152 replies to this topic

[Tesunie]

Microsoft created MW2-3-4. They already had people who had the experience, or at least things they could look back onto for guidance and referencing. Those 25 designers probably also had more experience overall, if not more experience in a MW title to start. This does help them out. They also didn't have to worry so much about weapon balance, as it was designed as a campaign, single player game with online options. They didn't have to tweak balance once it was produced, or correct problems in the game. (Differences between a single release date game, and an online game that constantly needs to be changed, patched and debugged.)

But, you want to go into information, here is God of War: http://en.wikipedia....%29#Development

It started development in 2002, had a demo release in 2004 (which was bugged) and was finally released as a finished product in 2005. This, too, was a single player campaign game, with no online play that I am aware of. Online play only games become more difficult. This game took 3 years from start to finish, and was made for single player only, so balance was not much of an issue as it would be here, in an online player vs player environment.


God of War 3: http://en.wikipedia....III#Development

It was started in 2007. Finished in 2009. Single player game again. Same creator, and probably some/most/all same staff as previous games, making development faster. No online content that I am aware of again.


Guildwars 2: http://en.wikipedia....s_2#Development

Started development in 2007. Closed Alpha/Beta tests in 2011. Full release to the public was in 2012. 5 years here, and it has single player campaign, player vs player, world vs world... This is probably more what MW:O should be compared to, as it shares the most qualities with it. And this team also had previous experience from working on Guild Wars (1)...


I don't think you would want to know how long it would take me to sketch out the web site background, of course that also is already predesigned and created, and doesn't relate to creating something completely new from scratch...



Anyway, to reinforce the concept, a game takes anywhere from 2-6 years typically. MW:O isn't even into year 3 from the sounds of it so it's time table isn't too far off right now. They've had their problems which slowed them down, and inexperience sounds like it didn't help much either.

[Reno Blade]

I grew up with MW2 (and the expansions) and my whole live changed when MW3 was releases.
It was the glorious high of the MW franchise for me. MW3 was as close to BT Tabletop as possible.
Playing MPBT: Solaris7 and later MPBT: 3025 EA Beta (RIP), I played these multiplayer games until they where shut down.

What was left was MW2 netmech and MW3 multiplayer over the MS Zone (MW3 netcode was like a ping of 5000).
When M$ released MW4, the community was shocked!
What is that? A Cat, or a fat Chicken? An awesome, or a blockhouse? The grafic was toned down, the balance was horrible and the AI was the worst. Everything was made to make it easier on network gaming.

We tried to stay active playing MW4 coop vs bots, but setting the AI to level 8 of 9 would be easy walk in the park and setting them to 9 of 9, they would blow your face from 800m with a single Gauss.

If not for MekTek for creating the Mech pack mods, MW4 would have died very fast.
The huge amount of mechs and new balancing done by MekTek changed MW4merc to the better, but was still "only" MW4.
MPBT: 3025 Beta was way better than MW4 and close to what I (and others) were expecting for MWO (It had CW).

If you want to compare to a game, MPBT: 3025 should be the closest one not MW4.

*********************************************************


Overall, MWO looks great (depending on settings), the balancing is decent (miles better than MW4! ), but still needs a few tweaks.
Hitreg is a problem they are working on.
Big stuff (CW) is comming down the pipe (nothing you can speed up by complaining! ).
Communication has/had its ups and downs, but is still one of the biggest issues.
But, It's not a one-sided fault.
Communication is always about two sides and the community is as much at fault as the devs.
Sometimes the devs were over-confident and "promised" stuff and everyone was "disappointed".
And then the devs were too cautious and didn't communicate before they released features and people felt like "ignored", because they could not give their feedback on the feature.

But on the other side:
The community reading between the lines, calling the Devs names and creating anti-trust-campaigns is not helping the development or growth of the game at all!
There is no gain by the amount of "critics" some people flood the internet with, but to spread distrust and negative emotion.
This behaviour is often defended by such lines as "but we want to warn new players to not 'waste' money on this game", or "because we care" and "because they don't listen to feedback and suggestions anyway".

Think about it....
If you care, you want the game to change to the better, right?
Why are you working against them and not with them?
Did they hurt your feelings so much that you gave up beeing "reasonable"?
If your feedback/suggestion was not disregarded, don't give up!
Improve yourself! - Get stronger!
Improve your idea, bring it to live and give it another try! But don't choose the "dark side" and moan and cry your heart out, collect more moaning followers and strive the internet like a horde of blood thirsty zombies hunting the Devs and trying to KILL this game!

[DEN_Ninja]

Time to cut and paste the same old arguments about why any current gen or even previous gen games are much harder to produce even with a good time and some time.

