By Kieron Gillen on March 18th, 2009 at 3:53 pm.
You suspect 3000AD’s Derek Smart is the man the phrase “outspoken developer” was coined for. He’s… oh, you have an opinion, don’t you? Whether or not you’ve played – or could even name – one of his games, everyone’s got a take on Smart. He’s also a perennial PC gaming figure which we haven’t talked to yet. With All Aspect Warfare approaching release, we thought it time to change all that. Talk about where he’s coming from, going to and – whisper it – whether he was actually right all along. Along the way, we take in the death of Space Sims, Steam’s power being over-estimated, his take on the Space MMOs, some cheery demonization of EA and… well, whether he ever regrets comment threads.
Join us.
RPS: Okay, from the top: All Aspect Warfare. Could you explain its germination? How do you think it fits in with your other games? Is it fair to say the scope is more focused this time around? Or is the focus just different?
Derek Smart: Well, apparent by the time we released our last space combat game, Echo Squad SE, that the days of space sims – as a viable business – were pretty much over. The genre is as dead as a doornail; and anyone who says any different, has maybe one or two other day jobs, lives on Ramen noodles and their monthly bills amount to a monthly grocery trip.
Seeing that we very well couldn’t make the same kinds of money over the years on the genre – short of rolling out our MMO (which is still about eighteen months away) based on our existing properties – I decided to do a game in between. A sort of stepping stone if you will. Sure it could have been KnightBlade, the space game we were planning on doing for PC/XB360. But given that no publisher in their right minds is going to sign a space combat game – let alone a console one, I decided to play it safe and put that game on ice and start a new game from scratch. Plus I wanted a break to do something else for a change.
When you have a franchise property you’ve spent decades on (in my case, twenty plus years already), you don’t just abandon it and start from scratch. Most especially not when you have a large install base. So this game, though radically different (for one thing, it is not a space game), takes places within our pre-existing game world and mythos.
The focus is 100% on planet side aerial and infantry combat. The game was designed, developed and fine tuned specifically for that. Which is why the majority of our technologies were either written from scratch or heavily revised for this game. It has been a HUGE investment. We’ll see if it pays off or not.
RPS: Is the space-combat game actually dead then? What can resurrect it? I’m interested in how older genres have been unexpectedly rejuvenated – I mean, the Adventure game finding a new home as webgames and on the Wii of all places. See an opportunity anywhere, or is it just the MMO?
Derek Smart: Yeah, its dead, Jim.
Well, you just hit it right there on the head. While adventure, war games etc are no longer mainstream – as far as retail publishing goes – there is grassroots support for it by gamers and developers alike. The way I see it, a publisher won’t bother with a game that won’t sell five copies. However, a developer (or web publisher/developer) who knows that he only needs to sell two copies for his break even, can still survive by going the alternate publishing route. More often than not, they often end up making more money than if they went with a publisher. Why? Because if you sell direct, the money goes to you directly.
If you have a traditional publisher, you have to wait to get paid. If they actually do pay.
Nevertheless, nothing beats the sheer number, volume and face time than retail gives. But that brick and mortar model is on the way out. The publishers know it. The retailers know it. It is only a matter of time before retail becomes an afterthought. Much like mainstream PC gaming.
There are so many opportunities for online distribution these days, that there is no longer an excuse to not do it. The biggest decision you’re going to be faced with is who to go with and how many. On one hand, you can sell through a lot of portals and dilute your metrics or go through a single [popular] portal and cross your fingers. That’s like selling to Walmart and not bothering with the likes of Best Buy, Target etc. If that’s how you roll.
And believe it or not Steam -even with its “Valve games powered numbers” – is not the leading online digital distribution portal. IGN’s Direct2Drive still is. Primarily due to their very diversified game portfolio, non-preferential treatment, developer friendly rules, brain dead straightforward contract, friendly and responsive sales and develop personnel etc. Gamer’s Gate is the same way. Been working these two and several other smaller portals (e.g. Digital River, BMT Micro) for many years now and have no complaints or qualms.
All of a sudden, everyone wants to get on Steam. It is easy to scream up to the rafters about hozillion subscribers. It doesn’t mean squat if a good portion of those are only on Steam specifically for the exceedingly popular Valve games. And I know for a fact that I’m right. Otherwise, you’d have already seen product specific numbers (like you do with NPD and such) from Steam already to backup those claims. Sure you’d get a sales spike there every now and then. But so what? You’d get the same sales spike if you put the game on any of the other portal and offered the same price, period and conditions. Marketing is marketing, no matter how many gimmicks you wrap around it. Selling a gamer a game he already owns, is the ultimate gimmick. That’s like selling ice to Eskimos.
The point is that even if you didn’t want to setup your own storefront, if you have a finished product – specifically a game – you can get it online rather quickly and start selling through the developer friendly portals without having to go through the same bullshit you normally would if were going with a traditional publisher. Plus, you’ll get paid – and on time. All done automatically.
Seriously, you can get a game on a good portal in under a week. Tops. In fact, the biggest delay is probably in getting the DRM scheme that they use, sorted out because the contracts themselves are just fill in the blanks simple.
There are also other upcoming ones which target a specific demographic. e.g. GoG. I mean, was that a brilliant idea or what? Its like retro bargain bin hunting. Hopefully they can get a lot more classics on there. But my guess is that the biggest hassle they’re faced with is tracking down the developers/publishers, finding out who actually owns the rights to properties etc. GameTap went through the same thing. It ain’t easy.
In many of my legacy interviews, I said – quite clearly – that MMO games and digital distribution, were the wave of the future. Those interviews are still up on my website to this day. And guess what? That’s exactly where we are today and specifically for PC games which will never be able to make their way to retail shelves.
So the way I see it, space games may be on the out, but they can be revitalized in the online distribution space. If the game is good and there are gamers out there who would rather buy than pirate (bastards) it, you can probably made a decent return on investment. But given the thinned out popularity of the genre, I wouldn’t quit my day job to develop and sell a space sim. Especially one that didn’t already have an incubated fan base. Seriously.
Just look around and see how many mainstream space combat developer from the old days are still in business today. I’m sure that if you approached Larry Holland [Totally Games, of X-Wing series fame - Ed] today about doing a space game, he’d probably (depending on the size of his bank account at the time) just laugh and saunter off in mild amusement. The same thing could be said for Egosoft. I’m sure they’re hurting – but my guess is you won’t see another X3 game for a long time because there is a point (the point I reached with the last niche space game) where you have to say enough is enough to derivative works.
There is a good reason why, for example, David Braben has been threatening to unleash Elite IV since Nixon was president and why you still haven’t seen it – and probably never will. At least not until you grow Grey hairs in places you didn’t realize could actually sprout hairs.
RPS: Your games have been… okay, let’s go with “divisive”. If you go with something as simple as a metacritic score, they’re always mixed. Yet despite that, you’re a perennial PC-developer who seems to have found an audience who appreciates your vision. Would you think this fair? If so, how does AAW fit here – both in terms of reaching new players and the pleasing old ones?
Derek Smart: Divisive huh? Well, that’s new. Usually I get sentiments ranging from mediocre to challenging…and all the way to the crap end of that particularly ecclectic opinions spectrum reserved by gamers solely for the purpose of expressing repressed emotions. You know, the kind that controlled substances, therapy or resolved Mommy issues don’t quite fix.
Seriously though, I love what I do. For me, being a sci-fi geek who grew up on all things sci-fi, getting into space games was a no-brainer. Sure I could have picked another genre (e.g. RTS) and still gone the sci-fi route, but even as a kid, I had always been fascinated by space and all its mysteries and such.
Playing games like Elite, Star Flight, Echelon etc just sold me right there and then. Once I decided to go out and make my own game instead of just sitting around playing someone else’s, I realized that life as I once knew it, was, well, over. I always felt that I could take the genre further.
My previous games – as you well know – are designed and developed for a specific group of people. I didn’t – and still don’t – care about the people outside that classification. My games, you either like them or you don’t. There is no in between, no fuzzy logic and certainly no repressed emotions. You can’t win over everybody and trying to do that is just a lesson in futility. So, I’ve always targeted like minded folks. And once that segment grew large enough to sustain my company, I decided to just keep doing it. Twenty years and thirteen (and at least two more to come) games later.
For this game, the goal is the same. While we’re not targeting the space combat fan base, I’m sure that those guys play other games too. So this is a chance to see how well (or bad) we do outside of our (space combat) comfort zone. As I’ve been telling the publishers we’ve been speaking to, if you want a cookie cutter fps game, this ain’t it. Which is why we have been providing them with the game’s docs first and foremost. Those who like what they read enough to play the game, go on to request an eval. So far, we’ve had some good responses and feedback. So I think we’re on the right track.
Apart from the fact that this is a “Thinking man’s fps”, a lot of the technologies were designed with various genres and gamers in mind. For e.g. the aerial combat aspect features proper cockpit and camera views, awesome flight dynamics and avionics. And oh yeah, a proper camera – not that rubbish those other guys are currently pushing and frustrating gamers all over. So an aerial combat flight jock is going to feel right at home, even if the only time he ever steps foot on solid ground – or fire a weapon – is when he’s searching for a fighter to jack. You start off in the ground, in fps mode. None of that “start and end in the air” crap.
As to the infantry combat aspect, it is all skills and experience based. If you don’t have the skills or the experience points to fly a fighter, you’re never – ever – going to be able to get in one. This leaves flying to jocks and the rest of the heavy lifting to the infantry guys. And even they need experience points to drive most of the vehicles in the game or man the numerous ground surface to air missile and gun units. When I designed this, I didn’t want any of the rubbish you see on other game servers where it is a free-for-all and with mostly griefers.
Oh, and – btw, IMO – Metacritic scores are the greatest injustice to the creative minds that actually work (yeah, some of us actually do that) to bring fun (and a balanced level of frustration) to gamers. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t contain “scores” from all print and on-line media reviews, its just plain wrong to use that as a yardstick for measuring excellence or failure when in fact the data sampling is hardly indicative of a true weight/ratio analysis based on the written word. But that’s a whole other interview.
RPS: Following on from the last question… do you think that makes you ahead of the curve? As in, realising you don’t need everyone to love you. There seems to be more and more people who work in PC gaming who seem to realise that actually servicing a niche of people who care about a certain approach and then making a game with a suitable budget is something that’s sustainable and worth doing – especially when you’re one of those people who want the game you’re making. You’ve been doing that for years.
Derek Smart: Well, it is only now when most of them either find themselves on the receiving end of redundancy or losing money hand over fist, that this common sense notion hits them. A lot of companies and small devs have been doing that for years. Most – if not all, like us, are still in business. Mostly it is greed and bad planning that gets some of these companies into trouble. Why spend $250K making a game and sell it to 100K people who actually want it, when you can blow $10m on a wildcard while trying to get 500K people to buy it? The mainstream economics of game development today makes absolutely no sense to me. It all boils down to bloat and mismanagement.
Plus I blame EA.
They started this bullshit about how games worth having or which are to be considered high end, would and should cost North of $30m because of the “next gen consoles”. It was retarded bullshit then. It is retarded bullshit now. And their shareholders are wondering where their money went right about now. Look no further than the likes of Eidos, Atari and every single one of them who bet big – and lost. Meanwhile, guys like us, Stardock and everyone in between and around, are still around making our low budget games for a group of people who actually enjoy them.
When I did my first game, the fact that I didn’t go straight out of business and back into the realms of obscurity is because a group of people saw what it was I was trying to do. So, they stuck around. Funny that. But since 1996 when I released my first game, the game that started it all has had no less than eleven iterations, derivatives, sequels and the like. Why? Because those small group of people keep buying the games. Some new ones come on board along the way and some get to stick around, while some get to move on. The economics is simple, if someone isn’t buying a game, why spend time, effort and money making it. So even with all the crap you see some gamers writing about games – they probably never even played – and which they claim suck, you have to wonder which planet they hail from.
The same thing here with All Aspect Warfare. Take our small budget (though this game has a higher budget than our previous games) and build a smallish game for a specific group of people.
I always joke with Sergio (one of my fellow developers) that if someone were ever (foolish enough) to give us $30m to make a game, that I was going to buy an island, disappear and leave him $2m to make the same game. :)
RPS: As everybody knows, co-op’s been one of the bigger trends of the last few years – I’m interested in how you’ve approached the issue and what the key of it for AAW is. Purely going on my own recollections, while my really early co-op memories were arcades, in terms of the late 90s/early00s, what little co-op there was seemed really quite hardcore. Like – say – Flashpoint, which is very much that realistic thinking man shooter’s sort of thing. While it lead to agreeable chaos, it was more grounded than the mental chaos which most co-op games lean towards now. What sort of pacing does AAW’s Co-op have?
Derek Smart: Well, in our game co-op is basically a multiplayer mode in which the four team members in the story mode campaign are replaced by human players.
The pacing is no different than if you were playing the scenario alongside the three NPC team members. The only difference is that you would expect your human team mates to actually make intelligent decisions and work together to achieve the objectives. But my guess is none of that (intelligent decision) is going to happen. But since voice chat will be available, you’ll be able to scream out obscenities on the fly and have them mean something.
The largest obstacle to co-op in games is the handling of NPC characters. Primarily who to attack, when and how. For us, an NPC targets list is prioritized. So its not like they’re going to attack player A who is 100m away, while ignoring player B who is standing right next to them.
No big deal really. I always wanted co-op for this game. Playing L4D just solidified my suspicions as to what it is we needed to aim for in doing it the no-frills but correct way.
RPS: Could you talk more about the experience system and multiplayer? I presume that your skills will be linked in a central server if you’re trying to make characters develop classes which they can’t easily grief. Or am I just making nonsense up out of my head again?
Derek Smart: Well as we (gamers that is) all know, Games For Windows Live is severely lacking. Since we just decided to do our own thing.
And doing our own thing means that we get to control the fate of our game, our servers, our player base, our patching etc. Our IP. Our worlds. Our rules. Nobody gets to hold us to ever shifting standards. Standards which tend to be relaxed for some (publishers) while steadfastly enforced for others. To this end, we just built ours from the ground up and tied it directly into the game. The way we did it is simple. You can play the multiplayer game using the game’s built-in server browser where you can host and/or join a game. There is no stats saving. So when you quit the server, it is all gone.
If you wanted to play on (ranked) stats saving servers, you have to use our external GameLobby app seen here. Doing so requires you to create a unique UserID (aka GamerTag) which is then stored on our servers. For your stats to be updated and tracked on the server, you have to always join a server this way. You can then look at your real-time stats and compare against others on our leaderboards over here. During multiplayer (there is no stats saving/tracking in single player), your kills, rank, Experience Points etc are tracked and updated in real-time, all the time. Since XP is tied directly into the game (e.g. you need a certain amount of XP in single and multiplayer to use certain vehicles, do certain things etc), the higher your XP, the more things you can do in the game. So there will be this on-going quest to get your XP very high.
Due to the game’s design and mechanics, you can also use XP for doing various things. e.g wantonly killing other friendly players, dying (yeah, each time you die, you lose XP when you re-spawn), failing objectives etc. So in one week, you could be at a high rank and XP, then the next – bad – week, your stats have tanked. And all of a sudden, some n00b has more XP and ranking than you do. If a player ends up griefing other players, we just ban their UserID, their IP address etc. They then will never be able to create another one, let alone join any server that is reporting to our master servers. They can still of course join a non-ranked server and play as normal and without a UserID. But even so, they can still be banned from there because all servers report to our master server – and that’s where the ban occurs.
You know me; I have zero tolerance for anti-social misfits – so I’m going to do everything in my power to keep them away from my game and off my servers.
We went all out on the multiplayer aspect of the game – to the extent of radical revisions to the multiplayer engine (e.g now it is a pure client-server architecture) – because we know that the popularity of multiplayer fps games lies in the multiplayer component and community. So, unlike our previous games where multiplayer was just another feature, this time around we focused on it as much as we would on any other feature or technology in the game.
For example, even the GameLobby has a bunch of unique features including friends list, invites, private messaging and such. As well as the ability to chat with a friend who is currently either in the lobby or on a game server, and vice versa. So if you want to locate your friend on a server, just login to the GameLobby and their UserID will tell you what server they’re playing on. Then you can send them a message directly from the lobby. e.g. while you are waiting to join a full server, you two can chat directly with each other via private messaging. Your friend never has to leave the game. We are considering extending this to sending Twitter chats, IM etc – directly from the lobby or the game. Sure, there are other third party (e.g. XFire) tools that have similar functionality, but we wanted built-in support without having to resort to yet another external app for the same functionality.
RPS: While I suspect it’s too early to talk about what you’ve planned with your MMO, what do you think of the current Space MMOs? What would you do differently?
Derek Smart: Well SWG [Star Wars Galaxies - Ed] is, well, uhm – (with no offense to the developers) – rubbish? And my guess is that the only reason it is still going is because that demographic – rabid or not – won’t touch Eve with the longest barge pole. Just wait until STO [Star Trek Online - Ed] launches and watch what happens.
And I don’t have any confidence whatsoever that Star Trek Online will be anything but. However, I am going to reserve final judgment on that until it is actually out and the gamers have spoken. From what I’ve seen, heard and can tell, they’re going with the tried – and failing – Status Quo. Its like these guys doing MMO games are stuck in a time machine. Yet, those who aren’t making it, just don’t get the message that the Status Quo doesn’t work for everyone. It is all about risk taking. Look at Eve! That, to me is the greatest risk ever undertaken by a developer. See where they are today.
Don’t like Eve. Never did. Only because it is not my kind of game. I love the genre, but there is a limit to how much love I can dole out when my idea of “fun” is being tested.
Eve – the quintessential spreadsheet in space – is popular (the stagnant subscriber base is testament to the space sim’s thinned popularity) because those guys decided what they wanted to do, did it – and stuck with it. So when the gamers jumped on board, CCP didn’t turn around and renege on what they started out with because some publisher said so. They bet that there were enough gamers out there who – spreadsheet or not – wanted that specific kind of game. And those who were first exposed to it, obviously liked it enough to stick around. CCP saw that – and thus far hasn’t done a single thing to rock the boat. So that’s how you do it. That’s the way we did it. And it has worked out pretty well so far.
If CCP had a publisher looking over their shoulder and had released Eve as the usual run-of-the-mill space combat shooter, mind blowing graphics or not, they’d be out of business by now – or at least struggling. Guaranteed.
For us, the long term goal is to get KnightBlade – our next (single player only) space combat game based on the AAW engines – out in early 2010. Then hunker down and release the Beta of our final (yes, it will in fact be our last game) space/planetary game, Galactic Command Online later that year and do a final roll out in 2011.
