83 replies to this topic

[Zanathan]

Tice Daurus, on 25 March 2013 - 07:32 PM, said:

Did you also have the original code from MechWarrior 4 from Activision and then when you figured out that the old code you had wouldn't have worked on the CryEngine realize that you'd have to write all NEW code from scratch and dump everything given to them because it wouldn't work?

You see I was around at the near beginning when they told us that and new once they announced that they would have to do everything from scratch with an all new engine. I remember the first couple of weeks with the constant problems of games dropping every couple of games and if we could go at least 4 games without the game crashing that was on a GOOD DAY. Since then it's taken them a long time to correct those bugs. And then on top of that, they added new content weekly, along with the bug fixes. Problems with speed issues aka going over 140kph. Mechs causing memory leaks and crashes. Weapons not working right. Does anyone here remember flamers being OP? I do.

I can see why at first it's take so much money for them at first because of the constant roadblocks and problems they've had in the past. It hasn't been easy for them but so far, they're doing alright for the 98 pound weakling trying to take on the 800 pound gorillas in the room.

Now can they do better? Yes. But I think they know this and I'm still game to see how well they do.

Code and map texture/terrain assets are completely different things. Unless they had to reuse the old assets for maps and retrofit then yes it would be painful but really, why would you do that? I would re-use backend, game mechanics, frameworks, etc code if I really had to but that wouldn't extend to the graphics.

Having said that I think you should re-read the history of MWO and PGI. PGI were developing a Mechwarrior reboot themselves so it's not like they were handed a solution from somewhere else and had to understand it from stratch (I refer to the Dev 0 blog post).

Anyway we are probably off on the wrong tangent. I listened to the vid and interpreted it as it costs us this much NOW to produce this content. And not so much as it cost us THAT much back then due to rehasing and integration problems by using a hand me down half finished game as described by yourself.

[XIRUSPHERE]

250k a map for the garbage we get with terrible textures and horrible geometry where anything and everything constantly gets stuck or has issues. Sounds like someone at PGI used to work selling hammers to the government for 5 grand a pop.

[Vassago Rain]

Wingbreaker, on 25 March 2013 - 07:40 PM, said:

Protip: There was a thread that got K-town'd that was basically decrying this exact thing, seriously, with an extended bit about how PGI was "Squirming", and various other ridiculousness.

Once again, **** /vg/ believes.

It's funny that 30 some people are somehow holding this multi-million dollar game hostage with reaction images and an anonymous messageboard, that doesn't save anything.

Oh wait, there's no such thing, and if that was indeed the case, it'd make the whole game even more ridiculous.

[Buckminster]

Lonestar1771, on 25 March 2013 - 07:37 PM, said:

Wait, I'm confused. You have no professional training whatsoever in game design and yet, because you struggled to make a map that automatically means it must be hard to make video games and that PGI is justified in blowing all that money on mediocre maps and taking months to do it? Wow.... next you will tell us all that the world is flat and the sun is the center of the universe.

My point is that I thought it was easy - "just make a map already" - and then I tried it. Aside from the work that goes into actually making it, there is a lot of work that goes into finding the flaws with it so it is playable. What a lot of people don't realize is that it'll take hundreds of hours just running around a map, looking for glitches and issues that would be a problem. And then there's that fact that every map needs to be worked through to check sight lines and fire corridors, so that the sides are balanced. It's a lot of work.

And while I'm not a professional map maker, I AM a professional engineer with gobs of 3D CAD experience. I wasn't used to making maps in CS:S, but I have plenty of know how in 3D design.

[Kdogg788]

hammerreborn, on 25 March 2013 - 04:56 PM, said:

I think it's more that most people get one paint scheme/job/cockpit item and stick with it. Or clan colors. I don't think many people are like my wonderful wife who has painted everyone of my mechs different colors.

I guess I'm not the only one with paint schemes invented by their wives. You should see my pink/white/black zebra Catapult A1!

-k

[Effectz]

Thanks for posting this.

[Khell DarkWolf]

Skip to 20:40 in the video:

"Maps take 3 months to finish, cost anywhere from $70k to a quarter of a million dollars"

If you roll back to around 18:40 when you hear the start of the conversation on prices to make stuff.

"Mechs take 8 weeks from start to finish, costing $60k between the concepts, modelers, riggers etc"

3 fracking months for just 1 map, 8 weeks per mech (est 2 months) each.

