|
I have no idea what possessed me to read 5,000 posts worth of this thread but welp, here I am.Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:Will there ever be a promised-game like this again, that brings so many weirdos into its orbit and gives us a view into the minds of people who never quite got past their tweens? It's not even in the same astronomical unit as Star Citizen, but some years back Ryan Dancey, a guy whose claim to fame is getting hired by game companies for his amazing ideas and then leaving/getting shitcanned when his ideas turn out to be bad, raised some 1.3 million dollars in total to create Pathfinder Online, an MMO based on a tabletop roleplaying game which itself is a serial-numbers-filed-off copy of another tabletop roleplaying game. I bring this up because Pathfinder Online, if you go back and look at all the hype surrounding it before most people more or less stopped caring, is like Star Citizen in microcosm. Dancey ran a million dollar Kickstarter full of stretch goals to give backers promises of exclusive gameplay bonuses and swag which, of course, haven't materialized since there's barely a game to be had by this point...like Star Citizen, it languishes in a sort of "pre-Alpha" state. Some people payed thousands of dollars to own virtual property in this hot new upcoming MMO. And of course not only did Dancey promise all the faithful backers that PFO would be an amazing player-driven sandbox experience without any non-consensual griefing thanks to his staunch anti-goon policies (not exaggerating, Dancey was briefly employed by CCP and has Strong Opinions about goons in games), but those same faithful backers spun whole reams of crazy bullshit "features" that they wanted/expected to be included in this new game. Can I be a stableboy? What about a tavern keeper, I want to serve adventurers drinks when they aren't off actually doing quests and otherwise actually playing the game. You know what would be great, is if when my 20th level wizard casts Time Stop that it literally freezes time for everyone on that server until the spell expires, can you do that? Last September, most of the MMO company's staff was laid off while Ryan Dancey quit two weeks prior for "unrelated personal reasons," having successfully wasted over a million nerd-dollars to accomplish gently caress-all. So to answer your question, I don't think there's ever going to be any shortage of people who get so wrapped up in their unrealistic and dumb ideas of the promised MMO that will be so amazing and immersive that it whisks them out of their mundane lives ala Captain N that they're willing to pitch thousands of dollars at a snake-oil salesman willing to tell them that the next great advance in procedural PVP slider technology is just around the corner and for an extra $250 theirs can have racing stripes on it.
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 06:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:29 |
|
|
Tippis posted:Hey, I remember him. He was Chief Marketing Officer or something during the ambulation/WiS/incarna development period. Funny that… especially considering how it, too, only ever produced a dodgy tech demo without gameplay after having been iterated on five times over and having all the work that went into a very respectable vertical slice be thrown out. Ryan Dancey is the person responsible for convincing Wizards of the Coast that making Dungeons & Dragons "open source" would be a great decision that would assuredly lead to them replacing all other RPGs forever with the d20 system. Instead of caused the nerdgame equivalent of a housing bubble crash and led to Paizo being able to wholesale file the serial numbers off of the third edition of D&D and resell it as their own game, becoming D&D's number one competitor. In the Kickstarter for PFO (one of them, because there were two Kickstarters, both successful, one for a "proof of concept" and the other to fund a "tech demo" meant to solicit even further investment) he was billed as the "Steve Jobs of MMO marketing," a title which seems self-applied since I can't actually find any evidence of anyone saying that about him ever. I can't find the direct quotes at the moment but someone asked Dancey about griefing in PFO and what would be done to keep the horrible goonswarms from disrupting everyone's rich and immersive roleplaying experience. His answer was essentially "through community action and self-policing, but also heavy-handed and arbitrary moderation." A little something for everyone really. Here's an SA thread all about PFO for those who want to read more. The consensus is that the ultimate way to grief PFO players is to simply let them play PFO. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 07:13
|
|
|
alf_pogs posted:thanks for the pathfinder online stuff, thats all super super fascinating. i play pathfinder with a regular group of dnd palz and its sordid history is really interesting. as much as we all love DnD we like having one consistent format for roleplaying, and 3.5 was our fave version of it so yeah. I can't at all fault Paizo for taking advantage of Wizards of the Coast essentially leaving their lunch out there to be eaten, nobody did anything shady or illegal or scammy there, WotC should have had someone to explain to them "this is what might happen if you make your big name RPG open-source" but, well, that person was Ryan Dancey. Pathfinder Online looked scammy as gently caress from the outset though, and the ways it parallels Star Citizen are uncanny, from the whales dropping four figures on a jpeg of a tavern (with LTI no less!) to the sheer incompetence on display (hey players, be aware there's a bug that could cause you to lose the expensive poo poo you prepurchased if you do certain things, we don't know what causes it though) to the endless stream of empty promises designed to make people fantasize about a game that in no way resembled what was actually delivered (basically an empty Everquest-esque protoMMO with no real content). And like clockwork Ryan Dancey is nowhere to be found when things fall apart, no doubt preparing for his next great venture as a professional ideas guy to people too stupid to know not to trust someone who used to read co-workers' private e-mails.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 07:56
|
|
|
