Disgruntled Mythic Employees reveals secrets of game development.

ConverseSC

 

source: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

Disgruntled Mythic Employee reveals secrets about the Art Direction of Warhammer Online:

Oh. My. Gawd.

I’m not going to rag on my old boss, but let’s just say that Mythic screwed the pooch on this one. Wait, why dance around it?

OK. So some devs tried to blame Games Workshop for all their “restrictions” but that was just bs. Utter bs. Paul Barnett wanted this game to be DARK. The management demanded dark, chaotic settings and ugly ass character models.

Paul, fist in palm, told us how “WAR will never have dancing! There is no dancing, these people are in a WAR!” So brilliant. BRILLIANT. Copy WOW and abandon everything that made DAoC great, but leave out dancing the one place where artists really get to express ourselves.

FU Paul and your arrbitrary stupidity.

So many other bad examples. Irony? When we did the international releases we were told we needed to make the models prettier because they were too ugly. Gee. Ya think?

What I’m saying is that it wasn’t the art management, but the “direction” was fucked from day one.

 

Disgruntled Mythic Employee reveals secrets about why Warhammer Online didn't capture the magic of DAOC:

 

 

Panic set in, and it suddenly had to be WOW 2.0

Almost none of us actually played Warhammer while we worked on it, it was so hard to get into, let alone Dark Age. DAoC was like UO to Mythic. They gave them tiny tiny teams, stole the “best” people and left people they didn’t care about behind. Everyone else was on WAR.

Actually UO got better treatment than DAoC I think.

I don’t really know how all the “Anti-DAoC” politics worked, I admit. I don’t think it was malicious as much as stupidity. People looked to managers for answers they didn’t have, but they had to say something! And that became law.

 

Disgruntled Mythic Employee reveals secrets about Mythic, EA, and Bioware:

 

 

Hi everyone,

I would think myself to be part of some noble cause, like the original EA Spouse trying to save her husband from a hellish work environment at EA. That had a happy ending, however, with tons of publicity and a total change of overtime wages and salaries and how they are handled within the company. I do not expect a happy ending, so I’ll be personal and selfish, and this is just for me.

So just call me EA Louse.

I found out recently that I will be dismissed from Bioware Mythic during the next round of layoffs EA coming this November. I’m sick of seeing EA outsource their art and find every excuse to get rid of us and still not achieve anything. Mythic is dying, and its not us who killed him but we’re taking the fall.

But if you want to know what really went down with Warhammer, I’ll tell you right now.

First, the project leaders did not know what they were doing. Jeff Hickman was the saddest excuse for a producer I’ve seen. All he did was drink the Koolaid and suck up to the right people. He was the perfect yes-man, and this reached down to almost all managers.

My boss who will not be named, again and again would tell us that Rob Denton, one of the original owners, said we should “do this” and “do that” and we would say “omg it makes NO sense, please explain A, B, and C to him. “And then he’d come back and tell us, after we thought he had gone to talk with him,” No, Rob wants in this way. Jeff agrees, this is what we’re going to do. Understood? ” They never actually talked back to Rob. We didn’t talk back to them.

Rob said jump, our leaders said, “How high?! And on who?”

So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear, especially since Mark Jacobs was fired.

Oh, he left voluntarily you say? No, he was fired, and everything placed on his shoulders by those closest to him so they could divide his salary and annual bonus. I bet Rob is enjoying that sweet new Maserati he bought after leaving the knife in his partner of 15 years.

Want to know more? Keep reading. I can keep ranting.

Rob was never there during the development of Warhammer. We always joked about when his next weekly holiday was coming. (Answer? Next week!) Mark was not available, was way too head down trying to design his own contributions or whatever. Rob always handled things. We were told NOT to speak with Mark in person, never, or else we would be explaining to Rob.

The coup began long before Warhammer, and Jacobs did not even realize it.

And yet, this is common gossip in the company, and nobody in this industry seems to get it. So get it! Rob was responsible for the entire project, then blamed Mark when things went wrong.

Ah, but could not do it alone. No, he needed Jeff Hickman, promoted from customer service to produce the Warhammer project. Wait, let me let you have that sink in. The man running customer service, on the theory that the management of a large team of CSRs qualified him to run a game development project, was put in charge of a $50 million project with no previous experience.

And he needed Eugene Evans, the man who brought you the almost non-existent marketing campaign behind Warhammer. We could not even believe how bad they fucked up the marketing campaign. There was almost none. We slaved for years, and this is how we were rewarded for it by Eugene and the people of EA? Being told that Warhammer was not “worth” a lot of money spent on it? LOL. Now he’s in charge of Bioware Mythic.

