BBC claim says that Unreal firm could buy the game RTW built using its engine
The slow, sorry saga of Realtime Worlds' collapse has found another twist.
Despite a failed attempt to sell off the sunken studio and its games assets, a BBC report has named Epic Games as one of the parties interested in buying the rights to APB.
All Points Bulletin was the online game that led to RTW's downfall - built from $100m investment, it failed to find an audience quickly after its release in July. Although the game had potential, it seemingly failed too fast, and took the Dundee studio with it.
The game was built using Epic Games' Unreal Engine, the hugely popular technology powering a large number of major releases.
Which means that if Epic was interested in the game assets, it would know, at least, the technology it is built on.
But Epic has been tight-lipped as to the accuracy of the claim.
The BBC quotes Epic Games spokesperson Dana Cowley as saying: "Mark [Rein, Epic Games VP] absolutely loves APB, and everyone here loved what they saw.
"We've got our hands full of Gears of War 3, Bullet Storm and the recently announced Project Sword. If any talks like that are going on, then they would be confidential."
We had a deep fear of letting anyone find out anything about our game until the last possible minute. “Release early and iterate”, a proven success model for online software, was anathema to RTW. We would constantly find ways to avoid showing features off or talking openly about the product. Press interest was built by incredibly elaborately-constructed demos, choreographed with clockwork precision. Our team of QA ninjas trained night and day so as to be able to act out the same scripted combat scenario on demand (they were actually pretty impressive to watch doing this!). At first, the press would just watch these sessions as examples of “live” gameplay. Later, they’d be allowed to join in, but would be so outnumbered by our staff that they would be forced to stay on the rails of our script.
Our best attempts to interact with the outside world were when we occasionally let some of our QA and development staff loose on the forums and in-game.
The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for – wait for it – emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
But these are all problems that successful games have. We had a different problem – engaging with our community and getting people to give a shit about our product – and all these rules and divisions just got in the way .
My god. This is the exact shit I was blasting them for at the end of the beta. It seemed like no one at RTW gave a shit about what the community said, because hardly anyone there addressed peoples' suggestions/criticisms of the game.
It seemed like, from the beginning, RTW had their minds locked on how they wanted everything to be in this game, and didn't pay attention to fun, valid suggestions made by the community if they didn't fit into RTW's preconceived vision for APB.
Where's Seneku? He posts around here, and was an employee at RTW.
e: heeeeey, Seneku.
e2: after reading your post, it seems I was 100% correct
I wouldn't go that far. They probably just spent it REALLY REALLY BADLY.
I would love to see where the money went. It's not like we're talking about a start-up industrial company that has to buy a lot of equipment to make widgets. I'd bet the majority of the money went to salaries.
I'd think for a $100 million spent on bright young things, you'd end up with a product that didn't crash and burn in less than 3 months.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Our best attempts to interact with the outside world were when we occasionally let some of our QA and development staff loose on the forums and in-game.
The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for – wait for it – emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
Yep, loved how we were given the job of moderating the forums etc then told off when we actually did it, that was the point when I knew they'd lost the plot...I stopped posting around that time when that happened and when another was given a bollocking for trying to cut down on the amount of flaming and crap that was going on in the forum community, we were the only ones active on the forums and trying to help but we were given zero support at best.
I'm not gonna really go onto the subject much as obviously many others already have and the general feelings of mismanagement are known. What I will say is that nothing in any of the reviews should have came as a surprise to all but the most blinded of them, QA fed back on it constantly, lots of the people internally did so as well and lets not forget the beta players providing tons of feedback as well...instead of actioning changes they simply ploughed on ahead regardless. If I blame anyone for this mess its the Designers and management that had locked in their overall structure years ago and refused to change the game until it was far too late.
The point at which it became obvious to me that APB was done was in the beta. Mainly, when I read over the suggestion forums, saw a lot of really great feedback on how to make the game systems in APB a hell of a lot more fun, and noticed that the forums staff at RTW were mainly replying to posts about stupid shit like implementing stripper poles and such, rather than addressing serious balance concerns.
