If horizons was rereleased....

lilreap2k3 · April 2007

With all the performance problems fixed. By a company who cares about the game. With more content added frequently. Would you play it?

I know I would. I enjoyed being able to build houses, and it taking tons of mats to build one. Being able to be anything you wanted was also nice. I don't remember having any performance problems when I first played Horizons. (About 2-3 months after release.) Dunno what happened, but it's really awful now.

The game could have been really great, too bad it bombed. =(

Stoneysilenc · April 2007

What I loved was the opening days of the server where everybody worked together to rebuild tunnels, cities and other things. I remember being a mule running fully loaded from a harvesting field carrying product to a crafter in the wilds who applied the material to project. Never had a better experience in a MMO and I have been playing them since 1999.

lilreap2k3 · April 2007

I know what you mean. I enjoyed it while it lasted. It had alot going for it. Pisses me off to think about how badly it failed.

Geeky · April 2007

Yes, yes I would.

I was thinking the same thing. Somone please buy this game, fix it's rep and put it back on the market.

Ahh...dreams...they are so frail.

Samuraisword · April 2007

Originally posted by Stoneysilenc

What I loved was the opening days of the server where everybody worked together to rebuild tunnels, cities and other things. I remember being a mule running fully loaded from a harvesting field carrying product to a crafter in the wilds who applied the material to project. Never had a better experience in a MMO and I have been playing them since 1999.

Yeah this was a unique and fun concept and part of why Horizons is still considered one of the best crafting systems around. However, once all the structures were rebuilt, newer players didn't get to experience that aspect of the game.

boeskyle · April 2007

Originally posted by lilreap2k3

With all the performance problems fixed. By a company who cares about the game. With more content added frequently. Would you play it?

Yes, but after many fixes:

Class fixes - confectioner and monk, rebalancing
Race fixes - racial quests so the races are different
Craft fix - XP from primary skills (like lair crafting) and not secondary (which allowed easy cross-class craft grinding)
Game mechanics reinforce lore - especially for Lunus dragons and the hatchling-adult rite of passage
A dynamic withered aegis enemy

Then, and only then, can talk about adding content - such as racial housing and lifting the cap to level 120.

I just don't see that happening. Ever. Now if a company imported the art assets and converted it into a better engine . . . .

Hadesprime · April 2007

scrap the game and remake it and re release it

there isn't enough money and time in the world to fix the train wreck that is the current game Horizons.

No one is even going to touch it. I wouldn't even waste the money on it if I had won the lottery or something. You would spend as much money on just fixing it that you would making a new MMO from the ground up.

I'd also call it something else. The horizons name will simply make no money and no return on an investment.

kruch · April 2007

I would return for sure. the craftign, and house building, and classes was great.

Eisdrache · April 2007

I'd shurely return.

But Hadesprime is right: The name is ruined. Better take the idea and create "Horizons2" or whatever it might be called.

I lost my ancient dragon with the fade of unity. But i would prefer to see a brand new game than a bunch of fixes.

I cant stand this bleeding to death of Istaria. Call the Lunus and the Helian for the last great battle and BURN IT DOWN!

Like Kurgan (Highlander, first part) said:

"It is better to burn out, than to fade away!"

Kez95 · April 2007

Originally posted by lilreap2k3

With all the performance problems fixed. By a company who cares about the game. With more content added frequently. Would you play it?
I know I would. I enjoyed being able to build houses, and it taking tons of mats to build one. Being able to be anything you wanted was also nice. I don't remember having any performance problems when I first played Horizons. (About 2-3 months after release.) Dunno what happened, but it's really awful now.
The game could have been really great, too bad it bombed. =(

Have you tried tale in the desert? You can craft until your eyes bleed and build all sorts of things too. It's not my cup of tea, but 100 times better than anything Horizons ever had. I tried Horizons near release and again a full year later, and there was no difference - still extremely, extremely laggy and buggy, and still no thought gone into item decay or the monotony of collecting resources.

