As a preface: this is mainly directed at MPOE-PR.
I wanted to wait for two things before I made another post on this topic: 1) the release of MP's game design dossier, and 2) the release of GTA V's gameplay video.
As a quick anecdote, a few years ago before I owned a 360, I was playing GTA IV at a friend's place. He stated something that has stuck with me ever since, "Every action in this game is so satisfying." At that moment I realized the depth and subtlety of the design of that game. Something so profound I couldn't even begin to fathom the man hours that went into even the simplest of actions.
In the GTA IV artbook that comes with the special edition there is a short commentary from the art director, Aaron Garbut. He does a quick postmortem of the evolution of GTA, but goes on to state the following:
With each new generation of consoles, we have to revolutionise what we do. As artists, animators, designers, audio engineers, programmers and writers, we have to convince you once again that what we do is worth taking an interest in. We have to take what we've done in the past, throw it away, and start all over again.
When we moved into the last generation of consoles, there was a very obvious choice in how to evolve the experience. We took the top down world of Grand Theft Auto and moved it into three dimensions. The key difference pulled the player into a new world and immersed them in the experience. For the last 5 years, we continued to push this experience mainly in terms of scale; bigger play areas, more vehicles, more characters, more story, more missions, more features. When we had the opportunity to rethink our process, it became apparent that what we needed to do with all this extra power was to take a look at what we already did well and add detail, rather than simply provide more of everything. This time, the changes are both more subtle and more powerful. Just adding more polygons and bigger textures would be too easy. Instead, our goal was to add detail to the entire experience and to create a world in high definition, both in terms of the visual richness and the opportunities to interact with it. We pushed ourselves hard to add a sense of cohesion to the world, a sense of purpose to the characters that live in it, a sense that the player is part of something larger. We wanted to create a world with its own history, its own sense of identity.
This is the exact opposite of what I gathered when I read MP's statement. "Do not form an expectation and you won't be disappointed" and "nothing will work at first". This is garbage, I'm sorry to use such a blanket statement, but what's the point of promoting a flagship product, then releasing a buggy alpha?
Personally I feel as though I'm being served a glorious turd all dressed up in fancy clothes, and being told it's an innovative next generation action figure, or that it will one day grow into that innovative action figure. Maybe this isn't exactly the case, but the evidence presented isn't very convincing.
The issue I brought up to begin with:
In game development the traditional business process is in reverse, you start by making sure your game won't suck, then do everything else.
This has been reiterated:
if your game is horrible it won't sell, no matter if it has a good business model
ThickAsThieves philosophically disagrees with me saying, "Just wait and see, you'll be surprised" or as he posted in the forum:
A game be released, yet not be ready for final judgment. This is a work in progress, and likely will be released as one as well.
SimCity tried this, players realized they were being served a turd, and Maxis is losing fans, as I stated in a previous post.
GTAV's first gameplay video came out, and the final judgement can already be made this game will be nothing short of extraordinary.
How do you make a game fun? You listen. And you clearly don't want to listen to your would be fans:
None of this crap is a contribution, or useful, or welcome. We don't need ideas, we don't want ideas. We have plenty of ideas, and I can assure you nobody over at S.MG even reads or ever will read any of this crap, outside of me, and my orders are to just discard it whole.
I think on one end you are confusing public opinion with forum agitation, and on the other Nobody Cares what FanFic Says. It's a rule. People who try and please a public are neither artists nor ever successful, and it occurs to me that probably the greatest service S.MG offers developers is complete immunity from having to ever listen to Internet people.
Game designers very much do care what FanFic says, because FanFic is a fan. It's probably a disservice to the designers to shield them from Internet people, as they will never be able to hear legitimate criticism. You'll probably state, "Internet people don't count as real critics" for one reason or another, but that dismissive nature further digs this hole, that I have no idea why is being dug.
When I had a discussion with ThickAsThieves about my concerns on IRC with MP present (I don't keep logs so I'm quoting/paraphrasing by memory), it seemed as though development would be open to players, as stated in the dossier announcement on Trilema. But what became clearly evident is the allure of the game will be provided by emergent gameplay, particularly based on interactions between players. Your example of "sword renting", would be an example of this emergent behavior. The main problem is this depends on veteran players, and a well maintained community. I brought up the example of Eve, and The Battle of Asakai which involved more than some 3000 players. There is an entire player based history (much like the history of the Bitcoin community), as to why this Battle occurred.
Eve turned 10 in May, thus it's taken years to develop the intricate emergence that allows for a player driven war to occur.
A few days later we went on to discuss Elite after I jokingly brought up Roomba Simulator 2013 as being the next Game of the Year (which may surprisingly get a few thousand downloads due to it's ridiculous nature). Soon after I see this post:
http://trilema.com/2013/have-you-played-elite-back-in-the-80s/Relating to Eve, and subsequently a post relating to the scams in Eve created from it's emergent gameplay. Eve of course is a reimplementation of Elite, and the original developers of Eve state Elite was the inspiration for developing Eve.