1. Every game development suffers from bad management of time and resources. This has been documents there's tons of articles about it from even the best of teams. No one is really exempt. It is hard to manage a project now because there's more to a game. In ye olden days a guy and his friends could make an awesome indie game in a garbage but they all pretty much shared the same responsibilities. You didn't have one guy doing high poly models. Another doing the textures. Another doing maps. Or one guy just for netcode. None of that existed back in the day. Technology has progressed. Things are harder to develop now.

2. This is not the same ballpark as those old games like unreal or quake when all you had to do was a bare bones netcode to make sure that shot A correctly applies damage to player B when we used more direct connectors using a server to host it.. No everything is now server authoritative to stem hacking and both players send data to the server for it to be spit back out. It doesn't track just the projectile anymore it is trying to gauge speed and all the damn entities in the world. It tries to fix lag time errors and accurately apply damages while communicating with the clients. CoD has such poor netcode that Player A can be in front of player B but for Player B they are behind a building. Player A shoots player B and it looks as if he's shot through a wall. Battlefield still has massive issues with properly registering all those tank hits. I'm magically firing 1 HEAT round every 5 seconds along with every other tank in the game and that must be fun to track.



Lastly,

Hypocrisy, first off, the design pillars that came out in 2011 were mere ideas. Real programming did not start until at least very late 2011/early 2012. Even then the netcode was a huge problem. They didn't want to have to spend the time and money to develop their own engine and used Cryengine 3 but found a whole slew of problems. They still got a barebones game out within the year. Christ Roberts managed to get his raw dogfighting module out right? It is still pretty raw I bet. These things take time.

Anyways. "We aren't like some of the other complainers. We totally have valid complaints unlike others" "They aren't listening to us or don't care about us" "We are totally on an island LULZ"

Guess what. They care. They cared enough to try and resurrect Mechwarrior TWICE. You forget that they tried to get the reboot off the ground too before the lawsuit. Everything they've done is for us and them to play a MW game. They brought communication and I mean good communication and people have spat in their face. A while back the dev tracker was abuzz with responses to topics but when CB came along and the people who didn't get the game THEY envisioned lashed out.

That's where some folks step out of their boundaries and feel the need to insult and mock the devs. Clearly there is only one example of a dev making a insult which is the whole island thing. Guess what, I see twitter responses that rival that comment a hundred times over. Some *** on twitter insinuated that PGI was not a real developer and should look to Everquest Next. Did he make an island comment? No he calmly said that he was watching.

Some of y'all are not much better than goonswarm and they PURPOSELY troll. But I still see signatures that mock PGi. You are playing their game for free and y'all make banners that insult them. Post topics to call the incompetent. You know what I saw? No one bothered to volunteer to help with the netcode early in CB. There were posts about it. PGI linked to their hiring page but I have yet to see the community help out on that even those they make comments about how they could do better.

tl;dr the point of the article went over some heads.

Edited by Tichorius Davion, 03 February 2014 - 05:39 AM.

[Rebas Kradd]

PGI's slow development pace can be tracked back to some early design missteps. They had to go back over and rework the CryEngine layer. They had to redo the UI, and in the meantime duplicate every feature they cooked up for two separate UIs. They also launched without public test servers or internal telemetry tools, something that cost them a lot of reaction time to in-game tendencies and which most people don't even include in their criticisms.

Those things explain the delay. PGI had to go back and rewrite massive portions of their game from the ground up, and it cost them most of 2013. There were early missteps that they had to recover from, and now those missteps are in the past and PGI is trying to reinvent its development schedule.

What's most interesting to me is that even with the obvious hangup being the UI, and even with how much it probably frustrated and pissed off the devs, we only know about it from a handful of posts spread out over a few months. We have exactly two comments that I can think of that really capture their frustration, one of them offhand and in-game. In most studios, they would have been a lot more forthcoming and transparent about something that was blocking their development. There would have been a lot more visible grumbling from them.

The simplest conclusion here is that these things are muted and sparse because PGI just doesn't talk much. They're a quiet, insular studio. It's just their personality. Maybe it's because they're still shell-shocked by the criticism from early OB, maybe it's just Russ doesn't like his people to be distracted, maybe IGP has gag orders on them and is scared over consumer confidence, maybe it's just because they're Canadian, I don't know. But they come off to me like the quiet, stammering worker bees compared to CIG, which is composed of smooth-talking extroverts.

I don't LIKE this personality, because it comes off as indifference to the community. They obviously need a slick spinster on their side who can get his hands dirty with the community, because nobody currently over there (except maybe Kyle Polulak) really gets it. But it's not necessary to conclude that they just don't care about the community. We're not qualified to build the game anyway.

[Roadbeer]

Just because it keeps getting brought up...
At the time (circa 2000) a development team of 28 people for a single player game was HUGE. Just 5 years earlier, Richard Garriott and a team of about that size built UO in 2 years. And BOTH UO and MW4 were backed by major publishers.

Just sayin...

