Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen, Pantheon etc. are attempts to make a game on the developers terms. It's kinda sad to see that progress is painfully slow on these games, updates are far between and at least for Star Citizen, you have Chris Roberts drunk ranting about new features he unfortunately has the power to set in motion (Yes bedsheet physics, im looking at you)
I was so hoping for a revolution in how games were funded, which then led to a revolution on what types of games we were served in the future (bye bye cash shops, always online etc)
A few very good games has been born from Crowd Funding - Grim Dawn, Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity among those - But sadly the "big failures" overshadows the entire concept
I was so hoping for a revolution in how games were funded, which then led to a revolution on what types of games we were served in the future (bye bye cash shops, always online etc)
The revolution is already underway. More and better indie titles are being produced, while AAA series are suffocating under encrusted structures. And this is mainly because modern commercial engines and their developer tools are affordable and usable for everyone. But if you want to develop something outside the technical scope of these engines and tools (and that is the case with MMOPRGs), you cannot resort to a ready-made home, but have to painstakingly put brick upon brick yourself. And that often exceeds the skills and resources of indie developers. For games with a larger scope, the the support of an AA or AAA publisher is still needed, who of course does not want to lose their investment.
By the way, Kickstarter MMORPGs are not pure crowdfunded indie projects, because behind every single one (the big exception being SC, as always) there are one or more larger investors who are not actually video game publishers but nevertheless have similar interests.
(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)
Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.
Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.
Yes, it is easy to deploy new servers like these, Mark Jacobs most likely just lying, as usual. Or maybe his employees are lying to him, to give an appearance that they "work so hard".
The kind of employees that are too lazy to properly scale the background image on the launcher, so default launcher window size cuts off the top portion of the text of background image (unless you manually maximize the launcher window):
And the kind of employees that are too lazy to apply basic textures to lazily placed in-game buildings (yes, the game is set to max settings on this screenshot, there's just no textures at all for these buildings):
I logged in a few times like... 2-3(??) years ago and it looked better than that.
How are they making the game look worse over time?
(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)
Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.
Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.
Yes, it is easy to deploy new servers like these, Mark Jacobs most likely just lying, as usual. Or maybe his employees are lying to him, to give an appearance that they "work so hard".
The kind of employees that are too lazy to properly scale the background image on the launcher, so default launcher window size cuts off the top portion of the text of background image (unless you manually maximize the launcher window):
And the kind of employees that are too lazy to apply basic textures to lazily placed in-game buildings (yes, the game is set to max settings on this screenshot, there's just no textures at all for these buildings):
I logged in a few times like... 2-3(??) years ago and it looked better than that.
How are they making the game look worse over time?
That's insane.
I too recall seeing shots of the game looking way better than that.
Didn't someone make this same observation about Chronicles of Elyria looking progressively worse compared to older footage.
Can anyone tell us how it went or is the the NDA one, I lose track of them all?
The NDA is still in place. That doesn't seem to matter to some people because the game image posted explicitly says not to redistribute or share.
I'm not a backer or under NDA so I can't answer your question. I do feel like if they're going to make marketing announcements and PR blurbs then the studio should follow up with results and let players provide public feedback about the event, otherwise they should keep it under wraps.
or maybe, provide their own in-game footage of the event, that would be rather cool as well, and avoid all the crying doom boi's.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Can anyone tell us how it went or is the the NDA one, I lose track of them all?
The NDA is still in place. That doesn't seem to matter to some people because the game image posted explicitly says not to redistribute or share.
I'm not a backer or under NDA so I can't answer your question. I do feel like if they're going to make marketing announcements and PR blurbs then the studio should follow up with results and let players provide public feedback about the event, otherwise they should keep it under wraps.
or maybe, provide their own in-game footage of the event, that would be rather cool as well, and avoid all the crying doom boi's.
I take your point on the doomsayers, but that means this could end up a totally internal event. Hopefully that's of some use to CU because it is of no use to anyone just interested in the game.
