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Read the two sections and compare (from the website). If you're short for time, just read the red words:
Part #1 Mar 25th 2007
<BUSINESSSPEAK>
It's no secret that our one and only problem so far has simply been the lack of progress as a direct result of our as of yet inability to procure solid and reliable investors for our project.
</BUSINESSSPEAK>
It's damn depressing to pretty much have a completed product in high demand; to be 90% there and unable to come the last 10% simply because of the lack of petty cash.
Here is a small chunk of undiluted truth about Divergence:
As far as the design and the overall plan are concerned, this game is nearly done.
Dozens of factions both human and alien alike, barely any of which are even announced.
Playable races already sketched, outlined, implimented and quasi-balanced.
Hundreds of special abilities pre-designed and scripted ready to be cut and pasted into the engine.
A gaming world just slightly smaller than the land mass of Sweden.
The combat and crafting models in their entirety.
A three-year story arch composed of 36 monthly and unique chapters.
Bandwidth and hosting provider ready to go.
3d assets and animations for all playable and NPC races, factions, creeps [mobs], items, components, doodads, weapons, armor, everything ready to be chucked out at a moments notice.
Voice actors on standby.
It's all done.
It's all been done for months upon months.
We've been done with this stuff for so long we're even past Convergence and into designing a D-O universe console for nextgen!
We just can't come up with the money we need. It's really as simple as that.
Part #2 Mar 28th 2007
Here's the new idea.
The likelyhood of anyone attached to this project helping a bag lady across the street and finding out she is a multimillionaire and has always wanted to pewn nubs with her grandchildren is for lack of a better phrase, hellaslim.
As the residing money... person... my biggest obstacle has always been the lack of more or less anything at all to show potential investors. Oh I have very pretty ideas! ... And a couple sketches! And a white shirt and tie! But nothing to put in front of someone[s] and say, "This is what I do. Your dodge stratus outside PALES in comparison to that which is Divergence!"
And so we reach the crux of my quasi-witty little spat. We're basically going to dump what money we have left into a modicom of 3d assets which we would need in the end regardless of the engine anyway instead of busting hump to get the engine license requirements first.
It pains me to say this, but the next step it looks like is to take said art and plug it into an engine we already own to create a "demo" so to speak purely as a data dump for preexisting special abilities, factions, whatever, and to begin chucking out screenies. At least then we'll be able to say, "Well I can't show you any of the cool and dynamic scripted content we want to have until we get the new engine... but you can at least see all the different "types" of things we have going on.
So as Paul Harvey would say, "Now you know the rest of the story."
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
Comments
It looks like bioman or ultraman and mas rider black hehe
divergencefall 2.0 see ya in 6 years lol..
It's funny how much these guys were raging against a game that was in development back in 06 that had no money and was being made by one guy, and now it's in ressurection and is getting support and visibility at an exponential rate! It has an awesome looking game engine and graphics and has a functioning world the devs can log into.
Take that unbelievers of the past!
The difference here is that you are basing your stance on belief and they are basing theirs on history.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I don't doubt that you feel what he has so far is anywhere near a completed game. However, all the snarky "violas" and "take thats" in the world doesn't change the fact that he is nowhere near anything that could be remotely called a game. To be clear, I'm not knocking the engine, graphics or world he's creating. It looks simply stunning and it could very well be used to make a game. There currently is no game, though, and until he realizes how far from a game he is, he will never have a game because his view will remain that money is the blocker.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Yeah i agree to some extent, money is required, but money isnt the "be all an end all" of a project especially when your an indy developer, what is important is the game, you can build a game just with place holders for graphics and text, most games start out on paper and can normally be play tested that way.
In the eventuality that you have a game and you do need money then theres many routes to attempt to gain the required funds.
Exactly.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Feydikan sums up Divergence Online development.
"OMG working so hard..pant pant... need sleep... pant pant.... and money... pant pant....keep faith"
From what I understand they have changed from different engines around 3 times at least. So I can understand (if that is the case) how badly that would ruin any features they actually did have complete for their game. Not saying I know much or anything about engines, but I don't figure that it is easy taking a game that works in one engine (working doesn't mean I thought it was at 90% at any point, it's easily feasable he badly misinterpreted the completeness) and make it plug into a totally different one.
I'm not mad that he stated those things back in '07, or if he claimed that most of it was done. As long as he didn't actually realize how much needed to be done since he has been all by himself this amount of time, it is easy to not understand what there is actually left to do.
He now has a developement team, some quite skilled in what they do, so hopefully now we get an accurate time-frame, we get regular updates from their twitter daily, they are active in the forums and answer many of our questions. For me that's good enough faith for a indie project.
Only reason I truly support it is because it has been one of the ONLY kickstarter/indiegogo MMO projects to have any footage in their promotion videos. Unlike others where it's just a developer talking, that pisses me off.
Anyway, in conclusion. It could easily fail. It could also succeed but I'm not going to pump sunshine and say that it has a great chance of success. Most likely the chance of success is no where near 50% likely, even so I don't want to play other games out there at all.
(It sucks you dont wanna see it)
I didn't mean to sound snarky I just hate cynical assholes who give an indie dev shit for not being conistent like major devs. It's just nice to see a project that looked like it was headed south has come back with a punch, despite what's the cynics thought.
I think the progress that has taken place over the last month should be evidence enough that the game is carrying some weight. The company has taken a few steps in the right direction by hiring 3 or 4 guys to work on this full-time.
The first indiegogo campaign is a complete success, and Ethan has already blogged that the next campaign will be kicking off fairly soon when they have sufficient data to back it, this will be in the form of several new gameplay videos and images to show the money is being put to good use.
