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EverQuest Next and the 60% Done Comment
AmbrosiaAmor
Member Posts: 915
I think 60% of the features they want to implement are done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the percentage given in the interview ties in with the "entire scope" of the game. Here is the transcript (to the best of my ability) from 11:17 – 12:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtGfWgW5kDs
BM: About how far along are you with Next then, like 20% or?
DG: Well see that is a tricky question. If we were only building EverQuest Next, we’d be pretty much in the same spot we are now. Because there is all those supporting systems and all the ancillary features that have to exist before we can build the new Norrath that we want to build; all the destructible worlds, all the Holy Grail stuff that we went through last year, is all stuff that we absolutely have to have. That is being developed in public view in Landmark. So we are [pause] 60% complete with EverQuest Next.
BM: The rallying calls are going to be a big part, which you said is still kind of in process.
DG: The strategy is when Landmark goes open beta we’ll be mostly feature complete for EverQuest Next. And then we just focus on A.I. and content and the characters and all that other stuff and push push push push on that stuff and really make the new Norrath suddenly come to life.
BM: Landmark is for builders and for explorers. Next is going to be for the people that want to roleplay within that world.
DG: A really deep and immersive, episodic kind of game that is constantly changing that you can get into and make a big difference.
Comments
You guys are getting this all wrong. The game might as well be 60% done, because 60% of EQN is what Landmark is. So yeah, you ARE playing EQN right now - just a 60% done version.
As a game designer myself, I can completely understand where he comes from. Most of what makes a game is invisible to the players. Let's take as an example, building a castle in the game. Maybe it takes you, what, 2 weeks? Let's assume a professional can do that in half that time. Cool. But thinking, prototyping, developing, debugging, testing, and refining the TOOL that lets you build that castle, probably took most of a year, if not more.
So yes. I do believe they are 60% done with the game. Another 20% are the mechanics left to implement, and the debugging and testing of the final features. The remaining 20% is tying it all up and presenting it in the best fashion possible.
They probably have lots of stuff already thought out, and probably even implemented, but they're just not showing it. Just keep in mind that just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. - Ernest Hemingway
You nailed it. A lot of these guys don't get it. The engine, and the tool systems are an absolutely huge part of a game's development. This is why many game devs choose to use 3rd party SDKs when creating games.
You could code the engine, the animation system, the rendering code, the terrain editor, and everything else from scratch... or if they will suffice for your project, you could just use UDK, Cryengine 3 SDK, Unity or other SDK to cut out all that work and focus on adding the content.
60% done is probably very accurate, and they won't need to be 100% before they give us an alpha access. I give it 6 months at most and we'll be inside testing EQN for sure. Sometime around January after the holidays, just like they did with Landmark.
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It depends entirely on which systems are developed first.
It's entirely possible to be 90%+ done and not have an alpha yet if a developer focuses first on the underlying systems, especially for a more sandboxy game where the ratio of systems to content is weighted much more heavily towards the former and when internal testing is done primarily through automated tests.
Likewise it's entirely possible to be 10% done and already have a playable alpha, it's just a matter of focussing on different systems.
Consider that 0% isn't the point where you have an empty paper in front of you on your desk, ready for wonderful stories to be written on. 0% is having no paper, no desk, no pen and no means whatsoever to get any of these.
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Resistance is futile.
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When DG said 60%, I immediately thought to myself, "oh another default answer".. How many times do you all go to a restaurant with a waiting line and told "20 minutes"? Countless to me, and why is that.. Because that is the human psychological limit most will wait for a table.. Most staff are told to use that number.. There are times I wait 5 or 10 minutes, and times it's easily over 20 and I leave pissed off..
Don't hold your breath on the 60% comment because that means nothing in time.. Does that mean that the other 40% will be completed in 6 months? or a year? or longer? We don't know and I bet they don't know either.. Creating the world and tools to build it is the EASIEST part of the game.. The hard part is yet to come.. That being the interactive NPC and mobs that must be coded and debugged.. This part is the most critical and will take the longest to complete, cause if you screw this up the game will crumble as so many before it has done.. SWG comes to mind here..