Edited by Roadbeer, 03 February 2014 - 08:52 AM.

[DaZur]

Clearly PGI is guilty of making some extremely egregious mistakes in judgment... That said, they know they screwed up but cannot reverse time and undo a single one of them but learn from them and move forward.

That's the the reality of the situation...

What kills me about this community and admittedly, it's the nature of the internet:

- The communities inability to move on. You cannot find one thread about any topic where someone (Typically the usual suspects) refuse to miss an opportunity to spew some vitriol. It's like they are not happy unless PGI's transgressions are enumerated in every thread...

- The communities inability to accept PGI being human. Yup, PGI made mistakes, had lofty expectations, broke promises and are guilty of a little arrogance.. That said, maybe a little less throwing of rocks in glass houses might be in order?

- The communities inability to accept that not every suggestion requires Dev commentary. For whatever reason, the forwarded premise is the PGI doesn't listen nor care what the community says because they do not personally acknowledge each and every flipping one.

- The communities inability to accept not every suggestion is realistic or plausible.. Believe it or not, not every idea is brilliant nor is every suggestion possible to implement.

- The premise of "my idea was ignored" = PGI doesn't listen. Yup... You got it. Just because your personal suggestion was not immediately instituted into the game means they don't care and refuse to listen.

- New members parrotting Vets. Absolutely... this is a personal pet peeve. There is almost nothing that chaffs my arse more than seeing a new member parroting some rhetoric they've seen a vet spew, knowing full well that they have no frame of reference other than what they glean from the vets vomit.

Lastly... As eluded to in the article, there is nothing a company hates more than a customer strutting around with the premise that their money gives them the right to be belligerent, condescending, demanding an demeaning. Guess what... the motto "The customer is always right"... was coined in the early 1900's. While still relevant, the original intent was founded in the understanding that people had integrity and a keen sense of value.

Sadly... today the mistrust between customer and a business precedes the inability for either party to accept that the other is not trying to give the other the shaft.

Edited by DaZur, 03 February 2014 - 09:10 AM.

[DEN_Ninja]

I had no idea that the dogfighting module for Star Citizen was delayed until March/April.

Cryengine 4 needs to fix all the stupid problems that are brought up. Everyone is encountering the same damn problems. At least stuff looks pretty...

Anyways, no one not even the legendary team of developers at RSI/CIG can prevent delays. Bugs happens, Bugs and severe problems occur and can take a long time to fix.

[Roadbeer]

Marack Drock, on 03 February 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well that doesn't excuse PGI's 2 years of only mechs, maps, 2 game modes, a beta test UI2.0 and talk and not much more.

I'm not compelled to enumerate the content of over 24 patch notes since Open beta (which seem to be where your standards lie) or the 8 patch notes since Launch, to refute this completely obtuse statement.

[DEN_Ninja]

Marack Drock, on 03 February 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well that doesn't excuse PGI's 2 years of only mechs, maps, 2 game modes, a beta test UI2.0 and talk and not much more.

They made mistakes but they are not exactly doing much to reconcile them.

Half this thread is about how game development times have increased. They are now tall orders to fill. The most common game that is used in comparison to MWO is Star Citizen and that has a target release YEAR of 2015. It has been in a year in development so its slated for 3 years of development. They are over a year of development but because of certain cryengine limitations they have had to delay the dogfighting module.

They are reconciling them. That was the entire point of explaining why UI 2.0 is such a landmark.

[DaZur]

Marack Drock, on 03 February 2014 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well that doesn't excuse PGI's 2 years of only mechs, maps, 2 game modes, a beta test UI2.0 and talk and not much more.

They made mistakes but they are not exactly doing much to reconcile them.

In fairness... It's a "no win" for PGI regardless of what they do.

They add content... the get beat down for not fixing enough bugs. They fix bugs and they get beat down for not providing enough content. Even when they provide a portioning of both, both parties still think more could have been done.

What a lot of folks fail to appreciate is how much stuff is being intentionally held back in wait for UI 2.0 to break ground... There is a lot of stuff that could have been introduced already, but doing so would have required re-developing it to implement in the UI 2.0 framework.

Sure... it would have been nice... but it would have been extremely poor development logic to implement it twice, doubling development costs.

[GoManGo]

PGI has had all the information it needed from Past MechWarrior PC game models to Randall Bills? How could they make a simply stated =World Of Mechs= game instead of a true MechWarrior game based off of a social platform like the older games were? Yes they cannot retro back 2 years and undo the flawed basic core design but I still do not believe the Dev's understand MechWarrior games.

They did not and still do not understand the community and how involved they were in leagues and social chat and role-play and everything the older MechWarrior games were.How could you be a Dev of a game and be this naïve about what was fun about the games and what made them fun?

And its not like the community has not tried to help them understand MechWarrior.

