All Posts by UnSub

Originally posted by girlgeek

 Therefore, MY chat window is full of fun chat from my guild, the zone I'm in, the city I'm in, trade channel, and the people standing next to me. 

Playing WAR, MY chat window is full of gold spam. Guild chat comes in a distant second :-)

Originally posted by Burntvet

And how do you know that some members of the community haven't done more than "read some blogs and questions of the week on the game" ? The devs, to their credit, have taken a lot of input from members on the official site, some folks posting as long as a year and a half ago, and who knows what some folks have done for Icarus? 

Most probably are not allowed to say.....

Actually, we won't know what input has been taken in at all until FE launches or has an open beta.

Originally posted by franke

ijust got a new pc thinking i can play  bf:bad company to find out its not comeing to pc yet now i find out star trek online isnt!! is this true or am i f**ked?

Last I heard, STO is coming out on the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the PC. I wouldn't be surprised if Cryptic drops the PS3 development, but it will come out on PC.

Originally posted by Urrelles

It's like Square Enix making an RPG that is not Final Fantasy. 

Vagrant Story?

To answer the more general question: why is Cryptic making this?

Because Cryptic will own it lock, stock and barrel (physical distribution being done by 2K aside). They are self-publishing and managing everything themselves. ChampO is another shot at the superhero MMO, sure, but it is also a shot at the underserved Xbox 360 MMO market and one that is leveraging off Cryptic's previous MMO strengths.

Don't know if it will be successful or be what people want to play, but the key reason Cryptic is doing this is that it gives them full control over their MMO, which is something they didn't have with CoH/V.

Originally posted by sactoking

Cryptic keeps jumping into superhero games b/c Jack 'Statesman' Emmert pushes them into it.  He's the head honcho at Cryptic and was the lead designer of CoH when it released.  At the game went public, he started pushing it in directions the players didn't like.  It became him saying 'This is what we're going to do because it's MY game' and the players responding with 'We pay for it, it's OUR game.  If you do that, we'll all leave.'

It boiled over to the point that Jack left and put Matt 'Positron' Miller in charge.  Noone was sure exactly what was going on, until not long after Cryptic and Marvel settled their lawsuit(s), NC Soft announced that it had bought out Cryptic from CoX.  Jack Emmert was the only Cryptic designer NOT retained by NC Soft.  Surprise, surprise, Cryptic (which was basically only Emmert) teamed with Marvel to make Marvel Online.  That fell apart and Jack brought Champions in as the licensor.

Basically, he's a comic book guy who keeps jumping ship trying to find a way to make 'HIS' game, regardless of the fact that noone wants to play HIS game.  He created CoH, and the players liked it better without him.  He tried to latch onto the very project that tried to put his game under.  When that fell apart he brought on Champions and touted them as his bestest, most originalest choice in the whole wide world.

Let's add some facts to this, shall we?

Jack Emmert was one of the original founding members of Cryptic Studios and is the Chief Creative Director. He took over as Lead Developer from Rick Dakan (who was relegated to contract employee status) and helped CoH to launch. He's not the head honcho - Michael Lewis is CEO / President (and an ex-SOE guy is now CEO, I think). Emmert has been working on CoH since day 1 (pretty much up until Cryptic sold it).

Emmert took CoH in some directions that weren't popular (and some that were, but people forget that) and it while he was 'in control' that CoH had its highest player numbers. The problem with saying that players didn't want certain things is is that no MMO has all players agreeing on anything. While the Global Defence Nerf and Enhancement Diversificaiton weren't met well by some players, plenty more kept playing the game and saw the necessity in the changes so that all character archetypes / powerset combos were useful.

NCsoft didn't take Emmert off the game - when CoV was launched and didn't make its targets (it only brought in 60k new players) NCsoft cut CoH/V's operating budget. The CoH/V team was reduced to 15 people, with Matt Miller taking over the lead dev role as Emmert sought out other opportunities. One of these was Marvel Universe Online, which Microsoft Games approached them to develop.