Since GCO uses all our established technologies, we’re just going to keep our space combat pedigree alive by going the MMO model. We don’t need gazillions of dollars to do it either. Plus, we’ve already got decades of experience in that game space – so no learning curve there for us. Plus we have the (proven) space and planetary technologies.
We have a much larger – and popular – install base than most space combat games, so I am confident that the subscribers will be sufficient for us to keep it going indefinitely. Instead of killing ourselves with a new game, sequel or derivative works every eighteen months or so, we’re just going to use that effort to provide free content to our paying subscribers year on year. Hell, we may even release the darn thing on an FTP (Free To Play) model supported by in-game ads and micro-transactions. Though we’re talking to several partners about it. I just haven’t made any final decisions yet.
In fact, doing KnightBlade is just another stepping stone and we’re doing it simply because I always wanted to do a space combat game that takes place in first person perspective inside a carrier and in a free-form universe. It is the one feature that we couldn’t do in previous games for various reasons – all related to horsepower and technologies. It is one thing to have a carrier hurtling through space at FTL speeds and clearly another to have a player running around inside said carrier in first person mode, talking to and interacting with his crew, doing combat with intruders etc – while the outside space and planetary worlds continues to go on.
And the reason that it is single player only is again due to technologies. I don’t want to spent two years doing it and dealing with the problems of multiplayer in such a game, when I can spend nine months doing a more tightly focused single player game. Especially since the price, viability or attraction won’t change whether or not it has a multiplayer component.
RPS: Why games? What was the moment where you realised that – fuck yeah! – games are amazing. And when did that germinate in a desire to make the bally things?
Derek Smart: Never in my wildest dreams. I love games. I have a library that would make Lincoln’s library proud – and that’s just the ones I have space in that room for. The decision to make games came from a part-time hobby back when I first started learning how to program in C. Once I got ahold of Lee Adams’ books, it was all over. In fact, I blame him 100% for how I ended up here. Anyone who had any of his books back in the day, knows exactly what I’m talking about. Sure he wasn’t exactly a good writer let alone a top notch programmer (at least not by today’s standards), but his books were enough to get you started and headfirst into the abyss. The fact that he wrote about four books on creating a flight sim – complete with source code, was the high point of my life back then.
Man, as I think about those (I owned ALL of them) books, I remember sitting there and manually typing in every frigging line of code and trying to get it to compile. Kids today have it easy. But I digress.
RPS: Do you ever regret your approach to comments threads, even momentarily? You’ve said before that you enjoy it a bit too much, which is why you do it… but there’s no way back. Even if you changed your tactics online, you’ve got so much history that it’d take another decade for it to sink in.
Derek Smart: The only regret I have is that I used to take it all so seriously. Once I realized that I could just as well play their own game, beating them at it while employing shock and awe tactics was just the end game. But I think I’ve mellowed out a bit. Must be old age because it certainly has nothing to do with common sense.
I am who I am. What I’m not is someone who some faceless fool out on a weekend pass is going to put under siege just because they think they can. They can pull that crap with other developers, like – oh I dunno – Denis Dyack mabye, but not me. First and foremost, I’m a gamer. So someone wants to wind me up, they’d better be ready to play.
When Jesus H. Christ said to turn the other cheek, he said nothing about a baseball bat.
As a wise man once said: “Game developers are just human beings who happen to make games for a living. If you want to hold us up to higher standards of conduct, then go ahead …but don’t be surprised if we don’t uphold them.” . Oh right, that was Warren Marshall over at Epic Games from back in the day when we used to hang out over on Planetcrap. Those were the days.
RPS: Thanks for your time.
For more on All Aspect Warfare, you can go to the website. It’s due second Quarter of 2009.
Batton down the hatches lads, thar be cannon fire incomming off the port bow! ;-)
(I’m not being entirely serious here)
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I try not to comment on this sort of thing since the Freespace license debacle. Although that was fun. :)
*stirs pot*
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There’s plenty of stuff totally worth talking about in the interview without going near old controversies, methinks.
KG
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Hmm.. I don’t like this guy. I don’t like people claiming that a genre is dead.
It’s what people said about adventure games, but actually they just hadn’t released any good ones in ages. Or Epic claiming the PC is dead because they made some crappy games that didn’t sell well.
IMO If someone made a space sim that was actually different or innovative in some way it would probably do well.
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I suspect that no gaming genre ever really dies permanently, though sometimes it takes a pheonix like resurrection to bring them back into the light.
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Egosoft have already said no more “X” games. I had hoped that just meant more space sims in a new setting but who knows?
Eve’s subscriber base is rising, albeit slowly. Whether that’s actual players or the existing playerbase buying more accounts is a different matter.
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The game itself looks very, very sparse. There just doesn’t seem to be much stuff in the screenshots and what is there looks a tad generic. I can’t comment on the videos shown on the website because all the ones I’ve found are in WMV and I’m stuck on linux with no means to view them at present so take the following with a pinch of salt. It looks horrid and whether you like it or not visual appeal is a huge part of drawing players to a game and the sparse landscapes, generic space marines and ship designs just do nothing for me.
He talks about making it for a niche, which is fine, but being so aggressive about it with some of the design decisions is going to increase the risks of further reducing the size of that niche. I want to like it because it sounds right up my alley, but reading the interview I get the nagging feeling that it may be missing the point a bit and that unless you’re brilliantly skilled then you’re not going to have much fun because of the way the XP system works.
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I dunno, I found X3 oddly dissapointing, chief among the issues I had was the sectors that had a blanket view distance restriction, some times as much as 5km (Which takes almost no time at all to traverse) that was annoying rather than challenging. Somewhere between X2 & X3, Egosoft lost something and I’m clueless as to what this is. Maybe I just got hit by franchise fatigue? Thats possible I suppose.
Either way I’m far more likely to revisit X2 than its successor.
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I don’t think it’s fair to use Echo Squad as proof that a genre is dead. Echo Squad was…. oh, TBH, I don’t really know. I got lost in the tutorial. It was confusing as heck, and just stopped working after a while. Also, the game was hardly advertised anywhere. I think there was a press release when it came out, but that was that.
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3 Words; Flame War Follies.
The game; I’m in two minds about the game. I salute anyone willing to invest money in trying something original and prepared to try and make something innovative. I’m not an obsessive graphics whore – I like content over style. Does this game have any of either? Suppose there is only one way to find out…
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I don’t think that the space sim is dead, so much as lacking inspiration. The Egosoft X series never really held much appeal to me, though I can see its appeal to lovers of Elite…
I’d love to see a properly story-driven space sim. Bridge Commander missed this entirely. I was hoping for traditional Star Trek focus on story and plot, and just got space battles strung together with minimal plot. Star Trek Online seems to be no better, with too much focus on combat; missing a fantastic opportunity to have a dynamic galaxy full of intrigue and exploration…
Eve is pushing that way, what with faction wars and wormholes, and the odd nod to professions such as ‘archaeology’ which break from the ‘blow stuff up and sell what’s left’ mould of space sims. More of that please.
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Sorry, I usually read all your articles, but I had to give up midway into the second answer. All I was getting from it was alerts for hyperbole, bullshit and cliché. When that happens IRL, you just walk away from the person – same rule applies here, for me at least. Brave you though Mr G.
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I admire the scope of his games, but he comes across in this interview as an extremely angry, bitter and unpleasant individual, which is pretty much the impression I had before from all the stories about his legendary flame wars.
Still, the game does sound interesting.
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I guess mr Smart has never heard of the X franchise ? It sells well enough to be in constant development with another xpac ( free for owners of TC ) coming, and a thriving modding community.
Not to mention Freespace, which is still going strong in its open-source beefed up engine incarnation.
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‘His game’
I’m sure the other people working on it appreciated that.
I’d love some more space combat games.
Developers just need to solve the problems that seem to creep into those types of games.
Ship complexity [I still have no idea what a corvette is or why I should buy one] is one.
Another is something like HAWX has where the things you are battling are so distanced from you that what you are ‘fighting’ are just a bunch of hexagons and squares on your heads up display.
That’s magnified when you put them in a much larger fighting space [pun intended].
Where space combat works is in things like ‘ship fiddling’ [power, shields, weapons and engines] and your place in the grand scheme of things; being a small part of a larger space battle and story.
Try telling me Tie Fighter wasn’t great.
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Tie Fighter wasn’t great…
…You didn’t say I had to mean it. :p
There seems to be a lack of back to basics space superiority fighter games that break through into the mainstream and I find myself wondering why that is…
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AAW is an FPS and one trying to do something a bit different, so I’m sure I’ll take a look any demos at the very least. Certainly not much competition out right now, though just coming from the year of CoD4/TF2/many excellent singleplayer FPS we’ve been spoilt rotten for a while.
I think the comparison most people will be making is to the the aging BF2142. Does anyone know how it compares in terms of being more realistic/faster/slower?
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Ugh. What pretentious snobbery dripping from every word. I couldn’t read it.
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“You know me; I have zero tolerance for anti-social misfits – so I’m going to do everything in my power to keep them away from my game and off my servers.”
This is Derek’s fantasy. His game, his rules. You don’t like it? BAM! Here comes the banhammer, mofo. Like petty Counter-Strike mods who kick anyone that kills them, he’s exactly the kind of person who should not be allowed this kind of power in a game.
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The game sounds interesting. I’m not the audience for Derek’s space games, but I just might be the audience for his “thinking man’s FPS.”
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Talking of space games where the hell are the Starfox/Lylat Wars/Panzer Dragoon games?
I love that sub genre it’s probably my second favourite after rpg/shooter hybrids. I can understand the cost and scale of the latter holding devs back but why no linear-arcade-3rd person-shmups? Double especially so given the popularity of 2d shmups.
I know thats not what you mean by space games but I am of simple pleasures.
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Yeah, I’ll wait until first impressions come out before deciding on AAW. I was put off by not-exactly-glowing reviews for the last few games, but it could be interesting. I’m not sure whether I have the inclination to dive into what looks like being a rather complicated flight model (I’m not a teenager with a ridiculous amount of free time any more), but we’ll see.
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“You know me; I have zero tolerance for anti-social misfits – so I’m going to do everything in my power to keep them away from my game and off my servers.”
This is Derek’s fantasy. His game, his rules. You don’t like it? BAM! Here comes the banhammer, mofo. Like petty Counter-Strike mods who kick anyone that kills them, he’s exactly the kind of person who should not be allowed this kind of power in a game.
Sounds like the kind of guy Jack Emmert, former owner of “City of Heroes”, would find a kindred spirit.
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I will forget anything I know about this guy and his game.
DELETING DATA
DELETING DATA
DELETING DATA
ZEROING SECTORS COMPLETE!.
[]
Looking at these images. Is impresive for a indie to be able to show something like that. I can admit he has a ego, and his games are “hard”, and maybe somewhat broken (YMMV, are broken to me)…. but he!.. he can pull this thing, and other achievents. I am impressed. I think is fair that RPS is interviewing this dude.
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Outspoken developer?. More like abrasive
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Oh wow! I thought Derek Smart was long-gone from the game dev scene for good! And here he is with his brand spankin’ new game! I love the screen shots, especially the HUD… Derek, have you learned nothing from your previous games? That is one butt-ugly HUD. While I admit that there are much less 3-letter acronyms than his previous games (3000AD anyone?), he still uses them!
Derek, i’m being bluntly honest here. There are some very good reasons why your not successful:
- Your communication is very unprofessional. I would not want to work with you.
- You are not a team player.
Fix those 2 issues and your professional life should become much easier.
Anyways, I know your probably steaming mad at me now. Feel free to beat-up another Coke machine to let of some of that steam.
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I’m impressed by the info that direct2drive outsells steam.
You never here any developer say stuff like that, so it’s good to read it when it does get said. Interesting…
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“There are some very good reasons why your not successful:”
When people get angry with me in comments they say the same to me. But get this: Derek Smart runs his own business where he makes games and keeps all the profits. he has being doing it for decades.
If that’s not success I don’t know what is. You can dislike him, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a commercial success, as he clearly is.
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guys its great that you want to stand up and take a swing at him but for gods sake stop being so damn amateur troll about it
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Syneval: Actually, Mr Smart specifically mentions the X franchise.
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Bah! I wouldnt’ be concerned about it if I were you. Inconsequential posts (aka drivel) by trolls – who think are dilusional in thinking that their vitriol has any impact whatsoever – get deleted around here.
Don’t care what anyone thinks, says or does. Me, I just want to make games and live out a meaningful life when the dust settles on my career.
Anyway…
Anyone who says that the space combat genre isn’t dead, needs to stop drinking that denial Cool-Aid.
And when we say dead, we mean “mainstream dead”, not in “some guy in a basement isn’t making them anymore dead”.
If the genre – as we once knew it – wasn’t dead, and I didn’t want want to take a break and do something new, I’d have done KnightBlade instead of this fps stepping stone.
Fact is, it is a choice that I get to make.
And as with ALL my games, worst case scenario, I’ll make every cent of my money back. So yeah, we should all be millionaire failures.
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Cooper42: “I’d love to see a properly story-driven space sim. Bridge Commander missed this entirely.”
I just thought of Mass Effect, reading that. I was enamoured with the Normandy, and all that background info you get on space warfare … only for the game never to touch on any of that. I’d melt if somebody could take the plot-driven Mass Effect with fun exploration of planets, issues, people, and gunfights, and combine it with a strategy/simulation of the Normandy in space battles. Something not as complicated as a full-on simulation; something along the lines of Empire: Total War’s naval battles, only more in-depth. I can but dream.
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Doctor Derek Smart, people!
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Is the website even Firefox compatible? I’m getting an exciting blank white screen with a horizontal divider across the middle, it’s very informative, and I can’t be bothered to load up IE to check it. The game sounds somewhat interesting I suppose – I seem to have missed out on all these flame wars of the past, sadly.
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Interesting interview, I can’t say I agree with all the things said in it but I appreciate I’m speaking as a complete industry outsider. I do think the vitriol in the comments thread goes far beyond a reasonable response to anything actually raised in the text of the article.
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@ Sum0
Actually STBC was the inspiration behind my wanting to do KnightBlade. But of course, in my case, I’m going to go completely and shamefully overboard. No clicking this that and other. We’re going to have 100% complete control – in first person mode – of your entire ship crew.
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which is why the rank amateurishness of it all is so annoying! put effort into the trolling or do’nt bother
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@ Rob
Vitriol? Methinks you jest. I’m not known for doing marketing fluffy ridden interviews. A Derek Smart interview is a Derek Smart interview. There’s no Grey area. If the written word comes off as being vitriolic, then I guess you’re only admitting that I am in fact – much to my dismay – human.
Fact is, you are mistaking vitriol (nice word, learn how to use it) for passion. Once you learn the difference between the two, you’ll regard the interview for what it is: a conversation – not a marketing fluff piece. Especially since I’m not selling anything. Just talking.
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I appreciate the response but actually I wasn’t accusing you of spewing vitriol, but rather some of my fellow posters in this comment thread.
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… and so he begins to make himself look even more of an ass.
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To be honest i would rather read an outspoken person who says his mind but his mind is full of rubbish, then a boring PR person who says rubbish to market his game.
Even though he says a few good things in there.
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…yeah, that attack on Rob was a bit uncalled for.
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@ Rob,
hehe, looks like we got some wires crossed there ol’ chap. My bad for not breaking up that into a second paragraph.
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Dick? Maybe. But if I was making money from making games I think I’d be a smug cock with all the trimmings too.
Now lets all talk about how nice it is to play videogames.
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Yeah, a ship commanding game where you interact with people rather than a simple interface to get things done could be quite interesting. Would make for an interesting cooperative game, too, if each of you could take command of a given bit of the ship.
Then again, you’d have to have a pretty good characterisation for it not to look like you’re in charge of a ship full of robots. The problem with simulating personal interactions in games has never been really well done without heavy scripting and so on, although Valve’s face system could be a good step in making it work.
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Attack? Seriously? Oh wait!! You’re just trying to start a fight, aren’t you? ;)
Rob was talking about vitriol in the comments thread. I made a generalized in the vein of “…vitriol? Thats nuthin’”.
Of course it went downhill from there in my explanation about vitriol as it pertains to how I do interviews vs the responses to things I say.
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@ Gap Gen
That actually is what I have in mind. And everything you said, is exactly why I haven’t done it yet. The tech just isn’t there to make it believable. The best one can hope for is co-op where each personnel slot is manned by a human. But even so, that would only work within the MMO space where you are guaranteed to have a bunch of people online and playing the game according to a set of rules.
To do that in a non-MMO multiplayer game would be a waste of time (IMO) simply because everyone will want to be the captain.
And even if you do it, adding multiplayer just makes the game that much more difficult to develop, let alone play. And of course, once you go down that route you are going to end up in a situation where your efforts get un-needed negative criticism because you didn’t go far enough.
Gamers today are their own worst enemy when it comes to the type of games that get developed. Hence the reason publishers keep churning out the same old derivative stuff – in different clothes – year after year.
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It’s no problem, just a small misunderstanding easily cleared up.
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Neither the adventure, nor the space sim genre is truly dead, outside of mainstream publishers that is. I bet a lot of people would be drawn in if there was ever a new Wing Commander or Monkey Island made.
Trouble is, that most indie efforts have been bad to mediocre, which is a shame.
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And thats the problem right there. If one publisher came out and did really good space sim, the others will just do what they ALWAYS do: copycat.
Before Ace Combat, nobody would dream of even doing that kind of game on the console. To date, all of them – including the one or two ill-fated space combat games on consoles – have failed. All except the AC series, of which AC6 was the best bar none.
AC6 did really well for an XB360 only release. And since UBI already had their medicre offerings in the form of Blazing Angels (?), the next logical step was to see if they could up the ante. So of course came HAWX. It just so happens that, after paying Tom Clancy so much dough to use his name, that it stands to reason that they’d pillage that name to kingdom come.
The indie offerings are few and far between, but they won’t be anywhere in the mainstream – ever. So, like adventure, war games etc, will remain in that low yield category forever.
Heck, even NCSoft had a space combat MMO* in the works and canned it. The devs got the IP back and are still trying to get it out. But from the looks of it, is not what the space combat junkies are accustomed to or looking forward to I don’t think.
* Blackstar
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I’ve laughed at Derek in the past, but reading this interview now, I’m realizing that every word he has said is spot on. The man knows what he’s talking about and I have a lot more respect for him. He’s doing what he loves, carving out a niche, and he’s successful at it.