It's not like I'm mad that my idea didn't get implemented, rather I was upset that RTW had all of these great, intelligent people testing their game, at no cost to their company. RTW could have just started up a thread on the forum about game balance, and had all those people discussing ideas with forums staff at a moment's notice. I was practically salivating to have the chance to discuss my ideas with someone at RTW over the forums. Even if they came in and said "nah, that's shit. We're not doing it." I would have said "OK! Here's something else that goes in a totally different direction!"
That's when I realized that even though people were making really awesome suggestions, if they at all clashed with what the developers had in mind, even if the developers' ideas were complete shit when held up to an ounce of scrutiny, the players' suggestions may as well have not been made at all.
One of the most harmful organisational walls we built was between “business” and “development”. Once we took that investment, responsibility for anything with a £ sign in front fell to a small group of “business” people, most of them in our US office. We’d ask these people how much gameplay bandwidth cost us on APB, in case we needed to optimise our usage to make the game profitable. We’d ask how much patch bandwidth on our CDN cost, in case it was worth adding bittorrent support to our patching system. We’d ask how much running a server cost, in case it made business sense to spend more time on server code optimisation and reduce the number of servers we needed.
Every time, we’d be met with a condescending pat on the shoulders. “Don’t you worry about that, son, you just get on with making the game. Let us take care of the money.” We asked, and we asked, and we asked, and were eventually point-blank refused, and later just ignored, on these and other important questions.
Anyone who looked at the game in beta and seriously thought "Yeah, this is good to launch in a month." got what they deserved. "Release and iterate" does not work in the unforgiving MMO market. I guess those millions didn't tell you want many of us know as fairly common knowledge.
I somewhat disagree. I think release and iterate can work, but it has to be presented as that from the outset, and you can't hype your game up as this complete product, then release a half finished game. Your game also probably shouldn't have a 100 million dollar budget if release and iterate is your plan. Release and iterate does work (see Mount & Blade and Minecraft, though admittedly those aren't MMO's), it just has to be done correctly.
The reality is a smaller development company with less than half the budget probably could have created a smaller and simpler version of APB that would have been exponentially better put together.
A company gets a success under their belt and suddenly thinks they are on par with Valve or Blizzard, but even then don't realize how Valve and Blizzard do business.
Release and iterate does work (see Mount & Blade and Minecraft, though admittedly those aren't MMO's), it just has to be done correctly.
Well Cryptic somehow pulled it off twice.
I'll give you Champions Online, because I think it still has a moderately healthy population from what I understand. STO on the other hand is a sinking ship (if those were your examples).
Yeah I guess STO wasn't that good an example, but I'm still surprised that people not only paid for that game, but also purchased lifetime subscriptions considering the abundant lack of content (amongst other things) prior to release.
Yeah I guess STO wasn't that good an example, but I'm still surprised that people not only paid for that game, but also purchased lifetime subscriptions considering the abundant lack of content (amongst other things) prior to release.
I see this over and over again with MMOs (APB included). People don't want to believe they've bought into the hype of what is effectively a bad game. They'll use any sort of mechanism available to trick themselves into spending money on a game they've been following. Even when it's abundantly clear that they aren't getting what they thought they'd get.
That's one major design fault that they failed to see in beta due to developer blindness.
Man, I missed this on the first page.
But I would like to point out (again) that I called this exact problem (veterans completely slaughtering newbies) about 3 days into the North American beta.
That's one major design fault that they failed to see in beta due to developer blindness.
Man, I missed this on the first page.
But I would like to point out (again) that I called this exact problem (veterans completely slaughtering newbies) about 3 days into the North American beta.
Thanks for listening, RTW!
That's a pretty fatal design flaw. Very few people are going to play a game where they constantly get slaughtered for months on end.
In a game where character levels or skill points or whatever make a huge difference, separating PVP areas into tiers seems like a no-brainer.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Yeah I guess STO wasn't that good an example, but I'm still surprised that people not only paid for that game, but also purchased lifetime subscriptions considering the abundant lack of content (amongst other things) prior to release.