This means we'll only have 4 1/4 new mech and only 3 maps by the end of december.

Lol, yeah. I clearly have wasted my money kicking starting this for the direction they are taking this.

Quality is only as good if it can bring depth, and the game already lacks so many key points for that depth to draw and keep the playerbase.

by the time community warfare comes out, we'll be told to kill the opposing "Faction" to wrest control away from another house/merc unit by gathering points based on win/loss. And we'll do it on the same maps over and over and over again because we have no large map pool to play with.

*golfclap*

[hammerreborn]

Khell DarkWolf, on 26 March 2013 - 08:32 AM, said:

Skip to 20:40 in the video:

"Maps take 3 months to finish, cost anywhere from $70k to a quarter of a million dollars"

If you roll back to around 18:40 when you hear the start of the conversation on prices to make stuff.

"Mechs take 8 weeks from start to finish, costing $60k between the concepts, modelers, riggers etc"

3 fracking months for just 1 map, 8 weeks per mech (est 2 months) each.

This means we'll only have 4 1/4 new mech and only 3 maps by the end of december.

Lol, yeah. I clearly have wasted my money kicking starting this for the direction they are taking this.

Quality is only as good if it can bring depth, and the game already lacks so many key points for that depth to draw and keep the playerbase.

by the time community warfare comes out, we'll be told to kill the opposing "Faction" to wrest control away from another house/merc unit by gathering points based on win/loss. And we'll do it on the same maps over and over and over again because we have no large map pool to play with.

*golfclap*

They have said repeatedly that the biggest thing that's taking so long with the current map generation is making the assests. Once volcano and asteroid come out they said they'll have all the assests they need to start churning them out in the future without having to build the whole thing from scratch.

[Greyfyl]

Parnage, on 25 March 2013 - 01:21 PM, said:

F2P isn't going away. It offers constant content, constant updates and the idea of a long term product. Instead of buying a game and then it being over in a week you throw a few bucks into a game here and there and the game that you enjoy gets better and more stuff is added over the years. Can it have negatives? Of course but so can full priced games(HI SIMCITY 5) the payment model is moot so long as the product is good.

So the question you have to ask is, do you think MWO is a good product? I do. It's only getting better.

If you have any common sense as a consumer you would realize how terrible the F2P idea is. MWO is NOT a good product at all.

[Bubba Wilkins]

$250k for a full map with all assets from scratch is reasonable.
$70k for a full map which utilizes the same tileset of assets from a 250k map is also reasonable.

[Wingbreaker]

Greyfyl, on 26 March 2013 - 08:46 AM, said:

If you have any common sense as a consumer you would realize how terrible the F2P idea is. MWO is NOT a good product at all.

Relative to your interests, not to everyone's. F2P has seen the capability of crowd sourcing to revive MW, Space Sims, improve existing games, the list goes on.

Here's the funny part: F2P and crowd sourcing in general are proven as a *good* thing for the market by the music industry. Effectively, the Itunes and Amazon single-track market are what F2P is to the games industry; monetization at a consistent rate of return that allows for a company to not have to rely necessarily on large corporate sponsorship (IE Publishers) to release content. While there are still Corporates, the smaller companies able to push their content expand and innovate the market, leading thankfully away from the stagnation that we can easily see in the "AAA" market.

[hammerreborn]

Thontor, on 26 March 2013 - 09:26 AM, said:

I don't know how anyone can be against something they can play completely for free if they choose to do so, and have it constantly being updated and never stagnate like an off the shelf product.

I'm guessing the argument is more "if you end up paying you don't get your money's worth". Basically if they had a standard release with all the stuff available for 60 bucks then I would have saved like 120 dollars that I've slowly spent with microtransactions.

[hammerreborn]

Thontor, on 26 March 2013 - 09:43 AM, said:

Pay once and get everything with a "standard release" doesn't really work on a game that will be continually growing with new content etc. It simply wouldn't be enough money in the long run because a lot of people would just pay that one time and be done.

Its basically either F2P or a subscription... Oherwise the money just isn't there for new content... We would end up having to pay for new content with expansion packs...

IMO there is plenty here that I feel I get my money's worth... Mech bays and GXP conversion especially. Both are cheap and well worth it.

