Eden Studios' COH RPG (Any devs care to respond?)
By
Acanous_Quietus,
Posted on: 2007-10-01 17:39 in Roleplaying
*Blinks*
Kay... 
Edit: I don't know what is up with Eden... I don't keep track of 'em, actually!
So... They make the CoH comics?
Erm...not really sure what this thread is doing here. AFAIK, our devs aren't involved in Eden's project beyond granting them license to make it. You'd probably have a better shot at grabbing some info if you contacted Eden instead. 
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
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@Proto_Zone: No, they did not make the comic book.
@DeviousMe: Contact with Eden is the problem. They have nothing to say. The project is so far in limbo apparently that they can't even comment on whether it's going to come out or not. So now I come here (after 2 years remember; don't think I just went, "Dur, here's the first place I should go to get info about another company's project.") to find out Cryptic's standpoint on this. Are they gonna sit on their thumbs? Do they still have faith that Eden can pull it off, or are they gonna try to get another company involved? Do they care one way or another about this project at all?
Mean Girls on Protector Server! The 50s: Fragdoll - DP/MM Blaster, Black Rhinoceros - WP/SS Tank, Brooke Shields - MA/SD Scrap, Fraggy - AR/En Blaster, Reign - Grav/Storm Troller, Soundquake - Earth/Sonic Troller, Blightvine - Plant/Rad Troller, Rattlesnake - Thugs/Pois MM, Operative Wasp - SoA, Arachnos Think Tank - Bots/Traps MM, Rogue Shark - Mercs/Pain MM
Next time I run into the Eden guys, I'll ask...I usually see them during convention season.
Well, I guess there ya go. 
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
That'd be great - I enjoyed working on the CoH RPG with Manticore a *lot*, and I'd like to hear what the status is on it, and my payment for it...Eden, unfortunately, hasn't been forthcoming at all. 
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Next time I run into the Eden guys, I'll ask...I usually see them during convention season.
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It's been two years. I'd say that it's waited long enough. Get one of the company lawers to talk to them, and get an answer now.
I've long ago given up waiting on this thing to come out. Long, long ago...
"I do so love taking a nice, well thought out character and putting them through hell. It's like tossing a Faberge Egg onto the stage during a Gallagher concert." - me
@Palador / @Rabid Unicorn
I've been updating this thead as I see posts on the Eden boards. I'll check and see if there's anything new...
Added: Nope.
It certainly seems that Eden has shelved the CoH RPG in favour of getting their own lines out. I can understand the why for doing this - they own the IP, so get more revenue from these titles - but it's not good that it's taken 2+ years to get to a stage where they are still releasing this title 'soon'.
You know the Eden guys Statesman, but please don't take 'soon' for an answer. The CoH RPG never has to go to a printers - they could sell the pdf through a number of channels and get a decent revenue from it. I'd buy it, mainly because I want to read the extra lore it contains.
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Next time I run into the Eden guys, I'll ask...I usually see them during convention season.
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Gracias.
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I've been updating this thead as I see posts on the Eden boards. I'll check and see if there's anything new...
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And thanks for the link, Malohin.
Mean Girls on Protector Server! The 50s: Fragdoll - DP/MM Blaster, Black Rhinoceros - WP/SS Tank, Brooke Shields - MA/SD Scrap, Fraggy - AR/En Blaster, Reign - Grav/Storm Troller, Soundquake - Earth/Sonic Troller, Blightvine - Plant/Rad Troller, Rattlesnake - Thugs/Pois MM, Operative Wasp - SoA, Arachnos Think Tank - Bots/Traps MM, Rogue Shark - Mercs/Pain MM
Ahh, Eden Studios. I love their games, All Flesh Must Be Eaten for example is just about the perfect system for almost any monster invasion scenario, and want soooo much to like them. But they have had this tendency to bite off more than they can chew for as long as I knew of them as an entity. I would do so much more to support them, if I could ever find their product in the stores. Between the time that they aquired the rights to CJ Carell'a Witchcraft and they finally got around to printing the Armageddon: the end times source book, I no longer had a group of freinds who wished to play.
