Starcraft Ghost Update

GamesIndustry.biz has an interview up with Blizzard creative director Chris Metzen and VP of business operations Paul Sams, where they discuss the status of the Starcraft Ghost title. From the article: "Basically the status of that is that we've kind of gone back and reassessed certain of the elements of the game that we felt needed to be refined. I think E3 was a big influence to us - we looked at other products that were in that genre, and felt as if we were quite competitive in many ways, but maybe there were some other things that we weren't getting to where we needed to go."

The Duke?

The development team has an unstated desire to compete with Duke Nukem: Forever's development cycle. Teasing people with little updates seems to be part of the plan. Am I the only person who doesnt care to hear about a game until its out?

Shut up and..

...JUST RELEASE THE FREAKING GAME ALREADY!

Not that I'll buy it -- I'm still pissed at Vivendi over the bnetd debacle. Cocksuckers. (Nice to see all you WarCraft III and WoW players stuck to your principles on _that_ one.)

Somebody's got to count the money!

Penny arcade said it best:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-09 -20&res=l [penny-arcade.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-06 -23 [penny-arcade.com]

Release Dates and Growing Up

I find it interesting to compare the movie industry and game industry. Movie studios are generally able to predict the date of a release as soon as production begins. Dates do change, but this is rare. But in the game industry, it's rare when a game publisher is actually doesn't change the date. Is it that there are more people involved? No. Money? No. Are games just more complicated to make than a movie? I can't see why. So what is it about games that makes it so difficult for publishers

Why is it that the best studios are the ones who often claim the mantra "when it's done" as their release date? It seems to me that a truly great studio ought to not only craft great games, but do them in a timely manner. I don't think this would bother me so much, except that in every E3 they imply and act as if the game is coming out that year. They're taking advantage of the press and fans, and eating their cake too: they get to put out whenever _they_ feel like it. Seems like a raw deal for us.

Someone needs to kick the game industry in their pants and tell them to shape up and act like, oh you know, every other professional industry.

Re:Release Dates and Growing Up

I think anybody who's ever coded anything of even a moderate size, much less a giant project of the scale of what Blizzard would be taking on, knows that the unexpected just happens sometimes and it can set you back weeks, or more. Predictions of how long software projects will take are usually more accurately called "guesses". And trying to get a project out by a deadline no matter what usually means "Ship it with the bugs, we'll patch it later." I don't think Blizzard should be criticized for *not* taking this approach.

Of course, it's not like Blizzard products have never shipped with a bug in them. But I think the entire idea of polishing a product until they're sure it's worth putting out is a good one. Lots of good games have been ruined by being pushed out too early. And while Blizzard's development cycle is quite long, they don't seem to have a vaporware problem, either.

Course, Blizzard seems to have almost nothing to do with this game, so we'll see if they hold it up to the same standards since their name's gonna be on it.

Interesting story

Even if completely irrelevant for loyal Slashdotters.
Because we [slashdot.org] are [slashdot.org] still [slashdot.org] boycotting [slashdot.org] Blizzard [slashdot.org], right? Just checking.

Anyone read the article?

The "relevant" part about Ghost is 1 question, and it's in the post. Fairly useless post if you want to know anything about Ghost. I have to say that she looks better in Gabe's drawings, too.

As far as another 3rd person stealth action game on the console...YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWN.

Seriously...what could this game possibly do that would be markedly different than other games out there? Have you infiltrate Zerg bases? Whoopty doo. If it comes out, maybe I'll care at that point, until then, I file all Ghost news along with the Duke Nukem Forever news.

Old article?

Inspired by E3?

E3 was in May last year, is this article old?

And just cause the quote's funny...

From the article, about WoW:

That's one of the other things that I think is interesting about this product. It's really the only MMO that has an extremely long history, where there are millions and millions of people that are already dedicated to that franchise. They're already tied into the storylines, the characters and what have you, and as a result of that we think that we have a built in audience that is going to be interested in checking it out.