I see this over and over again with MMOs (APB included). People don't want to believe they've bought into the hype of what is effectively a bad game. They'll use any sort of mechanism available to trick themselves into spending money on a game they've been following. Even when it's abundantly clear that they aren't getting what they thought they'd get.
The hype machine of flashy trailers, screenshots and scripted interviews glamor so many people into buying crappy products.
Pretty much any MMO put out today is going to have a flashy trailer designed to mislead you about the actual product.
Look at Aion's trailers, or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online. Great trailers. Bad games.
If you're fooled into buying a product from a trailer in this day and age, you're a chump.
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
edited September 2010
If upcoming MMOs from Bioware, ArenaNet and SquareEnix (and it should be obvious which respective MMOs i'm talking about) fail horribly in delivering on their promises in coming months, I will lose all hope in this industry. I don't think it's likely that even one of them will fuck up this bad, because RTW was just in over their heads and stupid as hell with their money, whereas these companies have ethier made lots of successful titles and even MMOs, or are swimming in even more money that they aren't just throwing down a tube.
This genre is just so full of fail at the end of the day because one company (Blizzard) did it right, and made all the business people froth at the mouth for easy, recurrent revenue, without realizing how it all really works, and have thus bankrolled failures such as APB. And we help them do it, like Krunck said, we let ourselves drown in hype and then spend money on mediocrity only to later scratch our heads and wonder why there is no ideal and fun MMOs as stable and polished as WoW out there.
That's one major design fault that they failed to see in beta due to developer blindness.
Man, I missed this on the first page.
But I would like to point out (again) that I called this exact problem (veterans completely slaughtering newbies) about 3 days into the North American beta.
Thanks for listening, RTW!
That's a pretty fatal design flaw. Very few people are going to play a game where they constantly get slaughtered for months on end.
In a game where character levels or skill points or whatever make a huge difference, separating PVP areas into tiers seems like a no-brainer.
The thing is, APB had a match-making system that was supposed to circumvent this very problem - people of vary gear levels facing each other. In theory, the matchmaking system would only put you up against people with similar gear levels.
The problem is, there are around 300 gear levels, and only 100 people available in any given matchmaking pool. Then, you have that number divided by faction, as well. So, if you're an enforcer, you'd only have ~50 people to match up against. Crims could fight other crims, so they'd have 100 possible matches.
As you can tell, the odds of a R50, for instance, going up against a guy with R200+ are still pretty good, because the matchmaking pool in APB was just way too small for a good matchmaking system.
APB was such an awesome idea, but was so incredibly flawed in so many obvious ways.
Really though, reading that blog posted on the first page really explains a lot. When I was in the APB beta at the time, I wondered how the different systems in the game could have possibly been so bad to start off with, and despite the community's good suggestions, those systems stayed pretty bad when the game launched.
Welp, now I know why that happened.
e: this whole thing is like a cathartic schadenfreude for me, in case some of you are wondering why I keep going on and on.
I told them that the progression system in this game was going to turn a lot of people off, but they didn't listen. And look what happened.
This is like watching an ex-girlfriend try to become a supermodel, and you told her that she'd have to go to the gym to pull it off, but she didn't listen. You'll just sit back, and watch her fail miserably, telling her "I told you so". And truthfully, she really could have made it big had she listened to you.
Watching that video just make me want to see more internal stuff from RTW as the development of this game was going down. I just have to know what was going on in those offices.
And another concept video, obviously not all this stuff would've made the cut, some of these were what went into 1.4.1/1.4.2 albeit in a slightly nerfed version.
seneku on
-=Seneku=-
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
Release and iterate does work (see Mount & Blade and Minecraft, though admittedly those aren't MMO's), it just has to be done correctly.
Well Cryptic somehow pulled it off twice.
I'll give you Champions Online, because I think it still has a moderately healthy population from what I understand. STO on the other hand is a sinking ship (if those were your examples).
Star Trek Online is actually doing pretty well. Better then CO, in fact.
Everything i've read about APB says that the QA team and developers had a mind-boggling bureaucracy to work past.