Screw the naysayers, Derek is awesome :)
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@ Hypocee
Envious people – especially those with an inferiority complex are always the first – to start with the personal attacks. Do you feel inferior? Maybe you should.
The difference between you and I is that I put my money and my talent where my mouth is. And what you have done lately?
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Its always neat reading a Derek Smart interview, because its such a change from the carefully corporate controlled pap that the usual developer interview is. He’s going to say his mind, in his own way.
Anyway, although I am quite thoroughly outside of this niche gaming genre (I remember playing a version of Battlecruiser that came free with a gaming magazine and being both impressed and utterly confused by it), I am interested in a “thinking man’s FPS”. I’ve only seen the screenshots that come with this article, and read the the description on the website, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.
And since this seems like one of the few times I’ll actually get to have a direct communication with a developer, a question (suggestion?) for you, Derek: one of the things I’ve liked about a lot of recent FPSes is the movement away from the “floating eyeballs with a gun” feel to giving the player a much greater sense of being in control of a body. So, when you go up to a vehicle in AAW in first person view and press the “use” key, do you just instantly, magically appear inside the vehicle, or is there a first-person animation of you clambering in? I’ve been playing a lot of Far Cry 2 recently, which is why this comes to mind. (I have not watched any videos of the game yet, so this already may be in)
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I though it was a pretty good interview and Derek hit the nail on the head about space games and some other PC genres which are “mainstream” dead for all intensive purposes. It was only through the talent of Lucasarts 2.0 aka Telltale they were able to inject a bit of life back into that particular one.
I was also interested to read that direct2drive sales were better than Steams which is something I’ve long suspected, the Valve fanboy teams recently tore apart Stardocks Brad at shacknews for daring to insinuate that Steam is not the best thing ever.
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Spoken English for a start, Doc-torrrr.
Oh, and additional relevance: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/11/interview-starwraith-on-evochron-legends/
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Hypocee: you say niche dev and low budget like it’s a bad thing… (glares at stardock, bohemia, CRS, Eve)
And seriously, anyone who makes the games they want to make for 10+ years without massive compromise (regardless of AAA success) might actually have learned a thing or two.
Never could get into Battlecruiser but I like the idea of it. The MMO reminds me of watching my older brother play the old Startrek moo/mush where people actually had to code their components for ships and took a group effort to make them move and fire etc.
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Funny you should mention that!! You and I have the same opinion. When I was commissioning the new animations for the new skeletal animation system used in the game, I fought long and hard – with myself – to do those animations as you suggested. Though – through animation blending (which we use extensively, thanks to Sergio’s magic) – it can be done with ease, I decided against doing that sort of animation for one simple – but critical reason. It breaks the game flow – and adds nothing to the game.
Climing into a vehicle, fighter or whatever, using an animation, requires that the animation be played. While it is being played, the trigger action (you being switched from fp mode to the vehicle cockpit) is HALTED until the animation is done playing. That breaks it completely.
Even in games like GTA-IV, the only reason you see an animation of you opening the car door and getting is, is because there is a door to begin with. So if you’re going to halt the trigger by opening the door, doing collision detect, playing the animation – THEN – letting the player have control, it makes sense that you would do an animation. Why go half way when you can go all the way?
Our games don’t have any doors, the cockpits don’t open or anything like that. So the switch is instanteous.
However, we did add a feature whereby since most units have various sets (pilot, driver, gunner, passenger etc), you see icons letting you know which are available. As long as you are facing the one you want, you can enter it. If you misse and enter the wrong one, exiting and trying again is trivial. Imagine if you had to wait for an animation to play before you had control. That is a bad design decision and doesn’t fit in my idea of the game. So I didn’t do it.
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What vitriol in this comments thread?
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You waaaaaa!? They’re some of my favourite people in the world!
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@ Black Mamba
Yeah, I saw that thread.
The fact is, Brad is 100% right.
While I don’t think Impulse is any competition to Steam, let alone the likes of Direct2Drive, Gamers Gate, Metaboli etc thats not the point. The point is that Steam is everything to Valve and Valve games – and nothing more than a residual sales portal (D2D, GG etc) to everyone else.
The Valve fanboys have invested in the platform, so of course it stands to reason that they would defend it. But I personally know of several friends who no longer buy games on Steam for a variety of reasons.
Steam has huge numbers, but those numbers are primarily derived from Valve’s own games. I know several developers with games on Steam and I know for a fact that being on Steam has zero impact in terms of the sales you’d think you can get just by being on there.
Its not like Steam have 15m gamers is going to guarantee that 1m of those are going to buy your game. Thats like saying because Walmart is the biggest retailer, Game Stop, Best Buy etc should just give up the ghost since everyone will just try to get into Walmart.
It just doesn’t work like that.
We get quite a decent amount of sales from Direct2Drive, Gamers Gate etc and even though putting it on a popular portal like Steam is always a good thing if there is someone there who will rather buy from Steam than Direct2Drive, its not a make or break decision.
Heck, people don’t give gamers credit these days. If a gamer wants a game that they’re willing to pay for, they don’t give a rats ass who is selling it.
When have you ever seen ANY of the other portals tout their numbers? Ever?
Valve has a lot to prove because they’re using those metrics to attract developers (whose products they want) and publishers (whose business they want). They certainly can’t use individual sales numbers because that would breach all kinds of laws, privacy issues, contract issues etc.
The same can be said for e.g. Braid. Jon is putting it on Steam and other portals just because he can, not because he had to. In fact, he has come right out and said that he’s not even concerned about the PC sales revenue.
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Hypcoee. Oh well then I mis-read your response :) Sorry bout that.
Speaking of Impulse, I found it interesting that they’re selling Corel Painter on it.
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I’m not trying to be a prick, but are you really going to make a game called “KnightBlade,” because that’s a horrible title for anything.
It sounds like a generic piece of shovelware from the 16 bit era, or worse, a Rob Liefeld character.
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*cough*TheverysurvivalofIntroversion*cough*. And as I’ve said somewhere else here that I forget, I was around for the launch of Sword of the Stars – patches (desperately needed because that game was released ridiculously bugged) took literally more than a month after website release to trickle through the bureaucracies of GG and D2D.
On the other hand, I’ve been balanced on Steam for a long time, and right now I’ve been unable to play my several hundred bucks in Steam games for two weeks and counting because of a five-dollar SNAFU with my bank.
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“guys its great that you want to stand up and take a swing at him but for gods sake stop being so damn amateur troll about it”
Actually, no, it’s bloody pathetic. If you guys want to act like childish dicks, go play on YouTube. Me, I’m here to talk games and am exceedingly grateful to have the chance to interact with honest-to-gosh game developers here on RPS. It’s bad behaviour like this that gives gamers a bad name – those responsible should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
As to your comments, Mr Smart, I’m glad you clarified your position re: the death of the Space genre. It has been many years since a decent mainstream space game appeared, and I think the last two or three of note were from East-European developers. It greatly pains me to admit that a genre so dear to my heart is all but cremated here in the west but I find it interesting to analyse why this is. I remember once holding out great hopes for your Battlecruiser NextGen project – would I be right in assuming that’s been shunted into the MMO model you were talking about? – and was gutted when your plans moved in different directions.
I’m not sure I can trust what you said about Egosoft, though. Without proof of them ‘hurting’ it sounds very much like pure personal opinion, and as previously noted, it doesn’t jibe with the constant new releases and determined efforts to develop new content for patches. I, for one, am curious to see which direction they go in next, having devoted all these years building just one IP.
I blame EA, too. :)
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Gentlemen, be gentlemen.
KG
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He took a very large dump on EvE, which I don’t appreciate.
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I thought he was pretty generous to Eve. He basically said it’s not a game for everyone, but it’s a great game for the people who like it. This couldn’t be more true.
Calling a space spreadsheet is a bit reductive, but the game asks for it.
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Reading this interview made me hope again that maybe one day I’ll make my own games too…
This guy is like some sort of Howard Roark of the gaming world:)
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Speaking as someone who hasn’t played any games by Mr. Smart, nor do I know much about him, if this game pulls off what’s intended, I will be very interested to play it.
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If you misse and enter the wrong one, exiting and trying again is trivial. Imagine if you had to wait for an animation to play before you had control. That is a bad design decision and doesn’t fit in my idea of the game.
Okay, well it obviously depends on the type of game. Far Cry 2 was very focused on delivering an immersive, “realistic” world, with a Half-Life-style lack of cut-scenes, guns that jam, long healing animations, etc. When you’re under fire and you have to make the choice of staying on foot or jumping on the machine gun mounted on a vehicle, part of the calculus of that choice is the knowledge that you’ll be vulnerable while the climbing-aboard animation plays out, just as you would be in a real firefight. However, in other games, with different design intentions, that mechanic would be intolerable.
What makes a little less sense is it seems that you’re claiming that GTA IV only put in character-climbing-into-car animation because they had car models with doors that open. I feel like Rockstar did put a lot more thought into what kind of game they wanted (gameplay vs. immersion) when they chose to have players wait while the animation plays out than “we’ve got doors, lets have the characters open them”. If you decided that AAW was going to be the kind of game with that design aesthetic, you would have demanded that cockpits open and close.
But you’ve decided to make AAW with a different feel, thus you didn’t put those animations in. Note I am not in any way saying that this is a bad thing. You’ve obviously put thought into it, and it is your game after all.
I also a agree with PC Monster that talking to an actual developer (and one, now, of a genre I love — FPSes) is really cool and the trolling is lame.
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Yeah I’m on the boat of regardless of your feelings about whether or not he is in your opinion a developer, he still has games development experience which places most of us one level beneath him… You can either accept that, or be bitter. I choose the former.
I found in Planetside, the game would switch to third person for exiting and entering vehicles and also a landing animation sequence for when you’ve ejected from an aircraft. The exit/entry animations were swift enough that I never had an issue with them, though on full consideration I would’ve preferred it if they’d not broken perspective in order to do it. The bail landing animation was kind of annoying, though mostly because the ‘elite’ players knew how to bypass it whilst the casuals didn’t, the games ended up being full of holes of that kind.
Still, you’ve made your choice for how entry/exit of vehicles is done and given a good justification for doing so, so I won’t argue over it since its personal preference at work as much as anything else.
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That is a big ‘if’. It may be the biggest ‘if’ you’ve ever spoken. That’s pretty much the point of the Dr. Derek Smart brand.
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I much prefer gamers gate to steam as it’s much more user friendly for me and apparently more friendly to most developers as well. I think that a lot of people need to tone down on the whole “valve is saving pc gaming” routine. It feels good being able to say that knowing that anyone wanting to flame me has to get past Derek Smart first. Thanks Derek.
Neogaf have some pretty impressive animated gifs. I’ve seen them. It’s hard to respond to debate at that high intellectual level, so be careful.
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Really interesting interview to be honest. Whoever the developer is, I prefer more candid, less PR based interviews that don’t just talk “Project features A, B, C, numbers X, Y, Z, screenshots!”.
I especially like the insight into Steam and other distribution services – there is really no need to call any of them the godsend, they’ll all compete (diversifying or consolidating, or targeting niches as appropriate). The comment on GoG is spot on.
I’ll be trying the demo if there is one – I think this is a bigger investment of time then some other smaller team projects (at least I assume Dereks team is smallish), such as it is a bigger game, thus well worth some attention. Space combat specifically never really tugged at me, but tactical ground combat always is interesting.
I wonder if it’ll support modding in any form. Most FPS multiplayer titles generally do just for map creation or diversifying the AI or in built attributes/weapons/vehicles, and keeps the game going for a nice while too. Hard to add in some cases though, I’ve no idea what the tech is like underneath.
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just because your editors seem to get it wrong in every goddamn article, it’s GOG not gog or GoG or gOg, but all caps, Good Old Games. The lower case “o” is primarily only used for small words that don’t have much meaning like WoW is “of.” “of” is insignificant incomparison to World or Warcraft, which is why those two are capitalized in the name “World of Warcraft” as opposed to all 3 words
in Good Old Games, all three words are capitalized because all three are equally important.
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@ PC Monster
Yes, indeed. Battlecruiser Next Gen was to be the next big thing. The original plan was to overhaul the whole thing, add in-door levels to all (over 50 objects) cap ships, stations, bases etc. In fact, that overhaul would have taken the better part of two to three years to do since it would entail gutting out a lot of our legacy code.
However, the more I thought about it, the more nervous I got. At 45, with a family of my own now, I’m not the gung-ho Jack I used to be back when I started out. So these decisions tend to take me longer to make as I stare suspiciously at my bank account.
In the end, as I said in the interview, it just made sense to spend North of a million or two (amortized given the fact that most all the core engines we have in AAW were practically gutted and re-written) doing an MMO which we could then nurture over the years in the same manner that we have our plethora of non-MMO games.
It is not question of whether not it can be done. Of course it can be done – especially given our tech and collective experience. The greater question is how we’re going to address that whole ROI issue.
So, I either spend $2-3m and about two years doing the BCNG overhaul, or just go balls out and spend a little bit more on the MMO that is sure to have a better – and more rapid & stable ROI.
Basically, BCNG because GCO. The rest is history.
To be frank, doing AAW and KB are just financial stepping stones and an attempt to shore up our bank a/c because once those two are over and done with, until GCO is launched, the only income we’re going to be seeing are from those two and our residual income from previous games. I don’t have investors – don’t want any – and my games support the company as they always have. So I’m not going to go out and borrow $5m to do a game, when the prudent thing to do would be to be conservative and just take the time. There is no rush to bring GCO to market. There is no pressure. In fact, I even toyed with the idea of canceling KnightBlade altogether but why do that when I can make money off a game based on engines that we’ve already overhauled? We don’t have to spent two years on KB when we already have the engines. In fact, most of the work is going to be in the asset creation than in engine and gameplay development.
The end result is that GCO – when it comes out – will be a mirror of our niche games, but with all the bells and whistles of a community based MMO and high-end features. Things like first person action, space and planetary combat, trading etc – all staples of our games, will all be present. The new additions – apart from the new and revised engines – in terms of high end features, will be the indoor levels for all cap ships, stations, bases etc. As well as the ability for players to replace NPC crew slots.
Well I was talking in terms of the decline in sales of the space combat genre. If it made sense, there would be another X space game coming. As it stands, there isn’t. And even if they announced another space game, my guess is that it will be an MMO. It is the most sensible thing to do. IF they can afford to do it, that is.
@ Jad
Actually I made no such claims, did I? Reading….nope, didn’t. In fact the reason its done in GTA-VI, is the same reason you cited and why it was done in Far Cry2.
Those are different games with different style, pacing and gameplay.
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@ Weclock
RoTFLmAo!!! :)
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Since Dr. Smart is responding to comments, I’d like to ask one. The basic premise and screen shots of AAW immediately lead me to comparisons with Planetside. How would you compare and differentiate the two games, aside from one being a MMO and the other a more traditional multiplayer game?
Also: Why has everyone who has tried to make a spiritual successor to the original X-Com failed, in your opinion?
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Loving the site.
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Exp is only saved in ranked servers and single play and its needed to use advanced weapons and vehicles? Then why bother playing unranked servers?
Also the exp system has been already used in a quite similar game – PlanetSide. It worked nicely until most of the players gained all skills.
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DS has already said that XP will be lost for poor performance and losing games, de-levelling you if you like. Perhaps that means skill saturation won’t occur.
Might have some problems of its own, though. My ETQW experience was surprisingly full of players grinding XP, achievements, switching to the winning team, sitting in spectator for up to 10 minutes to join the winning team, quitting the game if they can’t get on a winning team and generally blaming everyone else for ruining the appearance of their stats page.
All this in a game without unlocks and where silly stats numbers didn’t matter. It became the case that the only fairly accurate measure of a player’s skill was frags/hour as that was difficult to cheat on.
So, whats going to happen in MP AAW where joining an obviously weak team will put your pilot’s license at risk?
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The losing team having an exp bonus might help. The exp system seems really unfriendly to beginners, not only are you worse at the game, you are being handicapped for it.
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I’ve seen people (Here in the UK) wishing they didn’t have to play against Americans because apparently they’re sore loosers who’ll quit a game if it looks as though they might lose or are just generally annoying in some way. I don’t game online enough anymore to be able to claim I share that opinion though.
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@Bremze: That’s the reason WWII Online scrapped the xp loss on death before release. Of course, in WWIIOL, there are limited numbers of everything but the most basic vehicles/infantry loadouts, so having a n00b drive all three of your remaining Tigers into the same anti-tank ambush, one after another, does not engender desire in the experienced players to be understanding of youngsters who can’t be bothered to read the documentation.
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The way I read it, the XP restrictions may only apply on ranked servers.
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I think he makes a lot of excellent points in all fairness, I only ever bought Battlecruiser 3000AD back when it was released but I just failed miserably at getting my head around it. It did get a high score in PCG at the time which was what promted me to buy it.
I must admit preconcieved notions about Derek Smart, but the interview has warmed me to him (obviously he has no reason to care about my feelings one way or the other, but I think it is nice to see a larger side to him than the usual comment wars)… and to understand why he responds the way he does, well, I don’t think he should be judged any differently for responding in kind than those he replies to, if anything it’s refreshing not to have someone take the high ground and passionately defend their work – at least it shows self belief.
Interesting comments on steam vs other online sales..er.. thingies. All in all great interview, good job Kieron (and Derek)
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I can’t shake the feeling that one particular joke would’ve been funnier if Rossignol were the one doing the interview.
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Oh and he clearly has excellent taste in site designers.. much like RPS.
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Agreed. this is mental.
99.99% of the people who talk about DS being such a total failure would explode in orgasmic delight if they could swap their current jobs for running their own games companies and owning all the (obviously sufficient) profits.
Its like the people who work in cubicles who snort with derision at millionaires beacuse they don’t earn as much as Bill Gates.
DS does exactly what he wants, with no boss to tell him what to do, and makes a living from it. As someone in a similar position, I can assure you that such a life is great. I don’t think he needs any sympathy
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They are vastly different. You can’t compare two games just based on their premise and genre. I could list a bunch of features that Planetside (and probably ever other fps on the planet), doesn’t have – but that would be a waste of my time.
I have a better idea. Here, go read the game docs. They are 99% completed except for the multiplayer (needs some revision) and the appendix (needs a bunch of info).
Come back and ask questions if still have any.
Planetside – IMO – would have fared a lot better were it not an MMO.
Incompetence would be my first guess. But thats just me.
Indeed. You can lose XP in a bunch of ways and that IMO will balance things out.