They are 9 years in and all they have to show is concept art. Why would they ever lift it? So people can see how little they actually have done?
Seriously let's say they did lift it tomorrow, would it matter at all? Do you want to spill the beans about how crap this is really badly? As if everyone and their dog doesn't already know.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Can anyone tell us how it went or is the the NDA one, I lose track of them all?
The NDA is still in place. That doesn't seem to matter to some people because the game image posted explicitly says not to redistribute or share.
I'm not a backer or under NDA so I can't answer your question. I do feel like if they're going to make marketing announcements and PR blurbs then the studio should follow up with results and let players provide public feedback about the event, otherwise they should keep it under wraps.
or maybe, provide their own in-game footage of the event, that would be rather cool as well, and avoid all the crying doom boi's.
I would love to show some footage and I can assure you there would be crying.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Can anyone tell us how it went or is the the NDA one, I lose track of them all?
The NDA is still in place. That doesn't seem to matter to some people because the game image posted explicitly says not to redistribute or share.
I'm not a backer or under NDA so I can't answer your question. I do feel like if they're going to make marketing announcements and PR blurbs then the studio should follow up with results and let players provide public feedback about the event, otherwise they should keep it under wraps.
or maybe, provide their own in-game footage of the event, that would be rather cool as well, and avoid all the crying doom boi's.
I would love to show some footage and I can assure you there would be crying.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
I am taking that as not tears of joy? Ah well give it another year or two.
(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)
Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.
Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.
Yes, it is easy to deploy new servers like these, Mark Jacobs most likely just lying, as usual. Or maybe his employees are lying to him, to give an appearance that they "work so hard".
The kind of employees that are too lazy to properly scale the background image on the launcher, so default launcher window size cuts off the top portion of the text of background image (unless you manually maximize the launcher window):
And the kind of employees that are too lazy to apply basic textures to lazily placed in-game buildings (yes, the game is set to max settings on this screenshot, there's just no textures at all for these buildings):
I logged in a few times like... 2-3(??) years ago and it looked better than that.
How are they making the game look worse over time?
That's insane.
I too recall seeing shots of the game looking way better than that.
Didn't someone make this same observation about Chronicles of Elyria looking progressively worse compared to older footage.
Recall after Mark took a new round of investor funding in early 2018 he proceeded to say the release target was by the end of 2019, or early 2020.
He walked back on that date around October 2019 when he began working on the new game, Final Stand, Ragnarok which wouldn't be announced until Feb 2020 to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the original game's backers.
Two years later and they are working now on stuff which would have had to be completed back in 2019 for there to have been any chance of release, unless Mark was flat out lying to his investors.
I think somewhere in 2019 Mark's team realized they had painted themselves into a design corner with the game's engine not being able to support the promised number of players, the core feature on which everything else hinged on.
So to save face with the investors Mark offered to deliver a much smaller scale game using the assets created to date while the team went back to do a significant reworking of CU.
This is a lot like what the Pantheon team did, so they too had to reset everything so suddenly zones previously shown in videos as largely completed were being seen at a graybox level once again.
Pretty sure it's the same thing for CU which is why so many placeholders are visible and definitely why Mark won't be dropping the NDA as it would reveal his latest switcheroo which he's not interested in sharing after the FSR PR fiasco.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Can anyone tell us how it went or is the the NDA one, I lose track of them all?
The NDA is still in place. That doesn't seem to matter to some people because the game image posted explicitly says not to redistribute or share.
I'm not a backer or under NDA so I can't answer your question. I do feel like if they're going to make marketing announcements and PR blurbs then the studio should follow up with results and let players provide public feedback about the event, otherwise they should keep it under wraps.
or maybe, provide their own in-game footage of the event, that would be rather cool as well, and avoid all the crying doom boi's.
I would love to show some footage and I can assure you there would be crying.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
What would you gain from it?