Though, some of the design decisions were on their heads. Like another poster said, they actively refused to balance the game out into tiers, meaning newbies had to fight guys with rocket launchers and one shot one kill (To newbies.) assault rifles. RTW claimed that as "time went on, the game would naturally stratify itself by instance into tiers". No such thing ever even began to happen.
There were tons of mind boggling things like that done by them.
In addition, hopefully the people who got burned on this who were also fans of saying "Haters gonna hate" have learned their lesson on what a retarded statement that is. It's the equivilant of shoving your fingers in your ears and screaming "LA LA LA LA". Yeah, in this day and age, we get a lot of vitriolic comments from people, and it must suck for somebody to slam a game you're interested in. But most of the time, there's almost always a reason behind that hate. I popped my head into the APB thread every now and then, and I would see these kinds of posts:
Beta tester: Man, these guns are stupid. There's one gun that the police get that kills you in 2 hits, and with a full team using them, you can't win. The balance is shit.
Over and over and over again. I think the absolute best thing that happened was that a tester complained about something, a chump said "FU HGH", and then a few days later said chump comes on complaining about the very same situation! There's weeding out unproductive criticism, and then there's this full blown blindness that people seemed to develop. It was astonishing.
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"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Release and iterate does work (see Mount & Blade and Minecraft, though admittedly those aren't MMO's), it just has to be done correctly.
Well Cryptic somehow pulled it off twice.
I'll give you Champions Online, because I think it still has a moderately healthy population from what I understand. STO on the other hand is a sinking ship (if those were your examples).
Star Trek Online is actually doing pretty well. Better then CO, in fact.
Wait, did the community recover that well after Season 2 released? I haven't really played since then, and didn't play much after release, but the playerbase was basically dead after the first month or so. Have the numbers really risen that substantially?
If so, I might have to start hopping on a bit more frequently.
Oh, and on topic, I was tempted so many times by this game. The concept just sounded like so much fun. Luckily, I frequently checked in on the PA APB thread, and was reminded of how shitty it was. Even the three wolf moon shirt couldn't save the game.
I was just reading this article that was linked in the RTW employee's blog, and man... some of the things Dave Jones said are misleading, or straight-up lies. For instance:
Dave Jones: We have a broad range of weapons. When you start the game we give you an assault rifle, it's called a Star. And then we unlock weapons as you go through progression in order to build out your arsenal of weapons. However, the Star that you get right at the start is balanced in exactly the same way as a weapon you get at rating 200. Rating 200 unlocks things like rocket launchers, so it's different weapons. But there is no progression in the damage they do. It's exactly the same as Modern Warfare.
But when people die, they see he's using a weapon they don't have access to, and assume that's a more powerful weapon. What they don't realise is every weapon is situational. It's actually a very strategic game. If you get in too close range of somebody with a shotgun, you will die. If somebody takes you out from a hundred metres away with one of the long-range sniper rifles in the game, then that's just a situational awareness thing. But the very first gun you get, the Star for example, is a very powerful, good, medium-range weapon to use. Even some of the guys who have played 300 hours still use that weapon.
OK, the base guns are exactly the same, but the difference is that a higher level STAR (to use his own example) has upgrade slots on it that change the power of the gun.
Look at Aion's trailers, or Age of Conan. Great trailers. Bad games.
If you're fooled into buying a product from a trailer in this day and age, you're a chump.
Fixed for accuracy, cause WAR is far from being a bad game. Granted I'd punch the world design team in the throat if given half a chance... but that doesn't make the overall game bad.
Yeah I guess STO wasn't that good an example, but I'm still surprised that people not only paid for that game, but also purchased lifetime subscriptions considering the abundant lack of content (amongst other things) prior to release.
I see this over and over again with MMOs (APB included). People don't want to believe they've bought into the hype of what is effectively a bad game. They'll use any sort of mechanism available to trick themselves into spending money on a game they've been following. Even when it's abundantly clear that they aren't getting what they thought they'd get.
The hype machine of flashy trailers, screenshots and scripted interviews glamor so many people into buying crappy products.