So when I heard that Eden was doing this game, I knew I need not worry about the quality, just likelyhood of ever seeing that quality. I still want to get a copy of the City of Heroes book, should it come out soon, but I'm not holding my breath. And I have fewer freinds who are both into gaming and into superheroes than I did last year at this time, who knows how long I'll have a use for it.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" Adam Savage from Mythbusters
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That'd be great - I enjoyed working on the CoH RPG with Manticore a *lot*, and I'd like to hear what the status is on it, and my payment for it...Eden, unfortunately, hasn't been forthcoming at all.
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I'm in the same boat. Manticore was a blast to work with, things were going great, and then... silence.
Heck, at this point I'd be glad to get a kill fee. Most of the stuff I wrote's desperately out of date as it is, what with the multiple updates, new regions, changes to storylines and stuff....
At this stage, I'd be just as happy to see a print or pdf CoH/CoV sourcebook that gives a good compilation of comprehensive info which I could then simply use in either Mutants & Masterminds, GURPS, or Champions.
Dear NCsoft, if you go through with this shutdown you've guaranteed you'll not see another dime from me on any project you put out, ever.
http://xx-starhammer-xx.deviantart.com/
Exactly. I'm damned proud of the work I did, but at this point I'd be happy to take the kill fee. Eden hasn't just dropped the ball on this, it's like they never picked it up. As things stand now, the background material'll require massive revisions to be marketable at all.
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Next time I run into the Eden guys, I'll ask...I usually see them during convention season.
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Gracias.
Fraggy... you know con season is almost over right? WW:Texas (which I don't think Cryptic is going to be at, nor Eden) is about the biggest thing out there. So most likey a reply this way is at least Spring - maybe even Late Summer '08 away.
If they've given up on the book they should at least throw up what they have as a PDF and charge something minimal. that seems to make sense.
-K
<QR>
FWIW, at Gen Con, Eden had hard copies of the quick start rules displayed prominently and indicated to me that it is really coming and that it is coming sooner rather than later.
I'll believe it when I see it, but I've stopped calling it vaporware.
The Quick Start rules have been out for ages. My big concern is that there's been somewhere between a lot and eleventy-seven million game changes since all the writing was done. The game, if it ever comes out, will require massive overhauling in the background and zone writeups to be worthwhile for a City fan, at the very least, not to mention the new powersets and powerset changes.
Eden Studios products are top notch, when they finally see print. George and Alex, yep Eden Studios is two whole people (with day jobs other than making games) and a handful of freelancers, are great guys who try to do their best. But it seems they've taken a couple of hard financial kicks to the head when they were already in the position of needing to wait on the revenue from one product to have the funds to produce the next.
On the .pdf issue, George has stated that he's leary of the medium and was made more so by learning that their Army of Darkness book was found to have been put on a pirate site where over ten times the copies thay had sold were distributed illegaly. He saw that as a massive loss of sales for his already struggling company.
Of course, the merits and flaws of .pdf can be debated ad nauseum. IMO, if done properly (see Pinnacle Entertainment Group) .pdfs combined with print can can make a company solid and viable.
As someone who's just a fan of their products and a regular reader of their forums, Eden seems to be in the unenviable position of not being able to put out product without cash flow but unable to get sufficient cash flow without putting out product. Chaosium, the makers of Call of Cthulhu, were in a similar position a few years ago, including being unable to pay their freelancers. They held on, kept fighting and have finally been getting new product flow and sales and have been slowly catching up on paying their freelancers and such. Maybe Eden can pull of the same thing, maybe not.
I'm just an outside observer putting together what I've heard. Only the insiders really know the facts. Ultimately, if you're a fan of Eden's (or any other company's) products and/or are wanting CoH tabletop or any other proposed product to come out you can support the company buy purchasing their products and trying to get others interested. If you don't then don't be surprised if the company dies or that waited for product doesn't appear. Of course, sometimes even if you do everything you can, the company still dies.
Here's the question though: If the game comes out, will we still get the Prestige Power that it was advertised as having?
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Eden just lost the license at this point. They shelved their Buffy projects and lost that license while they were working on the City of Heroes RPG (which, I'll be honest, I felt was superfluous at best -- I really don't understand this whole 'pen and paper RPG based on MMORPG' trend at all, and I wasn't very impressed by the quickplay/demo), and now this. Honestly, the company's too damn small to handle major licenses, especially after the setbacks they've suffered in recent years. They should really just scale back their operations, focus on their core lines for a while and then expand once again.