Oh yeah, and he needed Paul Barnett. You know him as the crazy British dude that appears in random videos at EA to promote his latest bullshittery. We know him as the crazy British dude who we have no idea of how he still has a job. This man was supposed to be the savior of Warhammer’s vision and design. Now all he can do is promote his strange ideas about his little secret project web Ultima game that’s been almost universally criticized by all of us and focus groups. What’s that? You didn”t know Paul loves one of those old Ultima games sooooo much he’s making a literal copy of it for Facebook? Well, the cats outta the bag. Too bad it sucks ass.

So what do they all have in common? All of them failed, badly, in Warhammer, and each of them is in a position of authority in the new company, while the rest of us are facing pink slips. How do they sleep at night? They spin aruond, blame everything on Mark, divide his old salary between them, and never speak about it again. Oh, and they fuck us little guys as well.

Almost makes me congratulate them for having the balls, but after watching them work, it’s obvious they don’t have any. They’re cowards running scared trying to hide under the wing of Bioware, now that Rob has become a general manager of EA.

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit 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 ……

Anyway, back to Warhammer. We shouldn’t have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn’t done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out.

We sold mor ethan a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down every since. It’s “stable” now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade make more money than our biggest project.

So there it is. Rewarding the incompetent. Firing the competent.

I say it anonymously so I can keep my next few paychecks coming.

So I’m a louse. A big fat EA louse.

scuubeedoo

I would like to please the mods to not close this thread, WAR players have a totally different viewpoint of the matter than SWTOR fans. And anyway what's the problem in having different threads about the same matter? Don't you guys have anything better to do than trying to control what we discuss and where?

What bothers me personally, as a WAR player/fan, is that this guy came out and said i am working on EA/Mythic and i am gonna get fired pretty soon bla bla... while trying to keep his anonimity.

I don't have a reason to believe it's fake, neither that the guy is stupid, so we may have a mass firing era for EA/Mythic coming soon? While anticipating the RvR pack? Did they dropped the project? Hope i am just overreacting here.

SkullFighter

It seems as a studio in this age of gaming if you sell yourself to EA or Activision you are more than likely going to get chewed up and spit out.  Feel sorry for blizzard getting in bed with activision.  I kind of feel now that companies who merge with EA/Activision are just doing it for the money.   How many game companies have we seen get destroyed by them?  I have watched quite a few now go down in flames. 

I hate to say it, but looking at SWTOR I kind of feel the same.   I dont see it being that big of a success.   Sure it will draw in people early likely more than WAR did but I dont see the staying power in that game.  I suspect it will fail and when it does Bioware will be no more since EA will do to it like it did to all the other studios.  

Pheace

Mythic as a studio has been shrinking and/or having people work on SWTOR for years now.

 

I doubt EA considers WAR to be worth any noteworthy investment at this point, so once the RvR pack is mostly on the table I wouldn't be surprised to see more layoffs.

 

Mythic as a studio, even when taken over used to hold a lot of weight because of it's Daoc roots and lots of praise, but WAR kind of took away all the shine from that and made the name mediocre at best. there's no particular reason for EA to hold on to it anymore, and I doubt they care. At the moment it's all SWTOR.

 

WAR had it's shining moment, brought in it's bit of cash with sales releases and the number of people still subbing every now and then. It's not going to magically recover or anything. no MMO's do, especially not those that sank after a shining moment (release).

ThomasN7

To me this just proves that you have people out there who think they know how to make good games but really don't. You have politicians and yes men running game development studios and we all wonder why the mmo genre in general is pretty pathetic. Only very few enjoy good mmo success, the rest just struggle to survive.

Arioc

Everything this person says sounds pretty much on target for the sort of nightmare dev teams that exist in this industry. Thankfully I haven't worked in an environment like that but many people I know have a horror story simmilar to this; about having worked under clueless leads or shadey directors who seem out of touch or just plane bullies.

Like any business the product is evident of the work environment; and companies varry as much as people do with the same character flaws. Everything this employee says rings of truth in my ears.

adam_nox

sounds like made up BS to me.  I know what was wrong with WAR and most of that drivel didn't touch it.  And ragging on SWTOR just proves that it's BS.

cheyane

I once worked for a firm where they were stealing money left and right and I did not even know until I was there for almost 3 years. Even then if the boss had not died we would have gone on happily. I tell you really what really goes on inside an organization will curl your toes.

bunnyhopper

"OK. So some devs tried to blame Games Workshop for all their “restrictions” but that was just bs. Utter bs. Paul Barnett wanted this game to be DARK. The management demanded dark, chaotic settings and ugly ass character models.

Paul, fist in palm, told us how “WAR will never have dancing! There is no dancing, these people are in a WAR!” So brilliant. BRILLIANT. Copy WOW and abandon everything that made DAoC great, but leave out dancing the one place where artists really get to express ourselves."

 

Wut? The game being dark was a major issue? Dancing is what made DAoC great?