Perhaps the untitled S.MG flagship title will be able to attract a player base capable of creating such an emergent experience, but without following fundamentals, this dream will never become a reality.
But if a battle of Asakai were to occur in in S.MG's lets hope it goes a bit better than in Eve, as this player who was there stated:
I was there. I was there and it was horrible. The game's developers have taken this unholy, all consuming black nightmare and turned it into a PR triumph, but let me tell you my perspective on Asakai.
By the time my fleet, a Goonswarm subcapital reinforcement fleet, arrived, maximum time dilation was already occurring; time was technically being made to pass in this solar system at one tenth the speed of normal time outside the system. Except all that was doing was alleviating the effect of the soul crushing lag enough to let us experience it fully in all its hellish detail instead of, for example, dumping people out of game or bringing everything to a halt. Time was actually passing hundreds of times slower. Actions that would normally take 5 seconds were taking ten minutes. Responses to control input that should be instant were taking 5 minutes. At one point an action that should have taken less than ten seconds to complete took 20 minutes.
Over the span of 5 hours, the actual fighting that took place would under normal circumstances have happened in about 10 minutes.
Then, because it was only happening in that system, the entire rest of Eve still running at normal speed had hours to speed across the universe, jumping system to system hundreds of times faster, to participate in or just to see this fight the likes of which have never been seen and had hours for breaking news of it happening to spread. So from the perspective of the fight in Asakai, endless waves of escalating reinforcements were joining a fight from the word go from across the universe, and from the Goonswarm perspective what had started as a reasonable looking fight with even numbers got vastly out of hand, only after our people were committed to the inescapable black hole of time dilated lag. They technically managed to escape after around 10 minutes of realtime fighting. Ten minutes stretched across 5 hours where we sat and watched everyone with a grudge against Goonswarm (many, many very stupid dull people) fill the system.
The game developers are full of excuses about it, such as that we should have told them this accidental monumental fuckup by the original titan pilot - DBRB, we still love you, don't ever change - was going to happen or that we should be grateful they've improved things to where their servers didn't just explode in flames, which would and has happened in the past. But personally I'm pretty annoyed they've turned it into a promotional event when they really dropped the ball.
Time dilation as we here on io9 know should technically mean everyone there aged slightly less than the rest of Eve, but I felt pretty old by the time I managed to heave my ship out of that disaster in the early hours of the morning.
A game needs to be fun, period. Don't lose sight of that, and perhaps S.MG will be able to make something of itself. But that is a difficult endeavor. With public acknowledgement of a lack of artists (they are in constant recruitment from what I can tell), a mysterious if not absent designer, and a PR rep telling me "it's gonna be fun don't you worry", while arguing:
at some point you'll have to notice that all you do at the computer as long you're not typing is move the mouse and click the mouse.
I'm hard pressed to have faith S.MG has competence in this field. S.MPOE is successful, MPEX is successful. But the endeavor that MP is undertaking as his flagship for S.MG dwarfs the former two monuments in scope and burden. To think otherwise is delusional.
To conclude this, my biggest concern comes from the public relations department of S.MG dismissing the "aesthetics" of game design as a whole. Maybe that wasn't the initial intent, and perhaps there is a true appreciation for them, but I don't see any belief or adherence to them thus far.
Again maybe the statement:
at some point you'll have to notice that all you do at the computer as long you're not typing is move the mouse and click the mouse
was just to say "it's just a game" and a game is just some abstraction. Maybe you don't give a fuck about gaming. Or perhaps you think the argument is moot.
But Rockstar publicly released this in relation to the postmortem of GTAIV, the point I've been trying to get across:
...it's easy to [dismiss] the look and feel of a can of soda but if details like this are not considered, the entire experience begins to fall apart. Through the combination of detail, enormous scale and cross referencing, video games can offer an experience unlike any other creative medium. It offers you the chance to experience a virtual world as you would the real one, at your own pace, through multiple ways based on your own perceptions, choices and actions.
It's the interaction with this world that helps push the experience further. We interact with the world in a physical way and by this carrying over to the damage on the cars or the movement of the characters, it adds a layer of realism. Each element interacts properly with the other to the point that smashing a car into a bench will dent the car, and a flying bit of wood will knock over a passerby. Again, it's all about detail.
...These are visual touches that people may not consciously notice but makes them feel like they are visiting a real place.
While you public released:
While I can appreciate your own aesthetics and the fact that the brain exists principally to recognize patterns in the environment, be they actually there or not, at some point you'll have to notice that all you do at the computer as long you're not typing is move the mouse and click the mouse.
Now don't take this the wrong way, but if this is the mindset S.MG is taking in their approach to making games, (that is what S.MG does right?), Farmville the MMO will arise from this clusterfuck, and the ~9000 BTC raised will have been for naught. I hope to God, this isn't the case, but the evidence isn't very convincing.