For one thing, there is no spectator mode. And specifically for the reasons you cited.
Second, it doesn’t matter what team you are on because the personal stats are not team based. They are individual.
There were links in the interview, but for some reason they don’t seem to appear in the RPS transcript, so here they are.
GameLobby (screen shot)
Leaderboards (Live, but WIP)
At the end of the day, there will be loopholes, exploits etc. We will tackle and ultimatedly defeat them as they occur.
Apart from the fact that not everyone can setup a ranked server? And even so, they’ll probably be full most of the time?
Don’t feed the trolls. Let them starve to death. Either that or they’ll just keep wondering why their posts keep mysteriously disappearing.
You just can’t reason with people like that. So why bother? Thats like the school yard bully who feels all powerful and strong because there’s a teacher or his buddies closeby. Get him in a corner and by the time you’re done, he’ll be running home to mommy with pee stained pants. I knew a few like that in my day. My guess is they’re either dead, in jail or living under a bridge somewhere.
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But seriously if this is sort of easy to figure out (unlike every other game DS has made) and it has a decent tutorial, and it isn’t buggy as hell I might buy this.
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I’ve always thought Mr. Smart had a lot of good ideas and could talk a good game, but in the end just could not deliver. Nothing I’ve seen over the years, or anything I’ve seen in regards to the current project, has changed that assessment.
I don’t really care if he’s abrasive or arrogant. Artists often are. He’s a PC game developer who makes, by and large, mediocre PC games. Kudos to him for sticking to his principles and keeping his nose to the grindstone–everyone should do the same. That said, persistence and dedication do not immunize one to criticism, and Mr. Smart’s seemingly outright (and often vitriolic)rejection of even the most valid of criticisms does sour my opinion of the man. He has a large enough fan-base to keep him in business, sure, but this is the internet and the 21st century. There is a market for everything. You can be the biggest Twilight fan-fiction writer there is, but that still doesn’t mean your writing is good.
Some people enjoy his games, and I say enjoy away. He can (and should) keep making them. I reject the notion that everything that can find a fan-base is worthwhile and that criticism is the product of a weak and envious mind, however. Mr. Smart is very dedicated to his craft, I just don’t think he’s very good at it. That does not mean I think he should quit.
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I have to agree that the XP loss/banhammering sounds like a major turnoff. Horrible, horrible memories of the otherwise good Wolf:ET and getting kicked because moron teammates wouldn’t stop tapdancing on my minefields.
I’m curious as to how exactly need to put levels into piloting skills will stop the plane-griefing hell of public BF1942, too. There are far too many hotshot dicks in the world who will all camp the airbase while the team fails, then TK whichever of them manages to clamber in first. Needing to specialise just means that they’ll be even less equipped to do anything but camp for planes.
People are dicks, but trying to use mechanisms to stop them being dicks doesn’t tend to work very well, because dicks are perversely creative in their chosen passtime of being annoying.
(Also: ye gods, if Derek’s unrepentantly abrasive writing style what passes for full-out arrogant cockery these days, be glad you lot haven’t seen the Linux Kernel Mailing List. You’d spontaneously catch fire, or something.)
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Every game I have ever developed, has been released for free, by me – and as a way of giving back to an industry that affords me the luxuries of doing what I love and what I’m good at.
I don’t regret what I do, how I do it, nor how I’ve done it. For me it has been one helluva learning experience.
So yeah, take your pot shots. I’m not the one sitting in a cubible slaving for the man, buried in debt, living a meaningless existence and going through life like I was born into some sort of entitlement. I’m the guy sitting in my home office – or by the pool – in my underwear living the life I want on my own terms and my own rules. With a laptop, an internet connection and not a care in the world except for my family and the guys who – for so many years – have worked with me day in and day out doing what we love the most and because we all share a common idea of what it is we want to do.
The life I live today is based on brave decisions I made many years ago and the storms I had to brave because I believed in what I was doing. All I needed was to believe in what I was doing. Everything else, all this rubbish you guys keep dishing out, is just inconsequential noise.
To this day, on sites around the world, my games – free – and all, are downloaded, they make the download charts (e.g. here is the File Planet one) constantly.
Thats how I build my install base. People who would otherwise not have tried my game – for reason (e.g. the crap that losers who never played my games, tend to post) or the other – tend to try it, make a beeline for our website and ultimately end up buying the latest game. Thats why I keep making them.
As I type this, I’ve been funding a major v2.0 graphics upgrade for a game, Universal Combat CE I released in Q4/07. For free. The last title of its kind and I wanted to give the ol’ gal a proper send off, so I upgraded it with all the new graphics bells and whistles from the Echo Squad SE game (2008) and will release it for free when its done. That effort costs money, not to mention time. But since there won’t be another space game in the series for another two years, I wanted to extend the life of that last nice space combat game as best I could to tide the tribe over. Thats the sort of thing that keeps me in business. Its called loyalty. Look it up.
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I don’t like Derek Smart games, but I do like Derek Smart interviews and comment threads.
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Incidentally I disagree that the space combat genre is dead, seeing how X3 Terran Conflict actually sold really well.
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@ LionsPhil
Yep. Believe me, as a gamer, I am well aware of all that and we have steps in place to combat it.
For one thing, unless you’re a pilot class, your ass ain’t climbing into a plane. Period.
And if you want to be a cock while playing the pilot class, well you’ll find that my games are not just notorious for cutting edge AI, you’ll also learn that cocks don’t fly. Because by the time you’ve actually spent your short and meaningless life in the air for the sole purpose of griefing, my guess is that a SAM or SAL site has already shot you down enough times to leave a burn mark on your ass.
And playing as one of the three infantry classes also has some shockers in place. e.g. just because you see a vehicle, doesn’t mean you can get in it.
And kill your team mates – even by FF – you’ll get a violation flag. Get enough of those and you won’t be able to play on ANY game server. Ever. In other words, you’ll be griefing the NPCs in your single player game – not other games in multilplayer.
Plus, since we’re using ByteShield DRM (virtually uncrackable as of this writing) which uses an online authentication method tied to your account, keep at it and I have the ability to completely lock you out of the game entirely. Something that I can legally do btw since you would be violating the TOS.
So whether you play on ranked servers or not, we’re not going to tolerate any griefing. People already know my short leash for that sort of thing, so it will come as no surprise when I start banning people. It will just make them all the more mad at me. That, I can deal with.
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Indeed. But to deal with dicks, you have to be a dick yourself. That, I have no problems with.
The best way that most of us devs and publishers have to found to deal with dicks, is to completely take them out. Out of the equation that is.
Sure they will find ways to get around it, but the more effort they put into coming back, the more you know that you’re hitting them where it hurts. The time they spend circumventing the system (new account, email address, IP proxies etc), is time they’re not griefing someone else in your game.
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“Plus, since we’re using ByteShield DRM (virtually uncrackable as of this writing) which uses an online authentication method tied to your account, keep at it and I have the ability to completely lock you out of the game entirely. Something that I can legally do btw since you would be violating the TOS.”
Hehe this is going to go down well.
I seriously do hope this game has a good tutorial and is reletavily simple to at least start playing. As an FPS type game I’d assume it is but who knows!
If this game comes out with a demo, and is actually easy to get into and pleasant to play I will genuinly buy a copy, and recommend it to my friends, instead of just aquiring it through other means to show my friends how bad it is.
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Oh dear. From the ByteShield site: “…an honest end-user with auto login turned on will never notice ByteShield”. Yes, because obviously acting as a hidden little botfly larvae burrowing its way around inside the paying customer’s Windows install has proved so popular with every other copy protection system. At least Steam sits in your system tray and says “I’m Steam, and I’ll be managing your licenses for today”.
Violation flags might work as long as there’s a cooldown on them, to allow for the inevitable thing which makes friendly fire a game dynamic in the first place: it requires care to not shoot the wrong guys, and sometimes artillery falls short, lines of fire get crossed, and someone fails to hear “frag out”.
Which at least means that those doing it on purpose are rate-limited, if not stopped, I suppose.
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It is easy to discount deranged trouble makers when in actuality and reality, it is those same people who are utter tits to others in real life, in multiplayer games, in forums etc. So why expect those people – like you for instance – to be any different?
It is no inconceivable that a thief is always going to be a thief and an opportunity. So hard is it to point out that people behaving like dicks, attacking others etc, are people who are used to doing that. This thread alone is a Litmus test of that.
If someone behaves like a dick, they’re a dick. It doesn’t matter one bit who the target is. And it doesn’t matter if that target – or someone else – points out that you’re being a dick.
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urgh XP in first person skill based games that last any longer than per round is the devil, never ever let it rear its ugly head if you can help it on any project you work on.
but i guess the target market is happy…
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‘”Something that I can legally do btw since you would be violating the TOS.”
Hehe this is going to go down well.’
You lot really should try reading a EULA one of these days. Yes, I know, all that nasty legalise in your face when you’re trying to install Killfest Online 2010, tut tut. But they’ve been stating that you can lose your license to play the game if you get banhammered online for years. It’s taken until Steam to actually enforce that for offline play as well (IIRC), but you’ve theoretically agreed to such terms long before then.
(AIUI, the legaity of some clauses like those in EULAs is questionable, and operates on the basis that it’s easier and cheaper for the publisher to try to enforce them with technology than lawyers, and likewise utterly impractical for the user to ever challenge it. IANAL. YMMV. Consult a professional if symptoms persist.)
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Oh good, the trolls have sent off the developer. Thanks a bunch, guys! For an encore, perhaps you could come round to my house and rip the preview sections out of my copies of PCG?
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Yes but no developer in the history of ever has come out and said “WE WILL BAN YOU FROM PLAYING MULTIPLAYER IF YOU TK A FEW TIMES FOREVER”
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To be fair, I didn’t find the manual at all helpful in trying to work out what the hell I was supposed to be doing in BC3kAD, which was a shame as it looked fun. I believe I managed to launch something and fly into a planets atmosphere then crash, go me.
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Hasn’t PunkBuster’s hardware-hashed GUID mechanism been used for cross-server banning for some time?
Unless it’s specifically the “telling people” aspect you object to, in which case you should have equal qualms with Valve’s policy on cheaters, and their claimed infallability of VAC.
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Nice interview. Derek is still a bridge selling bull—- artist with a penchant for wild overgeneralization, but there’s quite a bit of astute observation in his remarks.
For example, the Steam comments. A lot of the “Steam roxxors” sentiments are written by people who just happen to be huge fans of Valve, which doesn’t mean much as an endorsement of Steam. When women and older people start flocking to the product, a la WoW and Wii, then you’ll know you’ve hit mainstream.
I also agree with him in that the way to make MMOs is to learn from EVE, not WoW, because nobody’s going to buy your game if it reminds them of WoW unless you’ve spent (literally) a billion dollars on it.
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I actually like his games. They’re complicated, rarely fulfil their potential and suffer from some amusing bugs, but it kinda adds to the charm.
Though the BC3K manual (grey, with a picture of one of the fighters letting rip with a laser on the front) did kind of suck. To this day, I still haven’t figured out how to beam up an away team. Many the career of a captain was brought to an end stranded on some forgotten alien world, because the damn transporter only works one way and the shuttle pilot specialises in the kind of landings which become “public artworks” shortly afterwards.
Whether he’s a dick or not is irrelevant, I’m paying for the games, not to spend the night with him.
As far as Steam goes, the problem isn’t that it’s necessarily bad, but that it’s turning into a dinosaur. In the past year alone I’ve watched Gamer’s Gate and Impulse mature and change in response to user comment and feedback, to the point where they’re actually offering a better service than Steam (GG is now client free, Impulse can not only track patches, but driver updates) which I can’t remember having a significant change since they added the Steam community. Top marks to Valve for being able to play the actual business side of things well, but both Impulse and GG are currently higher on my preference list than Steam, and it’s purely down to quality of service.
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I’ve always liked mr. Smart. His “outspokeness” is a blessed contrast to the measured press releases of most developers and publishers. And although I’m not part of his niche (I really like space sims, just not as much) AAW caught my interest and KnightBlade even more, as it’s probably is a idea most of us always had around while playing space sims.
It was an interesting interview and even more interesting comment thread. I really like some of Smart’s observations.
And that’s all there is to this comment, it’s not meant to add something to the debate just to give thanks to our RPS overlords and mr Smart for this interesting piece of internet writing.
And besides. He has both Crusader games boxed. You just can’t argue with that.
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You’re not a real PC game site/blog until you have 100+ comments about Mr. Smart and his games.
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@Theoban a lot of the commentators seemed to have been directed here from other places.
Sort of like when the anti Valve/piracy/zombies bat sign goes up and the website goes apeshit.
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To tell you the truth I thought Derek Smart was a made up character.
An intelligence barometer used by games bloggers to see:
A) How many of their readers actually play the games that are talked about.
B) Whether the readership is insane.
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Radiant: He still could be, all things considered. I mean, have you ever SEEN a Derek Smart? All we know is press releases, interviews, and a name attached to game titles. All VERY easy to fake, and with an audience so intent on image and ego nobody would want to admit, one, that they’ve never heard of a Derek Smart, and two would never admit that everyone else could be making it up.
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Have you played any of his games?
I haven’t no.
Are they any good?
DO THEY EVEN EXIST!
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Do I?
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If a tree falls on my wood.
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The game itself looks very, very sparse. There just doesn’t seem to be much stuff in the screenshots and what is there looks a tad generic.
And very, very flat. This game must take place on a planet without any geology.
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Right. Let’s get deleting, eh?
KG
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I saw we take off and nuke the page from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
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They mostly comment at night. Mostly.
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That’ll do.
KG
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Not going to disagree, I was trolling. When Dezza Smack is involved it’s inevitable.
BUT…
“I’m starting to wonder just how much of Mr. Smart’s reputation is the work of dedicated Angry Internet Men.”
Some, but not all. Fact is that just about every ‘discussion’ in which he gets involved descends into this kind of silliness. You can search Google’s Usenet archives to find many more examples going back years. It has always been like this. Of course some of it is down to immature nincompoops like myself, can hardly deny that, but not all. The one consistent factor in all of this? Why that’d be one Mr Derek Smart.
Blame it on trolls all you like (Dezza certainly does), but it’s his attitude that’s ultimately at fault. Other developers post on gaming forums all the time and they don’t have this kind of reputation, nor do their posts generally cause this much kerfuffle. And unlike Dezza many devs have actually made good games.
RPS knew exactly what they were doing when they posted this article. Regardless of how interesting the game sounds – and honestly, global banning rubbish aside, it really does – they know a Smart interview gets this kind of attention. He’s a one-man hit machine.
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*glances up*
Hoho!
Also, you’ve got to admit that it takes a lot of cojones to make a game that permabans for TK/griefing. It’s the sort of thing you’d love to do as a server admin but not something you’d see elsewhere.
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Neat interview, I didn’t mind the outspokenness on some subjects at all, I’d agree with most of it even. As some have said already, it’s about time people started to put certain things in perspective (like Steam).
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Absolutely. The Gamers Gate revelation, if it can be substantiated, is just what I’ve been waiting to hear. I’m fed up with Steam being touted as the second-coming when it’s plainly not.
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Good to see a game developer who talks to gamers- that is a rare thing IMO and something more should do.
I haven’t played any of your games but they sound like something I might like (I was a big fan of the Elite series). I would be very keen to play that FPS set in the cruiser that you speak of too!
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Your new game sounds interesting, might just have to check it out when it hits the virtual shelves.
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“Good to see a game developer who talks to gamers- that is a rare thing IMO and something more should do.”
Absolutely! Dialogue between Developer and Gamer/Customer should always be encouraged. That way we all get more of what we want. :)
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Direct2Drive, non-preferential treatment? Wait, what? Do they actually sell more than 10% of their games to non-Americans now?
(I knew you meant it differently, but couldn’t resist :P Also, semi-serious question. Has been a year or so at least since I had even a cursory look at Direct2Shite because they would never sell ANYTHING for our filthy third world € currency. Anyway, drifting off too much into semi-irrational hate-of-regional-publisher territory…)
Sounds good about AAW, by the way. I just hope there’s some form of orbital bombardment in it, as nonsensically achieving objectives the hard (grunt) way in sci-fi when you could just nuke it from orbit and be sure is a pet peeve of mine.
And someone really should father a space sim / rpg bastard child. Think Mass Effect (only better) with focus on actually piloting from the cockpit (as stupid as manual controls in a sci-fi setting are, gameplay comes first, I guess). HEAVAN [sic], I tell you. I also think people would actually buy something like that, although development costs could very well be prohibitive.
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Another problem with Direct2Drive is that unofficial mods rarely work with games bought through it, which for me instantly puts it in the “don’t use” category.
P.
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DSmart dropping massive truth bombs all over this bitch.
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OK, looks like the trollish stuff has been removed, back to sensible discussions now that I am in the middle of my first coffee for the day.
@Dave
Its not entirely flat actually. Please don’t judge a 400 sq. km area by looking at the 20km area you see in shots and movies. Those areas were deliberately – and manually – flattened for the purposes of putting stuff (e.g. the bases, areas of interest etc) on the ground.
The game – apart from having a variety of relief features, climate zones etc – is certainly not flat all over. There are mountain ridges, hills, tundras, valleys, rivers, beach heads etc. The world map shows various climate zones with various [particle based] weather patterns and such
Those in the Beta, publishers, media etc know this because I even have cheat codes that allow you to warp to ANY part of the planet and to check it out without have to walk, drive or fly there.
The first (Air Combat Certification Test) public BETA test will be out soon and you’ll be able to see for yourself first hand. Its actually ready, but we’re waiting for our dedicated ByteShield DRM server to go online so we can deploy the game. The reason being that most games get cracked when the demos, tests etc are released without DRM protection. Then the crackers just compare those builds to the final released version and get cracking. While I know for a fact that they can’t crack ByteShield – I’m not taking any chances.
And the good thing about ByteShield is that once you register for the BETA, demo or whatever, your a/c remains active. So when you buy the full game, your info is already there. So you start the game, authenticate it using your previous username/password – and you’re off. You will NEVER know that ByteShield is even there. It doesn’t install ANY drivers, hide ANYTHING on your machine or do any of that stuff that most gamers (without reason) tend to bitch and moan about.
I don’t mean to sound like a ByteShield shill, but as a tech aficionado, I like it. As a gamer, I have no complaints about using it. Some would [needlessly] balk at the online authentication, but it is a one time thing – unless you’re doing something totally un-cool. Plus Jan is one of the coolest guys you’re likely to meet anytime soon.
