And I thought we got spared of the NMS BS posts. Go back to SC reddit.
And I thought we got spared of the NMS BS posts. Go back to SC reddit.
Your wrong about the prequel. It can't just be replaced by a quick story. The developers want it's players to feel apart and attached to the game. What to they do? they allow us to write the entire history and future of the game were playing in.
As far as the ElyriaMuD becoming the game your high. Like honestly on some high level LSD lol.
I hate these kind of posts to be honest. You can't compare the two games...
The only similarity between them is they are hyped games.
I don't know anymore.
there is NEVER any guarantee that an mmo indie game in development will have all of the features talked about at launch
heck, there's never a 100% guarantee that an mmo indie game in development will even launch
having personally followed many mmo games and their respective player communities through the prelaunch cycle there are three things that i personally look for:
1) is the base concept appealing to me personally
2) does the dev team show not only enough competence, but also passion for the project
3) does it look like there will be enough of a player base to support the game both before and after launch
CoE, for me, scores high in all three categories - enough so that i will be pledging at Duke level once the store re-opens - i have a good gut feeling about this one
disclaimer: there's never a guarantee that my gut feelings are right :)
Honestly from what I've seen I think we'll be fine in that regard. NMS had a lot of issues with actually communicating what the game was, in contrast there's plenty of transparency from the devs here so I doubt people will have their expectations crushed on launch day.
NMS was taken down by suits, because the developers were foolish enough to get involved with a console.
There are no plans to have CoE on a console at launch (or possibly ever), so that makes for a lot fewer suits to ruin the game. Not that there aren't any, of course.
Posted By Scheneighnay at 3:29 AM - Mon Aug 29 2016
NMS was taken down by suits, because the developers were foolish enough to get involved with a console.
There are no plans to have CoE on a console at launch (or possibly ever), so that makes for a lot fewer suits to ruin the game. Not that there aren't any, of course.
That isn't why players are mad. You communicate when your game goes to shit.
Imagine ordering your favorite pizza for a party and being hyped for it to come. Hmmm, they changed the toppings and forgot sauce.
Would you want to them to A: Call you and tell you they fucked up your pizza and ask if you still want to buy it or B: Take the fucked up pizza and blame the 30m or less delivery time set up by suits and still end up paying for a pizza you don't want.
I don't know anymore.
I'm personally not sure where everyone heard all the broken promises with NMS. I admit I didn't follow from the start. Just from this year. I got what I thought I would as well, a game that isn't multiplayer. You could never group, but was meant to have a chance of running into another player. Oddly enough I ran into about 4 systems that someone else had already been to within my first 5 hrs.
To me it's an exploring game that you are only meant to be played alone. No building, no multiplayer. Just going from planet to planet. Only two things really pissed me off. Crashing out, watching my FPS drop so low I couldn't even move and had to shut down the game. To naturally I lost hours. And how rare I thought animals were meant to be. I heard 10% of planets would have life and 10% would be overflowing from life. Seems to be around 70-80% for me.
The only thing you can really compared from NMS to CoE. Is both are aimed at a small crowd. The worse thing that happened to NMS is you got heaps of people that got pulled into the hype train. I don't expect CoE to ever hit a million players. Cause it's not aimed at being mainstream. I was the same so surprised to see how many players brought NMS in the end. It wasn't aimed at being huge. But the media overhyped it like crazy.
Posted By Gunnlang at 5:34 AM - Mon Aug 29 2016
I'm personally not sure where everyone heard all the broken promises with NMS. I admit I didn't follow from the start. Just from this year. I got what I thought I would as well, a game that isn't multiplayer. You could never group, but was meant to have a chance of running into another player. Oddly enough I ran into about 4 systems that someone else had already been to within my first 5 hrs.
To me it's an exploring game that you are only meant to be played alone. No building, no multiplayer. Just going from planet to planet. Only two things really pissed me off. Crashing out, watching my FPS drop so low I couldn't even move and had to shut down the game. To naturally I lost hours. And how rare I thought animals were meant to be. I heard 10% of planets would have life and 10% would be overflowing from life. Seems to be around 70-80% for me.
multiplayer isn't the problem of NMS. its all of the actual promised features missing but that is for another thread. Last I counted they are missing over 22 features promised that broke the game for players. Google it.
I don't know anymore.
I think you've got a bit of misunderstanding about the prequel games. They're not spin-off games to build hype more a way for Soulbound to open up certain areas of the game up for player testing and feedback long before the full game is done. The hiring being done right now is for the full games; the prequels will be made at the same time because it's the same code.
