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I'm actually glad EQN is unlikely to be released
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I don't know what EQ2 was like at launch as I never played it then. I also don't know if Tigole and whats his face who ran a big guild in EQ1 who eventually started designing WoW with heavy influences of EQ1 and may have copied some of the elements of EQ2.
But I do know that when I tried EQ2 about 3-4 years ago it was an identical clone to WoW with worse combat and horrible questing. Plus it lacked the production quality of WoW so that's why I made my comment! Regardless of the release time of the 2 games it doesn't matter because 1. EQ2 is still a WoW clone and 2. my original comment was the game is trash for me.
EQN was the only MMO I was following and feel that it would of changed the genre for the better which is why I am sad to see so many deep cuts and visionary staff layoffs. Sadly I doubt it gets published in the same vision that people like George and Jeff had for the game.....if it gets published at all.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
1) Ok, so 200k copies sold at $20 each -%30 steam cut = 2.8 million dollars. Is that success?
Note the 100-200 million budget wasn't my number, just pointing out what other people were saying (which I don't believe). We don't know the budget or the size of the team, but I highly suspect the cost is a whole lot more than that 2.8 million in sales. Do you agree?
What it MIGHT do IF it released for consoles or when the word beta is removed is not relevant until it happens. What we do know is that the game is already down half of its concurrent users. Which fits the trend of their previous games.
2) You don't think you are using obscure numbers and guesses in place of information.
Guessing 1 million copies sold for DCU and an average 2 month retention.... based on what? You make guesses at team sizes to figure out budget?
All you need to know about DCU being a failure is that it repeated the same process of every other failed MMO. Release game in poor shape. Player population plummets. Massive server mergers. Games revenue model changes to F2P.
It is the same thing that happened to every SOE game they released this decade. The fact that DCU has the bare minimum amount of servers (2PC/2PS3) and they are always empty says more than any napkin math you can speculate. Sorry if that comes of harsh sounding, it isn't my intent. I'm just being direct.
3) SOE didn't just post 1 loss. It has been culling staff in multiple rounds of layoffs, closing studios, shutting down games, closing down unreleased games for the last half a decade.
Sure no one has the specifics numbers or direct access to their financials, but the situation is clear enough. This isnt' a case of a company posting a loss while it spends a ton on development costs. SOE has always had 2-4 different games in development for the last decade. This isn't something new.
You claim "That's just how things are" but you're talking out of your ass.
You said "Fact: Having a massive amount of the company fired is a net loss of resources. Sorry if you don't like that."
This is not a fact. If you got guys who aren't producing quality work, who are also collecting bloated paychecks because of how long they were at SOE, you could fire those people and then hire more people at a lower cost who are hungry for a chance to prove themselves and who will produce superior work for less money.
That would be a net gain of resources as far as getting a product released.
Notice a lot of the layoffs were high end people who have been lingering around SOE for years on end. Some of them may, or may not, have been worth their cost, but we didn't do the evaluation of their job performance vs their salary, so you nor I can say either way.
Just pointing out that you're not thinking this stuff through and you're being a doomsayer based on zero facts and that your definition of the word "fact" is pretty far from what a fact actually is.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
There are a few things that SOE does that make them a bit different from other MMO gaming developers the hire/fire based on projects.
1) SOE has had an average of 3 games in development every year for about the last 10 years.
2) Each release increased their stable of games that needed support and expansion
3) SOE bought a new game from other developers about every other year.
SOE wasn't really a company that made a game and then fired he unneeded developers. They just move them to the new project. It isn't like their development needs went down every year, because they always had roughly the same amount of games being created and each year there were more and more games to support.
No, it is a fact that losing nearly half the employees is a loss of resources. Someone is going to have to either pick up the work from those who were fired or that work will not get done. Either way it is a net loss of resources.
Until those employees are actually replaced (as you speculate), then the layoffs are in fact a net loss of resources.
I'm not sure how you can say I'm talking out of my ass when your entire point is based on blind speculation. You act like half of the company was fired for being completely useless and then replaced by fire in the belly less expensive employees who are far more productive.
Where on earth did you get that information and feel like it was credible enough to call someone else out for pulling things out of their ass.
Just to be clear. If Columbus Nova had fired half the company and replaced them with new people, I would be praising that choice. SOE needed a shake up for a long time.
