Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
They were supposed to lift the NDA a LOOOOOOOONG time ago. They never did. The thing was the actual gameplay was pretty spot on. So why hide it? I think that was fault number one.
And that says to me there was disorder behind the scenes. It can't be about money. Well it is only about money because it took too long and the money has likely backed out at this point. It is more about people probably squabbling about direction in the background. The kind of thing where higher ups lack communication with others and shit just doesn't get done. That is what hiding behind an NDA for way longer than you were implying would happen seems to be saying. Cause I have seen MUCH worse games open up much earlier in development.
Combine that with the fact more was being taken away than added, and it just screams internal fighting to me. Internal fighting that is likely only getting worse as everything falls apart around them.
What I wonder is what happens to the game? Like it is literally playable and fairly enjoyable even at this point. Sure it is missing the hooks and various other things, and has been mired by all the microsoft integration limiting its playability, but the GAME is still there and functional. If the project falls apart, would it just fade away? That is kind of sad.
They were supposed to lift the NDA a LOOOOOOOONG time ago. They never did. The thing was the actual gameplay was pretty spot on. So why hide it? I think that was fault number one.
And that says to me there was disorder behind the scenes. It can't be about money. Well it is only about money because it took too long and the money has likely backed out at this point. It is more about people probably squabbling about direction in the background. The kind of thing where higher ups lack communication with others and shit just doesn't get done. That is what hiding behind an NDA for way longer than you were implying would happen seems to be saying. Cause I have seen MUCH worse games open up much earlier in development.
Combine that with the fact more was being taken away than added, and it just screams internal fighting to me. Internal fighting that is likely only getting worse as everything falls apart around them.
What I wonder is what happens to the game? Like it is literally playable and fairly enjoyable even at this point. Sure it is missing the hooks and various other things, and has been mired by all the microsoft integration limiting its playability, but the GAME is still there and functional. If the project falls apart, would it just fade away? That is kind of sad.
Someone made a comment a little while back that it felt a little bit like playing a flash game and that was my impression from the beta. Never really could tell when I was hitting someone or not with everything going on. Playing phoebe I would just be circle straffing folks mashing sword - couldn't really tell when I hit or not, same with shooting. Was annoyed by little things like trying to jump over a tiny ledge that looked like I should be able to but not being able to cause it was just a little bit too high.
I feel like they showed the game off too early. It got a lot of good press for just being very pretty. Then like two years pass before beta begins. I don't think you can really do that in this day and age.
I feel like they showed the game off too early. It got a lot of good press for just being very pretty. Then like two years pass before beta begins. I don't think you can really do that in this day and age.
A shame because Gigantic is actually really good.
How would that have helped? It probably would have just died and destroyed the company without anyone ever noticing that it existed.
Though I guess Microsoft probably wouldn't have made them the offer, then, so they might be better off without having had to rebuild so much.
I feel like they showed the game off too early. It got a lot of good press for just being very pretty. Then like two years pass before beta begins. I don't think you can really do that in this day and age.
A shame because Gigantic is actually really good.
How would that have helped? It probably would have just died and destroyed the company without anyone ever noticing that it existed.
Though I guess Microsoft probably wouldn't have made them the offer, then, so they might be better off without having had to rebuild so much.
If MS hadn't made them an offer, presumably they'd have run out of money earlier. Then we'd see it in early access on steam, where it'd have choked to death because it wasn't ready for release. I don't think, "we picked up publisher funding" is generally an excuse for a game running out of funds before completion.
I played gigantic at pax prime and had a blast. Ended up going around again and playing a second time. Was excited for it to come out so it's really a bummer that it seems to be dying.
I like it's third person concept and mechanics a lot more than whats going on in a game like overwatch.
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
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Dyshow am I even using this gunRegistered Userregular
Damn, I've been super excited for this game. I just got a beta invite.
The NDA literally went down last week, so people haven't even been able to TALK about it. So yeah.