I'm not disagreeing, just trying to explain what he meant. Though if we are still going with the "box" example, most of the releases (CW, map packs, mech packs, etc) would be packaged as DLC.

And I love this game. I like to use a 1$ an hour conversion rate for any multiplayer games in terms of am I getting my money's worth (somewhere around 5 for singleplayer only). So far, just using rough numbers, I have 6 days played in my Jenner D alone, which is 144 towards the ~150 I've put into this game. With all the other mechs I've attempted and pretty much immediately stopped playing I've definitely hit even at this point in time.

[MaddMaxx]

Vassago Rain, on 25 March 2013 - 12:44 PM, said:

So does this mean mechwarrior has to be some supercasual charicature of itself?

An abomination? In the eyes of all its fans?

You tell me, PGI.

Context! Please include the context.

To get it made, would it have to be the above.

For most Publishers, they wanted something made that would sell 3 million copies, or forget it. Single player +Online. The F2P model was the answer.

Driving one of MWO's Mechs is hardly a casual activity. LOL

[Chazer]

They wonder why cosmetic stuff hasn't struck a chord with their player base. I think their cosmetic items are a combination of odd pricing and difficult to understand exactly what you're getting (single use camo versus unlock for chassis).

There is also mention that P2W and features that they see a lot of negative feedback on sell the best in f2p games.

Edited by Chazer, 26 March 2013 - 10:02 AM.

[Garth Erlam]

Tennex, on 25 March 2013 - 01:26 PM, said:

haha thats one thing PGI has that Tribes doesn't. while it doesn't seem like PGI respect us and closes threads any chance they get, at least they seem to listen to us...
but after playing it for this long and seeing some of the features and problems I wanted to be addressed when i started playing finally be addressed, I have no doubt that PGI will deliver.

I'M GONNA WRECK IT!

[DirePhoenix]

Greyfyl, on 26 March 2013 - 08:46 AM, said:

If you have any common sense as a consumer you would realize how terrible the F2P idea is. MWO is NOT a good product at all.

Not sure how you correlate your opinion that MWO is not a good product with the concept of F2P. That's like saying Coca-Cola is bad because Capitalism sucks. Coca-Cola may be bad in your opinion and Capitalism may not be your preferred economic model, one does not correlate to the other.

F2P does allow for a more dynamic development process. It is much more ruthless, but the benefits for pulling it off are much greater. With F2P, the consumers have much more power to "vote with their wallet", and the developers have to be much quicker to steer their ship in the direction of the people with money. The result is more content at a quicker pace, directed by the consumers. You don't like hats? Don't buy hats, and they'll stop making hats and make something else you'll want to buy. (although it could also easily turn out that lots of people not including yourself actually do like buying hats, in which case, they're going to keep making hats for the people that do enjoy hats to buy)

In subscription models, the customer pays a flat rate for whatever content is provided regardless of how much or little the individual actually plays per subscription period. Development is done at the studio's rate, and the customers don't have much say because they're paying the same amount regardless. If they play at all, they're paying the same as someone else regardless of whether or not they enjoy or even make use of the new content being developed. (Ex: Development pushing endgame content even though most people won't be able to play it or aren't interested in it)

[MaddMaxx]

I thought it was cool how the moderator got to see first hand how a Mech was made, 24:30+ and totally seemed both freaked out and amazed over how complex and complicated the whole process really was.

As they say. This is not your Fathers MechWarrior.

Edited by MaddMaxx, 26 March 2013 - 10:10 AM.

[XIRUSPHERE]

At around 33:00 minutes a guy tries to ask how they can justify the expanse of items costing huge amounts of money over say the standard price of a title. They could not answer the question and simply said well if you want to be competitive, then went into saying we plan on doing this for years by then it would cost a fortune. They then chime in saying you could experience the entire game with a single mech.

Like I keep saying, these are the acceptable attitudes here. It's not about creating value or innovating. It's about extracting as much as they can out of a niche genres whales while at the same time introducing mechanics that will allow them to nickle and dime the droves that will pay for a perceived advantage. If they expect people to even do so much as spend what a AAA title cost they should deliver a product worth it. The attitudes suggest otherwise.

[9erRed]

Greetings all,

Here's the whole 1 hour plus panel. It's only the sound and not video but it's the whole discussion.

https://soundcloud.c...othefuturepanel

Later,

9erRed