Basically, an EA employee slated to be fired goes on the record, loudly, about how and why Warhammer Online sucked, why the new Star Wars MMO is going to suck, why Bioware is being totally mismanaged and will probably die, and why the planet/satellite relationship between EA and its dev houses is generally a recipe for ****.
Saddle up for the comments section too, it's fairly juicy as well.
chmod said:
I don't want to live in a world where there are no consequences for being stupid. A few thousand years ago these users would have been eaten by lions.
And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. **** you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?
And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas,they’re panicking , and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing back launch.
Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too ……
I find it hard to believe its past $300 million, that just sounds batshit crazy. If I were them I would be proud of that much voice work in a game, RPGs should have a lot of dialogue and MMORPGs certainly deserve more than they have now. I don't believe for a second that it will be as big of a failure as other MMORPGs have been, you'd absolutely have to try and make a shitty game to fail as hard as stuff like Vanguard, especially when your game is based on Star Wars.
Master Tailor Toprem Spaztastic, level 75 Drizzlecaller of Karana. Member of Clan Ta Veren
My default assumption is that New_MMO_073 will suck until shown otherwise. Most of them do. So that part's unsurprising.
As for "flail against the ubiquitous plasticized ****storm that is industrial capitalism," also unsurprising. Sometimes big production houses output good products, but that's not really the model... the model is to inundate the market with quick-and-dirty products and skim skim skim. It doesn't take much to fool consumers, and all you gotta do is have every household try it once before realizing it stinks.
Sounds like pretty much every other MMO that's been developed in the last few years, except with the whole bioware/SW naming people seemed to have larger expectations than normal. Which means it's going to launch with a spectacular 'THUD'.
once the NDA is lifted on beta (or open beta starts) we'll see....
As hard as WAR sucked, none of it would have surprised me in the least. I know several people who were boned by EA-Mythic over WAR around here, and they don't have much anything positive to say about the experience.
It's a funny read but I'm calling ******** on most of it. Yeah, because some **** in the art department somehow knows what George Lucas thinks, how much a game from an entirely different studio has cost, etc.
First off, I personally really enjoyed Warhammer. It didn't have a lot of longevity, but my wife and I had a great time playing it.
Secondly, I don't have any particular reason to doubt the promotion of untalented, unskilled hacks to positions of power. Welcome to a little thing we like to call life.
Third, some anonymous douche mewling with 'sky-is-falling' rhetoric about the quality of a BioWare game makes me immediately suspicious that it's just some invisible blogger trying to get some hits.
Edit: Fourth, this is the first time I've ever seen someone suggest that a giant, faceless corporate entity coming in and taking hands-on control of an acquisition would be a positive. Doubly-surprised that this blogger thinks that highly of EA.
I am curious about this whole IceFrog business, as I was a long-time DOTA player and nobody ever really seemed to dispute his contribution(s) to the thing...
Part of the DotA team or something. I *think* he was one of the first developers? Or he was one of the guys who took it over from the first team. Dunno for sure.
That post would kind of explain the weird direction Valve seems to be going with their "DOTA 2" (a.k.a. HON3).
"Answers without reasons are magic, not mathematics, Woolly Coati." -- the Space Hopper, Flatterland, by Ian Stewart
Great read Nenjin... thanks! Very reminiscient of "old school" drama. There is a LOT of good commentary in there about the MMO industry as a whole.
It also kind of makes me wonder where the next EQ is going to come from (if ever at all). i.e. A little sleeper title without the baggage of proprietary licensing that puts gameplay to the forefront and aesthetics pushed back a bit. I've really curbed my excitement on much of anything that is in the works as they all sound like rabid WoW remakes.
I've pretty much given up on MMOs at this point for these reasons. I dabble in WoW here and there when I need a fix. But the Wii is far more entertaining and cost effective. That seems kind of sad to me that such an important and dynamic genre has been reduced to a vapid void of Hollywood tripe.
No I don't want to relive EQ again. But the empty glitz and glam they're passing off as MMOs isn't opening up my wallet anytime soon. And this is exactly what EA Louse was getting at.
My two bits and a dose of negative-nancy-defeatism.
You're right Snibbs, IceFrog took over DOTA development about when or a little before it became a massive hit. So either he was pawning continued updates off on others and taking credit for them, or he has some idea of game design... because for years (probably at least five), his was the primary name attached to the growth and change of one of the most successful independent games of all time.
Also, HON3? DOTA came long before HON. HON is a (damn good) DOTA clone.
Consider Bioware spent four million bucks on the Blur video for SW:Tor. Consider the sheer amount of VO work using SAG actors.