This was a big thing for me. The NDA plus small closed beta beta community meant no streaming, no guides, no real way to build up knowledge and experience within the community. When should I favor one summon over another? Should I even bother attempting a summon if it's likely to die soon? How important is hunting enemy summons versus hunting players? Which of these dozens of character skills, which I can't even LOOK at until the game timer starts, are smart to take? I had no idea what I was doing and there was nobody to ask because we were all forbidden from talking about the game.
And in-game communication was no better because of UI issues that would have been trivial to solve but were never looked at. All text was thin and white with no outline, very difficult to see over the background. And there were no audio cues for anything, so even if someone was trying to help you over team chat you'd probably never see it. I think ping options were really limited too. And they kept trying to push some gods-forsaken third-party beta chat client.
Ultimately, the game wasn't advancing very fast, and the community COULDN'T advance because of the NDA coupled with Windows 10 throttling the potential player base. Hell, was the beta ever even at a point when it was up full-time? It kept being a day here and a weekend there.
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
They always told us those "crashes" were just a quick fix to stop games from starting without full teams on both sides. Which is something other games that are released actually want (coughhack HOTS).
Of course zero feedback on why and no quick reentry made it seem more like a bug and people used to make up weird reasons for why it was happening on their own.
But outside of that (which if you believe them wasn't even a bug) the game ran flawless so yeah, that is why it would be such a major loss. A bad UI and some sound feedback are REALLY minor things towards a game seeing the light of day. I mean christ even the balance was pretty much good by the standards of the genre it is closest to.
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Allie was just community, and according to her LinkedIn, she's been fired.
Looking at motiga linkedin, it seems pretty much guaranteed they had staff bloat. All of these titles appear to have been staff just let go:
a competitive community manager, community manager, social media manager, head of communications, player relations specialists, streaming specialists, senior content strategist (who did marketing), and events manager
All this for an unlaunched, still under NDA indie game?
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Allie was just community, and according to her LinkedIn, she's been fired.
@TOGSolid might be able to back me up on this, but we attended the art panel at Prime two years ago when they first started showing it off. Lexi and another artist were there and we had asked about the font and graphics and I'm like 99% sure they mentioned Allie developed them and to get in touch with her about them. I just assumed she did other game art stuff in addition to all the community graphics.
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Allie was just community, and according to her LinkedIn, she's been fired.
@TOGSolid might be able to back me up on this, but we attended the art panel at Prime two years ago when they first started showing it off. Lexi and another artist were there and we had asked about the font and graphics and I'm like 99% sure they mentioned Allie developed them and to get in touch with her about them. I just assumed she did other game art stuff in addition to all the community graphics.
Feel free to look at her LinkedIn, but there are no art credits there.
Looking at motiga linkedin, it seems pretty much guaranteed they had staff bloat. All of unrest titles appear to have been staff just let go:
a competitive community manager, community manager, social media manager, head of communications, player relations specialists, streaming specialists, senior content strategist (who did marketing), and events manager
All this for an unlaunched, still under NDA indie game?
Motiga was hopelessly bloated. They had hired an in house streamer, relocated him from Florida to Washington, and were producing an hour long stream every week or so that was watched by less than a hundred people.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Allie was just community, and according to her LinkedIn, she's been fired.
@TOGSolid might be able to back me up on this, but we attended the art panel at Prime two years ago when they first started showing it off. Lexi and another artist were there and we had asked about the font and graphics and I'm like 99% sure they mentioned Allie developed them and to get in touch with her about them. I just assumed she did other game art stuff in addition to all the community graphics.
Feel free to look at her LinkedIn, but there are no art credits there.
Oh no I believe you. Just explaining why I thought she did art stuff.