@ SwiftRanger
I’ve got two emails about this already, but your post pretty much sums it up. My comment about Steam was more of a wakeup call and putting things into persective than it being a slight. Not that I care how Valve feels about my comments either way – because they are my opinions.
The fact is due to the vast number of Valve games – and consequentially the number of registered Steam users, people tend to forget the simple fact that the bulk of those numbers happened because of Valve’s games. Games which were inexplicably tied to their games. So given the Valve’s sales numbers for their games it stands to reason that they would have a large number of subscribers for Steam.
This is not like DirecTV and Dish network playing show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Nobody is likely to have both satellite services.
On the other hand, Steam is monopolistic within its own space. You want a Valve game, you need Steam. If I want to watch HBO, I can subscribe to either a cable or satellite network. I don’t need to subscribe to DirecTV to watch HBO. But I can’t buy any Valve game anywhere else. Even when I buy it at retail (e.g. The Orange Box), I still need a Steam account.
So this whole “Valve is saving PC gaming” is just the usual fanboy nonsense – fueled by Valve’s marketing people.
If you want to say an ESD company is saving PC gaming, well why not say Direct2Drive or Gamers Gate for that matter, is saving PC gaming? Both of them have a much – much – larger and more ecclectic offering of games. You’re not tied to ANY auth system, app to install/play your game etc. Even Gamers Gate no longer uses a client – which was necessary due to how their backend services work.
I can bet my company that if we were to obtain the game to sales ratio for say, Direct2Drive and Steam, that the results would be shockingly surprising. Espeically when you take into account that Valve selling 6m copies of TOB via Steam, is not the same as D2D doing 6m unit sales across the board.
Plus there are MANY other services, each with their own incumbated subscriber base. These are just a few from my bookmarks…
Boonty
Comcast Games-On-Demand
Direct2Drive
GamesMania (Canada)
GameStreamer
GameTap
InstantAction
Metaboli
MS Windows Marketplace Labs
Oneplays
Phantom Game Store
RCN interACTION
Solid State Networks
Trygames
Verizon Games On Demand
WildTangent
Yahoo! Games on Demand
And new ones (e.g. Gamestreamer) are popping up every day. Also, I haven’t even taken into a/c all the White box OEM services which the cable operators (e.g. Verizon) through Exent (their backend, which is what GameTap also uses) use.
Then lets not forget all the shopfronts that guys like myself, Cliffski and others have and some of which use Digital River (we use them), RegNow (also owned by DR) that sell decent number of games directly to customers all over the world.
Those numbers eclipse any numbers that Valve can put up any day of the week.
My commentary is factual because at some point in time, I’ve dealt with these companies. e.g. my games are currently on D2D, GG, DR, GameTap etc. So I know how each service performs.
Sure, we don’t get the same sales numbers from each one (e.g. D2D, DR, GT and in that order), but that just solidifies what I said that gamers will use whatever service they like, is seamless and which suits their needs. If you want to buy a game and its not on Steam, what do you do? Try this experiment. Send an email to Jason Holtzma (or any one at Valve). Then send the same email to D2D, Gamers Gate or Metaboli. Then wait and see who responds to you first and then gauge their response.
IMO the Valve guys are just being egotistical and arrogant. And that arrogance goes beyond marketing. Gamers – who aren’t in the frontlines – wouldn’t know this. But developers and industry people who have to deal with people like that at some point, do. Its not even the best kept secret. And as I type this, I can almost guarantee that there are developers and/or publishers reading this and nodding.
Guys like Fredrik over at Paradox/Gamers Gate the various Direct2Drive teams (e.g Sutton Trout’s group, John Burns/Alex Ham/Dave Mealing and all the guys in that D2D support group) are top notch people. These are the guys you’d never – ever – hear about or even know existed. But they are the guys who – silently – make things happen.
There are so many – many – other guys in various ESD companies who do an excellent job at pushing PC gaming that it is a total disservice and a slap in the face when Valve throws up un-substantiated numbers and everyone gets their jollies up and start shouting about Valve saving PC gaming. Thats just wrong and you shouldn’t buy into. It is rubbish.
There I’ve said it.
And they’re no different from the XBLA group over at Microsoft. A groups that (if most of them still have a job that is) that has seemingly losts its way – through IMO – bad planning, management and lack of direction. Thats why you see so much crap on XBLA and with the occasional gem (Braid etc). But fix it? Build a better porfolio? Hell no!! That would be too easy. Lets do what MS always does. Spend money on rubbish (e.g. NXE), ignore everything that devoted and incubated developers and publishers are clamouring about and just do what we want anyway. It is this same arrogance – rampant throughout Microsoft – that has seen them losing marketshare in practically every facet of their business.
Some say that I am arrogant. Sure I am. But the fact is, my arrogance never gets in the way of common and/or business sense. And since it doesn’t take a committee of host of meetings to get something done, the arrogance stops with me. For more than twenty years, my business has grown year on year (the GameTap deal was one of the most lucrative in our history) – and I have never posted a loss. Ever. Since my business is based purely on selling games, not tech, it is quite obvious that the signal to noise ratio about Derek Smart is inconsequential to my business because at the end of the day, gamers just want to buy and play games. Everything else is just noise.
@ PC Monster
There is nothing to substantiate. It is a fact.
Gamers Gate is just as good as D2D, Impulse etc. At the end of the day, you – the gamer – has to decide who you want to give your money to.
It is no different from you buying a game at Best Buy or GameStop. At the end of the day, it is all about pricing, convenience and customer service. A matter of choice.
It is not for everyone, but the BETA test and demo will be out soon enough. It will be extensive enough for everyone to get the full experience and be able to decide if they want to give me their money or not. And as with all my games, I sell enough copies, then of course we’ll just keep building on the games through patches, add-ons, features and of course the all but inevitable derivative works.
For one thing – I can tell you straight up that if you are a flight jock, when you fly around and experience aerial combat in my game, you’ll see just how rubbish H.A.W.X – UBIs latest multi-zillion dollar game is. Another example of how the indie movement continues to deliver games to a select group of [forgotten] games because they don’t fall into the publishers’ demographic which requires a substantial marketing blitz to penetrate.
There is no orbital bombardment because there is no space region in the game. The entire game is planetside. For orbital bombardment, you might want try one of our Universal Combat games. The original UC (2004) has been released for free. And if you like it enough, then you can get the Collectors Edition (2007) which is far more substantial in every regard.
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Derek, what’s your opinion on the new space oriented mmos coming out, namely, Jumpgate Evolution, Black Prophecy and Infinity, links for all three posted below. http://us.jumpgateevolution.com/, http://www.blackprophecy-game.com/ and http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=33?
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I am familiar with all of them. Since I haven’t played them, I really can’t give an opinion either way.
I did however play the original Jumpgate for a bit. If the new version is like the old one, but with just update graphics, well then they have their work cut out for them.
Jumpgate is so hardcore that I just don’t see how they are going to break out of that and cater to every one.
Lets put it this way, Jumpgate and Eve are both very – very – hardcore, but each are at the end of the spectrum. Eve – IMO – offers a much better community and experience than the original Jumpgate.
I have been following Black Prophecy closely and as a space comat junkie, am very much looking forward to it. It seems to have a good balance of pick up play and hardcore gaming.
I don’t have much confidence that Infinity will make it to any meaningful commercial (or otherwise) release – at least not in the foreseeable future. I used to follow that closely as well.
There is a big difference between building tech and building a game. You can’t have one without the other. All the tech in the world can’t overcome a crappy game.
But at the end of the day, as I said in the interview, the only place space combat games are going to survive, is in the MMO space. There you can build up your numbers, cater to a select group and keep your game going for years while improving on it.
Choice is always a good thing. So far, we have (in no particular order)..
Eve
Jumpgate Evolution
Black Prophecy
Infinity
Blackstar
Galactic Command Online (our 2010 MMO)
At least two or more of those will either outright fail. However, since they are run by smaller companies and individuals, hopefully they get enough numbers to keep the servers going.
e.g. Jumpgate being published by Codemasters is NOT a good thing. Anytime a publisher gets involved in games which are not mainstream, my warning flag goes up. And over the years, I’ve been right. They already went through this crap with two other publishers. So I have no idea why they chose to go round three with Codemasters. It is not going to end well. I can almost guarantee it. One can only hope that they retain all rights to their IP and as before, can take it over if things go South.
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Thank you for your reply.
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Been reading this pretty much the whole way though, I’ve opened up to gamers gate but much of their pricing is considerably worse than retail. Same with steam, D2D and impulse (these are the only ones I ever really consider aside from direct developer purchase) never actually used D2D, as when I browse the prices its never won out, but eh.
Truth is though, steam gets my money more often than the other vendors because of awesome prices, I like the impulse-gog-gamers gate install and forget method better, but I’m not paying double or more when steam being installed on my pc is required anyway.
Steam does have one redeeming feature, they seem to be often happy to piss off retail more than the others and genuinely be cheaper apart from token sales on old games and low profile indies.
I know my thoughts on what price games “should” cost is coloured by the fall of value in GBP but even when the dollar was 2 to the pound a lot of the prices I seem on all of these portals are bullshit, and when you count that the pound is now worth $1,30 these prices are even more obscene when you consider that the retail prices have not exploded.
So, steams sales are a time online wins. They may be arrogant but 90% of the time they are the only service I find discounts (compared to retail) on.
What I read here really put me of AWW, (banning and restrictive classes) but your single player carrier game sounds like hotness to a homeworld junkie.
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Dsmart: “…each time you die, you lose XP when you re-spawn…”
I just sicked up a little bit in my mouth.
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Yeah… Yunno I didn’t like that either, but it almost seems stupid complaining about it. He has his fans, he knows what they want. Who are we but unserved customers anyway? Truth be told, I don’t like EXP=options in any game, I like it to be about the individual players skill what they can and cannot do. Battlefield heroes pissed me off for a while until I got over the hump, same with cod4… 2142 I never bothered getting over the hump. But at least getting over the hump i could never fall back down (friendly fire could reduce your points, but not death). So if I face a clan of pros, me and my friends who are new might die 50 times more but every kill or captured flag we get is a tiny step towards a level playing friend in terms of options. But falling back when you are outclassed? Blah!
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“the GameLobby has a bunch of unique features including friends list, invites, private messaging and such. As well as the ability to chat with a friend who is currently either in the lobby or on a game server, and vice versa”
Why has no-one thought of this before?! That there folks is pure gold. Unique features, private messaging, friends lists. By all that is good and holy, a list, with your friends on it! Gadzooks!
I’m not knocking his games, I haven’t played them, but does he even listen to himself when he talks?
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Gamers are notorious for complaining about every darn thing. Most of the time, they really have NO clue what they’re complaining about. That is the primary reason why we as developers and gamers always walk the fine line between ignoring pointless griping and flatout ignoring everything.
Most gamers just think that we who develop games, either aren’t gamers ourselves or we just don’t care. Truth is, more often than not decisions about what goes into a game and whether it stays or not, is not down to one person. There is usually a development consensus and more often than not – surprising to some – the consensus that wins the argument is not usually what the gamer would like.
For e.g. the idea to reduce XP when you die, wasn’t based on concensess. It was a design decision that I made in order to – primarily – curb XP and achievement junkies from ruining the game; while ensuring that n00bs can have a fair go at it regardless of when they jumped into the game.
Sure you will find that even n00bs dying a lot will be carrying negative XP for sometime, but by the same token, those with higher XP on the server were once n00bs themselves.
Then there are ranks. Ranks are gained by XP. So when your XP drops, eventually you will drop in rank.
Then there are violation flags. These are gained by doing things that either violate the TOS or are a result of deliberate griefing or wanton Friendly Fire. Get enough violations and your XP will drop. Subsequently your rank. Before you know it, you’re back to negative XP – n00b or not.
Game balancing is not an exact science. Large and better funded companies EA/Dics for e.g. can’t get a grip on it. So who are we to think that we can? Fact is, we can’t. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to leave everything as the Status Quo and have others ruin our game.
As things progress – as with all my games – we will identify areas where we can improve upon and tweak the experience. My gamer have never had to sit around forever waiting for patches and such. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, my support of my games is one of the most important things that gamers, publishers and the media alike know about me and can attest to. I support my games. And AAW will be no different.
I have invested a lot of money in the community based aspects of this game and I didn’t do that so that I can watch all that go to waste. We have forums and we also have the GameLobby client which is unified chat interface.
I don’t have money to waste, so if I spend it one something, it means that I have to see it through and make sure that my money is working for me.
Most of you guys posting these concerns tell me that it is important enough and worth considering. Trust me, I am not oblivious to these issues brought up. But thats where team spirit comes in. You see a way for us to improve the experience, we’ll consider it and act on it. Thats the way we’ve always done it and nothing is going to change just because we are entering [un-familiar] fps territory where the stakes are much much higher.
So, help us help you and we’ll all benefit from it.
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@ heliocentric
oh, btw, I forgot to mention that the XP reducing when you die may be removed before the game is released if it proves to be inbalanced.
@ gulag
Thats right, sarcasm is always a good way to show just how smart (or not) you are.
If you actually took the time to read and take into context what was written, it would be painfully obvious (in your case, maybe not), that we’re talking about our game. I don’t care what anyone else has done before.
Plus, we have unique features that nobody has done before. Again, you didn’t bother to read that. You just want to twist it around and just continue your attacks (since your previously deleted posts weren’t enough) in some other [un-productive] way.
e.g. despite the fact that many games have in game server browsers, I can name out a list (most are triple A games) of those that seemingly botched it and which gamers and media alike bitched about. So you might as well complain “how can they botch this simple thing that everyone else has done before”. But no, lets engage in meaningless attacks instead.
And there is a big difference between a run-of-the-mill server browser and a community based frontend. There are hundreds of PC games. I can name only a few – and probably one hand – that has anything other than the bare minimum server browser.
So yeah, guys like XFire and such are just wasting their time because we as developers have it all under control and we can’t do any better so we might as well not do our thing and tout it in the process.
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dsmart: I didn’t mean that the player himself has to be the one bombarding stuff from orbit, just that the scenario/story writing is cognizant of the fact that it exists and could feasibly be used to just wipe a landscape clean when there is no plausible reason to conduct a traditional air/sea/ground-borne assault. It’s just that I have seen these kinds of implausible inconsistencies in fictional technological progress too often.
Also, about the XP-loss: Have you thought about it influencing the playstyle of those “XP and achievement junkies” in such a way as to make them play entirely defensively to minimise losses, promote risk-less, uneven, camping-favouring (given that it is viable at all) and thus ultimately un-fun play (for their opponents)?
I hope you did, because this is what I predict it will do.
But then, personally I like being able to charge a bunch of people and go out in a blaze of glory while taking a few with me instead of obsessing over how much I will lose doing it – maybe you’re different, I don’t know enough about AAW to estimate :P
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For the record, I read the entire interview, and understood it. Also, my previous post was my first post in this particular thread, so you might be thinking of someone else. (No, I have no aliases here, and I’ve been reading the site for a while.) Still, I’m suprised and delighted that you took the time to reply.
You list ‘friends lists, private messaging and invites’ as ‘unique’ features. None of them are, that’s just a fact. I went back to check if you had listed any other features as unique in that context, and you hadn’t.
In much the same way as you appear to carry a certain amount of disdain for certain other publishers/developers etc., I can’t help but call bull when I see a developer listing off mundane, back of the box, features as ‘unique’. That’s my only sticking point with regard to the above interview.
I’m sure the rest of your game is lovely, and will appeal to it’s fanbase. It certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck.
Sure, I used sarcasm. It’s the internet, we have that here.
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“There is nothing to substantiate. It is a fact.”
It’s not fact for me until I see the proof, however well-informed your opinion undoubtedly is. I need proof before I buy into it, basically. Figures. Metrics. That’s not to doubt you personally, I’d just much rather make that determination for myself than simply go by what I’m being told. I don’t mean to be insulting by saying that – you are probably (hopefully!) 100% right but until I see and understand how you’ve arrived at that fact… :)
Also, I don’t have much experience with digital download retail sites. I’ve bought one or two from Steam, one or two from GOG and that’s about it – oh, I also bought the two GalCiv 2 expansion packs from Stardock but generally I’m a bit of a luddite for a good box-and-manual that I can take to bed and cuddle.
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@ theaffront
Ah ok, I misunderstood you. Well, if you read the game’s premise, then you know that in the single player story mode, there is that RANDOM weapon ticking somewhere on the planet. That was an OTS (Orbit To Surface for those who haven’t played our previous games) weapon that didn’t detonate when it touched the ground. So yeah, if you don’t find – and diffuse it – things (the entire planet that is) will go boom! :)
Yes, that was the whole idea behind it.
There is however no way to prevent camping – especially in multiplayer. But what I did have in mind to do, was to start reducing a player’s health and/or XP if they remain in one spot – motionless – for too long. But then, my thought was that it then penalizes snipers – an integral class in the game.
If you have any suggestions or anecdotes which have been proven to work, I’m be glad to hear and consider them.
oh, trust me, you’ll be able to do that. Just prime a grenade and rush the mob. If you don’t drop it, it will just go off in your hand. The [spherical] explosion proximity based damage system and the shrapnel are sure to take out a good chunk of people. Guaranteed. I’ve tried it with my NPCs. It is a blast. :)
Or, given how the physics system works, if you have a rocket launcher or a mine, you can do nifty things like blowing up a building, vehicle, etc and watch it fly up in the air and land on someone’s head – killing them instantly.
Anyway, the test will be out later this week or early next week. THEN we’ll be having a conversation worth talking about how the final game is fashioned.
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@ gulag
This will be my last post to you because it clear that you’re not in this to have a normal constructive conversation.
There are features in it that you don’t know about and which are not mentioned in the interview. Plus, I already clearly stated that I don’t care about what has come before, fact it VERY FEW PC games have anything that closely resembles it. If you’re going to company XB360 to a stand-alone PC app, be my guest. Your posts already indicate thats the sort of thing that you’d do and then try to justify it with the usual nonsense – none of which is ground in reality or fact.
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@ PC Monster
This is what you said
I responded based on it. That being it is a substantiated fact that Gamers Gate is a viable and worthy ESD platform.
Now you’re saying that you were talking about metrics? Well you don’t need metrics to prove that. The fact that they are in business and very popular is all the metrics you need.
For one thing, they are bigger – much bigger – than GoG.
So how is it that the fledgling GoG (a relatively new company) metrics have more weight to you than a popular service that has been around for much much longer? I don’t get that. Why? Because it makes no sense to me.