Pretty much any MMO put out today is going to have a flashy trailer designed to mislead you about the actual product.
Look at Aion's trailers, or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online. Great trailers. Bad games.
If you're fooled into buying a product from a trailer in this day and age, you're a chump.
Seneku, are you guys still working on that second MMO, or is RTW closing its doors?
No idea whats happening with that, RTW as it stands is gone, Dundee studio has 7 people left to tidy up the mess and the US studio is shutting down as well though that was a much smaller team to begin with. There was 23 people brought back for myworld and I presume they will be with the "new" company in whatever form that takes, it's all a bit secretive so no-one outside really has a clue whats happening with it much other than what we read on the web as well. Either way I'm looking elsewhere ofc for work atm so hopefully get something soon, Reykjavík is sounding promising so who knows...either way working at RTW within the QA and Dev team was awesome, just a crap way to go at the end of it all.
seneku on
-=Seneku=-
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Seneku, are you guys still working on that second MMO, or is RTW closing its doors?
No idea whats happening with that, RTW as it stands is gone, Dundee studio has 7 people left to tidy up the mess and the US studio is shutting down as well though that was a much smaller team to begin with. There was 23 people brought back for myworld and I presume they will be with the "new" company in whatever form that takes, it's all a bit secretive so no-one outside really has a clue whats happening with it much other than what we read on the web as well. Either way I'm looking elsewhere ofc for work atm so hopefully get something soon, Reykjavík is sounding promising so who knows...either way working at RTW within the QA and Dev team was awesome, just a crap way to go at the end of it all.
Go work for CCP and do stuff with EvE. They don't make stupid design and budget decisions because they are crazy smart.
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Yeah I guess STO wasn't that good an example, but I'm still surprised that people not only paid for that game, but also purchased lifetime subscriptions considering the abundant lack of content (amongst other things) prior to release.
I see this over and over again with MMOs (APB included). People don't want to believe they've bought into the hype of what is effectively a bad game. They'll use any sort of mechanism available to trick themselves into spending money on a game they've been following. Even when it's abundantly clear that they aren't getting what they thought they'd get.
The hype machine of flashy trailers, screenshots and scripted interviews glamor so many people into buying crappy products.
Pretty much any MMO put out today is going to have a flashy trailer designed to mislead you about the actual product.
Look at Aion's trailers, or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online. Great trailers. Bad games.
If you're fooled into buying a product from a trailer in this day and age, you're a chump.
You. Me. Thunderdome
Double post for the sake of pointing out how flashy SW:TOR's trailer is, compared to the more relatively gameplay related trailer of Guild Wars 2.
No bias here btw. It's the night and day difference between beautiful artwork weaved seamlessly into actual game footage versus a highly rendered cinematic that has absolutely no relevance to the game other then to hype hype hype.
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
edited September 2010
they've never been represented as gameplay though.
Warhammer was poised to be the spiritual successor to DAoC. Bring PvP back to the main stream and breath life into the dynamic and chaotic world of Warhammer Fantasy.
Instead we got a bunch of instances, awful PvE and an endless keep grind for gold bags. No one cared about territory because there was none. No one cared about instances after doing it thousands of times. There was no world to get lost in. Only blocks of land connected together. Can't draw a world map because there wasn't a world. Rigid tiers of repeating content.
As a player and lover of DAoC, I came into it expecting the same sort of fierce, factional fighting over territory and jostling keep thats made that game a legend in the genre.
You guys can't tell me the trailers and press weren't the most misleading thing in the entire universe.
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PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
Picture Me Rollin'
My god. This is the exact shit I was blasting them for at the end of the beta. It seemed like no one at RTW gave a shit about what the community said, because hardly anyone there addressed peoples' suggestions/criticisms of the game.
It seemed like, from the beginning, RTW had their minds locked on how they wanted everything to be in this game, and didn't pay attention to fun, valid suggestions made by the community if they didn't fit into RTW's preconceived vision for APB.
