Why does this guy constantly talk smack about the game I like so much?

Can't find specific records of the events leading to Cryptic's departure so can't really comment on that much but player counts were a matter of public record back then.

When CoV launched it had the highest monthly server access numbers to date (of course not sure about GR's effects since they stopped publishing numbers) but it was even higher than at CoH's launch.

It did last about a year though before it dropped below CoH's launch numbers. Maybe perhaps because of the same reasons the red side is not favored today...not sure.

That lowest point in 4Q 2004 coincides with WoW's launch in october.

[edit]

By lowest/highest, i mean up until the time they stopped publishing numbers, obviously. The last number they published for 3Q 2008 of 124,939 was close to the lowest so not sure if it went lower after that.

[/edit]

NCSoft IR Quarterly Reports

Quarter Monthly Server Access Issue Issue Release
Jun-2004 169,925 1 June 29, 2004
Sep-2004 163,053 *2 September 16, 2004
Dec-2004 124,435
Mar-2005 140,481 3 January 4, 2005
Jun-2005 162,922 4 May 4, 2005
Sep-2005 150,068 5 August 31, 2005
Dec-2005 194,000 **6 October 27, 2005
Mar-2006 171,951
Jun-2006 171,000
Sep-2006 172,420 7 June 6, 2006
Dec-2006 154,953 8 November 28, 2006

Yes, i'm sure upgraded but not the same, however, not sure what sparked your reply unless it was the "from scratch" context again. To clarify that was going from MUO assests to CO assets...i did say except for the engine i believe.

No, his premise is that NCSoft cut Cryptic's funding to skeleton crew minimal (personally and cynically, I suspect in order to set up the position in which they'd offer to buy out the game and devs later) which put Cryptic in the position of needing money and being open to deal making. NCSoft never gave orders, just said "Hey, we're paying you less and keeping the extra money". Because the deal they'd made would be something that actually made them money, they'd focus on that instead.

To pursue the cynical line of reasoning: Years later, now that you know you have an established game with an extremely fanatical population, you buy it out, and position yourself as the savior. The extremely fanatical fanbase is more inclined to look upon what you do with a favorable light.

Your sarcasm and intentional uncomprehension does you no favors.

There's this little thing called a contract that makes that impossible to happen and if it did Jack would have sued them so >.>

It was definitely a case of #2. Marvel wanted Cryptic to develop the game. They had no reason to involve NCSoft whatsoever.

Marvel has been incredibly fickle when it has come to developing their property for a MMO. Prior to Cryptic, they had 2-3 different deals for development. Right before Cryptic, they were working with Sigil Games Online (the developers of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes).

We can read into it and say the Marvel/Cryptic game never came to fruition because of Cryptic, but that's just speculation. We'll never really know why that deal fell through, just like we have no idea why the Marvel/Sigil or Marvel/Vivendi games didn't work out. However, the common factor here is Marvel, so I have a really difficult time believing Cryptic is fully to blame for things.

No-one without a red name on these boards knows what that contract contained. I suspect - given that NCsoft was the big partner to the indie Cryptic - that it would have favoured NCsoft. Emmert may have been the face of CoH, but there were also NCsoft producers in senior positions involved with development (Brian Clayton?). NCsoft collects the money and is likely (I don't know for sure) to have a large influence over the development budget. There would be some sort of revenue-per-player deal that probably covered salaries, but Cryptic would need to go to NCsoft and ask for money for future development.

According to Emmert, CoV brought in only 60k new subscribers. At the time - and this is critical - NCsoft was pouring a lot of money into Tabula Rasa and weren't hesitant in cutting down any title that wasn't making the desired money. CoH/V got caught up in that trap. TR was going to be the 1m+ subs title for NCsoft, so CoH/V's almost 200k players were small beans in comparison.

Cryptic had (or Paragon Studios, for that matter) little say over what NCsoft does. For instance, I don't think they wanted NCsoft Europe shut down and their European personnel let go, but that happened anyway.