Again, my point remains. If you’ve bought from GoG, Steam, Stardock, nothing should stop you from buying from GG if they have a game you can’t get elsewhere.
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a course in usability would go a long way towards making derek’s games more successful.
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@ Ron
Indeed. But I think we’ve done a good job with that this time around. We’ll just have to wait and see just how good a job it was. *G*
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Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and GOG are all client-free (Impulse’s next phase will introduce a web portal where you can download games sans the (crappy) client). That will leave only Steam with its client and half-arsed offline mode.
As I said in the forums, Gamersgate, Impulse, and D2D could use some serious redesigns. The former informed me by email that they’re working on an improved website that won’t be bogged down with auto-play movies and obnoxious sidebar advertisements.
At the end of the day, though, Steam has Counter-Strike, L4D, TF2, DoW II, Empire TW, etc. That obviously counts for something.
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Fine, let’s see if I can rephrase less abstrusely Mr. Gillen. That wasn’t aimed specifically at Dr. Smart PhD With Lots of Monies And A Lawyer, it was a reply to the people saying ‘oh this is such a breath of fresh air we never get to talk to devs everything is corporate controlled press releases’. That’s a statement I disagree with strongly enough that I couldn’t let it pass. I gave a couple of examples from the large body of indie devs who talk straight from the hip to anyone who’ll listen. I mean, Derek Yu runs a popular indie gaming forum.
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Just wondering when you’re switching to the OGRE 3D engine. :)
I admire and applaud your gumption, drive and staying power. But the graphics in your games always seem flat and plain? Not the best description I know.
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That comment about Gametap makes me curious – how exactly do the people that make games make money off having them on Gametap? They have such a low monthly rate that I’ve never quite understood how the economics work.
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I like how it looks. I’ll give it a go. Reminds me a little of Warsow and Mirror’s Edge. Both games with simple texturing aimed for effect and clarity. Personally i much rather have a lot of geometry in a game than perfectly tiled, bumpmapped textures that take artists far too much time to tweak. Speaking of which, the game does look a little empty judging by the screenshots.
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Oh God graphics. Dwarf Fortress has the best graphics. Fact.
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dsmart: Sounds all good, so far. I trust RPS will report on the test release (if they don’t, poke them for me :P), so even my lazy ass will notice – I’ll be sure to try it out.
Concerning snipers: I don’t know what the requirements will be to use a sniper rifle, but if it’s restricted to a class you could just exempt that class from the health/xp drain.
Although I don’t think I would go that far to discourage camping. I’d probably try by means of very limited self-healing, or ammo – think Planetside, at some time your resources to power your health- and armor repair thingies simply ran out – or NOT awarding any XP for kills made while camping (and exempting snipers from this), given that this doesn’t conflict with one’s objectives in multiplayer, say, that sometimes you simply have to camp somewhere to achieve them. Although you could then exempt those specific areas from the no-XP mechanic.
Also make sure there are no weapons (or only very limited ones in their versatility/ammo/carrying a severe opportunity cost to lug one around with you, e.g. large inventory requirements) that significantly favor the camper over anyone else.
That way you could still camp if tactics require, but not for very long (or rather not against very many enemies in succession, unless your skill advantage is large) and not as a way to easily farm XP.
But I have not a single clue to which lengths you want to go to achieve this and/or how difficult/time consuming this would be as I’m not a programmer.
But enough idle speculation for now, I’ll wait for the test :P
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Engines don’t make games. Games make games.
You can have the best engine and end up with a crappy game that nobody plays. Or you can end up with the bestest engine and a half-assed game (see Crysis) so that most just pirate so they can benchpress their rigs.
There are HUNDREDS of good looking games with advances engines that tank at retail. Most of those who develop and/or publish them, are out of work as I type this.
We evaluated a bunch of game engines (Unigine, Ogre3D, C4, Leadwerks) but as engines go, they tie you to a specific type of game or different method (most of them unproven) of doing things.
e.g. The type of terrain we wanted to generate and process in real-time, is the kind of thing that ALL those engines get to dream about and will never pull off. Ever.
In fact, the closest was Leadwerks. Josh (the developer) is a standup classy guy who will do anything to accomodate those using his engine. We went as far as drafting up specs to have him build a custom terrain engine so that we would use Leadwerks. In the end, the time that it would take – and the learning curve of bolting all our proprietary stuff into LW2.0 was just too risky for me.
In the end after Sergio and I weighed all our options, we decided to just hunker down and do what we always do. Develop our own stuff.
So our terrain engine – like most of our technologies – is built from the ground up for this game. And is robust enough to build entire worlds once we get around to plugging it into KnightBlade and GCO instead of using the legacy terrain engine we have in previous games.
And I have to say this again, those trying to foolishly judge the game by a series of stills and grainy footage, have no clue what they’re talking about. Wait for the demo, THEN comment.
Also, when you’re building a box (aka level), you can afford to go overboard and do all kinds of things. We’re not building a box. We’re building entire worlds.
As an example, take a look at HAWX. Sure looks purdy at high altitude. With all that money, why did they spend it on licensing satellite maps and using boring rectangles with zero texturing instead of focusing on a richer experience in a smaller area? Because it takes a LOT to to do that.
Our game engines are designed for a specific task – and it does them exceptionally well.
If it doesn’t look like the latest Unreal copycat, thats because our texture budget and visuals take much larger spaces into account. Not closed off boxes with all sorts of viz limitations.
Does anyone think that the graphics in GTVIV or SR2 are cutting edge? Not me. The environment – a critical aspect in those games – makes those games look like they do. When you’re staring at a hundred beautifully hand crafted buildings (e.g. in GTA-IV) and looking at one or two levels in a game, it puts it all into perspective.
Then there’s the issue of budgeting. Sure we could hire the best modelers and have the bases be populated with a bunch of buildings. NONE of which add ANYTHING to the game since the game is not about that. But then you have a game that has its own set of limitations.
Considering the size of the GTA-VI city, it is just a small corner of our game world. If we did that, we might as well kiss away our Mach 2 flying fighters or even our gunships. Because before you even trim your joystick, you’re already off the map.
Sacrifices have to made in games. In my game, it has been a balancing act. I am comfortable with the games graphics and I am confident that in combination with the gameplay, that is does exactly what it was designed to do.
Wait for the demo and see for yourself. Some will still bitch and moan because it is in their nature or because they don’t like being wrong. But in this regard, I am 100% certain that I’m right in the decisions I’ve made in this regard.
The gameplay vs graphics vs AI is a balancing act that very developers get to do well – if at all.
There are two models. Licensing and sale. For us, we did an exclusive with them – and that was far more lucrative than the standard license (we have games there under that plan).
Without breaching NDA, all I can say is that their licensing model is no different from anything else out there. They license your game, you get paid either a single fee or a percentage of the proceeds based on the play metrics.
Yah, some of those areas weren’t fully populated yet when the shots were taken.
Also, remember that these are military bases. Not cities. So you’re not going to find a whole helluva lot of buildings and structures.
Heck, even games like Battlefield, TF2, HL2 etc don’t have ANYTHING other than the “closed level”.
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@ theaffront
Sniper rifles are in fact restricted to a class. Though, now that I think about it, we may have made a change in which any class can use it. I’ve made a note to check the code later today to make sure. And if in fact the other two classes have access to it, I’ll make sure to remove it again.
Your suggestions are all very good and thats the sort of feedback that we’ll be looking forward to once the [closed] multiplayer BETA test is out.
Since we have very little experience in the high end gameplay fps dynamics – especially the issue of campers – it is all going to end up being a learning experience in which we’re going to piss off a lot of people as we work to get it all tweaked just right. Not aiming to please everyone, so the end result is certainly not going to appeal to everyone. But thats the nature of the beast. You can’t please everyone.
As always, we’ll do out best to keep those who like it enough, to keep playing.
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Derek, we’re going in circles here.
If someone walked up to me tomorrow and told me Valve’s sales eclipsed all other retail outlets online, and also told me this was a “substantiated fact”, how do I know that this statement is true? I’ve only got your statements to the contrary to go on. By the same token, how do I – me personally – know that what you’ve said about Gamersgate or Direct2Drive is true? I’m not going to accuse you of lying – I’m willing to take your word simply because of the experience you have in the industry – but neither am I going to fully accept it as gospel truth until I’ve seen some hard evidence of it. I fully admit I don’t know what you’ve seen. You may be right but some spreadsheet somewhere may prove you wrong. Or someone with as much experience as you may contradict you. That’s the distinction I’m trying to make. I really, honestly, genuinely don’t mean anything personal by it – it’s just how I work. I’m just…careful…when it comes to choosing what to believe, having innocently accepted things in the past and then been burned by them. That’s not difficult to understand, is it?
“The fact that they are in business and very popular is all the metrics”
See, the fact they are in business is indisputable – I can go to the website in 2 seconds to verify that, yes, they are accepting orders and selling games. But popular? How do I know how popular they are? Because you tell me they’re popular? Until I see how many visitors they get, and get some idea of how many sales they make among gaming populations, ‘popular’ is merely an unquantifiable opinion. You may personally know lots of people who use them – I know no-one, so popular then becomes is just a word.
But all this is moot – I have nothing against any of these online distribution channels, barring some legacy luddite-ism. If they had a game at a good price that I couldnt get anywhere else, I would give them a go. No worries. :)
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Yes we are going in circles because I think you and I are talking about two different things. That is why I again quoted what you posted to make it clear what I refering to.
Listen, don’t buy from Gamers Gate if you don’t want to, m’kay?
I don’t work for them and I don’t care either way. This discussion – and what I responded to – had nothing to do with who you should buy from and why. Please read my post(s) again.
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After unpleasantness abounded in newsgroups over a series of many days long ago, I chose to keep a certain 10 foot pole between myself and Dr. Smart going forward.
However, I see now his passion and absolute devotion to my single favorite past time clear as day and I can look beyond personal eccentricities a bit better with an increase in my own age as well. I am grateful we still have those who care so much and work so hard to keep their vision alive. All the better if it’s profitable and allows one to keep following their dream, despite detractors and, sometimes, even themselves. Good on You, Dr. Smart.
Good on You, RPS, for encouraging and fostering this open and honest discourse. I can’t get this elsewhere. Much Gratitude.
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@the affront: The bit about snipers sounds really bad. That would only make all campers choose the sniper class which already happens too much in Bf2.
I can already see AT LEAST four faults in the exp system.
It opens up new ways of griefing – if you jump in front of a teammate while he is shooting, he will get punished for it.
Even if exp loss on death could make players use tactics and strategy it will probably just end up with the majority of players using snipers and much camping. Lastly not only will the new players be less skilled and equipped, they will probably have to face obscenities being thrown at them the instant they join a server. Think about it this way: if the player count is the same for both teams but team B has some players that are less skilled that means that team A will kill more players from team B and that will both make team A stronger from exp and team B weaker from loss of exp. A slippery slope. Something similar happens in DOTA, a beginner will cost his team a game so its about 5 mins until he gets to know what the other players think about his mother.
And if the exp loss is too big, none will be able to use any advanced vehicle.
The game sounds fun but whenever I hear the word “delevel” my heart is struck with fear.
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@ Markoff
heh, it has been relatively civil around here. But its not evident because most of the toxic discourse have already been deleted. And before this thread dies out, I’m sure that more will come.
Anyway, yes, with age, everything gets put into perspective. The fact that you even utter the word “newsgroups” immediately shows our collective ages. :)
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bestest engine and a half-assed game (see Crysis)
Tut tut Dezza. You come across as petty and bitter when you make disparaging comments about other games. Crysis is a great FPS and the graphics don’t matter all that much once you start playing. It’s a better game and a better engine than you have ever made. Does have a weak ending, but ‘half-assed’ is not a valid criticism for one of the best PC shooters out there. That’s the sort of phrase that’s usually associated with one of your bug-ridden releases.
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Bremze: Only if the sniper rifle can be used as a (one hit kill) short range gun (which is retarded game design anyway, if you ask me). If you make it basically useless at short range – maybe requiring being scoped in or needing to be set up before you fire, like a machinegun, or just not one-hit-killing anything unless you hit the head (and not having a crosshair while out of zoom) with a really low rate of fire, or only doing full damage after a certain range explained by self-propelled projectiles needing to build up velocity or whatever such contrivance – no one who not already would play a sniper anyway would use it to camp. Unless if the sniper class had a strong secondary weapon, that is.
This obviously also requires that the maps don’t hugely favor long range over short range.
But you’re right about the team/”feeder” aspect, didn’t think of that myself.
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Yes, yes indeed. That was part of the concern and why all classes have access to all weapons (22 in total) in this game.
However, a change from our previous games is that there are only three playable classes: pilot, infantry marine (aka the heavy – as seen in the shots in the RPS article), elite force marine
The machine guns were once restricted to the infantry marine, while the sniper rifles were restricted to the recon force marine – a class that is not in this game. So that that role would fall back to the elite force marine.
The problem with class based weapons – apart from the balance issues and that which you point out – is that you then have to implement silly restrictions. e.g. why would an infantry marine come across a sniper rifle lying on the ground, and not be able to pick it up? Those are the sort of artificial restrictions that I’m not generally in favor of.
Real restrictions such as the fact that only pilots and elite marines have access to and can use jetpacks, is much more plausible I think.
Similarly, only pilots can fly fighters. Marines cannot. And while pilots can fly both fighters and gunships, they class that they can fly depends on XP. And the marines that can fly gunships (again base on XP) can only fly transport gunships, not the attack gunships. Stuff like that we have already and working in the game and are properly balanced with multiplayer in mind.
Things like camping prevention, weapons use etc are much harder to justify restrictions for.
No he will not. Because there is a timer that checks the frequency and occurence of friendly fire. The action has be constantly repeated for it to count as FF – even if the person dies as a result.
Wrong. To assume that all players are going to want to play as snipers means that you are discounting the effectiveness and attraction of the other classes. You do not know enough about the game to make that call.
To wit: You can’t possible imaging a server full of snipers – neither of whom can ever get a fighter or gunship off the ground. Ever.
Again, you’re making a blanket opinion that is not based on facts.
In all games, everyone has to start somewhere. No way around that. What your comment has to do with XP eludes me. But all those with XP on the server, were n00bs to begin with.
Indeed. But I would ask that you not freak out just yet. :)
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@ Zago
My opinion – as a gamer – is that Crysis is a half-assed run-of-the-mill shooter with zero innovation. Deal with it and lets move on, shall we?
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Even if that were true it’d still be better than any of your games.
But hey, one day maybe you’ll make a game worth playing. We can but hope.
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It is ALL those things. It needs to be scoped in to fire. It cannot be fired from the hip – and thus useless in any run and gun scenario. They also have long reload times, recoil, blowback etc.
Head shots however – with any weapon that has enough power in the shots – are one hit kills.
The only secondary weapon a sniper would have is pistol and a shotgun.
Which they already do.
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In BF2 snipers were almost like you described them. That usually didn’t keep half of my team from being snipers in pub servers.
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I feel like the XP/sniper rifle bit went down a bit of a cul-de-sac. The interesting thing for me was not attempts to prevent camping – which is after all a sniper’s job – but the acknowledgment and counteraction against achievement-farmers.
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Then we clearly have to come up with a solution for defeating that.
As I said before, I am open to suggestions which will work within the current game’s framework.
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@ Hypocee
So how do you propose that we address that issue without making the game unfun and inaccessible?
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I don’t; if you’re going to have XP-locking for other design reasons, a floating XP system is the only family of solutions I can imagine to that problem. For all I know, it could work great. I just meant that the conversation had been veering more towards minutiae of sniper rifles and camping and classes and blah blah blah that every shooter developer has to deal with, when all that could well be moot in the face of your broader, and more interesting, strategic initiative against grind and grief.
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I didn’t follow the discussion but sniper rifles in a spaceships game sounds like a terrible idea :)
Also, calling EVE a spreadsheet betrays a truly terrible narrow-mindedness. Why don’t you have one of the most advanced servers in the industry, if CCP and yourself did the same things, Mr.Smart?
Oh Smart One, space games are about the endless possibilities of wide open space and the love you might find drifting in the radiation you discovered.. it’s not even a “genre”, no self-respecting artist would use that expression unless he’s able to add something new or bust up the definition…
Very worrying how much you like the censoring of untoward opinions, too.
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Please stop with the personal attacks. Can’t you ladies make a point with out such?
I am not the only person who calls Eve a spreadsheet in space. It is a known fact and is commonly used to describe it. And what exactly is wrong with that? Nothing. You just want to latch on to some inconsequential nonsense to engage in the same behavior that derails threads and causes posts to be deleted.
Do grow up. If you don’t have anything to post, don’t post. You’re not the only one in this thread and most here want information nor this needless and foolish diatribe you guys are trying hard to inject into it. All the reason that devs don’t even bother these days because life’s too short to be subjected to this bullshit at every turn.
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Great thread, but I do miss killfiles. *sniffs*
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I have a fairly pointless question about explosions.
Is it a fixed radius regardless of environment. So, say, if I cause an explosion in a corridor, will it travel down it at all; or keep the same radius it would have if was out in the open?
I only remember one FPS doing this. But I’m sure some of the more sim-type must have it too.
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It is a fixed radius. The size is determined by the type of grenade.
When one detonates, anything and everyone inside it the proximity zone will take damage depending on their distance to the center of the explosion.
So if you are low on body armor or health and are close to the center of an explosion (grenade or not btw), you will take damage and possibly die instantly.
This is one of the reasons why we have an assist animation sequence so that you can drag and injured colleague out to safety if in fact he becomes impaired and unable to move at any time in the game. So if your buddy is down, you just target him, press a key and start moving. He will be dragged along with you. Either one of you can cancel the assist mode at any time.
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I am not the only person who calls Eve a spreadsheet in space. It is a known fact and is commonly used to describe it.
Which is the ‘known fact’, Doc? That eve is a spreadsheet? Or that a lot of people call eve a spreadsheet?
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Antonymous: Strawman – the game under discussion isn’t a ‘space game’, it’s a large-scale sci-fi shooter. That’s a major point of Smart’s piece.
Doone – Leaving aside the question of whether it’s a good or bad gameplay idea, most explosive weapons do their damage by ballistic shrapnel which expands spherically, rather than actual expanding gas. You could argue that some corridor materials should encourage Flakker-style ricochet fronts (which could be awesome!), but in general distance=distance.