In other words, they're not going to abandon the full CoE to work on the prequels because the prequels ARE CoE.
There's three prequels planned. Prologue: The Awakening is a small offline game in a tiny corner of the world to let players test stuff like UI, combat, NPCs, basically all the player gameplay that doesn't require working multiplayer. Kingdoms of Elyria is a browser game that will test the dance of dynasties system, stuff like alliances, wars, resource claiming. And ElyriaMUD is essentially a text-based version of the full CoE game to let people stress the servers and the like even before Soulbound gets all the graphic assets done.
(More details on the prequels are at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soulboundstudios/chronicles-of-elyria-epic-story-mmorpg-with-aging/posts/1614502 )
Now, the "make one game to work on another" does seem similar (on the surface) to Landmark/EQN. Thing is, soon after Landmark popped up, SOE started working on Landmark-only features. It was billed as "we're giving you the tools we're building with!" at first, but if you've tried Landmark you'll know that it would be a very awkward way to build a full game. Far too slow and fiddly. (Which WOULD explain why EQN got stuck in development hell for so long, I suppose.)
The CoE prequels, on the other hand, are stripped down versions of things that are necessary to make before CoE is finished. They could even be the versions that the devs use for internal testing, with a few changes to remove unfinished stuff. And they're focused on the core gameplay elements, not the building tools.
This doesn't completely rule out CoE going the way of Landmark/EQN or No Man's Sky, of course. But I'd suggest holding off on panicking unless we stop seeing in-game screenshots. Or a cash shop gets added to Kingdoms of Elyria.
Oh, and Soulbound's about fifty billion times more transparent about what's going on than SOE or NMS ever were. That counts for a TON.
While I can't comment on No Man's Sky directly, as I haven't personally followed the game's development or launch, I can say our plan is to do our best to meet our objectives for the game.
One of the ways we ensure we deliver what we promised is through the release of the Prologue: The Awakening, Kingdoms of Elyria, and ElyriaMUD.
While to some those three things may seem superfluous, they are part of the very core of our development strategy. When players get the Prologue in their hands, they'll get a first-hand opportunity to see what is and isn't functional in the client, as well as provide us with their feedback.
Likewise, when they join in on Kingdoms of Elyria and ElyriaMUD they'll get to see first-hand which features the server supports, and which ones it doesn't.
In all cases - KoE, ElyriaMUD, and the Prologue, we're talking almost a year before launch of the final game, giving us time for testing and iteration before launch. When launch day comes, there will be no surprises about which features made it and which didn't.
So while some may see those three as adding to our development time, or even circumventing our development, they are in-fact the very things that will add confidence that we're on track to deliver what we aim to.
While I think the title is click-baity and a poor way to voice your concern, which is a valid one, I will avoid the irrelevant NMS portion and address the concern.
As a small note, if you want SBS and the community to take you and your concerns seriously, voice them for what they are, and avoid needlessly provocative titles. It is fine to draw a parallel to another game or mechanic to illustrate your point better but it should be done without directly tying your concern to that parallel.
As for the actual concern, most people seem to be under the impression that these other "games" are being developed in isolation and as such would be taking time away from the main development of the game, however, if you go back and look at the discussion around them, they are actually very early alpha testing mechanisms that will be in the final game.
While I don't know exactly what form they will take I think I can give an example that illustrates the concept. Lets say that I want to be able to test the fishing system back-end to make sure that bait, different bodies of water, variable fish size, etc are all working as intended. Before I worry about animations, or any graphics at all, I can build a very light text front end that lets me select a type of bait and a body of water to start fishing in. I could have it display a random key that needs to be pressed in X seconds in order to catch the fish and then if successful provide size and type of fish as feedback.
I would expect that as I selected different bait and bodies of water that types of fish would change and be appropriate to salt or fresh water accordingly at that certain size ranges of fish were more prevalent than others, but testing this on my own would give me a small sample size, and while I could write some automation to test things, if I instead write a small fishing tournament text based front end which should take roughly the same or less time, then I can have the player base test it for me.
This gives me several benefits. The community gets to feel involved and have some "hands-on" time with the game, my sample size will likely be very large and not eating up time on my own system so I can continue working on other things while the sample is being made, and it introduces a human factor that will almost always uncover more errors than any automation that I would write.
Hopefully that makes things a bit clearer. But testing mechanics and systems this way should make them much more robust and less buggy overall, and shouldn't really make a huge impact on development time especially when you factor in that this is really QA time that the game is going to need at some point anyway, just spread out more than having a big QA during the last several months of development.