I feel really dumb dropping $20 into this vaporware
EDIT: Because what the above poster said is true. They only have a model walking around a barren landscape and thats about as good as it gets. No mobs, no AI, no fighting no resources, no anything... IF the game is ever ready it will be years from now at the rate they have been going. Long after The Repopulation... and then ill have no interest in it as I am sure The Repop is my end all be all mmo for a long time.
No offense, mate, just curious... Since T:R is your dream game, what made you think that D:O would launch before T:R?
For clarity´s sake: when the D:O fundraiser lauched a couple of months ago, those barren videos were all there was... I understand why you may have thought DO may launch someday, but what made you think that DO was gonna launch before T:R? I´m one of those that believe that both games will launch, but seems clear to me that T:R will do so much sooner.
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"Evening Star": a The Repopulation novel.
Obviously you never have been to the Unity3d forums, CryEngine forums or UDK forums. There are hundreds of projects that look better than Divergence that never saw the light of day or will never see the light of day. Loktofeit understands game dev, you do not Fallbreaker, understand what he is trying to explain to you. You see pretty graphics in open world and call that a game, what about actual things like combat, quest, PVP, building houses, User Interface, hotbars, spells, abilities, vehicles, and the other hundreds of features this game promises? Divergence is a prototype at best, but I won't even call it that until we see some real game mechanics other than walking/flying around. Everything you see in Divergence can be done with zero coding knowledge and is stock Esenthel (www.esenthel.com) other than the art, models and animations.
As a bystander who hasn't really been following this game I'm really confused from a simple logic aspect.
If the OP's post is a dev explaining where things stand, I can't seem to reconcile the whole "it's 90% done, but I have nothing to show investors." That makes no sense.
If I'm misreading, please just let me know.
The 'barren' videos that are available were produced before the fundraising campaign. When Ethan started working on the game in 06 (i believe) it had an entirely different engine, which he replaced with a much more advanced one, on his own with no money. This engine ALLOWS for destructible enviroments, for structures and flora to carry correct mass etc.
What the dev team have been working primarily on since the fundraising campaign ended was the actual game world itself. The persistent, massively large area where when terrain is changed, things are built by players or blown up they stay that way until someone alters them. Read the devblog. Personally I am disappointed that little of since game prior-fundraising campaign has been shown off, and I've taken to the official forums to voice my complaints. The bottom line is is that Ethan and his team are working night and day on the game and are prioritising a finished game over PR, I think that's a bad call, but it's his decision. He put a poll up the the forums which options are:
- For us to bypass the placeholder systems entirely and prioritize getting a playable version this summer.
The first option got 9 votes, the second 69 votes. I don't think he should have put it to a vote, but oh well.
The reason why I trust this guy is because he has been at it for so so long, mostly on his own. You can search Divergence Online all over the net and see remenants of when it first started with a tiny bit of money before it lunged into obscurity.
But now this persistent fucker has some money and a team, and he already has much of the game world complete. He's not your usual dev who wants to wow and awe you with trailers and all the jazz, the kind of hype that ends up leaving everyone disappointed (GW2 anyone?). Bottom line is, he wants to get it done and then show it off.
Read the his blog and forum posts and make your own judgement
http://divergence-online.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.divergence-online.com/phpbb3/viewforum.php?f=1
No offense taken, I get where you are coming from. I was impulsive to say the least. I also more so believed that Divergence would come out 'soon' (beta by the end of the summer, which i paid for so hence something to play for it). My plan was to honestly play them both back and forth (as I am no longer a 'hardcore' gamer). But considering the timeline shows Divergence wont be in beta for 6 months + by that time I will have a lot of time invested in The Repop n likely lose interest in Divergence (I have adhd when it comes to games... fingers crossed on repop). Do not get me wrong I hope and pray my money was not wasted and I do get to try this game and it is on par or better than the repop but it looks grim. I have been bunny hopping mmo's so much that it is almost a daily thing. Right now I am playing Tera simply for the enjoyable combat... likely to switch to single player games soon
Ah! Gotcha!
I dunno... I for one I´m kinda excited that, also including the Face of Mankind revamp into the list, there are at least three indie Devs pushing it towards making Sci-Fi sandboxes. I realize that, at some point, they are competition and may cannibalize their playerbase, but on the other hand (and probably having myself to plead guilty of excessive optimism), I think that it would be awesome if the three of them could launch their games, and push a bit our beloved MMO genre in that direction.
It´s like it´s in the air: more and more players requesting their Devs to "Go Classic", sort to speak, and bring back some of the features that were rather common ten years ago. As if we are beer aficionados that, although won´t ever agree among ourselves whether or not Stout is better than Pale Ale is better than Lager, we are damn sure we are a bit fed up with so much frikkin´ diet drinks with weird fluorescent colors... and can´t help thinking that at least a few of the diet drinkers would actually learn to like good beer should there be some available.
(for the record: Stout is better, of course; just giving a simple example! :P)
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"Evening Star": a The Repopulation novel.
No you are not misreading. It is what happens when you make up bullshit faster than the speed of your blog post, which is the case for this developer. Anyway was thrown to this thread from somewhere else, I'm done here, good luck sperm glass camel, or stained glass llama or whatever, it sounds gross.
http://www.youtube.com/user/VynxeVainglory
http://www.twitch.tv/vynxe_vainglory
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
This confuses me greatly.
2007. "We have a finished game, just need money"
2013" We have money, now we need to make the game."
Wat.
Help get Camelot Unchained made, a old-school MMORPG, with no hand holding!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained