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World of Darkness: Mismanagement Contributed to the Game's Demise
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
According to a new investigative piece at TheGuardian.com, CCP's mismanagement of the development of World of Darkness eventually brought about the game's demise. Development on World of Darkness, after years in production, ended this past Spring to the dismay of many in the MMO games community.
Repeatedly, staff were shifted over from the former to work on expansion projects for the latter. At times, our sources say, the entire WoD staff was put onto Eve, particularly during the development of 2009 add-on Apocrypha.
“On many different occasions throughout the years I was there, CCP would often ‘poach’ WoD staff for expansion projects,” recalls Nick Blood, a former developer and game master at CCP.
“There were plenty of developers who would get redirected to create Eve content for three to six month cycles… During these times, World of Darkness development was significantly slowed down. I remember the upper management often exasperatedly trying to figure out what to do with the remaining staff for a six-month period while their artists and programmers were busy elsewhere.”
Read the full World of Darkness article at TheGuardian.com.
Comments
Yeah it sure sounds like it was just a filler project for them to keep extra staff busy when they didn't need them for eve. Can't really expect much from your staff when you treat a project like that.
Pretty disappointed, WOD has a crap ton of awesome lore and if worked right, could have been a great game to be vested into. The old computer game Vampire the Masquerade showed how in depth a character could have been, just imagine what kind of gnarly things they could have come up with today, but also with werewolves, fairies, sorcerers, etc. all working for or against one another to serve their goals.
Eff you CCP!
This has been something I've criticized ccp about for a while now, and a big reason why I left eve.
The constant over reaching and failure to iterate on promised features. CCP has made it a habit to hype new features, only to disband the team working on it and never deliver anything.
The couple of years there was praise for CCP getting back to focusing on flying in space, that translated to just balancing and reskinning elements of the game; with no significant work really being done to actually expand upon the game. It was one excuse after the next as to why some feature they were working on needed to be scrapped and the team behind it reassigned to other areas of the game. In the meantime they move developers onto a new project that in the end will only be connected to eve by name.
Dust has been out. For ow long, and it still has not reached the vision they put out when they announced the game. There's still no pve, no impact on planetary interaction and production, no connection to null sec, no control over planetary resources, no nothing outside of a rather pointless planetary bombardment mechanic that has no actual impact on anything happening in eve.
But hey, we'll get a lovely arcade space shooter in Valkyrie that will also have no impact on eve and cost ccp development resources that could have been used to actually evolve eve into the premiere space simulation they said was the future of eve.
What a shame... All the fans you guys have let down and disappointed because you refused to take the project seriously... This reminds me of the gearbox incident with colonial marines and the constant development changes with Duke Nukem. Did you guys not learn anything at all from those or did you simply just not care about WoD?
Really, really disappointing. I respected CCP up until this point. To do something so irresponsible and unethical, I no longer have any respect for them.
CCP's problem is their main community has them by the &*^&*s, every other product they touch suffers for it. I feel for them once there's real competition in the multiplayer space combat/trading realm. One product can only keep you going so long, they've had years of enjoying little competition, all of that is about to change.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I guess in the end, CCP realised that keeping focus on the EVE universe was more important than anything else, which will be good for EVE. Perhaps the recent renewed interest in the space-sim genre and the prospect of increased competition has spurred this refocusing.
CCP is not a "big hitter" in the industry. So far, they've done one thing well (EVE), but one thing only. I'm sure they were very nervous about actually rolling-out WoD, because it was a totally different setting and design to EVE. There was bound to be many challenges in managing that community and their expectations, and it would inevitably have resulted in diluting the focus on the flagship product.
To quote from the Guardian article: "CCP's CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, showed some acknowledgement of the company’s mistakes over the past few years. “I would say we’re re-focusing on simpler strategies and smaller teams,” he said. “I think that helped make us successful: EVE was made like that. And maybe we scaled up our teams and our ambitions too rapidly.”
I think WoD turned out to be "A Bridge Too Far" for CCP.
Incognito
www.incognito-gaming.us
"You're either with us or against us"
I'm seeing this trend more and more around here.
It's not the games fault, it's not the developers fault, it's not managements fault, it's the communities fault when something doesn't succeed.
its communities fault that ccp has made it a habit to refocus the way they develop eve year in and year out? It's the communities fault that ccp scraps planned content that the community wants because they need the resources in other areas? It's the communities fault that dust still isn't even close to anything cup said it would be prior to release, or that they are once again taking developers off eve to work on yet another game that will also have no connection to eve outside of the name?
its the communities fault that the developers who wanted to expand upon eve have all left ccp?