Oh hey how timely, a beta invite e-mail for the Gigantic closed beta. :tell_me_more:
Donnicton on
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
I had completely forgotten about Gigantic but the moment I saw this title I was like "oh RIGHT, that was another one of THOSE games"
How many is that now, there's Overwatch, Paragon, Battleborn, Battlecry (two separate games!!!) and... did one get canceled already? I think one got canceled
I had completely forgotten about Gigantic but the moment I saw this title I was like "oh RIGHT, that was another one of THOSE games"
How many is that now, there's Overwatch, Paragon, Battleborn, Battlecry (two separate games!!!) and... did one get canceled already? I think one got canceled
It's not directly a MOBA, though.
It takes queues from it, sure, but the best comparison is either TF2's symmetrical capture point maps, or Halo 5's Warzone mode.
With a giant monster fight being the match's end.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited February 2016
It annoyed me greatly when they went Windows-10-exclusive, so I reap some dickish vindictive satisfaction out of this. Like, I get that there are solid business reasons as to why they did it, but I'm looking at a beta invite right now that I can't use because I'm just not upgrading to Windows 10 until the spyware shit gets turned off for good. Totally petty and I fully acknowledge that, but the sooner we can get rid of idiotic reasons for exclusivity, the better.
On top of that, they spent way the hell too much time between the initial announcement and now to wend their way towards a potential possible release maybe somewhere in the future, and the access to the game has been almost nonexistent. People are slavering for Overwatch, but lots of people have also played it and there's been a lot of info about it and we know when it will be here. Gigantic, on the other hand, has been stuck in limbo for a while, with next to no media of it.
I feel bad for them because they basically got paid off by Microsoft to pull a dick move towards exclusivity (which I would've probably done myself, from a business sense), but it seems like there was a solid amount of poor management involved with the project and I don't have a lot of sympathy for that in particular. Just a shame that none of the folks that are the actual problem are likely to get laid off.
On top of that Win10 nonsense, I find it funny that they don't put out another invite wave until the day after Overwatch comes out. It's like... are you just overtly trying to kill yourselves? Is there some golden parachute the CEO stands to cash out with if the game fails and he just doesn't care anymore? What's going on in this company?
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Well, to be fair, I actually got a Gigantic beta invite, BUT NOT AN OVERWATCH ONE. Jerks.
The fact that it is a completely useless invite is even more sadly ironic.
I've had a beta invite for a very long time, never gave it a shot because it required Windows 10 and I wasn't ready to switch over yet. Ironically I just switched to Win 10 this last weekend but I doubt i'll really look into this much.
That Win 10 requirement imo was a HUGE misstep.
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They were supposed to lift the NDA a LOOOOOOOONG time ago. They never did. The thing was the actual gameplay was pretty spot on. So why hide it? I think that was fault number one.
And that says to me there was disorder behind the scenes. It can't be about money. Well it is only about money because it took too long and the money has likely backed out at this point. It is more about people probably squabbling about direction in the background. The kind of thing where higher ups lack communication with others and shit just doesn't get done. That is what hiding behind an NDA for way longer than you were implying would happen seems to be saying. Cause I have seen MUCH worse games open up much earlier in development.
Combine that with the fact more was being taken away than added, and it just screams internal fighting to me. Internal fighting that is likely only getting worse as everything falls apart around them.
What I wonder is what happens to the game? Like it is literally playable and fairly enjoyable even at this point. Sure it is missing the hooks and various other things, and has been mired by all the microsoft integration limiting its playability, but the GAME is still there and functional. If the project falls apart, would it just fade away? That is kind of sad.
To speak to the stuff I CAN speak about, just wanted to note that the type of squabbling and infighting you're describing isn't really an issue at the studio. Motiga is very laterally-organized, so while there are definitely people who have signoff and veto on decisions, opinions are generally heard and acted on.
I'll also say that while I don't have a lot of experience with struggling studios, general toxicity and finger pointing in this situation is pretty dang low. Speaking with people who have been through this scenario at a few different startups, we haven't seen any of the sniping and passive-aggression that tends to accompany a death-spiral. We've all basically known this was coming for awhile, but despite that, there's always been a sense of "we're in this together to the end". We're not naive, but we have faith that we're making a cool thing and want to see it through.