Where's Seneku? He posts around here, and was an employee at RTW.
e: heeeeey, Seneku.
e2: after reading your post, it seems I was 100% correct
I'd think for a $100 million spent on bright young things, you'd end up with a product that didn't crash and burn in less than 3 months.
Rigorous Scholarship
The point at which it became obvious to me that APB was done was in the beta. Mainly, when I read over the suggestion forums, saw a lot of really great feedback on how to make the game systems in APB a hell of a lot more fun, and noticed that the forums staff at RTW were mainly replying to posts about stupid shit like implementing stripper poles and such, rather than addressing serious balance concerns.
It's not like I'm mad that my idea didn't get implemented, rather I was upset that RTW had all of these great, intelligent people testing their game, at no cost to their company. RTW could have just started up a thread on the forum about game balance, and had all those people discussing ideas with forums staff at a moment's notice. I was practically salivating to have the chance to discuss my ideas with someone at RTW over the forums. Even if they came in and said "nah, that's shit. We're not doing it." I would have said "OK! Here's something else that goes in a totally different direction!"
That's when I realized that even though people were making really awesome suggestions, if they at all clashed with what the developers had in mind, even if the developers' ideas were complete shit when held up to an ounce of scrutiny, the players' suggestions may as well have not been made at all.
Wow.
I somewhat disagree. I think release and iterate can work, but it has to be presented as that from the outset, and you can't hype your game up as this complete product, then release a half finished game. Your game also probably shouldn't have a 100 million dollar budget if release and iterate is your plan. Release and iterate does work (see Mount & Blade and Minecraft, though admittedly those aren't MMO's), it just has to be done correctly.
A company gets a success under their belt and suddenly thinks they are on par with Valve or Blizzard, but even then don't realize how Valve and Blizzard do business.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
I'll give you Champions Online, because I think it still has a moderately healthy population from what I understand. STO on the other hand is a sinking ship (if those were your examples).
I see this over and over again with MMOs (APB included). People don't want to believe they've bought into the hype of what is effectively a bad game. They'll use any sort of mechanism available to trick themselves into spending money on a game they've been following. Even when it's abundantly clear that they aren't getting what they thought they'd get.
Man, I missed this on the first page.
But I would like to point out (again) that I called this exact problem (veterans completely slaughtering newbies) about 3 days into the North American beta.
Thanks for listening, RTW!
If there was then those people must be pissed
In a game where character levels or skill points or whatever make a huge difference, separating PVP areas into tiers seems like a no-brainer.
Rigorous Scholarship
The hype machine of flashy trailers, screenshots and scripted interviews glamor so many people into buying crappy products.
Pretty much any MMO put out today is going to have a flashy trailer designed to mislead you about the actual product.
Look at Aion's trailers, or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online. Great trailers. Bad games.
If you're fooled into buying a product from a trailer in this day and age, you're a chump.
This genre is just so full of fail at the end of the day because one company (Blizzard) did it right, and made all the business people froth at the mouth for easy, recurrent revenue, without realizing how it all really works, and have thus bankrolled failures such as APB. And we help them do it, like Krunck said, we let ourselves drown in hype and then spend money on mediocrity only to later scratch our heads and wonder why there is no ideal and fun MMOs as stable and polished as WoW out there.
The thing is, APB had a match-making system that was supposed to circumvent this very problem - people of vary gear levels facing each other. In theory, the matchmaking system would only put you up against people with similar gear levels.
The problem is, there are around 300 gear levels, and only 100 people available in any given matchmaking pool. Then, you have that number divided by faction, as well. So, if you're an enforcer, you'd only have ~50 people to match up against. Crims could fight other crims, so they'd have 100 possible matches.
As you can tell, the odds of a R50, for instance, going up against a guy with R200+ are still pretty good, because the matchmaking pool in APB was just way too small for a good matchmaking system.
APB was such an awesome idea, but was so incredibly flawed in so many obvious ways.
Welp, now I know why that happened.
e: this whole thing is like a cathartic schadenfreude for me, in case some of you are wondering why I keep going on and on.
I told them that the progression system in this game was going to turn a lot of people off, but they didn't listen. And look what happened.
