giants, Goblins and Sarnaks could gain and lose ground based on player interaction and if the denizens of Cabilis actually cared about their lost glory days and had aspirations to reclaim it. Sigh... EQ nerd off.
McCheese
SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
- 6,893
- 4,271
I wonder if those skeleton workers are still building that dry-docked ship in the Overthere. It always bothered me for some reason that they were working non-stop, but the ship never came any closer to being finished!
meStevo
I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
- 6,386
- 4,658
So I just got this email.
Dear all,
The journey we took exactly 5 years ago to change artificial intelligence in games has come to an end. We tried our best, the world changed a bit, and now it's our turn to take a bow and move on. Storybricks is closing down.
Over the past few months we nurtured a desire to go beyond games and find a different vision, one that was more inclusive and could make a difference for a large number of people. This combined with the effect our travel schedule was having on our families made me (Rodolfo) and my co-founder (St?phane) decide to move onto other projects beyond Storybricks.
It was our own decision and Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Games) bears no fault for it. Sony Online Entertainment had been up for sale for a long time so our exit had no connection with the Columbus Nova acquisition.
We tried to find a new home for our tech so somebody else would have continued our efforts. I can confirm that Storybricks was for sale, but we did not find an agreement with the buyers we wanted. Since this happened over the course of few months everyone affected has been able to find a new job. Brian 'Psychochild' Green is working on Camelot Unchained, Guilherme T?ws is at Mediatonic, Wallace Poulter and Brian Schwab are at Magic Leap (but they can't say what they are up to yet. Super secret stuff) and so on.
Majority of the work we have done is about EverQuest Next and is co-owned by Daybreak. But there are few side projects and a demo that we plan to release for free that are unrelated to EQN. It's nothing major but maybe some Storybricks tech can live in other games. Give us some time to sort that out.
We would like to thank the EverQuest Next team at Daybreak Games, particularly Darrin McPherson and Terry Michaels, for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have worked on a great franchise and alongside such talented people. We look forward to the release of EQN. We would also like to thank Ken Levine at Irrational and Kevin Bruner at Telltale Games (and their respective teams - you know who you are.), the many game developers who have reached out to us over the years to advance a medium that we love, as well as the players who have shared our dream of better storytelling through gameplay and AI.
St?phane and I are starting a new venture unrelated to gaming but we won't disappear completely. We are looking to hire AI engineers and iOS/Android front-end developers in the SF Bay Area (Sunnyvale/Mt View). Please reach out to me at rodolfo[at]metatron.xyz if you are interested.
Rodolfo Rosini & St?phane Bura
PS.
There is one more story to tell before we part ways.
We fell in love with the EverQuest franchise and we wanted the best possible future for it. We knew Sony Online (300+ employees IIRC) was for sale so Storybricks (barely 10 people) tried to actually buy out the whole division.
We retained an investment banking firm as a proxy and they went directly to Sony Corporate bypassing the local executives. We would have been able to raise the necessary capital, and had interviewed new and existing management ready for a turnover.
Alas, it was not meant to be as the terms offered by Sony Japan were unacceptable to us and to our investors. It is my understanding that other buyers had the same reaction and, in the end, Columbus Nova got a completely different deal that the one we were offered, but by then our investor group had moved on.
Make no mistake the company needed cuts badly, and we would have cut and cut deeply. Possibly as deep as Columbus Nova did but maybe we would have cut more senior management and less game developers instead. It was our intention to try to acquire the 38 Studios assets and made them available to players in EQN. Moreover we would have probably changed the server infrastructure allowing people to run their own servers. It would not have been a very canonical EverQuest but we would have done the best to service our customers with the limited budget of an independent studio who wanted to punch above its weight.
We really did try our best. And our best was not enough.
Dear all,
The journey we took exactly 5 years ago to change artificial intelligence in games has come to an end. We tried our best, the world changed a bit, and now it's our turn to take a bow and move on. Storybricks is closing down.
Over the past few months we nurtured a desire to go beyond games and find a different vision, one that was more inclusive and could make a difference for a large number of people. This combined with the effect our travel schedule was having on our families made me (Rodolfo) and my co-founder (St?phane) decide to move onto other projects beyond Storybricks.
It was our own decision and Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Games) bears no fault for it. Sony Online Entertainment had been up for sale for a long time so our exit had no connection with the Columbus Nova acquisition.
We tried to find a new home for our tech so somebody else would have continued our efforts. I can confirm that Storybricks was for sale, but we did not find an agreement with the buyers we wanted. Since this happened over the course of few months everyone affected has been able to find a new job. Brian 'Psychochild' Green is working on Camelot Unchained, Guilherme T?ws is at Mediatonic, Wallace Poulter and Brian Schwab are at Magic Leap (but they can't say what they are up to yet. Super secret stuff) and so on.