 

There was clearly issues with the Mythic team due to the bodged mess of a game they released when WAR hit the shelves, but this person seems to be whining about some pretty insignificant points.

demonic87

Originally posted by adam_nox

sounds like made up BS to me.  I know what was wrong with WAR and most of that drivel didn't touch it.  And ragging on SWTOR just proves that it's BS.

He wasn't pointing out what was "wrong with WAR". He was pointing out what "made WAR have all these wrongs". And your second comment is just you being a SWTOR fanboy.

eyeswideopen

Originally posted by demonic87

Originally posted by adam_nox

sounds like made up BS to me.  I know what was wrong with WAR and most of that drivel didn't touch it.  And ragging on SWTOR just proves that it's BS.

He wasn't pointing out what was "wrong with WAR". He was pointing out what "made WAR have all these wrongs". And your second comment is just you being a SWTOR fanboy.

Considering Bioware's story telling has always been better than their game design, I can fully believe his comments about SWToR's current condition.

teddy_bare

Originally posted by adam_nox

sounds like made up BS to me.  I know what was wrong with WAR and most of that drivel didn't touch it.  And ragging on SWTOR just proves that it's BS.

What? That dude hit the nail on the head w/ the one line that said something like: "we had to make WoW 2.0, and left out everything that made DAoC great"...umm, that, right there is exactly what went wrong w/ WAR. As for ther rest, seems to make perfect sense to me, the whole part about Hickman and Denton throwing Mark Jacobs under the bus, that sounds pretty spot on. Now, don't get me wrong, it can't be all that simple as Mark Jacobs was the head of Mythic and thus ultimately in charge of WAR and it's direction, regardless of Hickman being the EP. That being said though, it certainly does seem possible that everyone threw Jacobs under the bus as almost, if not all, of the other "Leads" and "Executives" got to keep their jobs.

I'm curious, does anyone know what Mark Jacobs is up to these days? After all, he was the man most directly responsible for DAoC, and I truly feel that if he would've just stuck to what he and Mythic knew best, instead of listening to everyone else telling him he needed to try and steal WoW's thunder, then WAR would've been what everyone was hoping for, DAoC 2.0, instead of a sorry ass mish-mash that was mostly trying to copy WoW w/ teeny-tiny bits of DAoC thrown in. I'd like to see MJ start up a new, independant studio, to maybe try and make the game we all want, DAoC 2.

And yeah...I have to say that I've been really hoping that SWToR turns out to be everything it seems like it could be, but after hearing this, I am no longer all that optomistic. Yes, this could all be total bullshit from some random dude just looking to stir things up, but what he says is very possibly the way it all went down, and certainly sounds logical. We'll have to wait and see, but I, for one, am a bit more guarded about hoping beyond hope that SWToR turns out to be the shiznit.

mmoguy43

Yeah I too would probably be turnned off at just any alpha of a game.

 

But about the rant... it seems to be well crafted with half truths (some statments are completely false) and can only be enjoyed as the inside scoop from a disgruntled employee drama that it is. Of course he is going to shit talk about anything he can before he goes. Although I think this selfish behavior is a bit sad. If they find out who it really is he's going to have a hard time finding a new job in the industry.

Sovrath

Originally posted by teddyboy420

Originally posted by adam_nox

sounds like made up BS to me.  I know what was wrong with WAR and most of that drivel didn't touch it.  And ragging on SWTOR just proves that it's BS.

What? That dude hit the nail on the head w/ the one line that said something like: "we had to make WoW 2.0, and left out everything that made DAoC great"...umm, that, right there is exactly what went wrong w/ WAR. As for ther rest, seems to make perfect sense to me, the whole part about Hickman and Denton throwing Mark Jacobs under the bus, that sounds pretty spot on. Now, don't get me wrong, it can't be all that simple as Mark Jacobs was the head of Mythic and thus ultimately in charge of WAR and it's direction, regardless of Hickman being the EP. That being said though, it certainly does seem possible that everyone threw Jacobs under the bus as almost, if not all, of the other "Leads" and "Executives" got to keep their jobs.

I'm curious, does anyone know what Mark Jacobs is up to these days? After all, he was the man most directly responsible for DAoC, and I truly feel that if he would've just stuck to what he and Mythic knew best, instead of listening to everyone else telling him he needed to try and steal WoW's thunder, then WAR would've been what everyone was hoping for, DAoC 2.0, instead of a sorry ass mish-mash that was mostly trying to copy WoW w/ teeny-tiny bits of DAoC thrown in. I'd like to see MJ start up a new, independant studio, to maybe try and make the game we all want, DAoC 2.

Actually, giventhe complaints we heard and everything that we know about the issues with Warhammer, that easily could have just been regurgitated.

Heck, I could have easily made my own anonymous blog and said those exact words as I've heard players say "warhammer is too much like wow".

I'm not saying that this blog is false but other than stating what has already been stated time and time again, why is this true other than it supports what some players want to be true?