If 60% of EQNext is developed on the claim that the landmark systems themselves take up the majority of that percentage then EQNext game systems are indeed being tested because Landmark itself is in Beta testing stages. The 2 games are intimately related. It would at at least a year anyway before claims that this development style is indeed holding the EQNext project back. Anything prior to that is speculation.
You stay sassy!
SOE clearly stated that no dates would be announced for either game so the 60% statement is precisely as ambiguous as they want it to be. We aren't supposed to glean information from it. It isn't intended. I honestly believe Dave G was trying to be honest but it is true that pulling a random % out of ones head is often inaccurate. He is the man in the know about development so it is entirely a matter of believing or thinking he is full of shit.
You stay sassy!
Let's hope their project management leads aren't total idiots then because that is about budgeting resources and time.
You stay sassy!
Landmark is the foundation for EQ:N and the development process is moving on quite nice in that.. clearly a lot further in the dev version of it as well so as EQ:N is using Landmark as a base then sure I can see them being qutie far along with the development of EQ:N without them being in any kind of public alpha/beta.
Either way I want them to release it when its done.. no need to rush anything as I want to play a good game not a rushed one.
It's well known that "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." (Copied from here.)
Well, I think this has been much harder than they thought it would be. I have Landmark, so I have seen first hand how it is slow going for them. I am not mad about it, I figure they are doing their best, and I understand it is new territory for them. The making of classes, normal top level land, and all the traditional mmos stuff wouldn't take them long, but they have to get the procedural generation of things to tie into the like 6 tiers of land/air/water, and make quality playable content with it also.
I could go on and on, but Landmark and Next are not typical mmorpgs, they are trying something new, Landmark is probably going to end up being huge (if they pull everything off, basically could be a make your own mmo under the SoE/Landmark umbrella) or a flop for the time/money put into it. You could also judge it separately, if the time/money going into it makes other games and they are a hit, then it is just a development investment situation.
I have no idea if I will like both end products to be honest, I look forward to seeing what they do, but a good amount of what they are doing isn't high on my list of what I look for (the limited skill bar with half tied to your weapons, didn't like it in GW2, as a personal reference). Not a big fan of big weapons and super flashy stuff...I know why they are doing it, but just my preference.
So I will wait and see, I try to not pay too much attention, and just check back when their are big announcements (yes, not playing Landmark atm, waiting on it to transition into open beta or atleast get closer, then checking out the newer stuff).
To me 100% is a playable alpha, so maybe 60% seems just about right.
Opinions, everyone's got them. But only a few weird ones think it applies to the world.
Different companies will have different definition's for what an alpha is, and from comments read here it seems alot of people don't understand what is meant by alpha builds.
Where I work as a developer we class an alpha build as a fully working prototype, with all planned feature's written and working. It's at this point we say the alpha is ready and then begin the next task which is to optimise the build and fine tune everything.
Now for us we don't have to worry about investors, so we can, as a company, do it this way, other places I have worked have classed barely working software as an alpha build and essentially built the software and called it an alpha.
It all depends on your understanding of software development and constraints that the company is under to produce a working product.
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Actually this debate is tired and time to put it to bed.
Why is this so important that we polarize ourselves? How is a number going to change your life? What folks do at a game making industry really effect your lives that much? Honesty of SoE or any other corporation is the cornerstone of humanity and might tip the balance of mankind?
I would actually like to read a thread that explains to me why I should be bothered by anything that happens at SoE, Blizzard, Bioware, Gpotato, NCSoft, Arena Net, CCP, FunCom, and Carbine, to name a few. What in the world is the point here?
Why all the anger? I often feel like this is some type of cult ish religious following sometimes. People get so emotionally tangled with games, companies and now even the developers/CEO's that make these games?
The truth is we ALL have freedom of choice here. The last time I checked, no one is forcing me to play any of these games, truly. I am by no means going to have a mental break down because David Georgeson made up 60%. I don't give two buckets of ogre vomit whether this "number" is factual or not. I do NOT loose my personal freedoms whether or not Smokejumper is lying about a game.
In the larger scheme of things, this all is just silliness when compared to folks that struggle just afford basic needs or people lying in a hospital bed fighting for their lives due to cancer or heart disease. We have relatives that are struggling with mental illness and society just ignores the needs of these people. There are wars between countries run by greed corrupted old men that care not whiff for the young people that die for their lack of communication!
