How Not To Make An MMOG 65
garylian writes "Some of the folks here might remember a Massive game called 'Mourning' that went into development and never really went anywhere. Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete. Some former fans have a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Highlights from the article include the fact that one of the game backers was a internet porn-lord!" From the article:"The game was going nowhere, no one really believed in its success. We all knew it was going to fail, but we were kind of reluctant in admiting it. Those who realized this and had better opportunities, left. Those who were blinded by different reasons or had no other choices, remained till the end (or maybe had different reasons.) It's not that we didn't try to change this direction the game was heading to... We did, but no one was listening to us. " The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt.
Re:Grain of Salt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Grain of Salt? (Score:2)
from what i can tell, this wasn't a serious game project to begin with - the people being interviewed were 'volunteers' - yet the slashdot posting seems to think that this game would be the same as one being developed by a sony or ncsoft.
Re:Grain of Salt? (Score:1)
The alledge interviewee describes himself as a programmer.
Now where is the truth in that we don't know but let's not mistake what is "written" down.
Internet porn lords (Score:4, Interesting)
How is that any different than Wikipedia?
Re:Internet porn lords (Score:2, Funny)
But, hey, if you can get off from the Wikipedia, then you are truly an uber-geek!
Re:Internet porn lords (Score:1)
And? (Score:2)
Why does-it matter where the money come from as long as it is from a legal source?
paco? (Score:1)
News at 11! (Score:5, Funny)
Which makes it different from other MMORPGs... how?
Re:News at 11! (Score:2)
MOD PARENT UP. :P
Re:News at 11! (Score:2)
Re:News at 11! (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it just me, or does the whole Q/A session seem like a personal attack by either a very informed player, or by somebody who used to work at the company.
Although character assination can (some times) be a just about acceptable thing, the whole interview seems to be going a little bit too far.
I'm sure they'll work out how this guy is, and we'll have another (possibly fake) interview up on slashdot in the next couple of days saying the exact opposite.. So remember kids, if you try and screw people, their going to screw you twice as hard :D
Just my £0.02p :)
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
You mean it seemed like he was a programmer as the link (in the Slashdot write up) is labelled a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Or that in the actual Q and A the first answer (when he is asked what his relation was with the product answers: I was one of the RoT's programmers.
I wonder what intriguing insights you will have on the follow up
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Q: OK, well let's talk about the man behind the money. Who is David Jasinski and what was his role in the development of RoT?
You'll notice this is the first mention of the names David or Jasinski in the entire interview. Either it's an extremely well-prepared interviewer, a case of two former employees interviewing each other, or one former employee interviewing himself. After this, the interviewer starts calling him "Dave" which indicates a level of familiarity.
I looked for a bit of background and it's in plain sight on the homepage:
Friday, December 9th, 2005: Spoonbender recieved an email from one of the former developers of Mourning a few months ago asking what had happened to the game. At that point the game had been taken offline and the forums were down. Spoon sent off an email detailing his experience with the developers and with the game itself, and the former developer replied with a few stories of his own. Spoon forwarded the email to Shintuk, Shintuk to Jdodger, and JD showed it to me. JD then conducted an interview with the former developer. His insights and personal stories about the behind-the-scenes events during his time working on the project constitute the best and most accurate picture we have of who was to blame for the mismanagement that Mourning suffers from. He will talk at length about Ado's 'unconventional' game designing style, Ego's tragic inability to grasp the true problems until it was too late, and even individual incidents with the development team that illustrate both the potential Mourning had and how that potential was, with almost criminal negligence, squandered.
I feel that it is nessecary that those that followed Mourning and devoted time and money to its success see where their time and money went. In short, they should know the truth.
You can read the interview and draw your own conclusions.
So that provides some background. Rebuttal from "Adonys" can be found here. [krelslibrary.org]
The whole things reminds me of Battlecruiser.
My Guess is (Score:2)
How to fail anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:5, Interesting)
> we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
That's the biggest of many difficulties pointed out in the interview. I think it's just as important that the HR process sucked; they eliminated a qualified applicant in favor of an unqualified friend, didn't take action when the friend verbally abused the staff, etc.
It was also a bad sign that the programmers (game designers) were not allowed to talk to the customers (fanbase). While of course there has to be a limit on everything, a certain amount of customer/programmer interaction is important to developing a project that pleases the customer, rather than the designer.
It doesn't bother me that this interview got a bit personal at time. Better that than happytalk-B.S.!
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:2)
Semi-OT, but "programmer" and "game designer" are not generally synonymous these days.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:2)
> "programmer" and "game designer" are not generally synonymous
I was being perhaps a little too concise.
In the olde dayes, it was all programmers doing everything to produce software. Nowadays, the work splits among a gazillion specialties, which is reasonable enough, but does not change the essential points: (a) makers who communicate with customers make things more like what customers want, and (b) people who get between customers and makers (e.g. system analysts, designers, whatever) may do so wit
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:2)
Ah, gotcha. Agreed, then!
People with a plan don't let programmers talk (Score:3, Insightful)
As another poster has pointed out programmers are not game designers. In other words programmers implement the game designer's ideas. The game designer should do research, or have research done for
Re:People with a plan encourage staff quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer [gdmag.com]. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game" [wikipedia.org].