This is like watching an ex-girlfriend try to become a supermodel, and you told her that she'd have to go to the gym to pull it off, but she didn't listen. You'll just sit back, and watch her fail miserably, telling her "I told you so". And truthfully, she really could have made it big had she listened to you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPy0ktI4Ms&feature=player_embedded
This is obviously a proof of concept video however like most of the 1.4.1 Combat changes it wouldn't have taken them that long to implement it.
no way in hell you'd be safe from minigun fire behind a stack of wooden pallets
And another concept video, obviously not all this stuff would've made the cut, some of these were what went into 1.4.1/1.4.2 albeit in a slightly nerfed version.
Star Trek Online is actually doing pretty well. Better then CO, in fact.
Everything i've read about APB says that the QA team and developers had a mind-boggling bureaucracy to work past.
Though, some of the design decisions were on their heads. Like another poster said, they actively refused to balance the game out into tiers, meaning newbies had to fight guys with rocket launchers and one shot one kill (To newbies.) assault rifles. RTW claimed that as "time went on, the game would naturally stratify itself by instance into tiers". No such thing ever even began to happen.
There were tons of mind boggling things like that done by them.
Beta tester: Man, these guns are stupid. There's one gun that the police get that kills you in 2 hits, and with a full team using them, you can't win. The balance is shit.
Chump: Phht. Guns look awesome. Haters gonna hate.
Over and over and over again. I think the absolute best thing that happened was that a tester complained about something, a chump said "FU HGH", and then a few days later said chump comes on complaining about the very same situation! There's weeding out unproductive criticism, and then there's this full blown blindness that people seemed to develop. It was astonishing.
Wait, did the community recover that well after Season 2 released? I haven't really played since then, and didn't play much after release, but the playerbase was basically dead after the first month or so. Have the numbers really risen that substantially?
If so, I might have to start hopping on a bit more frequently.
Oh, and on topic, I was tempted so many times by this game. The concept just sounded like so much fun. Luckily, I frequently checked in on the PA APB thread, and was reminded of how shitty it was. Even the three wolf moon shirt couldn't save the game.
OK, the base guns are exactly the same, but the difference is that a higher level STAR (to use his own example) has upgrade slots on it that change the power of the gun.
In no way were the weapons equal as you rank up.
Fixed for accuracy, cause WAR is far from being a bad game. Granted I'd punch the world design team in the throat if given half a chance... but that doesn't make the overall game bad.
You. Me. Thunderdome
No idea whats happening with that, RTW as it stands is gone, Dundee studio has 7 people left to tidy up the mess and the US studio is shutting down as well though that was a much smaller team to begin with. There was 23 people brought back for myworld and I presume they will be with the "new" company in whatever form that takes, it's all a bit secretive so no-one outside really has a clue whats happening with it much other than what we read on the web as well. Either way I'm looking elsewhere ofc for work atm so hopefully get something soon, Reykjavík is sounding promising so who knows...either way working at RTW within the QA and Dev team was awesome, just a crap way to go at the end of it all.
Go work for CCP and do stuff with EvE. They don't make stupid design and budget decisions because they are crazy smart.
Double post for the sake of pointing out how flashy SW:TOR's trailer is, compared to the more relatively gameplay related trailer of Guild Wars 2.
No bias here btw. It's the night and day difference between beautiful artwork weaved seamlessly into actual game footage versus a highly rendered cinematic that has absolutely no relevance to the game other then to hype hype hype.
there's been plenty of tor gameplay trailers.
Instead we got a bunch of instances, awful PvE and an endless keep grind for gold bags. No one cared about territory because there was none. No one cared about instances after doing it thousands of times. There was no world to get lost in. Only blocks of land connected together. Can't draw a world map because there wasn't a world. Rigid tiers of repeating content.
As a player and lover of DAoC, I came into it expecting the same sort of fierce, factional fighting over territory and jostling keep thats made that game a legend in the genre.
You guys can't tell me the trailers and press weren't the most misleading thing in the entire universe.
*puts on his flame retard(ant) suit.