And yeah we've been carpet-bombing the beta invites because servers are still up and can handle the concurrent users so, you know, why not make a show that people want to play the game?
I tried this for the first time yesterday, and sadly I didn't really enjoy my experience. I really need to spend more time on the game before I can make a proper judgement, but the big disappointment so far has been the monsters. When I heard about them I imagined huge, active creatures roaming the map that could join into battles that happened close enough to them, interrupting clashes over objectives, those sorts of things. Instead they seem to merely be glamorised turrets that occasionally move around the map. Gather enough objective points and a cool animation triggers, at which point the enemy monster gets a glowing weak point for you to shoot at for a little while. That seems to be it.
I'm sorry to be so down on it, especially with devs posting here, but so far I'm not seeing the draw.
I had completely forgotten about Gigantic but the moment I saw this title I was like "oh RIGHT, that was another one of THOSE games"
How many is that now, there's Overwatch, Paragon, Battleborn, Battlecry (two separate games!!!) and... did one get canceled already? I think one got canceled
That's how I was feeling, when it was it announced Gigantic was the only one actually released in some form of beta.
But now all these other mobaish / team based / hero focused / shooters are coming out ahead of it and they all have more polish and buzz around them.
It's going to be a crowded place for these sorts of games, and Gigantic has a big hill to climb to get any chunk of the user base.
I played a bit of this...maybe 5 months ago? It was good but didn't seem to stand out to me. A shame because I liked how it looked, it just needed a good hook to seperate it from the pack.
It had a hook: a clean colorful artstyle with excellent character design.
Then Blizzard announced Overwatch like six months later, and Motiga just kinda sat on the game for a year, so the hyped died off quickly.
In an alternate universe where they didn't do the MS deal, it probably goes to closed beta instead of Alpha some time early last summer, open beta and sales around August right as Prime hits. I mean, at the end of the day it's still Blizzard, so Overwatch is always going to be the game to beat, but it could have had a dedicated following and player base well in advance.
It had a hook: a clean colorful artstyle with excellent character design.
Then Blizzard announced Overwatch like six months later, and Motiga just kinda sat on the game for a year, so the hyped died off quickly.
I've been in the beta for a good while. It was a pretty cool game with a clean look and really great character design. Then they rolled out the "Windows 10 only" patch and the entire testing forum was a series of posts that all basically said, "Nope. Good luck." and then the game died.
It's really a bummer, but I don't know what you could possibly expect after the complete shit-show that was GFWL. Except now it's integrated into your OS... I mean, nope.
That's exactly what happened to me. Enjoyed the beta during July, and then they added the Windows 10 requirement and I couldn't play anymore. My version of 7 is not eligible for a free upgrade, and I have no need to upgrade Windows right now. Especially not for one game.
Ya I stopped just before the win10 requirement as well. I can upgrade my computer to it, but it really really needs a format and fresh install after all these years and I haven't built up the will to spend a day doing that yet.
If I had to guess they were probably in a bad place, either take the MS deal and then have to do things like Xbone and win10 versions or maybe not have the money to finish.
My biggest issue with this game was the lack of availability. It was only weekends and that really killed my ability to play it. But I like the hk deathbot character and a few others.
It's always sad to see a game fizzle out due to bad management. Getting that beta code last Prime and then realizing it was Win10 only was a disappointment. The game really has style for days, and Voden looked like he'd be a lot of fun.
I sort of hoped the entire time I tested it they would be like, "Well it turns out a lot of interest in the game comes from folks who can't upgrade to Win10, so we're not going to be doing that."
When it actually happened I mean, I knew it would eventually but I had hoped... which was a silly thing for me to do.
It's always sad to see a game fizzle out due to bad management. Getting that beta code last Prime and then realizing it was Win10 only was a disappointment. The game really has style for days, and Voden looked like he'd be a lot of fun.
Indeed, lovely visuals The rest being still too raw/mediocre and Win 10 did it, I'm afraid.