Uhm, I don't suppose you've ever heard of Star Wars Galaxies? There are, apparantly, people who are just a tiny bit attached to this "Star Wars" franchise as well. And that made it such a great game, too...

And, y'know, while on that subject...isn't talking about Warcraft in terms of its grand plot about on the same level as talking about the original Doom that way? I've played the games since the first one, and I haven't gotten much more out of the plot other than "Orcs kill humans, and then humans kill orcs." Admittedly, that may be because I filtered most of it out, but I still hardly think it's a crowning achievement that people are extremely attached to, character-wise or plot-wise...

Blizzard Puts Foot In Mouth

Quoting Paul Sams:
"That's one of the other things that I think is interesting about this product. It's really the only MMO that has an extremely long history, where there are millions and millions of people that are already dedicated to that franchise. They're already tied into the storylines, the characters and what have you, and as a result of that we think that we have a built in audience that is going to be interested in checking it out."

Umm, hello, McFly?!? How about a little game called ULTIMA ONLINE? Perhaps you've heard of it.

Sheesh.

Bruce

Ghost != 2

Nothing to see here. Move along.

I say...

I say just let them take their time, and do what they want. However, just don't tell us about it until you are almost done.

for starcraft fans

Patch 1.12 is coming out 'soon' now.

It has some interesting new features, like mini-map ping (like Warcraft3) and some alterations to current ladder maps (Lost Temple included.

Check Blizzard's main page for more details.

Pretty neat they are still supporting this game.

But

This game will be just like C&C renegade. Cute for a few minutes, because you see all the buildings you built in the first game but from first person perspective! And they're huge and they look really cool! Then you play the game a bit and it's pedestrian and there's nothing new. Some players might dig out an old copy of Starcraft and play that.

What they really need to do is make the Starcraft 2 we're all waiting for. How big was Starcraft? It was *huge* for its time. How much does the games biz like to rehash old popular titles to scrape a bit more cash out of the general public? Loads! (See DooM3, HL2).

I feel like a need a tinfoil hat. Why isn't there a Starcraft sequel in an age of sequels? Something is not right.

Re:Yeah, like other games completely?

You're almost right. Almost. 20 out of 88 realms are having problems. 23% is pretty close to 7%.

Linky [worldofwarcraft.com]

Text:

The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.

Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.

In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.

The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.

So yeah, there aren't, weren't, and never will have been any server problems that people are complaining about. Of course, you could verify the link, but their forums are down (again; for the fifth time today)--but there are no problems!

Re:Unrelease, just in case

No, if it turns out to be crap, they don't release it in the first place. See Warcraft Adventures, the game Blizzard eventually scrapped because it wasn't good enough. Ghost has been in development a while, and by most accounts it's shaping up to be a mediocre game. I'm honestly sort of surprised it hasn't met the same fate by now.

Re:Yeah, like other games completely?

Woohoo, the Iraqi information minister is posting on Slashdot!

Re:Yeah, like other games completely?

"That leaves 84 servers that are working ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY that Tycho and Gabe could be playing on but won't."

Won't? Can you move your characters from server to server at any time?

Re:Yeah, like other games completely?

There are a very few vastly overcrowded servers that are suffering issues. There are 88 servers total. Something like four are having issues. That leaves 84 servers that are working ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY that Tycho and Gabe could be playing on but won't.

According to the average /played, once you reach around level 30 and have your profession suitably leveled-up as well, you've played the game with that character for at least 48 hours. Therefore, moving to a new server is the equivalent of having your memory card save file corrupted in the last hours of Final Fantasy VII. If my save file was corrupted after 48 hours of an RPG, I would be pissed off, and probably so would you.

I don't know about you, but I don't think that the normal operation of one game (an MMORPG, specifically WoW) should be equivalent to a total fucking disaster in another game.

Real Translation: You are clueless

You do realize Blizzard gave over the majority of control in making this game to a studio, right?