An interesting idea. To this comment here "I fear that too much money and time will go into the browser game and the main game will be scrapped, and with a quick name swap the browser game will be released as the full game to fuffill the Kickstarter promise." I honestly don't know how hard it is going to be to develop a MUD game which is going to be browser and only text base, probably not long because there are applications that make that easy. So the browser game won't actually take that much money or time. And the spreadsheets that will be used on it to make it will actually be used in the game for actual functions. So don't worry about that time and money being wasted. Chronicles of Elyria is a appealing to a small amount of people not the mainstream gaming community which many games try to do both. From what we have seen so far they are doing a great job on the game and communication. Yes, I don't see every feature down perfectly or even done because they are small team doing a big game! I have spoken to Caspian on IRC and he has so much passion about his game, hell look at the most recent Dev journal, he dreamt a freakin tabletop game for it. Now, that's what you call amazing. So yes, don't over hype any game because that only leads to disappointment, instead look at what a game really is, something to entertain you for any given time, which this game will do.
About a week ago I was going to make a post about NMS's epic crash and burn and hoping that Caspian is paying attention to their mistakes and not repeating them then I reread what I wrote and decided not to post it. From the beginning Caspian has said that he wanted to keep clear of big time investors for just this very reason. Too much influence on when the game is released and whats in it. And if I am correct Sony was somehow involved with NMS? Needless to say that their track record is not very good when it comes to MMO's any more. I figured Caspian didn't need me to warn him to be careful of the same pitfalls NMS fell into.
I never was much interested in the game myself. I mean from the pre release youtube videos I saw there wasn't anything interesting to do in the game to me. It seemed all about mining with your gun. Which seemed a very lazy mechanic to me. The graphics were underwhelming and cartoonish which I hate. And it just didn't seem like there was much to do. And that was before the game was released.
As far as the Mud and the prequel. My thought is we are getting more than we bargained for and it seems people are still complaining. Sigh. Listen, I can't be worried about what Caspian thinks he can and can't do as far as this other stuff related to the game. He says he can and will do it so I assume he knows what he is talking about. If I didn't think so he wouldn't have gotten any of my money. Why start worrying now because we are getting something extra?
NMS has been quite interesting, insofar as the game is 99% what they always said it would be. You go back to interviews and videos and the stuff they talk about being in the game, is there. Sure, there has been a little hurt when two people, against all odds, managed to go to the same location and couldn't see each other and people felt the multiplayer aspect of the game had been lied about. BUT, given the developers had always said the likelihood of people meeting up was like 1 in 10000000000, I don't think ANYONE should have been buying the game with multiplayer in mind. It's more something people have seized on to attack the game with after the fact, than anything truly important.
Where there might be some "food for thought" re: CoE is you watch how, to most, it was clear what NMS was going to be like, both pros and cons, yet some people (now in the camp that hates the game), clearly made up OTHER stuff in their heads about what the game would really be and, when that didn't happen, they hit the roof. But vitally, the game never promised those things at all...!
In today's "blame everyone else" society, game developers are on a hiding to nothing when audience members invent what a game will be like in their head and, when it doesn't match that, go crazy.
FWIW, I was KS Backer #21 and wanted nothing but the best for this game.
Forgetting the title and all. Ill just point out a bit about this game and another i like alot eve online.
From my perspective, a good developer is transparent. Maybe not 100%. But they lay out their idea at each stage for all to see. And are active with their userbase in discussion.
This developer so far has been very transparent and helpful. Often active in the irc and forums discussing this with the players. And theyre only going to do it more once the game goes into alpha and later.
Eve has been pretty good about it aswell. And while it might not have the largest playerbase of an mmo. Its certainly one of the most stable throughout its lifetime.
Also the niche. Like Eve, CoE here is going to fill a very niche gaming demand for players, and offer something you dont get elsewhwre. (Can find 100 games that play exactly like WoW with different skins. You can also find plenty of other games to scratch your Exploration itch than NMS, many that are arguably better in their ways.)
CoE in its game type kinda has Eve to compete with, but at the same time very much not. I hope this game will sayisfy all the shortcomings that ive long had with eve, in that all the exploration in that game is done. Theres not much new to see. All ship stats are right there and whatnot.
Imagine in this though. There will likely be armies having wars and such. But if some random player develops a talent that can give them an edge (be it something directly offensive, like casting huge firballs. Or something more strategic. Say someone can smith equipment that while being full strength, is arbitrarily lighter). Unless youre told, how are the opponents to know?
Many interesting developments to be had as the players change the landscape. And ive said before that whenever boats and ships become a thing, Im pitching in resources for expeditions to the other continents. Cause i like a good frontier to go discover