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I´m all for innovation in the world of PC gaming. Innovation was the thing that identified the golden age of PC games. While I was playing System Shock 2 and the like, I thought that by today, games would have broken the barrier of “scenarios” or “missions” in favor of huge game worlds and freedom of movement, complex AI and whatnot.
In today´s world, things are very different. Gaming concepts have become stagnant. Console games repeat the main formulas with minor changes every time. PC games are just ports of console games or designed with the limitations of console controls in mind (I´m aware of the exceptions, just stating a general trend with the bigger companies).
In an extreme example, I am utterly shocked (not to say disgusted) when I see that we´re sometimes back to pressing arbitrary sequences of keys to do something like we did with Dragon´s Lair decades ago.
I say all that because, for all the flaws he may have in the Public Relations field (like many here, I didn´t care much for the general tone during the interview), Derek has the balls to keep innovating like in the old days, and has had the wits to make a living of it, and I respect that. He´s making games that no one else is making, completly unnapologetic about the fact that complexity keeps some players away, and I´m glad he and his company is there making them.
The “uglyness” of the cockpit is a price to pay to have somewhat “realistic” cockpits. I´m sure a F22′s cockpit is not much prettier. I like it, so long as it´s useful and not
completly hostile as well.
And Derek (this is kinda Off Topic but I have to say it):
A game where you are truly the captain of a huge ship (not just the pilot as in every space sim!) and get to actually BE in the ship and experience it´s massivness has been my dream forever. I bought BattleCruiser 3000AD because with lots of imagination it was close to that. Independence War was a fairly good attempt, but you still were mainly a pilot. Bridge Commander was sorta fun for a while, but too lighthearted (and you were kinda stuck on the captain´s chair). I was surprised to no limits to read just moments ago that You are saying you can make this very dream come true. I had almost given up hope on it. As your games
certainly don´t lack depth, I´m going to trust you on that, and I beg you, for the sake of everyone with a similar dream, make it a great game.
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for all the flaws he may have in the Public Relations field (like many here, I didn´t care much for the general tone during the interview), Derek has the balls to keep innovating like in the old days, and has had the wits to make a living of it, and I respect that. He´s making games that no one else is making, completly unnapologetic about the fact that complexity keeps some players away, and I´m glad he and his company is there making them.
I’ts not that. I think the issue is that Derek Smart is the loudest mouth arm chair quarterback in history. Look, his company has been promising this awesome games for years and one right after the other sucks. Meanwhile, ol’ DS won’t just admit that he pushes crap product that really nobody plays.
Oh I’m sorry. That’s except for the mysterious niche userbase of enthusiasts, of which, nobody has ever met.
Meanwhile, he sits there and blabs his big opinions about why Eve sucks, Jumpgate sucks or why X sucks, and why their developers are stupid and have crappy business models meanwhile his offices are located in a Kinkos somewhere in a mall parking lot.
Don’t hope too much Mort. You have a better chance of me pooping out the next great space game.
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@ Mort
Oh we have every intentions of doing it. We have the technology. We just to find a game to stick it in. ;) It is an integral part – and the primary selling point – of that KnightBlade game.
As to complexity, I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you because most of that complexity has been streamlined over the years (even Echo Squad SE was brain-dead simple to play). My goal for KnightBlade is not to create yet another Battlecruiser/Universal Combat game but with that missing feature. It is to create a more accessible (not as in casual, brain dead accessible of course) game in which most of the stuff you were tinkering with in BC/UC games are either automated or handled by the NPC crew. You will be commanding a starship – in full fps mode – with 100% freedom inside the ship.
Here are some of the early [un-lit] levels from a very Alpha of some of the areas inside the KnightBlade – the carrier you’ll be commanding.
08-03-18
08-03-27
08-04-21
It may not be your idea (or anyone else’s for that matter) of a great game, but my goal with my games is always to give whatever it is I do, my best shot.
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I will definitely give this a go if I get the opportunity. I am glad to hear that the bombing run video is not representative of the terrain in the finished product. Vast expanses of flat desert are for aircraft only.
FUEL is currently looking like the kind of terrain expanse I’d like to play a battlefield (lowercase b) game on.
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LOL here we go again. They let Dr. Smart rip eve as a “spreadsheet”, but you can’t point out that his most recent graphical offering is……well…..not good.
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Will the player numbers (32 in the doc?) be sufficient for the sheer size of the map? Or is most if the space simply for dogfighting purposes while the ground/gunship will be concentrated on a relatively small zone (by virtue of objectives of course, not artificial limits).
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Derek Smart is everything we love about PC gaming. Think about it.
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David: Your lover cover a small part of the PC world, because there are things out here, that in no ways can be represented by Derek.
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Pointless flaming comments get deleted. That is how we operate, and it will not change.
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Sorry to derail the thread a bit to an earlier post where you mentioned some mmo space sims/games.
Have you tried playing or at least have any opinions on the vendetta online space mmorpg?
I have played a bit with the free trial and done the tutorial missions, it seems interesting but I would like an “expert” opinion before I go ahead and spend too much time on it.
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Also: we moderate. We decide what’s funny.
KG
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The game supports 64 player on the PC. For the XB360 we’re targeting 16-32, but I have not yet made a final decision on that.
As to the size of the map. Think about this.
It is 400 sq. km (it could have been as large as I wanted but I picked this number because it seemed like a good compromise).
Most fighters are all capable of Mach 2.2 or 2700 km/h (Mach 2.2 @ 10k ft AGL)
Most gunships are all capable of 175 m/s or 630 km/h
Do the math and see how fast you run off the map and start getting warnings to turn back or be destroyed (radiation beyond the map limits).
So the map had to be designed in such as way that there was a compromise that gave all players enough room to play. This is not Battlefield where aircraft are just simulated fps controllers in the air and before you even throttle up, you’re off the map.
We have advanced avionics, flight dynamics, physics etc. Why? Because I wanted to ensure that those who did want to fly around, get the full experience without it being just an afterthought.
My guess is that a lot of gamers who are looking for – and love – air combat, will love the compromises made to accomodate them. The air combat aspect in terms of dynamics, avionics, cockpit (full 3D cockpits in all crafts), target acquisition, weapons delivery etc are all done with air combat – not fps – in mind.
Then we come to the infantry. Now there’s a 400 sq. km map with 64 players. So what happens if you only have a few people on the server?
They won’t even notice that they’re on a massive map.
Why? Because…
In the air, most of the action takes place BVR (Beyond Visual Range) – unless you run out of missiles of course.
On the ground, because all the action is concentrated in bases (where the objectives are), they won’t notice either.
There is nothing stopping infantry from taking vehicles out in open terrain. In fact the bases were designed (several parts joined together) to promote and support that. And in open terrain, you will still have firefights erupting when a convoy comes under attack and the guy with the rocket launcher is the one designated to take out aircrafts and such.
There are lots of vehicles and units. Players with high enough XP can build what they want/need as well. Stuff gets repaired when they blow up etc since we don’t have any “spawning” units.
So infantry moving long distances within the map can drive around, jetpack around etc. For those times when using gunships or shuttles to encroach on an enemy base, there are Dynamic Jump Pads which link all the bases. Infantry – with vehicles as well – can just hop from base to base at will. You never really have to fly there if you don’t want to.
There are lots of tactics which can be employed. Some which I haven’t even considered, but which I’m sure smart gamers will figure out. e.g. why would infantry – with or without vehicles – keep using the same DJP to enter an enemy base if the enemy has the exit DJP camped out by snipers? Even though you are invulnerable a few seconds after you emerge, there is still danger there. So for a full on assault, you would have low flying attack gunships cover the exit point and ensure that there are no snipers camping the DJP. You can lay suppressive fire (all attack gunships have auto-targeting FMGs (Forward Mounted Guns) using gunships and/or fighters to keep the snipers busy and distracted while the ground team makes the assault.
As for as co-ordination, thats what voice chat is for.
As I already mentioned, this game was not designed to be or play anything like Battlefield or similar (e.g. COD4) games. While I love those games, the only thing they have in common with AAW in terms of gameplay and such, is the premise.
We didn’t set out to make another Battlefield, Frontlines or similar game. We didn’t set out to make cookie cutter space combat games either.
We are looking to attract the higher echelon of gamers who just want more in their tactical games and who – after looking at our record – realize that we will continue to support them, fix things, improve things, add things etc for as long as they are commited to the game. Its not – by any means – going to be perfect, but it will be as good as we can make it. The rest will come with experience.
There is a reason why games like Warbirds, Aces, WW2OL (did anyone seriously expect this to be around today?), ArMa etc – despite their problems – still have a large dedicated fan base. Once you commit to doing something, it is just a matter of sticking with it until you find the sweet spot.
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*correction
Most fighters are all capable of 750ms or 2700 km/h (Mach 2.2 @ 10k ft AGL)
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Hi dsmart. I have a second (more on topic) question for you since my last one (still waiting for a response to that) was a bit off topic.
Since you are going for a more realistic shooter how are you going to prevent the jets from completely dominating the fighting without the jets being too artificially limited?
For example in a real battle a jet in the air is worth hundreds of infantry on the ground, yet your game will only have 30 to 60 people in it, making the infantry to jet ratio artificially low. Are you going to make it unrealistically easy to shoot jets down?
If you have already mentioned this then sorry for missing it.
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@Bob It’s true. Even with games trying to balance airpower + armour versus infantry if you want to pay even lip service to reality the combat vehicles are going to be more dangerous than the infantry. Countries spend billions on advanced vehicles for a reason.
So the reasoning goes if kills are your marker and jet > infantry, why would I choose to be infantry?
Put it another way, if we’re playing Star Trek, who wants to be the Enterprise, and who wants to be a shuttle? They both have roles, but if kills are points the Enterprise wins.
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Vehicles and aircraft should of course be more dangerous than infantry, but they also can’t be all powerful. The jets were capable of ruining batlefield 2 because they had no counter but other pilots, all you had to do was fly and bomb over and over without fear of reprisal and you were topping the scoreboard with ease and removing a lot of fun from those who were ground pounding it, vehicles and infantry alike. The reason was that AA defences were useless against them and even the AA vehicles were useless against them. They fixed the AA in one patch and it was glorious.. no longer could jets STRAFE AA EMPLACEMENTS THAT WERE LOCKED ONTO THEM without dying.. so the flyboys whined and it got reverted. Basically.. there need to be viable counters to go with the increasd power or it just kinda sucks.
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Well, again, you guys need to stop comparing jets in BF and other games to ours.
First of all, there are no cluster bombs in the game. Period. So jets and gunships do NOT have the capability to carpet bomb the ground and take out everyone standing around having tea and crumpets.
Each missile in a jet requires a target lock on. Without a lock on, the missile flies dead ahead in dumb-fire mode and self-destructs if doesn’t hit something solid.
The Surface To Air Lasers (SALs aka AA) are very deadly and highly accurate. Unless a jet is equipped with adequate Air-To-Surface missiles, they’re going to get shot down – probably even before they can get a lock on the target.
Flying a jet – in our game – takes a fair amount of skill. This is the PRIMARY reason why only a SINGLE class (pilots) can fly them.
There is absolutely NO point-and-shoot here. At all.
And using a jet’s guns to take out ground or ever air targets? I dare anyone to try that and see how many times they get to re-spawn.
The jets and gunships in our game do NOT have the capibility to dominate the battlefield. Good players will keep their CAP or even BARCAP sorties to the areas surrounding their base and pick off intruders who encroach on the base
air space. Those brave enough to do SAD or even the suicidal SEAD sorties have to be really – really – good to even get anywhere near a hit, let alone dominance.
Anyone who has an inkling what those terms even mean or who knows what NOE flying is – or LOS target acquisition – will be right at home in a jet. All others need not even bother applying.
Apart from having automated AI controlled SAM and SAL emplacements, infantry can also enter these units and use them manually. So if you don’t like a strategic SAM silo’s own target priority, a brave soul – with enough XP to do it – can enter it and manually pick out targets.
Sure jets have jammers, but most SAM missiles will burn through them. And with jammers on, you can’t do any target acquisition. If you have your jammers on at ANY time in this game, then it means you’re on the defensive. Not a good place to be in a jet.
Infantry, by way of personal rocket launchers, small arms (e.g. machine guns can take out low flying gunships), as well as guns mounted on vehicles and also manual gun turrets, have a distinct defense and offense against jets and gunships.
The only way a jet is going to be able to take out ANY infantry person on the ground either by using guns or missiles, is if the fool happens to be standing next to something that got hit and it goes boom. The proximity damage is what will get you. With sufficient body armor and health, you might survive.
Yes, we’ve done this ALL before and know exactly the [very valid] concerns that you guys are citing. So we’ve had much time to plan and implement these safeguards.
As I said before, my concern atm is getting people playing – I have absolutely NO concern about the gameplay aspects because I am confident that the game plays fine. Balancing will of course come later psot-release.
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@ Bob
I did reply to your Vendetta online query but I was distracted by something else and FF auto-refeshed the page and I lost what I had posted by hadn’t commited.
I looked at Vendetta a while back and stopped following it when I realize that it was just another shooter. Sure there is probably a market for it but IMO with all the other offering that offer so much more, why bother?
At the end of the day it is going to be a matter of choice. Since it is an MMO, you might as well try it for as long as it takes for you to determine if in fact it is worthy of the long term investment. Thats what I would do.
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But that is trying to balance an artificial game by assuming airpower has a 1:1 infantry counter.
Pick any recent fully engaged war and aircraft losses are going to fall way below infantry losses. If k/d is your only marker then you want to be in the heavy machinery. That’s why it’s there.
But that leads me to this point: you don’t want to only look at so called undesirable behaviours from the point of imbalance and griefing. That’s a gamer’s first assumption, but it’s rarely the root cause.
Occasionally people do dickish things just to grief like flying their teammates into walls, or dropping grenades in a crowded spawn. That should be punished, but not barred (if I can’t die from flying into walls or friendly grenades it feels fake and leads to unreal play).
But largely the reason people do things like camp spawns or repeatedly drop artillery on an area, or repeatedly bomb, it is because it wins the game. The rewards are set up that make bombing the spawn the idea manoeuvre.
I don’t like it when it happens to me, but I don’t fault people who do it (I just make it my mission to bring them down).
You can make it so bombing the spawn results in an out-of-setting-punishment (autokill, kick, ban), but that is the prison approach. Putting people in prison can largely be said to be about punishment not prevention. The undesirable behaviour is still committed. Worse than that, it requires you to have written rules which are not part of the in game universe.
The other thing you can do is make it hard to perform the undesirable action. A spawn with a roof and many exits make it difficult or impossible to camp. This fits within the game world better and no one feels they are being punished for playing well. It still gives people the goal of trying to camp the other team, but makes it likely they will fail.
Or you can look at how you reward players. Take the plane/infantry situation. Killing a person might be one point, but the whole purpose of the battle is to capture the bunker and stealing the intel: 100 points, a medal, mvp. Killing a jet is hard: 10 points.
You could get really inventive with scoring, give people points based on how many minutes the person they’ve killed was alive: less than one minute 0 points.
It won’t solve things, but you might be surprised how goal oriented most gamers are, and how reward can be as
effective as punishment. you structure the rewards so that someone who is playing the way the designers want scores higher than someone who isn’t.
“We’ve got a really effective banhammer” doesn’t fill me with joy.
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“But that is trying to balance an artificial game by assuming airpower has a 1:1 infantry counter.”
That part was @Nick
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It sounds like the jets are going to have a hard time of things. I know a lot of people who will relish that, but apart from surviving difficult odds, what are the highlights for the flyers?
Are the emplacements easily rebuilt? Will a successful SEAD pay dividends long term allowing free-er movement, or will the lasers just get rebuilt in the next few minutes?
How will the good pilots know they’re good?
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No it isn’t jonfitt, the only AA in BF2 was in set emplacements or in the special AA vehicles, no 1:1 counter, just a counter at all, they had no counter. Obviously in RL aircraft have less casualties than infantry, for one thing there are significantly more infantry in use than aircraft, for another most modern conflicts in recent times haven’t been against an enemy with any/many effective AA capabilities to speak of. All I’m saying is that jets should not be able to fly in known AA areas with impunity in any game. You don’t dive bomb SAM sites to get rid of them. Also, most pilots in BF2 didn’t help their team win, you could have two top scoring players on the losing team both flying jets, they helped nothing but themselves, all they did was pad their score and play god unless there was a better dogfighter on the other team.
But this is all not really related to Derek’s game so I apologize for offtopic – I am glad to hear that aircraft aren’t an I win button.
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If the chance to fly is not sufficient enough a highlight, then the player has no business flying.
Emplacements take time (upwards of an hour in some cases) to rebuild by themselves. Unless a player with a Personal Repair Unit (PRU) goes and manually repairs it. In which case it can take upwards of a few mins.
The other variant of the tech is that anything that is not a building and which gets destroyed, can remain that way until the script/world is reset (i.e. end of round). I may make this the default setting, but I have yet to decide.
So if the jets are good enough to blow up all the other side’s SAMs, SALs etc – well we know who will be winning that round.
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Just a note:
. Concerning the games you namechecked, as you know:
1. Warbirds has pretty much been in maintenance mode for the last eight years, even if it’s not called that.
2. Aces High is programmed and run by a very small staff based around the original lead programmer for Warbirds.
3. WW2OL was established by the rest of the WB teams (and Hitech’s replacements at iEN) when they quit iEN in 1999. Yes, I am amazed they still exist too, especially given that, in eight years, they’ve never had a game that really worked right.
4. ArmA is released by Czech group Bohemia Interactive. ArmA may not have sold like hotcakes, but they’ve just got a $50M contract from the USArmy. Add to that what they’re doing with the US Marines, the UK MoD, the ADF, New Zealand, and heck, most of NATO these days, and they’ve got a serious serious-game cashflow.
1-3 all have the same pedigree, and very small communities; the only reason why 2 and 3 don’t go the way of 1 is because the developers believe in the project enough to eke out a living doing it. Dale may have his airplane, and be fairly well-off, but it’s not a business model that leads anywhere. 4 has a community much larger and more complex than the other three put together.
All of these dev. teams share something else in common: their principals are all from Mr. Smart’s generation. Will the MP battlefield stay relevant to PC gaming, or will we view Smart as some sort of Engelbert Humperdinck, writing for an aging crowd of jaded schoolteachers?
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Who wants to be infantry? You’d be surprised. The number of players in planetside that defaulted to ‘foot zerging’ (As it was called) was frightning considering the comparative effectiveness of mechanised infantry versus field infantry.