Cryptic was a studio of at least 90 people (probably more) of which 60 were working on CoH/V and the others working on at least one other MMO that has never been formally announced. When the CoH/V title got its cutbacks, the extra people went into working on the Cryptic Toolset (that they use to make their MMO titles) and then, when MUO was picked up, more people were hired - if memory serves, Cryptic ended up with over 120 people working for them.

MUO falls over, probably due to interference from Marvel, and one month later a deal is made with Hero Games to buy the Champions IP. Given that Cryptic had spent a lot of time getting MUO developed, it makes sense to put that work into another superhero IP and use what they can of that work.

Also, when NCsoft bought CoH/V, all of the CoH/V devs plus one extra Cryptic programmer came across. Since then they've had a few more additions to the CoH/V team, but it hardly left Cryptic as being 'just Jack'. Also, you've conveniently left off Star Trek Online as another title Cryptic is working on with another, separate dev team.

The problem in saying that no-one wants to play Jack's game is that CoH WAS Jack's game. He admits he made mistakes, but a lot of players liked the game, even after it was rebalanced so that non-Tankers and non-AoE damage masters were wanted on teams. If no-one wanted to play Jack's game, CoH would have died at launch.

Cripes, I could go on, but I've written enough already. I try to keep a balanced view of what Emmert did and didn't do to CoH/V, but I think it is important to keep some facts in mind rather than unsubstantiated opinion that gets constantly repeated.

Releasing STO in Fall 2009 would only be just behind Cryptic launching ChampO (Q2 2009). I don't think they'd want to launch both titles back-to-back.

I think the optimum solution is for STO to launch without player crews so that Cryptic can see how people actually play the game.

A later expansion can allow for optional player crews based on how people actually behave in-game. But yes, the critical issue is "how to make the mini-games fun and necessary". Having played Puzzle Pirates I think that system works, but I don't think would fit very well in the ST universe. Would players be happy if the captain made every decision and they were left just tweaking the engines for speed?

I wrote something up on this issue previously. The rumour I believe is that Marvel cancelled the project (or agitated until the project was cancelled) so that they could get back the rights to develop their own MMO at some point in the future.

Unless the OP and his wife picked some incredibly gimped powerset combos at launch - Mace Tank, or Illusions / Grav Controller, for instance - CoH/V plays very well as a solo / small team game. Forced grouping isn't something I've seen outside of hazard zones (which, even then you don't have to), against Giant Monsters or Task Forces (which require a minimum number of players to start).

Also, the Fifth Column are back in CoH/V - you can fight them in some time travelling missions.

The latest GenCon videos shows ChampO as having quite a bit of potential interaction with in-game objects. There are some bugs on show, but the idea is there.

Originally posted by Deepgroove

A lot of people in the 190 member group I have in CoV dropped it when issue 12s roman pieces were taskforce only to go back to WoW. They felt cheated.

So they dropped a game where you have to defeat a certain set of opponents in order to get a certain set of armour to go back to a game where you have to defeat a certain set of opponents to get the chance of obtaining a certain piece of armour? Did I get this right?

I get confused when people say, "I hate looting! I'm going back to WOW!".

Nice.

Not sure if those are screenshots or concept art.

If FE LLC is going to self-publish, they will need to do a lot - and mean A LOT - more marketing around this title. Even people who follow MMOs don't really know what it is about or what it offers. Beta will help, but FE could easily get crushed underfoot of another MMO that gets more attention around the same time as they launch if they aren't careful.

If FE is self-published, then they take all the risk and the costs of getting the game on the shelves or via download. They will need to have someone managing the physical distribution of their product. Self-publishing their first MMO would be pretty ambitious for an unproven MMO studio.

It's more likely they will go with an existing publisher. If not SOE, then there is NCsoft or EA that have MMO publishing experience. There are some smaller game publishers that FE could end up with, but those with MMO experience would be very thin on the ground indeed.