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Brilliant vision
rounner
Member UncommonPosts: 725
A janitor at NASA's space flight center has decided to build a rocket to fly to mars.
He is going to outsource all of the components and get some friends to stick the pieces together. They initially used blue tack and nails but are hard at work replacing these with proper bolts they bought at the hardware store. Please be patient, the guy is obviously a genius and if he stays true to his vision will undoubtably be the first person on mars.
Comments
Trying to create an analogy of Brad's case to an extreme example (in this case Janitor trying to build a rocket) is a little polemic, dont you think?
"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace , the slaves of the ordinary."
Frankly, I think you're being overly generous in equating Vanguard to a tack and nails affair assembled from parts at a hardware store. I played this piece of excrement and was hard pressed to see why anyone would want to stick around. They did everything they could to make the game into a job. It was completely unfun past the first hour.
It is much more akin to said janitor deciding that because he enjoys spending his days cleaning the feces left by NASA employees, that we all would enjoy spending our livlihood time plunging toilets. Not only that, but he's managed to delude himself that the rest of the world would pay good money to do so.
I don't care how smart those NASA employees are, their waste stinks just as badly as anyone elses. And it in no way is fun to clean up.
playing eq2 and two worlds
Great quote!
What is it from?
Exactly what Vanguard is not.
playing eq2 and two worlds
Sigh, you missed the point by a mile, it's not about that.
It's about doing things that go beyond what is considered ordinary, it means crossing borders for yourself, nothing that can and will hold you back from what you think is possible and right.
The only analogy drawn here was that Sigil didn't take that leap, they stuck to what was already there, a concept completely copied from EQ.
A poster on MMORPG.com's forums has decided to try and build a funny joke.
He is going to outsource all of his material to people who may actually be funny, and get some friends to give him pity laughs at his horrid jokes. Initially his joke sucks really bad, but he is hard at work trying to suck even worse. Please be patient, some day this young man may end up being something resembling humorous.
The Vision itself has all the lack of total world awareness that plagued EQ. Why do you think Brad has mentioned adding some teleporting? Fact is in the real world distance is important. Cultures in the real world that were at the technological state of the cultures in Vanguard didn't even know about two continents of the Earth. Getting to those places took months and often killed people. You can't make a world even vaguely resembling that and then try to put an endgame dungeon on the other side of the world.
Brad wants the meaningfulness of a world sim without understanding what it means to make a real world sim. The Vision is intrinsically and fatally flawed. It is also doomed to have disgruntled customers because they want impossible non-sensical things like a non-world sim with world sim mechanics. It can't decide what it is and is driven by a fan base that will never let it decide what it is.
Its doomed because of the vision, every fix for one thing will be a violation of some other aspect of the vision. Games of the EQ/WoW/EQ2/Vanguard style, the loot/level grinds with fixed content, they can never be realistic and have mechanics like what Brad thinks is meaningful. In the context of these type game they are actually aren't meaningful, they are just pointless barriers. In a simulation style game they are meaningful. Why do you think so many people complain about both EQ and Vanguard and grinding etc? Its because of meaningless barriers that are part of the vision. The key point here is not that barriers exists, smart barriers are good. The problem is that they are meaningless. Whether or not you like the long travel times or not, ask yourself "What purpose does this really server?" The answer is nothing, just to kinda make people feel like the world has substance and space. Its just fake, its essentially BS. That is fine, it can be part of art, but its very bad design. Its a flaw because it gets in the way of one of the major points of you entire game. Ask yourself that same question in a game like Eve and the devs can give a very detailed answer that is demonstrably true. It is a fact that people operate in home systems and are forced into strategic and logistic thinking when venutring out on significant journeys either for fighting or trading. All the while a person can stay with his home system neighborhood and make a good amount of ISK by mining or pirating or ratting and never travel much at all.
This is the intrinsic and insurmountable flaw of Brad's vision. He is taking things from the real world that are actually meaningful and then placing them into a new system where they have no real meaning. He then thinks that because they appear similar on the surface to stuff with real world meaning that they are therefore meaningful. It is tempting think to yourself "Hey travel is important and meaningful in real life. We have significant travel times in the game. So since its meaningful in real life that is a meaningful aspect of the game". Tempting but wrong, because the game is no where close to real life. It is its own system and that feature meaning must be understood in the context of that system. .He has his analogies mixed up. So do many EQ/Vanguard fans. This would be fine except that these are in direct conflict with other key parts of the game. Even worse many players fall in to the same trap even though most people have an inuititive sense that there is something wrong, generally manifesting itself "What is the point of feature X its a pointless waste of time?" question usually followed by a vague subjective justiifcation that honestly seems to makes sense to the poster but never truly answer the question.
The execution itself, while bumpy and annoying, is perfectly adequate.
I think you just proved the OP's actual point. Here you have someone (Mr. McQuaid) who has seen a game built before and thinks he can do it himself. Unfortunately, his lofty aspiration (getting to Mars or building an uber-MMO) while looking good on paper turns out to be a rickety affair that shows little true understanding of what it takes to make a project of this magnitude soar. Either literally or figuratively.
I played for a full month even if I was bored after an hour. I gave him and his project time to change my opinion. The game fails on so many levels it isn't even funny. No, it's not as bad as, say, Dungeon Runners or Regnum or many other new MMOs. But it's still bad. It fails to entertain; wasting your time and money.