Majority of the work we have done is about EverQuest Next and is co-owned by Daybreak. But there are few side projects and a demo that we plan to release for free that are unrelated to EQN. It's nothing major but maybe some Storybricks tech can live in other games. Give us some time to sort that out.
We would like to thank the EverQuest Next team at Daybreak Games, particularly Darrin McPherson and Terry Michaels, for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have worked on a great franchise and alongside such talented people. We look forward to the release of EQN. We would also like to thank Ken Levine at Irrational and Kevin Bruner at Telltale Games (and their respective teams - you know who you are.), the many game developers who have reached out to us over the years to advance a medium that we love, as well as the players who have shared our dream of better storytelling through gameplay and AI.
St?phane and I are starting a new venture unrelated to gaming but we won't disappear completely. We are looking to hire AI engineers and iOS/Android front-end developers in the SF Bay Area (Sunnyvale/Mt View). Please reach out to me at rodolfo[at]metatron.xyz if you are interested.
Rodolfo Rosini & St?phane Bura
PS.
There is one more story to tell before we part ways.
We fell in love with the EverQuest franchise and we wanted the best possible future for it. We knew Sony Online (300+ employees IIRC) was for sale so Storybricks (barely 10 people) tried to actually buy out the whole division.
We retained an investment banking firm as a proxy and they went directly to Sony Corporate bypassing the local executives. We would have been able to raise the necessary capital, and had interviewed new and existing management ready for a turnover.
Alas, it was not meant to be as the terms offered by Sony Japan were unacceptable to us and to our investors. It is my understanding that other buyers had the same reaction and, in the end, Columbus Nova got a completely different deal that the one we were offered, but by then our investor group had moved on.
Make no mistake the company needed cuts badly, and we would have cut and cut deeply. Possibly as deep as Columbus Nova did but maybe we would have cut more senior management and less game developers instead. It was our intention to try to acquire the 38 Studios assets and made them available to players in EQN. Moreover we would have probably changed the server infrastructure allowing people to run their own servers. It would not have been a very canonical EverQuest but we would have done the best to service our customers with the limited budget of an independent studio who wanted to punch above its weight.
We really did try our best. And our best was not enough.
Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 8,761
- 613
At least the whole story finally dropped. Didn't think it would come out so soon. I didn't know they actually tried to buy SoE but I knew SB walked away and didn't get fired. I haven't confirmed this, but there was some talk about SoE approaching blizz and ea to buy them out. i was told that it was pretty unlikely to be the case by a daybreak person.
Sounds like they done with gaming too. Found something non game related that makes a hell of a lot more for them. Not sure what? I did ask why they didn't consider making the tech abailable for say unity as a plugin and was basically told no real money in it.
Sounds like they done with gaming too. Found something non game related that makes a hell of a lot more for them. Not sure what? I did ask why they didn't consider making the tech abailable for say unity as a plugin and was basically told no real money in it.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
- 5,518
- 583
That's what I found interesting, too bad Storybricks was unable to acquire SOE.
arallu
Golden Knight of the Realm
- 536
- 47
Just throw eqn in the trash, dumb fucks making dumb gimmicks.
Reinventing the fucking wheel for the sake of progress.
The mmo community is so flakey it doesn't matter what groundbreaking gimmicks you can put in your game, all you need is the same tired leveling system with a new world and new pixels to farm at the right time that doesn't run like dogshit on anything but a $6,000 PC.
Reinventing the fucking wheel for the sake of progress.
The mmo community is so flakey it doesn't matter what groundbreaking gimmicks you can put in your game, all you need is the same tired leveling system with a new world and new pixels to farm at the right time that doesn't run like dogshit on anything but a $6,000 PC.
Randin
Trakanon Raider
- 1,925
- 879
Which is actually why EQN is still on my radar, in spite of what's gone down with Daybreak. This genre's been utterly fucking stagnant for the past ten years, and anyone trying to actually nudge it forward deserves a chance to prove whether or not they can do it. If EQN can actually manage a competent ai, in spite of losing Storybricks, maybe a few other mmo developers will sack up and try to expand their horizons a tad.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
- 5,518
- 583
Dude. You missed the forest for the trees. SB was trying to buy SOE + 38 Studios Assets that means that EQN had basically no art assets or much of anything else internally when this proposed purchase was going on; otherwise SB would not have been interested in 38 Studios and tossing the voxel engine. Seems like SB was going to make a sorta EQ3 with SB plus traditional polygons using 38 Art Assets to fast track the project.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
- 5,518
- 583
Yeah. I did get a PM on that post that convinced me I was far, far too optimistic and that EQN would have been in a bad state even if SB had purchased SOE.
Back to figuring out the VGEmu forums I guess.