Vanguard fear?  Vanguard would've been a good game had it not been for SOE's ownership/control during the final days and of course the fact that Sigil's CEO was a hard faced idiot who I'm not exactly sure if he cared about making a quality game or making money...

Funcom is far away from that thankfully... however, I must say I've not seen Funcom do anything yet thats "astounding" by any means, and of course... they do have the gloom of the horrible launch of AO floating overhead.  Lord knows that would prolly be enough to scare anyone.  However... the fact that AO did have a horrible launch and that they are pushing this back and acting just like every other developer does in these situations... "We're pushing it back to make it better for you" when they push it back for unneeded reasons or for reasons that should've been caught and fixed earlier on in development really makes me hesitant to believe that they can pull this off.

While I agree with what many others are posting in consideration of the fact that a game is much better and more fun if the release goes over smoothly and has less bugs at the beginning.  I cannot however say that I am at all surprised as the competence, or lack there of, which the Funcom team possesses is gleaming once again. 

While they are going back now to fix something, that is a good thing.  However, what they are fixing are some of the most critical elements of the game.  In other words, they're scraping the game and starting over but they want to keep some of the systems that are small, basic, and that actually worked.  What this shows is a pure essence of lack of consideration in design and very poor testing from the internal side.  A problem with an overly complex and hard to understand combat system should've been something that they could've found out during closed ALPHA game testing.  Instead, a couple months for release and months into the beta and after a major show about how mature the game was at E3 and they decided "you know... our combat system sucks"...  So they start from the ground up and reinvent it.  Somebody in QA should've lost their job. 

As the topic about MMO's being a "Waiting Game" states... if they continue to push back dates over mistakes that are about critical elements of the game and fields and fields of bugs, they're going to turn off the community they have... 

Also, a note about the fact that the servers can't stay running for extend periods of time... well looks like they need a new lead server programmer then... 

My only problem with the graphics are they all seem to make it look like a bunch of short, fat, stubby characters and misc objects (those canons look horrible)... But the architecture I will admit is VERY nice.

How could you mention instances and NOT mention WoW?  Half of WoW is instances... if you want to succeed,. especially in end-game play... you have to run instances. :P

Which I'm afraid they are <_<

We're not saying the fact that it has boobs makes the game immature...its the fact that they need to prove the maturity of the game by proclaiming... "we've got boobies" and then furthermore try to show how "mature" and "sexual" the game is going to be by posting pictures of demons feeling themselves up on the website and call it a content update....  The game may be mature, alright sure, not arguing, the marketing strat isn't....

Reading your little hint there in between the lines made me chuckle thinking of acting like the Funcom guy did during some certain things...

I do agree that the lore behind the game is sexual in nature and has a lot of gore and such, however, as many have replied...  The game is not being marketed like it's a mature game.  Anytime you can quote a developer making an exclamatory selling point on the words "We've got boobies!"... thats not mature...

For such a "mature" game, that quote sounds like a sure way to get preteens interested....c'mon... who shows off about boobs to promote a game, thats just getting desperate.  This isn't BMX XXX

Didn't FFXI close or reset a few servers because inflation got so high?

For the most part, I  highly agree with this article.

It is in fact a shame that when it comes to the gaming industry that so few companies and developers pay attention to one of the most critical aspects to making a good video game, the ability to play the game.  While it is very important to have something new and innovative that will make people get the interest to try your game OVER others (notice: not steal other players), its also important to make sure that beyond the fact that its there and produce the fact that it works and works well...

Programming and development is and has came a long way, and I think a stable MMO is something you will see before you think you will.  As a developer currently trying to work my way into the industry and currently starting talks and such with some pretty big developers, I will not lie to you and put on that happy face that says "don't worry, everything is going to be ok." (Like Blizzard does whenever something goes wrong.... if they feel like it, half the time they don't even acknowledge problems for a few days... took them 1 year to fix a relatively simple bug) but I do aim and believe that the stability of the product is just as if not more important than the features it provides. 

I am a long time player of WoW and I will say, though I am addicted, I am very disappointed and disgruntal with Blizzard on their upkeep of WoW past its original release.  So the game grew really fast, thats no reason why 14 months have gone by and servers still crash like its week number 3 and if more than 45 players get in an area a relatively low graphic and static game world lag to pieces, and even more so when they do things like implement "Public Test Servers" where they load down and test new features that when it hits the live servers it all of the sudden goes boom (Patch 1.9 anyone?)

Originally posted by Grofit

 

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Originally posted by Sariah
You also forgot to post how important the "Designer" otherwise known as a "Writer" is... he writes your design document in detail explain how the system works at the same time developing the story for your game so its not a POS Free 2 Play asian grinder....

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I agree to a certain extent, although most MMOs dont really follow a story in-game, i mean look at WoW and most other MMOs. You know its set in azeroth, and there is some history there, but in game there is very little storyline or anything. Dont get me wrong there are plenty of books to read and NPCs who will tell you about legends and some creatures in the world but its not like there is a real storyline there, well except for horde and alliance are not friends :D

Although Guildwars did impress me on this front, as its got a decent underlying storyline which makes it worthwhile to do the missions apart from the leveling perspective of it.

I think its *Nice* and can make your game unique having a decent back story and some underlying theme as to why you are doing something in the world, although it just helps a game, it doesnt MAKE it in my opinion...

Please tell me you did NOT say that... I'm not even going to take time to finish reading the rest of the post before I point out that there is a LOT of story going on there..you don't see it because you don't know it...  Everything you are participating in is part of the epic warcraft universe storyline.  Though there are a lot of little mini-stories in MMOs, the overall presence and support of the story is what makes MMOs... Without the story, what do you have? Nothing...you have an idiot running around in a world that has no past, and you have nothing to do but kill things...

Depends on who you're talking to as a publisher and what you're going for as there are a good few out there, even a few major ones which understand the vicious cycle of....  "to get an impressive tech demo you need good programmers, to get good programmers you have to have money, to get money you need an impressive tech demo." 

What it comes down to more is if you can get the financial source confident that you can actually do the job in other ways, show that you've taken the time to document it, put together a good presentation, and have done the research on the market... and as always, show that you know how much its going to cost, while many game funding sources, primarily publishers already know what it SHOULD cost, they want to know how much you say its going to cost and why and see if you're even in the area of their own estimates, because if you're not close, the funding source/publisher isn't going to sit down and count the pennies.  You also need to prove you know what kind of manpower and how long its going to take to get it done.

You don't even need a solid tech demo actually... Sure it helps but its not a prerequisite, if you have a solid proposal that shows that you know what you're doing and have shown that you've done your research into what it'll take to get th job done at a reasonable cost to a publisher, then you're generally good to go.  Now, after that they may say, alright, we'll do it but take some money here and get a good tech demo done and we'll see about going full fledged, but :P

Originally posted by Sturmrabe

Originally posted by TrentH
Anyone else? :)

So you want it spoonfed to you?

 

Go to http://bymitra.com/ and do a search on the dev posts for anything you want... or click on Athelan's account and check his post history

Originally posted by Tyro
And remember: There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people.