[Heffay]

GoManGo, on 03 February 2014 - 09:35 AM, said:

PGI has had all the information it needed from Past MechWarrior PC game models to Randall Bills? How could they make a simply stated =World Of Mechs= game instead of a true MechWarrior game based off of a social platform like the older games were? Yes they cannot retro back 2 years and undo the flawed basic core design but I still do not believe the Dev's understand MechWarrior games.

They did not and still do not understand the community and how involved they were in leagues and social chat and role-play and everything the older MechWarrior games were.How could you be a Dev of a game and be this naïve about what was fun about the games and what made them fun?

And its not like the community has not tried to help them understand MechWarrior.

Battletech community is worst community.

Seriously, nobody should listen to anything that anybody who claims to be the "community" says.

[GoManGo]

HEFFAY SAID= Battletech community is worst community.

Seriously, nobody should listen to anything that anybody who claims to be the "community" says

DUDE you are the worst you have the same mentality the Devs have and that's why MWO is failing.

The battletech and MechWarrior community's of the past were awesome, gamers, players,and people I cant believe you would say something like this.

[Roadbeer]

GoManGo, on 03 February 2014 - 09:35 AM, said:

And its not like the community has not tried to help them understand MechWarrior.

Are we talking about the "Community" that can't wrap their brain around the fact that a turn based table-top game doesn't translate well (if at all) to a Real Time 3D environment?

Or the "Community" who is hyperventilating about the changes to Clan Tech, even though Randall Bliss acknowledged that the Clans were a bad idea, and while great for a story, was horrendous for game play?

Or the hybrid of these "Communities" who have now had console players invade and demand a never-ending series of "easy" modes?

So many "Community" factions, which should they listen to?

[GoManGo]

Roadbeer don't be a AASSHHOOLLE******* there is good and bad in all factions of the MechWarrior community's, fans and players a smart Dev team would look to the positive side of them all and try to incorporate the best of what they had to offer as in ideas and ingenuity for the MWO platform.

Edited by GoManGo, 03 February 2014 - 09:49 AM.

[Roadbeer]

GoManGo, on 03 February 2014 - 09:48 AM, said:

Roadbeer don't be a AASSHHOOLLE******* there is good and bad in all factions of the MechWarrior community's, fans and players a smart Dev team would look to the positive side of them all and try to incorporate the best of what they had to offer as in ideas and ingenuity for the MWO platform.

Weird, I thought that was EXACTLY what they were doing, and that the biggest gripes people have with the game, ironically, come from them listening to the "Community".

[GoManGo]

Sadly RoadGeer I doubt that's the truth it is there sad devotion to making a game that was not like the older MechWarrior games were and have not been largely accepted by the older community and by the thousands of new players that have come and gone and not supported PGI or MWO.

Edited by GoManGo, 03 February 2014 - 09:56 AM.

[Roadbeer]

GoManGo, on 03 February 2014 - 09:55 AM, said:

Sadly RoadGeer I doubt that's the truth it is there sad devotion to making a game that was not like the older MechWarrior games were and have not been largely accepted by the older community and by the thousands of new players that have come and gone and not supported PGI or MWO.

Roadbeer, on 02 February 2014 - 05:50 PM, said:

Please, your nostalgia is painting a meh title with rainbows and unicorn farts.

[DaZur]

GoManGo, on 03 February 2014 - 09:35 AM, said:

PGI has had all the information it needed from Past MechWarrior PC game models to Randall Bills? How could they make a simply stated =World Of Mechs= game instead of a true MechWarrior game based off of a social platform like the older games were? Yes they cannot retro back 2 years and undo the flawed basic core design but I still do not believe the Dev's understand MechWarrior games.

They did not and still do not understand the community and how involved they were in leagues and social chat and role-play and everything the older MechWarrior games were.How could you be a Dev of a game and be this naïve about what was fun about the games and what made them fun?

And its not like the community has not tried to help them understand MechWarrior.

Why?

Simple... Not one publisher was willing to risk any financial stake in a full SP/MM single-purchase title. The original Tinker & Smith pitch was in fact under that pretense... In short, for IGP, the F2P model was the best financial stake solution, netting the quickest return on their investment dollars with nominal risk.

The fact that their licensing has been extended gratuitously is a clear indication that regardless of how romantic the full SP/MM single-purchase title is in our hearts and minds... the present F2P model clearly is giving IGP exactly what they had hoped for.

Edited by DaZur, 03 February 2014 - 10:03 AM.

[BSK]

DaZur, on 03 February 2014 - 09:30 AM, said:

In fairness... It's a "no win" for PGI regardless of what they do.

I could agree with you, but when I saw the new UI 2.0 on the test server, and I saw that mechs of the same chassis werent put into the same row - I lost all my understanding for them. If that wasnt the most important point of making new mechlab, then they surely have lost overview and their project management is losing control.