Tenebrion · April 2007

I don't know so much that I'd like to see the current Horizons salvaged, but rather that I'd like to see the original Horizons (as invisioned by Utilayael's team, back in pre-alpha) get released. I followed Horizons for several years prior to release, and due to the drastic changes that ultimately lead to the failure of the game, I still have not allowed myself to install and play Horizons.

TherosIron · April 2007

The only ones resposible for HZ's failing is Ei Interactive/ Pixal Magic owned and operated by Edward C Andercheck & Raymond C Rask
the game was sailing along faily well till those bozos bought it and wrecked it with stupid non secure billing page/overbilling , non refunded overbilling and the kiddy like crack down on the official forum.
at least under tulga it was being worked on unlike now a stagnant shell of its former self
dwindling population and NO future development !
as for the dave allen fans out there .. where is a game he is working on / released apart from crusade/alganon ??

Ezekeil · April 2007

I LOVED Horizons .

I love the crafting system and the graphics.

I liked that crafting is actually usefull(making buildings, repairing broken down ones.)

And required for unlocking races.

I would resubscribe at ANY mention of new content in Horizons

Kenze · April 2007

Originally posted by TherosIron

The only ones resposible for HZ's failing is Ei Interactive/ Pixal Magic owned and operated by Edward C Andercheck & Raymond C Rask

the game was sailing along faily well till those bozos bought it and wrecked it with stupid non secure billing page/overbilling , non refunded overbilling and the kiddy like crack down on the official forum.

at least under tulga it was being worked on unlike now a stagnant shell of its former self

dwindling population and NO future development !

as for the dave allen fans out there .. where is a game he is working on / released apart from crusade/alganon ??

Id lay some blame on Tulga and David Bowmen too. He had to have known or suspected that these guys(EI/PM) couldnt cut it. I guess he milked the game and its community for all he could and passed it off to the first jerks that would take it.

Menkure · May 2007

Originally posted by Kenze

Id lay some blame on Tulga and David Bowmen too. He had to have known or suspected that these guys(EI/PM) couldnt cut it. I guess he milked the game and its community for all he could and passed it off to the first jerks that would take it.

Bowman is not to blame for the sale. He had NO CONTROL over the sale, or its conditions.

The sale was organized by Mr Edward C. Andercheck, of EI Interactive, and Chris T Baker, who was the principal financier and owner of Tulga Games LLC, and Horizons. It was Baker that put up the financial backing for Tulga and purchased Horizons from Artifact Entertainment, after AE went bankrupt.

Mr. Bowman was an employee of Tulga, and when Baker told him the game was being sold, Mr. Bowman tried to buy the game from Baker. The offer (Which involved the temporary layoff of several employees, as well as Mr Bowman putting his house up for collateral to get the rest of the necessary funds) was refused by Baker and the game was sold to EI Interactive.

Mr Bowman was ordered to layoff all but a few employees after the sale was finalized in writing. Those few left (Including him) were only held onto for a couple of weeks as part of a 'transitioning' period, in order to show employees of EI how to run the game. After that everyone was laid off. Mr Bowman's last action as CEO of Tulga was firing himself. Since then, Tulga exists but only as a shell company... it's only purpose is to exist so that EI can make the agreed payments in accordance to the sale......

.......payments which EI has (To the best of my information) so far defaulted on...

-Menkure

((edit: spelling))

Liddokun · May 2007

I wouldn't rerelease Horizons because the game engine is old (a modified Intrinsic Alchemy engine) and the art assets are not on par with modern mmos. I would instead probably use the Unreal 3.0 engine and modify it to fit Horizons systems, carry over the best systems from the original Horizons including the land plot system, crafting system and some of the basic systems. Well that is assuming I have about 75 million dollars to develop Horizons 2 into a modern mmorpg standard. First thing I would do is rehire the original visionary David Allen and most of the original developers of Horizons if they are available.

Oh the reason they used the Intrinsic Alchemy engine was that the engine has a feature that allows real time streaming of content to the game client ..example if a game developer plops a building in front of the player while the game is running, the building will suddenly appear in front of the player without needing a server reboot or game client patching. That's one of the great feature of the Intrinsic Alchemy game engine where game additions to the game world are streamed to the game client live.