However half of the employees are now expected to do twice the work they were previously doing. Think about that for a second before thinking that wasn't a pretty sizable loss.
As always made up info but I will start with just one, #3. So DGC has been around for about 18+ years. Not 100% sure on the date but its going a few years back from 1999 when EQ1 was released. So if they buy a new MMO every other year thats about 9 MMOs. Can you show me the list of games that long? #2 Games released take much small amount of staff to make new content and maintain. Thats why game companies lay off after release. #1. Again always at least 3 MMOs in development? Show me a list of what projects you are talking about covering what years. As always making up numbers does not make it so.
EQ2 was definately NOT a "WoW clone" at launch. If anything, WoW was an EQ clone.
At launch, EQ2 was a very different game, and for many of us it was superior. The original systems emphasized teamwork and group content. Crafting was a giant nest of subcombines, and the materials to build ANYTHING beyond the most basic items were generated from several different disciplines. It wasn't possible to make anything beyond newbie-level gear without having help from other crafters. The mini-game you played to craft things was difficult to master, even a single mistake would usually cause you to make an imperfect item, and quite often it would kill you (you took damage from critical failures).
The adventuring system was very solo-hostile as well. I remember well, getting off the "newbie island" and doing the initial quests in my racial starting zone of a suburb of Qeynos. Then, my brave level 12 character walked out into Antonica and decided to slay a giant rat. LOL! At that point, I learned that almost every NPC in the game was linked into a group... when you attacked one, the entire linked group joined the encounter and if you didn't kill ALL of them, you got NOTHING.
And EQ2 had very distinct classes with the expected tons and tons of skills or spells, all of which had to be purchased to unlock them, and where did you purchase them? From other players who crafted the scrolls, of course... and a poor quality scroll would teach you a less powerful version of the ability.
That was the game, at launch. However, it had issues. The performance was horrible... they designed it for future hardware which never materialized (an 8GHz single-core CPU, I learned from a dev later). Add to that some annoying database issues that caused rollbacks over the Christmas holiday, and many people got really upset. WoW happened to launch right after EQ2, and by contrast, their only real issue was the dreaded login queues because they expected to sell 100K copies and sold 1M.
Had they fixed their issues, streamlined some of the rough edges, and found a way to make the client run reasonably on normal hardware... I suspect EQ2 would still be a pretty strong game today. However, the folks in charge (Smedley) decided to chase after WoW and nerfed everything that made EQ2 unique. Linked groups, meaningful crafting, subclasses... all gone. The pale shadow you likely played is indeed a WoW clone, because that's the cash cow they chased after.
You were talking out of your ass because you don't know all the factors. Since you're not all knowing, and were making speculations, you did not make a factual statement. You made an opinion-based subjective statement that was contingent on certain parameters.
If you have a job that was being done by 10 people, and it's now being done by 5, it may, or may not be a loss of resources.
If 5 of the people were just getting in the way, creating bad code that was always causing issues, not showing up to work on time and just being bad employees all around, then nothing of value was lost and no resources were really lost.
If 10 great people were doing a job and 5 of them were fired, not replaced with equal or better people, then your statement could be true.
But what you said wasn't a fact, but you don't know the exact circumstances of what went on. So it wasn't a fact. It was just an opinion parading as one.
For all you know they may have cut bloated under-performers and plan to replace them with more people of a higher caliber who are willing to work for less.
For all you know they may have cut bloated under-performers and plan to just reallocate people who were working on other projects.
Sure, of course they could have just cut people who were doing a good job and have no plans to replace them or reallocate company resources from other games onto projects like EQN and H1Z1. But this is all what makes your comment not a fact.
Because you don't know either way.
Case in point, I worked on a project one time that had issues with a handful of people. We'd get our work divided up and then when it came time to merge our work, there were people who didn't accomplish their tasks. Other people "finished" their work but it was so messed up that it just caused nothing but headaches for the team. So a lot of time was wasted going back and fixing their mess, or waiting for work that should have been finished.
Cutting these bad apples from the team actually increased the rate at which we were producing features and resulted in a lot less problems as we worked. Cutting people in this case actually increased the quality of the product and the speed of development even though they weren't even replaced.
