Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
General: Top Developer Falls from Grace
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In many ways, the MMORPG development world is filled with 'superstars', those folks who have shown awesome creativity when making the games we love to play. But just as golden as their touch may be, it can turn to the touch of doom with a poorly executed game. In The List this week, MMORPG.com Lead Writer Bill Murphy takes a look at some of the fallen stars of the MMO development world. Check it out!
We love to build our stars up and then we’re just as quick to tear them down should they fumble in any small way. The same can be said of us as gamers. We become fans of developers who deliver us a good game, but we’ll just as quickly storm their houses with pitchforks and fire should they ever release a turd unto the public. In honor of this grand tradition of popularity backlash, here’s a List devoted entirely to the games and developers who experienced as much.
Read more of Bill Murphy's The List: Top Developer Falls from Grace.
Comments
Ahhh. Bill Roper.
That is all
Well Jacobs is a lawyer by trade so it is no wonder his journey in the genre was short lived. Since he was calling the shots for both DAoC and Warhammer, it is logical to blame him as the ulimate source of their demise. Personally will avoid any games he becomes involved in, I don't believe he has any talent in that area. He is a one hit wonder.
Braid Macquaid is a great designer, just has no idea how to run a business. Ask anyone who worked for him and you will get the same answer, he has no sense of how to spend money intelligently and does not communicate well with people under him. If he is running another company, you can expect another mess like Vanguard.
I think Bill Roper gets too much credit for Diablo, he just has not shown anything since then. Tends to make you think his skill set is a bit tarnished.
Garriot made his millions, does not want to take the time to put his skills to work. NCSoft got tired of his half effort and told him to leave.
I would have added Ralph Koster to this list myself. He was the genius behind both UO and Star Wars Galaxies and one of the leading sandbox designers in the genre. He disappeared from the scene after SOE's disasterous NGE, although there have been some whispers of him being involved in some social gaming projects. If so what a waste.
It isn't exactly a "whisper" when you own the company that was just shut down because it was a poorly thought out business case. OH, he also shut it down because he's got newer, bigger and better plans for something in the future too. Atleast that's what he says. Either way, the company he ran and had final say about how it was run went out of business. Just sounds like a less charismatic Paul Barnett to me.
Please dont say poor Bill Roper. The man wasted A LOT of peoples mone,y lieing and cheating his way to the demise of Flagship where a lot of people lost there jobs. This man shouldnt be aloud to work in the industry.
Playing: PO, EVE
Waiting for: WoD
Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO
Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Dunno... with all of these game dev's flubbing after a point, perhaps their success was merely the luck of being in the right place at the right time? Are the old games great because we have rose-tinted glasses on and are looking with fond nostalgia at them? I mean, the context was different back then. There were only a few games out on the market back in 2003.
If someone released a game like AO today, it would die, considering all of the technical problems, all of the bizarre design decisions such as requiring IP-expensive adventuring to use maps, holes in character class progression, and the fact that at release there wasn't actually that much to do in the game. We consider it one of the greats now, but when it was released it was lambasted in the press as being truly anarchic, and in a bad way. It was rated very poorly by critics. However, it still managed to survive, with a small but dedicated population, and is still going. If the same happened now, the game would have probably had the plug pulled on it.
DAoC? If it had been released nowadays, people would have whined about it being a WoW-clone with no endgame (what? only RvR omg!), and it would have struggled along at best.
On the reverse side of things, if something like AoC had been released in 2002, I think it would have been a massive hit.
I mean... DAoC and AO are still going, and they haven't really changed all that much in the past 5 years or so. Why aren't people saying that they were so good playing them now?
Incidently, "Falls-from-Grace" is the name of one of the coolest priestesses in any game ever
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
Yeah I would definitely add Raph Koster to the list. I'd also add the guy who started Horizons and Alganon.
Designing a game is much different than running a studio and really different from running a game. One person can't be great at all of these. I would guess that the most successful MMOs have figured out that what they really need is someone who can hire brilliant people and knows how to keep them happy.
I kinda feel for them. When a game fails the names of the investors, the company itself and the team often get away with it relatively unscathed, not so for the game directors; it's in the job description to take the fall. While I can't imagine that any game gets developed based on purely a single person's vision and decisions. It's hard to become a star and easy to come crashing down as a game director I guess.
My brand new bloggity blog.
I know how in the snap of two fingers both Jacobs and Garriott can reclaim the throne as MMO gods:
DAoC 2 and UO2.
God, can you imagine the amazing fun it would be to return to these great old lands and systems given 2011 technology?
Developers aren't superhuman (nor in the modern world are they solo). Original ideas that click together into a hit are usually half-accidental and just because you blazed a trail in one frontier doesn't guarentee that whatever you touch next turns to gold. I tend to see game worlds as a life's work: you can really only expect to get one good one before you're spent.