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Nick that’s precisely my point, they got points for the kills, and that’s what mattered to them. Winning the match was not rewarded, so they saw no problem with playing the losing team with the superior fighters.
Also, while there were definite problems with the AA/Aircraft/AAVehicle balances that went on in BF2 (not least the fact that the US fighters ended up being useless) the presence of the SAM nests was never meant to define a “no fly zone”, virtually every cap point had one, leaving virtually nowhere useful that was a “fly zone”. They definitely did (until over nerfed) provide a deterrent that kept pilots concentrating on clearing the way before they could do useful things. However Battlefield was way too simple (you didn’t need to take a specific SEAD loadout), and the maps way to small. That doesn’t look like a problem for AAW.
In game catering to RL type scenarios, given the right weapons, if a team manages to keep the air to themselves, then they should be able to rain down on the other team, that’s why you want to get control of the air. The counter to jets is jets. Forget RTS games AA weapons are a deterrent.
Helicopters are another story though.
But in a game that’s working, they won’t get total control of the air because your pilots will be stopping them.
If you have pilots on your team getting 100s of kills and you still lose, and you claim they weren’t being useful, then there clearly is a problem with the reward system not the power of the jets. They are up there to kill things, and maybe they weren’t killing the right things at the right time and the team loses, but the reward system made no distinction.
In my opinion I have no problem with jets really causing some damage, so long as it takes a lot of skill to do (and it looks like AAW definitely will require talent).
The one thing I would really like though is some sort of queuing system (but maybe that’s just the Brit in me). I absolutely hated having to scramble for the planes. I’d much rather get in line and pound the ground until a gap opened up.
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“If the chance to fly is not sufficient enough a highlight, then the player has no business flying.”
Don’t take this badly, I’m not saying that it is the case, but:
OR the game isn’t fun to fly.
I will take you word for it that it is, that is your area of experience.
“So if the jets are good enough to blow up all the other side’s SAMs, SALs etc – well we know who will be winning that round.”
Nice. As it should be.
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There is a reason why games like Warbirds, Aces, WW2OL (did anyone seriously expect this to be around today?), ArMa etc – despite their problems – still have a large dedicated fan base.
I think it’s a bad example. Those folks are fanatics. Hell, if I log on to Aces High today, I’ll guarantee I’ll see a half dozen names I recognize from Air Warrior on gamestorm/aol circa the 1990′s.
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@ Dinger
Well said. And I couldn’t agree more.
So you see, that is what I’m trying to explain that even with this game, if people keep playing it, then its going to be around for a good long while. And we’ll keep tweaking it.
In fact, the netcode is so solid (if I say so myself), that the 64 player cap is only there because I’m being conservative.
Since the server is multi-core aware, we can run a pair of dedicated 64 player console server instances on a dual-core machine with 2GB of RAM easy. Each server instance uses up less than 250MB of RAM each. So with a beefier dedicated server, nothing is stopping anyone from running 128 player servers if we remove the 64 player cap.
Since anyone can host a game – and play on the same machine – from right there in the game interface, its all good. If you want to run a dedicated server, then you go console server mode.
@ jonfitt
Now you see why I chose to make the game world so large?
If you guys managed to download the game’s WIP docs before the link self-destructed a few days ago, you’d notice that jets and gunships all have profile loadouts. So you can load up x10 ATA missiles (LOTS of selections) for CAP or load up on x08 STS missiles and x02 ATA missiles for SEAD.
With CAP, BARCAP, SAD, SEAD all having their advantages and disadvantages, the flyboys have absolutely nothing to complain about IMO. Unless of course they start bitching about the deadly accuracy of SALs and SAM silos – which I’m expectingt them to bitch about on day one. But thats where skill – and the ability to ingress and egress as NOE altitudes comes in because the game models all that. Every single unit that has radar, has a range that is not just distance based but also altitude based. So you can actually sneak right up to a base if you’re good enough and they won’t even know you were there until stuff starts blowing up. Of course since the game supports full 3D pos sound, they’ll hear your jet engines as you scream overhead.
If you haven’t yet, please check out this [lengthy] air combat tutorial movie because it is 100% indicative of what you’re going to be dealing with.
Indeed. In our game, we have two types. Attack and assault. The latter take passengers and vehicles. They are well armored and are useful for dropping troops and vehicles close to or behin enemy lines. Since most players (pilots and infantry marines only) will probably have jetpacks, they can also jump out (ala paratroopers) over the target area without waiting for the gunship to land.
And all gunships have auto-acquisition guns and missiles.
Trust me. This is the least of your worries. ;) It is only two weeks to the public BETA. You’ll see for yourself.
No need. In the game, fighters are on the runway. The goal is to get them in the air before they get blown up. If they do get blown up, players with enough XP can find a supply platform and use them to build whatever planes the team needs.
The player with high XP is very valuable to a team because he can do lots of high end things that others can’t. e.g. use various types of vehicles (e.g. the Mobile Forward Base which a standalone FARP all by itself), build units (vehicles, fighters etc), repairt units etc.
There is no spawning of units in this game. So there is no camping the runway waiting for a plane to re-spawn. Once all the assets created during the round are gone, they’re gone. And the only way to replace them is to build new ones. Or in extreme cases, have a player repair the destroyed (and charred) ones before they disappear completely from the game world.
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Well I’m looking forward to it.
It’s reminding me in a way of Tribes, anything in that?
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Have you played WWII online at any point? It seems like a relatively good comparison for the kind of Aerial combat you are after. In a certain sense though, the Rats made a game that was primarily a flight sim with ground combat as an afterthought, and gradually patched in fixes that made the ground war more interesting and playable.
Would this kind of model, one that sticks with a set code and environment and gradually adjusts content to please a limited audience be a better model for future games in the space genre? Perhaps that’s really all that most MMOs really are; initial concepts that are patched and honed to attempt to keep players interested and maybe widen the instal base. But it seems that for the most part the combination of environment and mechanics does in fact remove your new game from meaningful comparision. I mean, WWII Online starts you off running around with a bolt-action rifle. It takes a while before you can get a tank that can actually stand up to competition, or grab an LMG and sweep a field clear of Enemy infantry.
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Yes, I did play it for a bit awhile back, but left because it really didn’t do enough to hold my interest. I have no intentions of going back either.
While they did in fact start off with an aircaft model, we didn’t.
All our games – including this one – have specific and distinct technologies catering to space, aerial, vehicular and fps dynamics. Neither of them are related to each other. e.g. you’re not going to feel like you’re flying a plane if you’re driving a vehicle.
The model that will work for space combat games, is the model that works for Eve. I already addressed my thoughts on this in the interview.
Any game that does enough to keep a set number of people playing, and those people are enough to keep it going, will in fact keep going.
e.g. the original Jumpgate is still going even though all the rage about space combat MMOs are related to Eve, SWG and the upcoming STO. With Jumpgate Evolutions – which is just a polish job – my guess is that they will stick with the Status Quo and it highly unlikely that they will attract enough space combat fans to increase the install base by any significant number.
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Mr Smart, you say that Space Sims are dead. May be you are right. But, What do you think about East Europe Games like Tomorrow War, Precursors or Space Rangers 2 (not a space sim, but really fun anyway).?
Is there any hope in the East Europe Games?
They have low cost production and a lot of creativity (Stalker, Witcher, King’s Bounty)
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I personally feel the ‘dead’ label is hyperbole. Gaming is just in the unfortunate phase of becoming a mainstream pass time, and like books, movies and music the moment a pass time becomes popular and the unwashed massed start to spend their money the games start to follow the money (they’d be crazy not to). So you see a concentration on crime thrillers, romances, pop music, sit coms, (shudder) reality tv and the like. There are the occasional break throughs like Battlestar Galactica, but generally it is bland, masticated pap that is rendered tasteless enough for everyone’s consumption.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional foray in to the mindless myself, but to truly engage or excite me, to capture my imagination takes something that the ‘majority’ wont like.
This is what DS games are all about, being something the majority wont like. I don’t like them myself, I’m looking for something different in my space sims than what his games offer. What I do like was the fact that his games offered me an alternative that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I like the fact that there are still indy space titles coming out, like the starwraith games.
Like BSG a space sim will come out of nowhere that will be informed by all the indy/alternative work that has gone before. It’ll be a bolt out of the blue and all the big name publishers will scramble to get there own ‘innovative’ versions of it. Dev tools are getting more comprehensive and easier to use all the time… the barriers to entry are lowering with online distribution. Maybe it’ll be ‘you’ that make it.
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The “dead” thing is not hyperbole. Going by market and sales trends – as well as genre popularity, it is a 100% fact.
Space sims are now firmly in “indie” territory – much like the movie business whereby you have the blockbusters (most of which flop) and the indies – which hardly (if ever) get a wide showing outside of art houses and such.
Publishers aren’t interested in them because there is not enough money to be made in them. And it has nothing to do with production costs or we’d see as many space sims as we see fps games and such given that space games cost far less to produce than any other genre in gaming.
Fact is, the genre is only attractive to those who grew up with it. This is why the indie space games like the low budget ones you see coming out of Europe are being made. Low budget, minimal appeal, minimal sales. Enough for the devs to probably make their money back – but my guess it that doesn’t happen for a long while without an incubated fan base.
And all these space combat games coming out of Europe, each have various strengths and weaknesses. So they appeal to a limited few. Which is why the genre is so fragmented.
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Many people says that PC is also dead for the same reasons (mainly from the media). Specially Flight Simulators. But “suddenly” appears DCS Black Shark or (to be released) Storm of War BoB, Rise of Flight and, of course, X-Plane. All of them top quality products.
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Different argument entirely.
Comparing the number of space and flight sim games to the other genres shows a clear dearth of games in those two categories.
There is no need to be in denial about it. Just because DCS Black Shark shows up, all of a sudden flight sims are “in” again? Seriously? Have you looked at ALL the other games and genres being released?
Further, comparing Black Shark – a title so niche that my brain threatens to freeze – to anything resembling mainstream (i.e. high sales volume which is what determines popularity) is not exactly an adequate comparison.
X-Plane is not new. It has been around forever, pretty much.
BoB and Rise Of Flight are just the periodic releases in the genre which you see once in a while. Same regularity as space combat games. There have been other similar periodic releases e.g. those games from Third Wire.
When you think about the heydey of flight sims and compare to recent trends, it is quite clear that they’re “dead” – as far as mainstream goes.
Once again, most people are using “dead” as an absolute (as in nobody is making them anymore dead), not as an inference as to the popularity of the specific genre. Maybe we should just start saying that they’re an endangered species then? Will that work for you folks who just can’t wrap your heads around – or accept – the reality of the facts?
I never did buy into the PC gaming is dead rubbish, because it was just that: rubbish.
When you compare console game sales to PC game sales, it is clear that there is a major gap there. Especially in terms of sales volumes and earnings. The rampant piracy of PC games plays a huge role in how the numbers are perceived.
But going the PC vs console argument is no more different than the LCD vs Plasma argument. No matter how dead plasma was, they were still being manufactured – and sold – in large numbers.
The HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray “dead” is a more definitive comparison because without adopters, the format format died. Another example? Betamax vs VHS.
By the same token, if we all stopped going PC game development – then and only then – will the platform truly “die”.
Apples to Oranges comparisons are the hardest to argue and/or articulate, but when you think carefully about it, the argument is really cut and dry. Unless of course those debating same are more interested in discourse and argument than in facts and debate.
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Those were examples about a “dead” market and still profitable with top quality products. Compare last year with early 90′s and “golden age” of Simulators . There was very good sims in 2008: DCS Black Shark (It was released in Rusia and digital download in 2008), Steel Fury Kharkov 1942, Steel Beasts 2, iRacing, X3 Terrain Conflict and X-Plane 9. All of them continue creating more titles or creating add ons. I suppose all those developers has a lot of invoices to pay, so, probably they are earning some money. May be they don’t drive a Ferrari, but still have the work they want or they like. I think there is a market for sims, included space or sci fi sims.
I know X-Plane is not new, I use X-Plane since release 5, but every year, more or less, Laminar Research releases a new version, and still earning money. Not only them, but as well 3rd partys.
The only thing is dead is the “traditional” market, but there is enough room for all genres if things are well done. By example, Eagle Dynamics sells their simulators to the USAF and Bohemia sells Armed Assault VBS to the US Marines. So, they are able to invest enough money to continue their work without creating The Sims 4.
Maddox Games are licensing their engine for some other games and they are creating a new and promising sim to continue the IL2 Series with another “top” product.
Dead is an absolute word, don’t you think?. I understand your point, anyway, but there is some life after death, and I’m not talking about god or Jedi Knights.
But, please… tell me something about Tomorrow War, didn’t you hear about it?
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Oh, and you know they were profitable how exactly?
Plus, this has NOTHING to do with profitability. Please don’t confuse the issue with strawman arguments.
Everything else you said, I already discussed in the interview and in subsequent commentary in this thread. Again, I think you’re clearly missing the point.
Tomorrow War is just another cookie cutter space combat game IMO. It didn’t (and still doesn’t) look or sound remotely interesting enough for me to even consider playing, let alone buying it.
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Why do you think they were not profitable?. Are those developers some kind of charity organization?. It’s supposed they are still developing those sims is because they get some kind of revenue. I don’t know how exactly because nobody reveals those numbers, but Laminar research continues developing X-Plane and Bohemia still continues developing ArmA.
And yes, you are talking about profit, If I understand correctly the meaning of the word profit (as you can see, english is not my language).
Well, you just hit it right there on the head. While adventure, war games etc are no longer mainstream – as far as retail publishing goes – there is grassroots support for it by gamers and developers alike. The way I see it, a publisher won’t bother with a game that won’t sell five copies. However, a developer (or web publisher/developer) who knows that he only needs to sell two copies for his break even, can still survive by going the alternate publishing route. More often than not, they often end up making more money than if they went with a publisher. Why? Because if you sell direct, the money goes to you directly.
I’m not using fallacy or misunderstanding arguments, simply I don’t agree with all of yours, something a bit different. You can say all you want, but I have read a lot of times the word “dead” after some others like RPG, Adventure, Flight Sims, PC… So, when I read somebody talking about dead of a genre, I’m very esceptic.
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I wont argue semantics and I understand and to a point agree with how you see the space sim genre. To my mind the key point you made was when you said:
…the genre is only attractive to those who grew up with it.
This is the central problem, only those who grew up with space sims have been making them too. As such they have been basically making the same game over and over again (generalisation of course), but unlike other genres where the remakes include interesting remixes or the addition of other genre tropes the same old tired WWII fighter mechanics or more complex ways to trade widgets between tin cans in space is trotted out. Usually this comes with some of the industries worst examples of “plot”.
I understand that the simulation arena aims for realism, but in reality space is mostly boring – vast empty areas with literally nothing in them but particles of gas and dust. To my mind the allure of space is the mystery, the amazing visual vistas, the idea of exploring where no one else has been of seeing up close what no one else has seen and encountering awe inspiring and terrifying events. So far there have only been 2 games that have even scratched the surface of this: Elite 2: Frontier (only in the most peripheral sense – as you could explore the galaxy at your whim, but where ever you went the pirates had got there first and all parts were boring not just those in space) and Noctis IV which had exploration and being the first to discover things along with attempts to make the vistas amazing but which is so old and the graphics so very outdated.
Hundreds of classic and new sci-fi novels, short stories and movies and the best that we can come up with is trading widgets and WWII fighter combat in space? Bah, the genre’s not dead its still in its black and white, silent film days! Once all the ‘old boys’ have died off or given up on recreating the perfect ‘elite’ then perhaps the genre will have the chance it deserves.
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Maybe this is why people were just pissed at spore, rather than excited that they got something billed as a game to show your girlfriend, but turned out to be a relatively hardcore space colonozation game. Not that that’s what you mean by space sim. It seems that it’s not just the genre, but the environment of anything in space that isn’t a marine exploring a planet. How well have the last few games that covered the same subject matter of the last phase of spore done? Some of them were alot of fun, but they were never going to be blockbuster hits. X-wings are out, and stormtroopers (Halo) are in.
I think this might even pertain to air combat in general, or RTSes, or anything that isn’t just an FPS or RPG. Glaring Exception? Total War.
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“How well have the last few games that covered the same subject matter of the last phase of spore done?”
Err – ridiculously well. GalCiv 2 has made millions – with something in the region of a 1/10 dev cost/revenue split. Sword of the Stars worked well enough for the developer to now develop 3 new titles at once. Sins of a Solar Empire – see GalCiv2.
That genre is far from dead.
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If you are going by Brad’s GDC presentation for Sins, he got the math wrong. That would be 1/5 and not 1/10
Nobody said the “space” genre was dead. The “space combat action/sim” genre is whats dead. Completely different from rts, adventure, shooters etc though set in space, aren’t remotely in the same genre as space combat action|sim games.
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EVE Online subscriptions are stagnant? Everytime I hear it mentioned that number is consistently increasing. I know the logged-in player count is definitely increasing. I recently re-subbed after a hiatus of a couple of years and typically the number of people online is twice what it was back then.
I wouldn’t call EVE “stagnant”.
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The keys were sent to RPS today as the closed BETA has officially kicked off.
More info and shots on the game’s site
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I think there is still money to be made by private inde devs like the ones over at Evochron Legends in the genre. They realize the pickens are slim so they slim down their operation (to one or two people ? :P ) For example, one I keep using in several places, there is a very small market for Dwarf Fortress simulation ,hence there is only one game that offers such a thing but that game is very good at what it does and has dedicated followers. :P Dedicated enough that they donate money to Tarn so he doesn’t have to work on anything but his video game lol
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Indeed. As one publisher friend of mine I was speaking to the other day said, the future is in the hands of developers, not publishers. Why? Because digital is making huge strides and eventually retail will be a thing of the past for even console games as it has dwindled for PC games.
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The same things to be going on with music, CD’s aren’t selling so well and if you can get your music on I-tunes or something like that you don’t really need a record label.
I think this is a good thing, publishers are destroying creativity in the market and pumping out clone after clone. Things like Braid, Universal Combat, Evochron Legends, Sins of A Solar Empire ect are all so great because A) The Publishers let the devs do what they want or B)there was no publisher input at all.
If you spend less money and target a more focused market , say tricky puzzle games, and you only want to get those people to buy your game you know you can focus on game play making a tricky puzzle game and spend less money on the flash and make more profit over all.
At least that is how I think, obviously I could be wrong you don’t see me making any money lol.
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[matias - STOP posting this story, or links to it, on our site. If you have serious complaints against the man, then take care of them in private, with lawyers, and not on our server. Thank you - Ed]
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