I see some people crying about the NDA and such, but I have got to wonder, what would they personally gain from it being lifted?
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Didn't someone make this same observation about Chronicles of Elyria looking progressively worse compared to older footage.
As far as I remember, Chronicles of Elyra didn't release any "intermediate" results, not even for backers. Overnight, the CoE test environment (or whatever it was called) was released, and its graphics were not nearly as good compared to those in the trailers.
Whereas backers of CU can test the current build nearly every weekend. Nothing is hidden from view.
I think somewhere in 2019 Mark's team realized they had painted themselves into a design corner with the game's engine not being able to support the promised number of players, the core feature on which everything else hinged on.
Camelot Unchained has clearly proven that they can support the targeted player counts and more with their ARC testing. And no, you don't need live players to test the maximum number of players.
And I wouldn't call it a "design corner," but rather a "design shift." The new lead gameplay engineer is in the process of reevaluating old game concepts and separating the unrealistic from the realistic. And it's clear that she's also putting her mark on CU, shaped by her gaming experiences.
So to save face with the investors Mark offered to deliver a much smaller scale game using the assets created to date while the team went back to do a significant reworking of CU.
AFAIK, the investors approached MJ after they had already given him the money for CU and said that Cherry Siege could be developed into a standalone game. So it was the other way around. And: FSR's budget and funding are completely independent of CU.
I logged in a few times like... 2-3(??) years ago and it looked better than that.
How are they making the game look worse over time?
You mean those gray blocks? That's because of a technique called "greyboxing".
Normally doesn't come later in a game's development, unless of course it's development was reset (again) for some reason which appears to be the case here.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Conspiracy theory: maybe the start of a European server to prevent legal trouble from lack of refunds and game development promises for investments in Europe?
Comments
Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen, Pantheon etc. are attempts to make a game on the developers terms. It's kinda sad to see that progress is painfully slow on these games, updates are far between and at least for Star Citizen, you have Chris Roberts drunk ranting about new features he unfortunately has the power to set in motion (Yes bedsheet physics, im looking at you)
I was so hoping for a revolution in how games were funded, which then led to a revolution on what types of games we were served in the future (bye bye cash shops, always online etc)
A few very good games has been born from Crowd Funding - Grim Dawn, Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity among those - But sadly the "big failures" overshadows the entire concept
mmorpg junkie since 1999
I logged in a few times like... 2-3(??) years ago and it looked better than that.
How are they making the game look worse over time?
That's insane.
Didn't someone make this same observation about Chronicles of Elyria looking progressively worse compared to older footage.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
They are 9 years in and all they have to show is concept art. Why would they ever lift it? So people can see how little they actually have done?
Seriously let's say they did lift it tomorrow, would it matter at all? Do you want to spill the beans about how crap this is really badly? As if everyone and their dog doesn't already know.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com//Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
He walked back on that date around October 2019 when he began working on the new game, Final Stand, Ragnarok which wouldn't be announced until Feb 2020 to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the original game's backers.
Two years later and they are working now on stuff which would have had to be completed back in 2019 for there to have been any chance of release, unless Mark was flat out lying to his investors.
I think somewhere in 2019 Mark's team realized they had painted themselves into a design corner with the game's engine not being able to support the promised number of players, the core feature on which everything else hinged on.
So to save face with the investors Mark offered to deliver a much smaller scale game using the assets created to date while the team went back to do a significant reworking of CU.
This is a lot like what the Pantheon team did, so they too had to reset everything so suddenly zones previously shown in videos as largely completed were being seen at a graybox level once again.
Pretty sure it's the same thing for CU which is why so many placeholders are visible and definitely why Mark won't be dropping the NDA as it would reveal his latest switcheroo which he's not interested in sharing after the FSR PR fiasco.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I see some people crying about the NDA and such, but I have got to wonder, what would they personally gain from it being lifted?
It went well-ish (ofc some bugs appeared). Noticeably lower ping, which was helpful during testing.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
~Greatness~
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