Menkure · May 2007

Originally posted by liddokun
I wouldn't rerelease Horizons because the game engine is old (a modified Intrinsic Alchemy engine) and the art assets are not on par with modern mmos. I would instead probably use the Unreal 3.0 engine and modify it to fit Horizons systems, carry over the best systems from the original Horizons including the land plot system, crafting system and some of the basic systems. Well that is assuming I have about 75 million dollars to develop Horizons 2 into a modern mmorpg standard. First thing I would do is rehire the original visionary David Allen and most of the original developers of Horizons if they are available.

Oh the reason they used the Intrinsic Alchemy engine was that the engine has a feature that allows real time streaming of content to the game client ..example if a game developer plops a building in front of the player while the game is running, the building will suddenly appear in front of the player without needing a server reboot or game client patching. That's one of the great feature of the Intrinsic Alchemy game engine where game additions to the game world are streamed to the game client live.

The problem with David Allen was that, while he was a visionary.. he didn't have the ability to make his visions become a reality.

There is also the fact that many of his visions were simply not feasible (or were not at the time).

I know, this is nostalgia in the finest.. same as with people saying that families were soo much better before the 1960s / 1970s happened, along with the whole generation gap.. People who say that are quick to point at the lower divorce rates, and lower unemployment.. and yet they have total disregard that those times had their own problems (If you think spouse and parental abuse didn't happen before the 1960s, you're dead wrong.. back then though, people didn't talk about it)

The other part of your first paragraph was the "original developers".. those developers didn't have the drive either to make any of that a reality. Several million dollars had been spent and the only thing the original development team (The first team.. before Bowman even came into the picture) had was several pieces of concept art and a lot of expensive office furniture. The early development of Horizons can be compared to the early development of Diakatana by ION Storm.

I'm not saying Bowman was a savior here for the game.. Bowman had his own issues to contend with, and many of those who were kept on the team and carried over to the new one suffered from the same issues that Allen did. Sure, they had some great talent and could do some amazing art, but when they couldn't produce the work on time, they were useless. It's one thing to have talent, but you have to deliver (this coming from someone who used to work as an artist in the gaming industry)

The release of Horizons was a mistake, but it was forced. Here is where I would have done differently from Bowman. Bowman was told by the investors "No more money, and you will release on christmas this year". Bowman promised them it would be ready, and rushed into open beta. The beta testers told him it wasn't even worthy of Alpha stage, and it needed at least another year of polishing before release, but the investors would not listen.

The investors held the key.. without money, production halts. Every thing stops. On one hand I can't fault Bowman for giving in to the investors.. after all, if he didn't, he would have been fired and they would have shipped it out anyway.

Call me bullheaded, but I personally would have told the investors to shove it.. that it wasn't ready and that was that.. I would have then started looking for future investors to either support a year of development and polishing. Had they ousted me and fired me and shipped anyway.. well, we know what would have happened (cause it did). I would be confident in knowing I did the right thing, and at least if it failed my name wouldn't be on it.

Bowman held through though, and he did see it through to the end. He didn't quit, and before the sale the game started to improve big time..

In a lot of ways, I'm glad that Baker didn't accept Bowman's offer (where he offered to 'temporarily' layoff some of the key employees to cut operating costs, as well as put his house and other assets up as collateral). Had he done that, I figure the game would still have been sold later, and Bowman would have lost everything (and while some may be joyful at that thought.. David does have a wife and two kids, and they would have suffered just the same) I wonder if maybe Bowman is even glad now that his offer wasn't accepted either.. who know?

Here's some posts by Smeglor, an EX-Tulga employee (Programmer, Designer) who had been with the game since right after David Allen was let go, which give some insight as to the problems in the early days:

((In answer to the SOAP Vulnerability made public, in a discussion thread on another forum))

Someone posted: This looks like someone's first WS effort based on MS tutorial examples on how to write a WS.
Smeglor:

I can attest that this is very likely true. The web/launcher programmer was hired despite the manager being told not to, that he was a novice and was inadequate for the job. I personally saw one case of his copy-paste code (he didn't even rename the variables for their new purpose). His continued employment was a major sticking point for many of the devs (for more reasons than just his poor skills).