Don't mind me, though. I'm still deeply bitter over the loss of Buffy (before such books as Welcome to Sunnydale, Tea & Crossbows and Military Monster Squad could come out, no less), and I'm honestly only as bitter as all that because they do produce a high-quality product when they manage to publish, and hire excellent writers who deserve better than their completely unpredictable release schedule and utter silence on such basic questions as 'When is the book coming out?' and 'When do I get my paycheck?' I get that it's not totally their fault, but the silence is especially aggravating.
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Do not go gently into that good night - save Paragon City!
As one of the aggravated fans and a writer for the Paragon City Operative's Manual, I can only hope that the silence from Eden is broken soon. As much as I'd like a paycheck for my work, I'd really like to see the game even more.
I entirely sympathize with Eden's financial difficulties - the loss of the Buffy and angel licenses was a serious blow - but at the same time, stonewalling the fans and freelancers isn't a Good Thing, IMO. It's getting harder and harder to defend the game from both the Eden fanboys that want it to die in favor of other projects and the folks that come onto Eden's boards and start threads deliberately crapping on the game.
Fingers crossed here, but I'm not holding out much hope for the release.
I gave up on this RPG from Eden. Took to long, and it was becoming nothing more than just a replication of City of Heroes, including all the needed minutiea for a computer game in a Pen and Paper Rpg.
I've just gone ahead and started doing CoH/V styled power sets using the Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition rule set (Really one of the best to come along in the last 20 years). Building one power set at a time. This is solely for myself since I got tired of waiting for what is in essence a defunct product.
Hell even Wild Cards is going to be produced in the M&M system.
So... does the sale of CoX to NCSoft pretty much drive the last nail into this coffin? Or does the license agreement carry forward and keep the game tied up indefinitely?
The agreement carries forward, sadly, because NCSoft was already a signatory to said agreement (they've ALWAYs owned a large part of the COH franchise - the recent transfer is only a matter of having bought out their partner and co-owner, Cryptic Studios).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this game is pure is vaporware, and that fact seriously saddens me. While I have decided I dislike Unisystem (Eden's core mechanic/system) .... I woul still have bought the books solely for the background information ... to plug into [u]GURPS:Supers[u] or [u]Mutants & Masterminds[u], if nothing else.
's a damned cryin' shame, it is.
So this thing was supposed to have been released sometime in the summer of '05, but Eden suffered various financial setbacks that postponed the game's release. Now it's been, what? 2 years? And nobody over at Eden Studios has a thing to say about it. It's like zipped lips and taped mouths over there. The last 2 Eden responses (6 months apart, mind you) have been "Nothing new to report," which tells me. . . well, nothing. I think it means they still plan to release the game, but it's about 2 years outdated by now, and there aren't a whole lot of people on the payroll over at Eden, so if they're revising for CoH/CoV updates, seems likely all of that will be outdated too by the time they get done.
It'd be nice if someone over here -- one of the devs, perhaps (maybe a certain Statesman)? -- could shed a little light on this. It's gone well beyond the point of ridiculousness. Is the game coming out? In light of the CoH comic book being cancelled, is this sort of peripheral enterprise no longer a priority for Cryptic. Or crueller (is that a word?) but better yet, how long before Cryptic can pull the license and pass it on to a studio that can actually get the job done?
I may sound like a(n) [insert insult of your choosing] but I'm far beyond the point of caring anymore. Eden Studios may be a small business suffering in the wake of D20's onslaught, but dinosaurs die out for a reason.
Mean Girls on Protector Server! The 50s: Fragdoll - DP/MM Blaster, Black Rhinoceros - WP/SS Tank, Brooke Shields - MA/SD Scrap, Fraggy - AR/En Blaster, Reign - Grav/Storm Troller, Soundquake - Earth/Sonic Troller, Blightvine - Plant/Rad Troller, Rattlesnake - Thugs/Pois MM, Operative Wasp - SoA, Arachnos Think Tank - Bots/Traps MM, Rogue Shark - Mercs/Pain MM