Yep. DAOC 2 would get my money. I still have a lot of respect for Jacobs. He created an amazing game that has ruined my ability to play any others. I think his biggest mistake with WAR was Jacob's unyeilding support of Paul Barnett. He ignored everything that worked for DAOC in an effort to create a WoW killer. What he ended up with was a turd sandwich.
Without a DAOC 2 I will never play another MMO again. Everything else just sucks.
AO as is with a new engine, new graphics and combat animations would be great, AO to this day still has the most indepth and best character building of any MMoRPG except maybe Eve, you reading this Gaute?
Godz of War I call Thee
If there is a common theme to the case histories in this article it is that "Joe Smith - The Sequel" doesn't play as well in the MMO world as it does in Hollywood. And even in Hollywood there are a hell of a lot more Rocky IV's than Godfather Part 2's.
I guess it's just human nature to assume that someone who once had one or a couple of good ideas will continue to spew them out. But it seems to me that when it comes to producing a truly fun and new MMORPG hit we should be looking instead to the new starving artists in the industry.
I think we can agree that we're all tired of the same old crap regurgitated in a new wrapper and released before it's ready. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm in MMORPG releases these days and inevitably leads to the Industry Giant's fall from grace.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Of all of those, I think Brad McQuaid is the most hopeful. Mostly because Vanguard now is a gem of a game even though it's dying. I think maybe it needed more funding and time in the cooker and to come out not so close to when WoW launched. Hopefully he learned from his mistake and will deliver an MMORPG of epic proportions to make up for it.
The other guys on the list...meh, especially Roper, that guy has the worst track record I have ever seen. He needs to stick with casual gaming not games created around WORLDs.
Raph Koster is a hack. His book everyone touts as a bible: "A Theory Of Fun" is nothing more than a picture book with less actual words than this entire thread has. People talk about him lovingly but dont actually read his work, not that I expect people to actually do so.
If its more than 140 characters most people these days dont bother. :-)
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
1) Brad McQuaid
2) Mark Jacobs
The rest does not matter.
East Carolina University, Computer Science BS, 2011
--------------------
Current game: DAOC
Games played and quit: L2, PlanetSide, RF Online, GuildWars, SWG, COH/COV, Vanguard, LOTRO, WoW, WW2 Online, FFXI, Auto-Assault, EVE Online, ShadowBane, RYL, Rappelz, Last Chaos, Myst Online, POTBS, EQ2, Warhammer Online, AoC, Aion, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Allods, Darkfall.
Waiting on: Earthrise
Names: Citio, Goldie, Sportacus
I think a lot of information is being left out. For instance, EQ was on a steady decline after PoP arrived. Then, SOE kept cramming bad expansions down out throats. Is it any wonder, then, that McQuaid's game fell flat on its face? I doubt its a shocker to the people who despised the direction EQ went after Kunark.
Then, we have Mr. Jacobs. Oh man, did I love DAoC. Then the horribly thought out expansion ToA came out. Again, is anyone really surprised that the man who threw ToA onto his RvR audience totally bombed on a new game?
Its not like the hate occured in one day or in one instance. It was a buildup of failures that should have been a sign to investors. If someone ruins their game due to stupid actions, don't let them make another.
Games that have grown despite time; LOTRO, EVE, DDO, and WoW, just to name a few.
Developers fail because they're corny in their cornball hearts. They think adding 5 different types of meaningless crap adds to a game cuz as cornballs thats just what they think, instead of just DOING WHAT YOUR PLAYERS ASK IN A WAY THAT MAKES SENSE they add a bunch of crap just to have a longer feature list. They are corny and clueless some of them. They also have done nothing but program and pretend a lot of them, and others are so frickin CORPORATIZED and my gosh the ability to be arrogant and a bootlicker at the same time must be some sort of talent! Good heavens!
/rant off
...for now >:(
Beyond that the publishers make them do a lot of stuff that sucks, because most devs are just contractors
Bill Roper and Marc Jacobs are the two that I think ties the title of EPIC FAIL.
Bill Roper for his involvement in the STO disaster and Marc Jacobs for the huge dissapointment of Warhammer Online.
My gaming blog
Eh what about Smedly? I won't touch a product he has a hand in. SOE knows how to kill a game like no other!
Anyway....the people with the development money aren't gamers. Just like movies, or products or anything in the market...if one person makes a ton of money with something, everyone will copy it until it is bled dry rather than make something new.
The End.
Brad McQuaid and Mark Jacobs
These 2 guys should find a rock and stay under for the next century.
I honestly don't know why Richard Garriott is a factor in MMORPGs - yesh, Ultimate Online, but his real legacy was the original Ultima series.
That's what he needs to go back to, not a crappy MMORPG that people only like because of rose colored glasses
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
Being ambituous and visionary is not a synonym of being a good project leader. As those poor fellows learned.
One thing I see that dominates that list is EGO. These guys were intelligent and visionaries... but what they failed to realize is how lucky they got the first time around. Each one of them, because of their previous sucess, stopped listening to fans and thought they had all the answers.
Why is John Smedley isn't on this list?