*Supposedly* he was to be replaced as soon as the changes were finished as dictated by PBT, which was almost done. Instead he was let go with the rest of us after the sale.

Note that if this is the case, this security hole would have arose around the time of the standalone launcher being created. The previous web coder was much more experienced and I don't think would have made this mistake.

((Another post from that same thread))
Pharcellus Wrote:

my point is that I think the issue was more a lack of focus, experience, management, incentive, and GOOD TOOLS which allowed for rapid content development and deployment. Some of the depictions given to me by Amon and others of the process for building even the simplest of quests sounded severely painful and slow. I have no doubt that lack of good tools (and s good content development platform) severely hampered AE/TG's ability to turn out new content in a timely manner to help alleviate the grind.

Smeglor:

Completely agree. But remember I'm speaking from the employee's point of view - hiring people wasn't in our control. You'll see a frequent complaint of mine is that incompetent/disinterested people were not replaced in a timely manner (or at all).

At the very core, AE/Tulga's biggest problem was bad hiring practices, starting from the very beginning.

I don't mean to say by any stretch that Horizons couldn't have been better with the small team it had. Just that it'll always have some amount of "grind", and that that amount is always going to be more than MMO's with much larger teams/budgets.

And finally, this is a rather interesting read, regarding David Allen's "Vision":

Smeglor:

Responses to various things in no particular order:

By no means was there ever an intention of just "getting by for a couple more years". We wanted to fix the game. We wanted to make it good enough to support itself. And, to be completely truthful, at that point we were going to make a new game that didn't have all the baggage, and hopefully do it right with all the lessons learned (a smaller team would continue to maintain/add to Horizons). That wasn't an official company plan, just the hope of a bunch of us devs.

Never did we want to screw the "oldbies". We just couldn't hamper ourselves from making changes that were to keep new players longer. As for the world redesign - I actually agree with you. I don't think it really helped much. I think what happened is the world was made to be the scapegoat for some of the problems we were having.

If I had my drothers, and I pushed for this more than once, what needed fixing was the schools. Yes, the world needed fixes too, in the vein of tutorials (which we did, yay), and quests that properly lead you to appropriate content (which were underway) so you weren't ever scratching your head as to where to go and what to do next. To me, other than technical problems, the game's main problem was the lack of character interdependency, and thus the benefits of cooperation.

Both crafters and adventurers didn't benefit enough from assistance from others of differing types. This was very obvious in the adventure schools. They were not designed from any perspective of having a role or purpose within a group. I'll spare you some of the stories, but many of them came about simply as a response to someone inventing a title (e.g. "Knight of Creation"), then having a school built around that. Second, and much, much more importantly ,was the omission of mana. Again I'll spare you the long, torrid story of why it wasn't included, why those of us SCREAMING that it was necessary during beta were squelched (even after Tango and I ninjaneered it into the game - mana is fully functional if your school as a "Mana Usage" ability, as seen with the new Monk that was being worked in a couple years ago), etc. But if there was simply mana, most of the multischooling "brokenness" would have been much reduced. The way I usually put it is thus: the problem with timer-based abilities/spells is that more of them gives more total power. Easy case in point is the bomb spells. Having flame bomb plus energy bomb plus ice bomb is much more powerful than just one of them because each has its own timer. Now one fix is to put them all on shared timers (which Amon and I were very close to doing), but you can't put everything on shared timers plus that gets very arbitrary. If instead everything drew on mana, additional schools would give you additional flexibility, but not power output.

As for crafting, my opinion on that was mostly that the "create items instantly" idea was a mistake. Items have so little inherent value when you can pump them out at a ridiculous rate. Amon and I were going to have as part of the "Loot revamp" (which was becoming a full "Item revamp") that it takes time to make items. The result would be that making a suit of armor would actually take you an appreciable amount of time, thus the resulting suit would have value.