Its not the fault of gamers when developers fail.
That's certainly possible, however CCP could be far ahead of these games ( SC, Elite..) if they had stuck to their guns a few years ago in regard to expanding the scope of EVE. Again their existing community as usual held them back, they are never going to get anywhere with that type of direction. It was okay when they had no real competition, again that will no longer be the case, SC as an example is going for a much broader scope. They'll have to contend with that at some point, the ironic part is that they could have already been a leg up in that regard.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
You misunderstand, the community is not at fault it is management that is at fault for bending to their will.
WHat their CEO fails to realize is EVE got to where it was, because they were willing to take risks to expand it to as deep a game as it became. Today they do not shoot that far with it, everything they have focused on has been small scale iteration the last few years, when their real plan was massive expansion, their community asked for that focus and they served it, that was their choice as developers.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
To recap, they bought a company, started a game that they knew would take five or more years to complete without a plan or even a framework for how the game was supposed to work. It also sounds like this is how they got Eve completed and maybe why it took so long to get it into the state it is in today.
Maybe they didn't realize that since WoD wasn't self funded, or funded by existing cash that just winging it wouldn't work. It doesn't seem likely that they spent 9 years just wasting money on purpose. If they approached the project that way, they had an expectation that it would work. Even that manager who said to make the interface more "Pssssssssh!" had an expectation that saying that would result in some sort of successful result.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Whatever. If they want to survive they should really start thinking and acting otherwise. There was a lot of negativity already on their underdelivery - a friend of mine left the game saying similar things you guys say here. Next one was DUST. Seriously, what was that? I am interested in 'Legion' they advertised recently, but with 'Destiny' and 'WH40K - Eternal Crusade' only so much. DUST - again, as most said here - nothing it was promised. And like begging for it they cancel WoD. Really? No, I mean really? Following of this system is huge. I just found out today that a fella I know is big fan. Had no idea. And it is _vampires_online_. With mature rating. Yet they cut it. Good thinking. No, there is no huge vampire fanbase all over the world. Oh, you want to concentrate on EVE? In other words do thing your loyal fans had been asking for years? Good. Let's see. You have 'Valkyrie' that has nothing to do with your main game and basically is just dogfighting arena game, no connection to EVE universe beside setting. Good, no one thought about that ever. 'VR helmets only' is option for a win, of course. Yay cybersports. Also you have a PC version of DUST in development, that is so much more then DUST in your words. Of course everyone will take you for a word - you have reputation for that and all. And on top of that a bunch of people who just love you truly and wholeheartedly for teasing them with WoD.
I guess good luck competing with SC and ED. Oh, and argument 'our ships are not trigger-happy gunboats' is not plus. People was asking you to make your ships a little bit more arcade too, as well as general mechanics of the game.
EVE will survive, no question. There is always will be place for cutthroat sandbox experience where is good scam appreciated. But only until someone willing to build something with same ruleset - or lack of one - in fantasy setting. People can say whatever they want - fantasy is much more popular than anything else. And that's the only EVE 'thing' left because space card they played for so long is slipping through their fingers.
World of Darkness mmo could have potentially been a first for immersion in the world, re it's masquerade element of the game.
In public places, If enough players accuse another player of being a vampire, then the game population (player & npc) is in open season on that player. If a player makes too many false accusations of who is a vampire in public spaces, then they draw attention to themselves either with authorities in the games or a question mark overhead etc for a period of time.
Whatever, getting outed as a vampire has real skill & social status costs, due to the masquerade element of being a vampire & is a big compnent of actual gameplay itself.
Once you have a a dynamic self governing player system of conduct that's something like this due to vampire masquerade requirements, then you can start having a range of behaviours in various situations that npcs carry out, and which other players can also mix in with their own actions in public players.
Anyhow the point being unless you have gotten to know people or whatnot, it is very hard to distinguish who is a vampire or not and who is a npc or not in nominated public spaces. A vampire game could be really cool socially like that.
The "source" lost all the little credibility it has got once it mentioned "monocle-gate"...
I left Eve when I realised WoD wasn't going to be made and that they would never finish off Walking in Stations. And now their release of a Dust 514 version on PC tells me that their PS3 project is never going to get out of beta.