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And that says to me there was disorder behind the scenes. It can't be about money. Well it is only about money because it took too long and the money has likely backed out at this point. It is more about people probably squabbling about direction in the background. The kind of thing where higher ups lack communication with others and shit just doesn't get done. That is what hiding behind an NDA for way longer than you were implying would happen seems to be saying. Cause I have seen MUCH worse games open up much earlier in development.
Combine that with the fact more was being taken away than added, and it just screams internal fighting to me. Internal fighting that is likely only getting worse as everything falls apart around them.
What I wonder is what happens to the game? Like it is literally playable and fairly enjoyable even at this point. Sure it is missing the hooks and various other things, and has been mired by all the microsoft integration limiting its playability, but the GAME is still there and functional. If the project falls apart, would it just fade away? That is kind of sad.
Happened to Dawngate
A shame because Gigantic is actually really good.
How would that have helped? It probably would have just died and destroyed the company without anyone ever noticing that it existed.
Though I guess Microsoft probably wouldn't have made them the offer, then, so they might be better off without having had to rebuild so much.
If MS hadn't made them an offer, presumably they'd have run out of money earlier. Then we'd see it in early access on steam, where it'd have choked to death because it wasn't ready for release. I don't think, "we picked up publisher funding" is generally an excuse for a game running out of funds before completion.
I like it's third person concept and mechanics a lot more than whats going on in a game like overwatch.
They had a competitive community manager when the game had an active player base of about two hundred tops.
The development issues were glaring and bizarre but whomever was making business and hiring decisions there was out of their goddamn mind.
Guess I should enjoy it while I can?
My friends and I played it at PAX East last year.
We got stomped, but I still had a lot of fun regardless! I've been excited for a chance to learn the game better.
This is really kind of sad for me.
And in-game communication was no better because of UI issues that would have been trivial to solve but were never looked at. All text was thin and white with no outline, very difficult to see over the background. And there were no audio cues for anything, so even if someone was trying to help you over team chat you'd probably never see it. I think ping options were really limited too. And they kept trying to push some gods-forsaken third-party beta chat client.
Ultimately, the game wasn't advancing very fast, and the community COULDN'T advance because of the NDA coupled with Windows 10 throttling the potential player base. Hell, was the beta ever even at a point when it was up full-time? It kept being a day here and a weekend there.
I'm pretty sure Allie also does art assets for them. So while she may be the competitive manager, she's still contributing to development. Or was. Not sure if she was on the chopping block. But while that was her title, it wasn't her full time job. As for hiring Thor...I don't know what the hell was going on with that. I've met him twice now, and he's nice enough. But his casting wasn't anything really amazing, and he had nothing to actually talk about with the show.
All that being said, yeah they were putting the cart before the horse big time in terms of competitive play, and they kept the player base way too artificially small for way too long. Hell it's still way too small. It's a really fun game, once you get the intricacies of it down. It's weird, because all of the factors holding it back are "easily" fixable. It's not a balance issue. It's not bugs or broken shit in the game itself. DCs and crashes joining matches are annoying, but wouldn't be bad if queue times weren't horrendous.
I apologize for the following sort of self promotion (I guess?) but if you guys are trying it out, and want the help or advice you won't get elsewhere, ping me here with questions or follow my brothers stream (since he can stream it now). He's easily in the top tier competition wise and understands a lot of the timing/push intricacies better than I do. He's also going to try to snag a few keys from Motiga to give away on stream. I'll see if we can get a couple extra for PA folks here who haven't gotten in yet.
Of course zero feedback on why and no quick reentry made it seem more like a bug and people used to make up weird reasons for why it was happening on their own.
But outside of that (which if you believe them wasn't even a bug) the game ran flawless so yeah, that is why it would be such a major loss. A bad UI and some sound feedback are REALLY minor things towards a game seeing the light of day. I mean christ even the balance was pretty much good by the standards of the genre it is closest to.