And to think we here on this forum get all twisted up and take sides on whether Dave Georgeson is lying about the state of a damn game! Now, really, someone tell me how this crap is as important as those members of family that have come back mentally or physically scared because "political leaders" have become polarized and can not agree on anything thus they send 18, 19, and 20 year olds to do their fighting.
Time for some reality therapy,
Alyn
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
for an MMO, yes
MMO's are never totaly finished they will add stuff/remove stuff change. example would be WoW with its new expansions its far beyond the 100% it once had 10 years ago
Considering that most MMOs take around 5 years or so to make the 60% would imply they've been working on it for 3 years and have 2 more years to go until release.
Which would mean a Summer 2016 release. How is that no way in hell?
I think many here are seriously underestimating just how long these projects take and thus exactly how much work has already been done and, more importantly, just how much work still needs to be done.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
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My topic is not really off topic and yeah it is a General Discussion/debate. And once again why is it so important that we draw lines in the sand over what is deemed to be true or not about a game.
However, it's all good you all are going to make something out of nothing no matter what those of us that look at this entire debate from a different angle.
Alyn
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Well, something could be 100% feature complete, and Alpha/Closed Beta/Open Beta could be used to refine the already included feature. Obviously this hasn't been the approach with Landmark, and I personally believe Next will not have as many growing pains towards release as Landmark, due to Landmark being the proving ground for a lot of the technologies, but some stuff is going into Next, that will not be in Landmark, due to them being different in the end, so I think Next will still have problems to solve, even once they solve their problems for Landmark.
Again, what does 60% mean? Does it mean feature wise, or work wise? Land generation may be say 10% of the features or less, but 20-25% of the work, with the tiers and the 'earthquakes' that shift and 'reveal' new content. 20% of the content features may take 40-50% of the development time...So 60% of the feature list could be accurate, but in the sense of gauging how close it is to launch, it could be only 25% of the way time wise.
The only way to know, would be to actually ask if the 60% means feature wise, or development time wise.
sorry - couldnt resist (my day job is IT management)
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2235828&seqNum=13
Many people have come to me with projects that they believe are “90% complete.” They never have been. It’s hard to know exactly how far along a project actually is, but when someone tells you they’re 80% or 90% of the way done with a project, they’re almost always wrong. Why does this happen so often?
Well, first off, most people don’t actually bother to go through the effort of really measuring project status but want to act as if they know what they’re doing. So they tend to make up numbers, and 80% and 90% are good round, made-up numbers. Really, it’s just a common and convenient lie told by developers and project managers the world over. When people tell you they’re 80% or 90% done, ask them how they arrived at that percentage.
..
What happens is that developers write all the code to implement all the features before turning over the code to QA for testing, and they assume that testing is just a formality and won’t turn up very much. They assume, for example, that the testing at the end will be 10% or so of the project time. When testing turns up a whole bunch of stuff, they stick to their guns and think (or at least say) that they’re still 90% done. This is where we get the joke that “the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.”
EQ2 fan sites
As a software engineer myself, who works on games, I can see where you're coming from. However, Dave is not new to this process. This isn't his first rodeo and he knows how fluid time lines can be and he isn't making some rookie mistake of grossly over/under estimating how much progress they've made.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
We don't know exactly what he mean't by 60%, which is a good point. He could have just simply mean't they're about 60% done with all the features, and after 100% there is still work to be done with implementing / testing them. He could have also mean't that they're 60% through the development, 40% to go until day 1 release.
Another thing is that we don't know how far along they're going to get before they give players an alpha to test. Some companies do in house alpha/beta testing and only allow players to participate in an open-beta stress test 30 days out from release.
SOE let players into Landmark alpha well before the game was feature complete because they wanted players to use the building tools to create assets for the game.
So EQN close alpha buy-in for founders could start up in 1 or 2 months from now. It could start up a year from now. We don't know for sure. However, given how much they're involving the community for these projects, if I was asked to put money on the table and pick a time frame, I think the safest bet is 6 months from now, end of January / start of February at the latest would be my guess for when found-pack buyer closed alpha will start.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
I really dont know but I share the same hopes
EQ2 fan sites
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