So here is to Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen and see if they can deliver on the promises that CCP have failed to do.
I also hope another development team manages to get the rights to make WoD mmo from CCP because at the moment they own White Wolf and the rights to all the WoD.
Disgruntled employees tend to put the worst slant possible on any given situation from their previous employer and that's exactly what this reads like. Corporations have problems all the time and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if this happens in the majority of game development companies.
Time to add CCP to my very short list of companies to not play games from, killed WoD (I loved the vampire games), right along with the other company that killed the superhero game I played all the time, thanks NCsoft. neither of these games I felt deserved their (pun not intended) untimely demise.
Oh well plenty of other games to play.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Elite is a single player game with consensual multiplayer contact. So little of SC has been released (actual core game content) that I can't even get a good read as to how the game is going to play.
WiS was never going to be anything as great as people wanted it to be. Dust: Legion will probably do ok because CCPs core following are PC users and if they allow good interaction between the Eve Universe and Legion, it will give that core something else to latch on to.
Their decision to platform-lock Dust 514 on a single platform in the hyper-saturated FPS market was a massive mistake. I think they'll take what they learned in that development and improve upon it for the PC version.
Thanks so much for the article, it was one of the most interesting readings that I had lately.
I can't remenber any other franchise with so much potential and with so much bad luck as World of Darkness...
Honestly all my faith in CCP was gone when they axed WODmmo, it seems they've been cheating Vampire The Masquerade fans for years after all. I foresee they will bankrupt soon because EVE Universe is not what it was in the past and some other studio will notice the potential of WODmmo to licence/buy that IP to make a AAA sandbox mmo due to its unique moderm-days setup and background.
thats a big shame for CCP .. i felt the same as the above comment, i was expecting this MMORPG, its sad they abandoned all this work and this chance to build a modern MMO, TheSecretWorld is a mediocre and lowbudget game, i was hoping CCP to overcome that one, but they gone to the opposite direction ...
What follows here is opinion, but I have yet to see any hard evidence to sway me from it:
"To understand the failings at CCP, one must understand the relationship that has developed between Hilmar and Alexandar Gianturco.
The "Something Awful" crew arrived at EvE Online with their signature, singular focus: To destroy the game.
Somewhere along the journey, Gianturco managed to ingratiate himself so deeply into the CCP offices as to manage the recruitment of several main developers, and I'll say it; The CEO himself.
CCP, now thus infected, does nothing that isn't in the best interest of, and I'd also wager at the direct behest of, Gianturco's in game 'Corporations, Alliances and Coalitions'
This was never made any more clear than when Gianturco committed an offense so grievous as to have no hope for apology, yet instead of being permanently banned as CCP would have done any other individual, he was merely suspended so the fracas would die down.
His 10k plus followers, flooding the forums in traditional SA forum warrior fashion, scared CCP badly enough to cave.
Anyone who has played the game since before the SA crew arrived sees this clearly.
Now, having posted this, watch as the SA forum warrior brigade comes to their usual battle stations, just as they do on the EvE forums any time someone brings up this issue. ( The SA crew now includes moderators and GMs to ensure the silence of dissenters )
Then will come the fanbois who will excuse it as CCP simply following "good business" by catering to a large subscriber bloc.
It isn't "good business" when that subscriber bloc exists for the sole purpose of driving enough players from the subscriber base so that when they, themselves quit en masse, will leave an insurmountable deficit which will kill the organization.
Already, on any given day, I would wager easily that a majority of the 40-50k online are mains and alts of Gianturco's SA wrecking crew.
History repeats itself.
Very sad to see it happening here.
I pity whoever attracts their attention next, once they are done with this play toy." - anon
(edited for spelling errors of mine on the first line; the parts in parens are copy pasta'd and appear as I found them)
I'm with you there. City of Heroes/Villains was awesome and it was my go-to MMORPG. That is until NCsoft shut it down so they could launch Guild Wars II. To this day, I always say that GW2 killed CoH/V because of NCsoft's apparent selfishness. They knew the original Guild Wars was popular so they decided to make a sequel MMO in order to siphon more money out of the franchise. Hell, even the Paragon Studios team fought to keep their game open, but NCsoft's greed won out in the end. I hope the PS team goes indie under another name and grabs the game back, similar to what happened to Hellgate. We former inhabitants of Paragon City, Rhode Island, and The Rogue Isles want our superhero world back!