Everything isn't as black and white as you think it is. Especially not in game development.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
1) PLEASE READ WHAT I WROTE... For the last TEN years. Not 18 like you are putting words in my mouth.
Games SOE has had in development the last ten or so years off the top of my head (12 total)
The Agency
Magic the gathering tactics
Star Wars Clone Wars
DCUniverse
Landmark
EQNext
Free Realms
Planetside2
H1Z1
Fortune League
Untold legends Dark Kingdom
Legends of norrath
So yes, I think I can safely say they have about an average of three games in development each year for that past many years. I will let you figure out what games were developed and which overlapped as I am tired of handing you information you could have easily looked up before calling someone else a liar.
2) If a companies portfolio of released games increases over time, those games will require MORE developer support than the previous years. Also if the number of games in development never really goes down, then the company will not have a need to have massive firing after the release of each game. Also as the company branches out into co-publishing/developers games with other companies it will require more resources too.
I'm actually shocked this needed to be explained.
3) Games/companies SOE has purchased:
PaxNora
Vangaurd
Worlds apart studios
The Matix Online
Games they have co-published and/or co-developed
Dragon Worlds online
Pirates of the buring sea
Bullet match
Dragon Prohpets
There are more I'm forgetting like their efforts in the Asian market as well as their facebook and mobile games, but you get the point.
You can apologize for accusing me of making things up anytime you like.
Fact: Nearly half the company was fired.
Fact: The remaining half of the company will be expected to do twice the amount of work.
Fact: No new resource have been listed as being added.
I'm pointing to the things we know happened. Therefor they can be stated as facts. Unless there is information to disprove them, they remain as is.
Now I'm sure you can make plenty of classroom hypothetical situations where half of the company were fat lazy slobs and more really means less, but come on. You might as well say firing half the company resulted in more resources, because SOE might have hired programming cyborgs from the future and I don't know the real details about those cyborgs.
We are not talking about a handful of people working on one small project. We are talking about hundreds of people throughout the entire company, which was already struggling to keep up with their workload. Why people are working so hard to create blind speculation that this is somehow a gain in resources is beyond reasonable.
2/3 are just speculation, we know shit ton where fired, half of them? No idea. You might be right you might be wrong, but the point these two are making is we don't know all the information yet. Trying to pass it of a fact is silly unless you have inside information or work there. There is no solid prof about 2/3 of that list.
Just trying to clear it up
Most of his posts are just that, stats speculation as fact. I kinda feel sorry for him because I am starting to think he believes it and maybe is not trying to just stir the pot (shrugs)
Just wanted to point out that unless Blizzard has a time machine (and they probably do) WoW released AFTER EQ2, pretty darn impossible to clone something that wasn't around when it launched.
As for the OP giving his opinion that EQ vets are getting the middle finger, well it's about time they stuck it up where the sun doesn't shine on some of the so called EQ vets, might loosen whatever is stuck up there.
There is no evidence to suggest that EQ:N won't be made.
With that said, if this is speculation is correct that EQ:N won't be released, I saw this coming a mile away.
I watched the reveal of EQ:N and I was in love with the idea. Loved it, all of it. Thought the sand presentation was really cool too. Loved how they seemed to be passionate about what they were making and I think Dave Georgensen is an MMO genius.
Then...they came out with some Landmark info. And then more Landmark info. And more, and more... I thought "Okay, maybe EQ:N is barely in dev and,obviously, Landmark is up to bat first." Then more landmark..and more landmark. Then it hit me about 1+ years ago that there was NO news about EQ:N other than 'round table' horescrap on their website. Nothing about EQ:N. Nothing. Now, Georgensen writes columns for this website, it seems, about MMOs...instead of actually making one?
If EQ:N is dead, I'll blame it entirely on Landmark. Their entire focus was landmark and nothing EQ:N. And I'll be pissed.
My MMO days are all but dead. GW2 started off amazing until Living story...now its just crap. Even with all of the improvements with the expansion, I don't think I'll ever play it again. Arenanet lost my $$. WoW is the same stale old, re-modeled, piece of crap it always was. Played it for 5+ years, tried the new expansion...Yeah, leveling was great. Raids are still fun. Thats it. Its a shell of a game. Nothing else to it. The only MMO I enjoy, currently, to any extent is ESO. The fact that it is going Buy to Play this month is a blessing because I know I'll get to play it whenever I want now.