INTERACTIVE MEDIA*
Effective through December 31st, 2009 with Monthly Extentions
Download SAG Multimedia Contract (PDF)
SESSION FEE $781.75
his Off-Camera RATE is paid for any single Interactive Platform performance of up to Three Voices during a Four Hour Day. Add $260.60 or each additional voice. The Day Performer RATE for 1 voice / 1 hour is $390. Voices used on any ON-LINE or NETWORK Platform or used as a ‘LIFT’ to another program, add an additional 100% of the original RATE in each case if the rights are acquired within one year of initial release and 110% after such period.
I can see $300,000,000 for it.
Skating away on the thin ice of a new day.
"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it."
Anyway, Icefrog was the main driving force behind DOTA updates and balance changes after it went into Allstars mode. He didn't create the map, that was Eul, and he didn't bring it to the spotlight after Eul abandoned it, cause that was Guinsoo (who founded Riot games, who makes League of Legends).
But, Icefrog was pretty liberal with the acquisition of elements from other maps to include into his updates, and made a lot of people in the WC3 mapping community pretty upset because of it -- they got no credit for his wholesale stealing -- but he maintained it was his ideas/content all the same.
Anyway, cut to the present time, Icefrog is working for Valve in the creation of DOTA2, Valve even goes so far as to trademark the 'DOTA' name and send C&D orders to both S2 and Riot for using their trademarks because their games are DOTA clones.
However, for a good amount of time Icefrog was working for S2, the makers of Heroes of Newerth! Oh, and he tried to get a job at Riot, too! This makes an intellectual property mess, in other words.
In other news, there's a lot of heroes in DOTA ripped off from other sources/games, and the announcement says that they're all being ported to DOTA2. It seems totally sketchy that in their promo art they'd have 'Drow Ranger', which comes awfully close to infringing on the intellectual property line of a certain megacorporation that owns the trademark on the world's most popular Drow Ranger.
But hey, I'm not Valve, but they are working pretty hard to protect someone who may not deserve it -- and if they rouse the dragon of Hasbro, they might regret it :P
Also, HON3? DOTA came long before HON. HON is a (damn good) DOTA clone.
Yea, what Tabbran said was the rationale. I guess DOTA3/HON2 would make more sense.
I have to say that I do like the coaching playmode idea, though I can see it being a griefer's wet dream. It definitely boggles my mind that they're not trying to mix it up, some. Demigod, for all its faults, at least tried to change the DOTA format a bit (it was just sooooooo slow paced) and even LOL has made some nice little gameplay alterations (jungling for buffs and such, grass allowing for ambushes or better juking, etc.). HON did the job of turning DOTA into its own legitimate game, a second game with identical mechanics strikes me as absurdly redundant for a what is still a pretty niche genre.
Disney’s upcoming action role-playing game Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned has been canned, and the studio behind the game are laying folks off today, Disney confirmed to Kotaku today.
“Disney Interactive Studios confirms the cancellation of the Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned video game which was scheduled to be released in 2011,” Angela Emery, Disney Interactive Studios’ vice president of communication told Kotaku today. “As a result of this decision, Disney Interactive Studios completed a restructuring of Propaganda Games, its Vancouver, BC, internal studio, affecting one of the studio’s two development teams. The studio is still in active production of TRON: Evolution, the video game, which will be released on December 7, 2010, with additional DLC (downloadable content) support following the game’s release.”
We’re told that Vancouver-based Propaganda Games, which is also working on Tron: Evolution, let as many as 100 people go this week, including most of the Pirates team and some of the Tron team. The remaining team members from Pirates were shifted over to help put finishing touches on Tron, we are told.
Emery declined to confirm the number of people impacted by layoffs, but did confirm that they’ve taken the studio from two teams to one.
This latest news seems to back up rumours we’ve been hearing since early September about turmoil at Propaganda Games surrounding disagreements with upper management at Propaganda and their parent company.
When we last saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned, we were impressed with it’s Fable-like graphics and the efforts the developers were going to to make the choices you made in the game impact the story, the gameplay and the look of your pirate and his ship.
Tron, on the other hand, still seemed to be struggling with bugs and development issues.
The only thing that worries me about ToR is I thought it was the same people that made ME, and DA behind it. On top of the game play I've seen, well It tempers my *want* some.
Voice acting is fine for one play through, but if WolK showed me anything dialog tells you to sit down and watch the game for a while.. it will let you know when you get to play and have fun again. It gets old really ****ing quick in a mmo. I don't want to listen to a npc bitch about this or that when I'm on Vent informing guild hunters what I did to their mothers last night.
"Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves." - Bill Hicks
Yeah, I don't really see a clear refutation of what was said in that blog post. Valve says it's fake. Another has no comment. Another simply says they didn't hire him.