Solarin posted:My theory: Belonging is a hell of a drug. Some find it in online games. People really do need it and will fight to keep it from vanishing. This is the one and only time I'll play armchair psychoanalyst re: Star Citizen and Pathfinder Online and the like. Someone in the PFO thread summed it up rather perfectly I think when they said that it's not games so much that these folks are craving but some kind of virtual reality. That's why you get people wanting to mix drinks and tend stables and be innkeepers and hide in boxes and spinning these wild, entirely fabricated daydreams about life in the 'verse and poo poo, because what they're actually hoping they're funding is some sort of proto-holodeck where they can plug in their VR headset and immersive flight joysticks and be transported to another world entirely. I'm not suggesting that literally every person who backs something like this is trying to escape their lives or something, I'm sure far more people backed Star Citizen simply because they thought (for some reason) that Chris Roberts would give them a cool new game to play, but by and large those folks are probably the silent majority that don't post stuff like the Stimpire or suggest that there should be space airliners with space stewardesses and a drink mixing minigame. Like, it's been brought up here multiple times over the last 5,000 or so posts (and gently caress off if you think I'm going back and looking for who said it when) that the sort of person who wants drink mixing minigames and space news vans and poo poo isn't the sort of person who's seriously played video games in the last 20 years or so, and yeah, that's probably right. Because they aren't actually after a video game, and their bizarre requests for ridiculous content and strange essays about a fictional video game that exists only within their heads is pretty strong evidence of that. They want Chris Roberts to be the one to finally deliver this fully immersive, seamless fantasy they've concocted. I don't know why they think he can do it when as far as I can tell his list of accomplishments begins and ends at "made Wing Commander," but he's speaking their language when he agrees that there's going to be seamless orbit-to-surface landings and procedurally generated flora and fauna and so they'll happily keep throwing money at him in the hopes that this project achieves some kind of critical mass, or hell, maybe just to keep the dream going at this point.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 10:08
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:Is this game some sort of pyramid scheme? No, because the idea behind a pyramid scheme, at least in theory, is that you have a chance to get rich yourself, generally at the expense of some other lower layer of suckers. There is no pyramid here, CIG is basically in the business of selling people their own repackaged daydreams with a glossy coat of CryEngine paint to make them seem more plausible. I would say that what a lot of these people actually want is something like a tabletop roleplaying game where they genuinely can try sneaking aboard starships in crates and fighting space pirates and exploring strange new worlds to their hearts' content, all powered by their own imagination, except the problem is that TRPGs actually require you to make some friends (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) in order to play them and I look at some of the backers that keep coming up over and over in this thread and man, I don't know how plausible that scenario actually is.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 10:50
|
|
|
trucutru posted:Don't forget these are the most boring people in the planet and, when given the choice to dream as big as they can they say "poker!", "crates!", "winamp in space!". It's like, okay, space combat? Dogfights? Shootmans? You can get that stuff in any game. If I had to guess I'd say these folks think that "immersion" means "an unrealistic and tedious recreation of every single bit of existence right down to the mundane poo poo most normal folks couldn't care less about" because otherwise what you have is just a game and not a fully immersive experience. Notice that this is that dude's exact argument. Hey, wouldn't it be immersive to have poker and jukeboxes and stuff? And while we're at it, why don't video game characters ever have to go to the bathroom? To these folks, all that boring poo poo is necessary for a game to transcend being a thing you play for XX hours and put away into a thing you lose yourself in for decades or whatever.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2016 11:24
|
|
|
skaboomizzy posted:Just realized that my most-followed topics on these forums are (in no particular order): Reality TV had the right idea, just not the right scope.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2016 08:50
|
|
|
Kavak posted:Obsidian did both Pillars of Eternity and (Partially) Wasteland II and had publishers for them. I think the idea is that these are very niche products that need money up front for development- someone had a post a few days ago about this. Bigger name publishers and developers have an interest in crowdfunding because it can be an extremely effective method of building hype and awareness and it even brings money in rather than money having to be spent, especially in the case of projects where they want to secure more funding from actual investors and want something to show them to go "see, look at all this interest we generated." Like look at Shenmue 3, there's no realistic way that Shenmue 3 is going to be made 100% off what they raised through the Kickstarter for it, but they announced the Kickstarter at E3 and hype levels went through the roof and hey, they even pulled in a bunch of backer money they can add to whatever other sources of funding they receive.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2016 09:39
|
|
|
Beer4TheBeerGod posted:You don't. What you need are professionals with experience on mocap who will work for far less than Gary Oldman, and then top notch talent voice actors who can overcome the limitations of the medium through the power of their voice. Naughty Dog started using mocap with the second of the Uncharted games and they had the voice actors provide the mocap data because they felt that having one person provide the physical acting and another person providing the voice acting would have too much of a disconnect between the performances, but the difference is that they weren't employing AAA-tier Hollywood talent for either. Also they didn't use mocap for things like faces and finger animation, all that stuff was keyframed. There's an article about it here that goes into more detail.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2016 20:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:29 |
|
|
Eonwe posted:does he think multimillion dollar companies keep lawyers on retainer to send letters to internet trolls This is why Half Life 3 will never come out btw.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2016 21:36
|
|