Warframe and Diablo 3 for me.
Heh, a harsh sentiment. I stand a bit between the two extremes. When I looked at the first gen MMOs, UO and EQ1, when they were new, I was utterly despised by that, and that hasn't changed. UO and EQ1 were always unplayable games for me. I am a vivid gamer for 30 years, but the sheer grind-fest they were... no thanks.
I started with EQ2, and was GLAD to see the improvements, hell I even felt much of what WOW did was good improvement.
HOWEVER, a lot of what I saw in Landmark made me question the direction EQN is going. So I am not sure about the whole idea either. I think *some* of the early MMo ideas were good. Like the UO attempt to make a real world, like SWG's idea to have a MMO with more than just combat and quests. MMOs who were WORLDS and not kill-quest-tunnels.
Still, a lot of the First Gen hardships were just boring, not hard. Like sitting down in EQ1 and waiting 5 minutes to have your mana bar refilled. Or standing 15 minutes at a shuttleport in SWG waiting for the shuttle to the next planet. Or camping a named fish bossmob for it's 4 hours respawn. That wasn't "hard" or "cool" it was always and forever just DULL DULL DULL.
I am quite sure we WILL see EQN. A company doesn't buy a game studio just to close it down. They want profit, and that comes from games being sold.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I'm sick and tired of EQ purists preaching the might and glory of EQ and smiting EQN's impurity. EQ is what it is, and EQN is something different. For most people who have never even tried EQ1 or 2, EQN is like a holy grail in their eyes atm. It has the potential to become the next Big Thing.
EQ fans can stick to their game, while others get theirs. What's the fuss?
1) The percentage of the employees fired comes from credible sources like Gamasutra and EQ2wire, who do have inside sources. Why you guys are trying to discredit me for reposting this information makes little sense.
2) If half of the company is gone and all of the previous work still exists (again Daybreak "confirmed" that in statements), then it is a fact that half the devs will now be asked to do twice the work. It isn't like Daybreak secretly hired 200+ developers to replace those fired.
3) Read that statement, please just read it.
The funny thing is I only posted this information to show that the developers over at Daybreak cannot be taken at face value for the claims they make. It is beyond rational how far people are going with hypothetical situations that are not plausible as they would apply to this specific situation... just to prove that the developers are telling the truth?
I get that some are twisting the discussion and it has gotten muddy, but come on.
There would be no fuss from me, or from many others, if the new game had a new name and did not pretend to be linked to the older games for some marketing purpose.
SOE (now DBG) has every right to make new games and seek new markets for them. But pretending that this new game was Everquest simply because it replaced the next Everquest game they were working on but canned a couple of years ago left a lot of bitterness around.
No one is arguing that a LOT of people were let go at DGC. What is being argued, at least by me, is that EQN is not being hit with the brunt of that loss. Only a handful of the EQN team was let go and only one of those was working on EQN in a technical/coding capacity. If you see each game as having "buckets", technically EQN has more resources than it did from a development standpoint. I don't think anyone would have thought that was the intent of the "EQN will have more resources now" statement.
SoE was a lot more than an MMO developer. It makes sense that since they've become just a game developer those para-game developer positions would be the major cut.
Actually your argument only supports the statement: "technically EQN has only slightly less resources than it did", but even that does not count the loss of coding support from Storybricks and from other areas within DBG/SOE that were cut heavily like QA and infrastructure. Also the loss of senior people like Dave Georgeson means that people need to step up to fill the gap, sooner or later that means someone who was coding before the change is now more heavily engaged in other duties, perhaps several someones.
I understand that "resources" is more than money, as you correctly pointed out, but the quote from the DGC seemed like a reference to money. In that regard, the salaries of four people are not being spent on the technical development of EQN, theoretically put into other areas.
The resources comment was more tongue in cheek. My main point was that the overall loss to DGC and it's effect on EQNs development was being overblown.
LOL, actually it is much more likely that the money saved is not being spent at all. They were making a loss and Columbus Nova will be looking to stop that and start making a profit. Face it resources were cut, reduced, lessened. They were not increased, they were not even maintained.
You may be right, you may not. You don't know and neither do I so I don't have to "face" anything then, right?
My only concern is what will be produced in the end.