Allie was just community, and according to her LinkedIn, she's been fired.
a competitive community manager, community manager, social media manager, head of communications, player relations specialists, streaming specialists, senior content strategist (who did marketing), and events manager
All this for an unlaunched, still under NDA indie game?
@TOGSolid might be able to back me up on this, but we attended the art panel at Prime two years ago when they first started showing it off. Lexi and another artist were there and we had asked about the font and graphics and I'm like 99% sure they mentioned Allie developed them and to get in touch with her about them. I just assumed she did other game art stuff in addition to all the community graphics.
Feel free to look at her LinkedIn, but there are no art credits there.
Bingo.
Oh no I believe you. Just explaining why I thought she did art stuff.
How many is that now, there's Overwatch, Paragon, Battleborn, Battlecry (two separate games!!!) and... did one get canceled already? I think one got canceled
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It's not directly a MOBA, though.
It takes queues from it, sure, but the best comparison is either TF2's symmetrical capture point maps, or Halo 5's Warzone mode.
With a giant monster fight being the match's end.
On top of that, they spent way the hell too much time between the initial announcement and now to wend their way towards a potential possible release maybe somewhere in the future, and the access to the game has been almost nonexistent. People are slavering for Overwatch, but lots of people have also played it and there's been a lot of info about it and we know when it will be here. Gigantic, on the other hand, has been stuck in limbo for a while, with next to no media of it.
I feel bad for them because they basically got paid off by Microsoft to pull a dick move towards exclusivity (which I would've probably done myself, from a business sense), but it seems like there was a solid amount of poor management involved with the project and I don't have a lot of sympathy for that in particular. Just a shame that none of the folks that are the actual problem are likely to get laid off.
The fact that it is a completely useless invite is even more sadly ironic.
That Win 10 requirement imo was a HUGE misstep.
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To speak to the stuff I CAN speak about, just wanted to note that the type of squabbling and infighting you're describing isn't really an issue at the studio. Motiga is very laterally-organized, so while there are definitely people who have signoff and veto on decisions, opinions are generally heard and acted on.
I'll also say that while I don't have a lot of experience with struggling studios, general toxicity and finger pointing in this situation is pretty dang low. Speaking with people who have been through this scenario at a few different startups, we haven't seen any of the sniping and passive-aggression that tends to accompany a death-spiral. We've all basically known this was coming for awhile, but despite that, there's always been a sense of "we're in this together to the end". We're not naive, but we have faith that we're making a cool thing and want to see it through.
And yeah we've been carpet-bombing the beta invites because servers are still up and can handle the concurrent users so, you know, why not make a show that people want to play the game?
I'm sorry to be so down on it, especially with devs posting here, but so far I'm not seeing the draw.
That's how I was feeling, when it was it announced Gigantic was the only one actually released in some form of beta.
But now all these other mobaish / team based / hero focused / shooters are coming out ahead of it and they all have more polish and buzz around them.
It's going to be a crowded place for these sorts of games, and Gigantic has a big hill to climb to get any chunk of the user base.
Then Blizzard announced Overwatch like six months later, and Motiga just kinda sat on the game for a year, so the hyped died off quickly.
In an alternate universe where they didn't do the MS deal, it probably goes to closed beta instead of Alpha some time early last summer, open beta and sales around August right as Prime hits. I mean, at the end of the day it's still Blizzard, so Overwatch is always going to be the game to beat, but it could have had a dedicated following and player base well in advance.
I've been in the beta for a good while. It was a pretty cool game with a clean look and really great character design. Then they rolled out the "Windows 10 only" patch and the entire testing forum was a series of posts that all basically said, "Nope. Good luck." and then the game died.
It's really a bummer, but I don't know what you could possibly expect after the complete shit-show that was GFWL. Except now it's integrated into your OS... I mean, nope.
If I had to guess they were probably in a bad place, either take the MS deal and then have to do things like Xbone and win10 versions or maybe not have the money to finish.
When it actually happened I mean, I knew it would eventually but I had hoped... which was a silly thing for me to do.
Indeed, lovely visuals