The intricacies of MS and Cryptic is also a grey area, but I understand that MS eventually wanted a guarantee that ChampO would sell over 100k units on the Xbox 360 plus 30% of the sub fee in royalties. So that was the end of trying to develop a MMO for the PC and Xbox 360 platform and a lot of wasted development time.

All that said, Cryptic now isn't the Cryptic that used to be. I understand around 30% of Cryptic's current full-time employees worked on CoH/V at one time or another, but there has also been significant growth (around 200 full-time employees now) and changes. For instance, Micheal Lewis, one of the Cryptic founders (along with Dakan and Emmert) is no longer the President - he's ceded to current CEO John Needham. It's split up into an 'engine' team (who work on developing the Cryptic Engine and toolsets) and then separate teams for each game, plus those working on projects for Atari.

Which is pretty much patently ridiculous if you look at MMO numbers over the years. WoW's numbers (which are an anomaly) aside, few MMOs have been able to cross the 1 million marker, and I don't think any title that has been released in the past 5 years has gotten anywhere close.

I think that was pretty much the problem with both Microsoft and Marvel. They want instant success, but they apparently don't know how to accomplish that themselves. That's likely why every MMO Microsoft has been involved in (with perhaps the exception of Asheron's Call) has been canceled or abandoned. For Marvel, they just seem to keep hopping from one studio to the next, hoping to find the golden goose.

The sad thing is, Microsoft's lack of luck with MMOs has seemed to translate into a significant roadblock to other developers being able to have their MMO on the 360. It's always seemed as though they are trying to protect that genre on their console for themselves. Perhaps this will change some when the PS3 starts having some success with MMOs.

That's true. But not sure where it was said that MS wanted WoW level subs. When Shane Kim of MS explained why MUO was cancelled, he did mentioned that he looked at sub-based MMOs and only saw one that was successful, but didn't specifically say he wanted 1mil+ subs though.

I can sort of understand what he's saying since at the time, WoW's subs was increasing regularly for years until it plateaued recently, while most others tend to have an initial spike then trail off. How fast and hard it falls varies per game but still have a downward trend even if it's taking years.

Or maybe among other things, MS just had a lot of other games queued at the same time?
It's not like Microsoft is desperate for a game release or anything.

Microsoft's Shane Kim On 'Fable 2,' Why Marvel MMO Was Canceled And More

Microsoft is hoping to strike gold with another game like they did with Halo. Unfortunately they fail to take into account that most poeple that play MMOs don't care to play MMOs on consoles, where Microsoft wants to put them with Xbox Live. Of course Halo's popularity was dumb luck to begin with.

Anyone who's played Bungie's other games - particularly from the Marathon and Myth series - knows that Halo is no fluke. The games from Microsoft's subsequent purchases of other independent studios and co-ventures have never yielded the same order success simply because Bungie is one of those rare studios like Blizzard and Valve that is capable of creating megahits.

Then Microsoft bought them and it became Halo this and Halo that. At least they were allowed to leave and reform privately in 2007.

"Microsoft's lack of luck" refers to their inability to come out with an MMO.

It's a little hard to say if people don't play MMOs on consoles, because they don't like it, or if it's just a matter of very, very few MMOs even being available on consoles.

Ghost Widow used to come to Pocket D on Virtue Server at least, got to RP with her a bit

They'd sometimes suddenly show up on big The Cape Radio events, and give people yellow titles, or events in general, they still sometimes do, so even with him gone, it happens.

I think Hamidon spawned in Pocket D once... much death was had

Quality of the game doesn't equal popularity. Halo became popular because it filled an FPS genre void in the Xbox library at the time when most were trying to find something similar to Goldeneye to play on the next console gen. It was picked up by Microsoft along with few other titles that have been forgotten to be Xbox exclusives in order to get people to justify buying an Xbox. If Halo had been released onto the PC at the same time, it probably would have done worse with the Xbox floundering as a result. This is mainly because it was widely regarded as inferior or a step backwards from popular PC FPS titles like Quake, Unreal, and CoD. However not releasing it on PC avoided it being compared on the same level as those titles and the bad press that would come of it.

In a way, Halo is a lot like Twilight in that regard. You take something that is mediocre or average overall and make it popular by monopolizing it in an area where there is no competition to hamper it.