Crafters would have also benefitted from more interdependency. Making a sword should require leatherworking for the hilt, etc. If everything was made of components (the original design, cut due to time), there'd be a market for those components, and you'd see more trade among crafters.

Anyway, I'm just babbling now, not really responding.

Here's the short of it. The game was broken, in lots of ways. We desperately wanted to fix it. There was no consensus on how to do that, and as multiple design teams came and went, each made their own clumsy stab at it. None really succeeded. It felt like we were finally doing some right things at the end as evidenced by attraction and retention numbers, then we had the game taken from us.

Oh, and the "vision". I laugh every time I see that. There was no "vision". During development, there was this murky concept that the game was supposed to be "casual friendly". Nobody really defined what that meant. We had a running joke that the game was meant for "Bob at WalMart". Yet the game wasn't really made for casuals at all. It's complex and very much expects you to take initiative on learning and discovering things. After launch (and the poor results thereof), the "vision" was simply to make the game work. Most of the first year was devoted to fixing bugs, finishing some expected features, and the like. The server merge was hastily planned and executed, as necessitated by finances. After that was more damage control and finishing promises.

Oh, and I'll let you in on the best part. There was and is no Design Document. During the blackout, the existing (ridiculous, unachievable) Design Document was (rightfully) tossed out. None was made in its place. When we demanded (literally got together the programmers and designers and wrote something together explaining how doomed we were without a document), we were told we didn't know what we were talking about, that DD's end up getting rewritten anyway, etc. I still don't understand why management was so insistent upon this. It is one of the main reasons the game is disjointed, incomplete (nothing was prioritized), and uneven.

I said it before, I'll say it again. Horizons is the sum of many individuals' work. Very little of it was the result of a group of people getting together and agreeing that ideas or methodolgies were a good idea. Very little of it was the result of carefully analyzing feedback and responding to it (responses to feedback were kneejerk, if anything).

Toward the end I started taking it upon myself to try to coordinate development better by getting the designers together, discussing a problem and possible solutions, then agreeing upon one. I'm not patting myself on the back or anything - anyone could have done it - but you can really see the difference in the tutorial and some of the upcoming stuff (confectioner).

On the question of working with Bowman again. Qualified yes.

A) All development money secured up-front, including a buffer for ramp-up after launch. Too much of management's time was devoted to trying to get more money. This was before and after launch.

Before production, a comprehensive design document must be made. Of course any of it can be changed as necessary, but having a blueprint that everyone works from is essential.

C) Someone must be in charge of the game overall that has no other responsibilities. This person would make sure everyone is working toward the proper, common goals and that everything fits together.

That's only scratching the surface of what Smeglor has to offer regarding the inner workings of Artifact Entertainment/Tulga, before the sale.

-Menkure

Menkure · May 2007

Here are two wonderful posts by Smeglor as to what the dev team was like right around launch, as well as why the sale was so disheartening to those who stayed with the company till the end:

Smeglor:
Rather than a point by point reply, Phillip, I'll just respond in general.

Yes, the people making design decisions pre-launch and during beta didn't react to the mistakes and problems. Why? On one hand, the game wasn't even done - we were working 80-100 hours a week during Beta (this actually started in Feb, 2003) just to try to "finish" the game. That's really not a very good excuse, though, because my opinion was to do fewer things, but do them well. I was ignored (I wasn't very influential at that time). The real reason - the people involved were not qualified to do the tasks they were given. This is reflected in the fact that the lead adventure designer and client programmer (among others) were fired a month after launch. Myself and others were lobbying to get them fired (or at least demoted) and replaced long before that. We were ignored/refused, citing that we couldn't afford to replace them at that stage.

For after launch, on the whole, I'm going to agree with you. Most actions and changes were made from a narrow perspective of how things "should" be according to an individual, not how they would impact existing players, and not as agreed upon by any sort of team. Plus the members of the design team kept changing, and with each team came a new set of ideas about what was wrong and most needed to be changed. And without insult toward Amon or any of the others personally (this was management's mistake, not theirs) - every replacement designer after launch had no previous design experience. They were all promoted from customer service, or had been hired as junior designers (data entry). They were all learning on the job, and some of them just weren't well suited to the work.

