Just a (badly written) comment going on at Grimwell. The origin is EverQuest 2 but I finish to go back to an old topic (nicely titled “Fuck the industry”).

I paste it here in a reversed order. The first part is the one I care about.

EDIT- After reading Darniaq’s comment (on Grimwell) I believe the term I should have used is “accountability”. Instead of “responsibility”.

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Darniaq:
I agree. These games need a consistent Creative Visionary, someone who’s hired to both deliver the game and manage it in Live. The trouble though is that developing and maintaining are so different, the people who do either do not necessarily have the interest to do both. I would be very interested to hear from people who’ve done this stuff whether pre-launch developers have enough love to maintain a game, are so burned out they can’t wait to find a new opportunity, or are just more interested in delivering a game than mother hen’ing it in perpetuity.

Yes, but I add more to that scenario. It’s not something about just a “leader”, it’s the whole team that is included in that reasoning.

The “Lead Designer” or whatever is just the predominant figure but even all the other developers need a commitment to the same degree instead of switching between positions, games and even companies.

The fact is that noone is responsible of anything. As they start to see some serious problems they try to jump the ship before it’s too late (if they can). That’s what I mean for the lack of commitment and why I accuse the industry for lack of passion and dedication.

There are designers that keep doing glaring mistakes and instead of facing the consequences they just move somewhere else collecting more and more “references”. The same for the positions less publicly exposed.

The point isn’t to fire these devs as the problems come up and as they show some incompetencies. The point is to FORCE them to learn. FORCE them to face the consequences of what they did instead of cashing and fleeing somewhere else.

That’s why a stable team is REQUIRED. It’s the only way to force them to commit to something and take the direct responsibility of what they are doing. So that they are FORCED to not glide and ignore the problems and the complaints.

I find this situation like the speculation in the economy. Noone cares about anything because it’s all relative, with no consequences and no implications. When you are bouncing from game to game and from project to project how the hell you can develop a serious competence that isn’t a pointless list of references?

It sounds like collecting badges in Pokemon.

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Scott Hartsman:
Not to be argumentative (maybe the opposite of argumentative?), but I agree with you that iterating most kinds of development is the right way to go. I disagree that it’s the exact opposite model of the one we use.

For starters, grouping all of our games into “how SOE develops” isn’t really an accurate description. Each team runs their own show. Ours is extremely heavy on the concept of prototyping and iterating.

The things in the game that have received the highest marks were the places where we were able to take the time to iterate exactly as you describe, which is our preferred method of adding to the game.

I was using the concept of “iteration” in a different context.

You think and use it as a way to develop an expansion till a final stage when it ships. And you say that if the various parts are being reiterated enough the final result will improve.

My point is slightly more philosophic. The idea is that the development of a mmorpg, as a whole, doesn’t end. So the idea of an optional expansion ot develop and ship in a final stage is ALREADY a distortion of the model.

Now, my point was specific to the PvP. Let’s take an example like DAoC and you’ll see that the PvP layer has been developed, expanded and tweaked FOR YEARS. Still, it has a number of glaring problems and a nearly infinite potential that is still waiting there.

This is the background of my critics. The point is not if you were able to fit enough iterations before the launch of the expansion. The point is to set-up a development process that keeps buiding on the basis of what was developed before.

The PvP REQUIRES this. You cannot wrap it up in “x” months and ship to then move the focus on something else. Already in the paradigm the development is simply not supposed to end. If not with the death of the game itself.

It’s surely possible and due to set various “stages” where the work can be packed up in an expansion in order to coordinate the economical aspect with the development itself. But the development itself shouldn’t be caged within a time limit and a feature list. Exactly because the strength of these games is in the possibility to build on top of what you worked before instead of just restart from zero with another, unrelated layer.

Simplifying even too much:
-It’s bad to think to the PvP and the features of an expansion in general as something to reiterate enough in order to offer a decent product to then “ship and forget”. Because the dev team will move on something else as the previous product is “done”.

-It’s good to use these expansions as a way to market and “chunk” a type of development that goes on uniformly and cohesively behind the scenes and that keeps building on top of the previous work. That keeps refining and reiterating the old parts. Without never stopping this process and using the new features only to integrate them with the rest instead of making everything independent and unrelated.

The point is that nothing is “done”. Never. A mmorpg should be always a building process that should never restart from zero but that should keep using its “age” as an advantage instead of a weight.

To achieve this result the development needs to be readjusted. The reiterations are not supposed to stop when the expansion ships.

They should never end.