Everquest used to do this kinda thing pretty frequently.

Many of the zones had toggles a GM could trip to trigger zone-wide events, like the sky turning blood red and all the normal zone creatures changing to zombies & skeletons. GMs could also spawn most monsters and take control of them to rampage around.



-np

I was a Guide in Everquest, and I took part in some of those events. They were completely defined by the GM, and if you had a bad GM (which I did) they were stupid. I was not allowed to interact except for reciting scripted lines, which I bound to hot keys. Mostly what I was told to do was go out, assume some monster's form, and gank players. More players complained about the events than praised us for them.

I think having a GM interact with players in a pocket dimensional nightclub is a much cooler and laidback way to go.

When then-independent Bungie first unveiled Halo in 1999, the game was to feature unique vehicle combat and huge outdoor environments and was widely regarded having tremendous potential, between its sophisticated graphics, physics, and AI. It was clearly a quantum leap ahead of Quake and Unreal (the Quake engine-powered CoD wasn't even around yet). When Microsoft stepped in to acquire the studio, its development's direction was changed in order to adapt it for the X-Box as, improbably, a console FPS. No matter what one may think of that, Bungie succeeded in reaching an audience an order of magnitude greater than other entries in that field. (Personally, I mourn for the PC game version of Halo that could have been.)

In any case, Halo's tangled early history tells us a lot about how video game development and corporate business can muddy up a title's history. There are bound to be some developers who will take advantage of this for self-promotion.

in other words, running on the heels of tribes is what you're saying.

THey still do in EQ2. Guides come around with scripted quests, some of them playing a monster to play hide and seek, and give you stuff. Recipes, house items, just fun stuff.

Sure, if Tribes had computer opponents with AI worth a damn, a storyline of any interest, or graphics that were better than run of the mill.

The relevant point for this thread, however, is that the actual development of a game in the context of its era blurs pretty quickly in the gaming public's mind and is often misrepresented by the designers later in their careers. Bungie is unusual in that although its founders later split up after the Microsoft buyout and the studio itself would return to independence, its alumni have never really talked smack about each other or their one-time parent company or come out with competing versions of their games' histories. It would be nice if that were the norm in the gaming industry.

Because, if you're just supporting a game you don't have the same budget you get for building games. If you want to keep people employed you have to build new games. I would love for CoH, STO, or CO to come up with a ton of new payed expansions to justify the continued employement of their designers, but as CoV, Vibora Bay and in part Going Rogue has shown payed expansions are not taken well by many established players of an MMO...who want to keep getting things for free. Free means you can't make enough to justify the workforce. Oh btw, Jack already announced that NWN that they're creating isn't an MMO. They're creating NWN 3.

In a subscription based game, the subs is where it's expected to get funding for future development. One person paying $15/mo is not enough to pay for development, that's why your goal is to have more people paying that instead of asking that one person to pay extra.

Which is what microtransactions eventually "feel" like.

If subs drop to the point that it's no longer adequate to fund development, that's still a bad sign for the consumer.

But either way, of course there's always some that would not like having to pay more but if expansions are infrequent and contain a substantial amount of features, it wouldn't be received as badly.

Back in my EQ days they had expansions like once a year there abouts, but i didn't mind them because each of those felt like they had several months or more of things to do and explore.

That doesn't seem to be the case in recent times except for a couple of games' expansions.

If GR had Praetoria as a full 1-40 level content (subsequently going to 50) in the next issue, then i think it would've been fine for the most part.

[edit] By "fine" i mean player reception. I think the sales of GR did well since they said about 75% of the active playerbase bought it, which should result in a spike in this quarter's sales figure. Which this year's was down to maybe half of what the normal sales was in past years.[/edit]

NCSoft's sales more than doubled for the quarter that CoV was released.

Quarter Sales
Sep-2005 6,412
Dec-2005 15,706 (CoV)
Mar-2006 6,523

CO was already viewed as extremely lacking in content at launch which included a large content hole which Vibora bay filled except Cryptic tried to ask for more money for it. (Trying not to delve into Cryptic's MT tactics hehe)