Whoever said HZ was made by amatuers was quite accurate. Very few of the developers, espeically those involved after the post-launch layoff, had prior game development experience. Hence all the mistakes, lack of consistancy, etc. You could also say this was magnified by a hands-off management style for anything other than broad tasks, leaving each individual pretty much on their own initiative to do the right thing. This can work and help foster creativity when the employees are experienced, mature, and professional. Too often that wasn't the case.

Part of the sorrow on Amon and Ophelea's part, I think, is the fact that at the end, the team remaining was now finally seasoned. We had learned many mistakes. We had started to put serious effort into taking our time in making decisions that made sense in both the short and long term (e.g. the tutorial), and were almost able to concentrate on those efforts as we finished fulfilling feature promises (such as Lairs, AROP, and Confectioner). There was still a long way to go and a lot of work to do with few resources to do it. We probably would have made a lot more mistakes. But maybe, just maybe, we could make something sustainable and enjoyable to enough people to be self-sufficient and start making a game from scratch applying all the hard-earned lessons. Now we'll never know.

Smeglor:
I again question the "duping" or "conning" that went on. The game was what it was, bad client, bad monster spawning, and all. It was your choice to pay for it or not. *shrug*

A new client based on OGRE was indeed being worked on, full-time, by two employees, for almost a year at the time of the sale. They had terrain, collision, and lighting working. It wasn't farther along because they were taking the time to build the foundation properly so that it wouldn't be the house of cards that the old client was.

You have to understand where Amon is coming from. Things were just starting to look up, both in terms of the game and subscriptions, with two new, motivated designers, and with great things coming (we absolutely had every intention of making the expansion) when the rug was pulled out from under our feet (by Baker, not Bowman). For me, it turned out to be something of a relief, since my wife has been wanting to move to Seattle for years now and I no longer had to feel like I was abandoning HZ (both for the other devs as well as the fans), so it's easier for me not to be bitter.

-Menkure

Menkure · May 2007

Originally posted by liddokun:
Oh the reason they used the Intrinsic Alchemy engine was that the engine has a feature that allows real time streaming of content to the game client ..example if a game developer plops a building in front of the player while the game is running, the building will suddenly appear in front of the player without needing a server reboot or game client patching. That's one of the great feature of the Intrinsic Alchemy game engine where game additions to the game world are streamed to the game client live.

As per the Alchemy Engine, here is what Smeglor had to say.. you might find this interesting liddokun.

Smeglor:
Alchemy wasn't really the problem. It wasn't ideal, it did cause some grief, but it's not the problem. Everything that was coded on top of it is the problem. In effect, the whole client was hacked together in order to hit all the "bullet points" of what it needed to do ASAP. It wasn't well pre-planned, it wasn't very modular (hence trying to fix something breaks 10 other things), and it wasn't coded efficiently at all (we've found all sorts of ridiculous things being done every frame). This was due to the inexperience and personality of the lead coder. By the time it was clear this was happening, it was too late to replace him and still meet Atari's demanded release date.
Evolution is written in C++. Mike Roberts (I forget if he had a handle - I don't think he ever came on the boards, he effectively had nothing to do with the game itself) was definitely its main architect. Jeremy "Fedyakin" Altavilla also played a major part in its development. Also, to clarify, Evolution isn't something you can make a world out of. It's a system of distributed virutal machines with the ability to communicate via a network API with client machines as well as a SQL database (or more than one if you want). You have to write a simulation in the script language (a derivitive of LUA) to run a world, then make your own tools to interface with that world. Horizons' tools were functional, but clunky. They grew with the product organically, and so weren't laid out with a good process flow mentality. So it took a while for new designers to learn the tools and make use of them effectively, and even when you were fully up to speed, they hindered your progress almost as much as assisted it.
The quest editor was pretty much done and functional. It was being used internally by the two new designers. It probably had some bugs/quirks to work out and/or some missing features.
I think that covers all the new questions.

-Menkure

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