Re:People with a plan encourage staff quality (Score:2)
I did not express myself clearly. When I wrote that programmers implement the designer's ideas I did not mean to imply that they (we) should have no feedback, suggestions, or other involvement. What I was really trying to say is that they (we) should have no direct interaction with customers. I agree programmers are an important part of the
Communicate with users (Score:1)
Re:People with a plan don't let programmers talk (Score:2)
Blizzard got to play it different because it was blizzard, they already had a huge fan base that was going to purchase the game no matter its condition because it had thier name on it. In addition they did a smart thing in not having and NDA so they had all the fans advertising for it instead of having local customer relationship person doing it.
Also blizzard had a mindset that
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the biggest of the difficulties, the root of all the other ones, was a bunch of incompetent jerks in positions of power. To succeed one needs at least competent jerks or incompetent non-jerks (quick def: folks not immune to reason, having a minimum of social skills), although without at least one competent non-jerk, the future is troublesome.
This is almost a
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not unusual in the game industry. The design document is usually a formality for the developer to present to the publisher to get the first check. When you get the alpha build from the developer, that's when it becomes obvious that the design document was no better than toliet paper. If you try to hold the developer (and sometimes the publisher's producer) accountable to the design document before issuing the next milestone payment, the rationalization, jutstifications and excuses add up pretty quickly.
When I was a lead QA tester at Atari, I was often forced to based my test documents on the game instead of the design document. The only exception was Dragonball Z: Buu's Fury for the GameBoy Advance, which had a 200-page design document that detailed everything. That was my favorite title to work on and it had a great developement team.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Insightful)
From the interview is seems like not only did the "designer" fail to write things down, he also changed his opinion every other day and got into fights with the people who were now working on "wrong" things without being told that the design changed. From the article it seems like he's a sociopath (may seem like a strong term, but the basic "tell
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:4, Interesting)
I had to work with a few of them. They do all the right things to make management happy while making everyone else unhappy. The only way they get fired is when they accidentally pissed off the wrong person. This is one of the reasons why I left Atari after six years since I didn't want to become one of them.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:2)
It should be pointed out that it i
Beware the classic waterfall model (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem, of course, is that a full, formal design document can often lead to a project's downfall. It works well if there are few unknowns (e.g. the technology, genre, and gameplay is well established), but for many other project types it can be a killer. For example, if the design document calls for one thing to happen, which turns out to be programmatically difficult or i
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your boss can't treat you with respect, it's an indicator of other issues that they have that are likley to destroy any chances you have of successful completion of any project. If you ever have the opportunity to see a company with a design team run like this side by side with one where the boss respects their employees, you can see that the difference is night and day.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:2)
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
If the people in charge of steering the project are not serious enough, then the project is doomed to fail.
Don't blame the disruptive guy, blame the manager who hired him and refused to let him go when all evidence of incompetence came to light.
The source of the money is irrelevant to the success/failure of the project.
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Insightful)
The answers of the "single" employee being intereviewed are interesting in that their English is significantly better in the first few answers.
Then, look at how they address a few of the questions. The questioner obviously had better contact with some of management than the interviewee. I don't care how many online forums you post in... it sounded to me like the questioner knew way too much about the situation to not have been an i
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:1)
From what I read, the people involved in the interview where not employees but close: they were volunteers. Two of them apparently where the Lore Team for the game (they came up with lore and background) and therefore had direct contact with management/developers I guess. (and as a side n
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How to fail anything. (Score:3, Interesting)
It was a small job (3-4 team members, a few months work). It was also crucial that it be done correctly. Work was started on the project (and completed) before the design doc was created. Our team still did interviews with all the stakeholders, and a 40 page design doc, because the PHB knew it was important. We just didn't actually have it to work from because PHB insisted we start coding immediately. You see, PHB committed to deliverables and timeline before e
Re:Interview? (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's what made it such an interesting read. It almost reads well enough to be fiction. You come away from it with a good sense of the main players (Dave, Ego, Ado) and can identify those people with others you may know. And Ado getting punched in the face.... he so had that coming.
Questions seemeed to go in circles, but it was an amusing read, especially for those with appreciation for software and especially gam
Slashdotting them wouldn't be hard (Score:1)
Re:Slashdotting them wouldn't be hard (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:3, Interesting)
the design doc is a highly overrated concept that is too often assumed to be a 5000 page bible written by a team of monkeys before the game's production.
the reality is that the design document is a living document that, while necessary, will inevitably change & morph as the project progresses.
what IS crucial to a project is a set of key design 'rules' tenets that must be used while assessing new features that a
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
I don't have any game development experience, and only a couple of years of programming experience in a business environment. I have found that projects with a solid set of documentation - be it a requirements doc, or use cases, or anything that maps out in detail what the finished product should accomplish, and which I'm assuming is roughly equivalent to a game design doc - were much more pleasant and easier to work on. It's not the existance of the
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:4, Insightful)
It's possible to get by without one if you're creating a relatively simple game with an extremely small tight-knit team, but otherwise you're going to need that documentation to at least make sure everyone is building the same game. Producing a coherent design on paper is hard work and may not be as fun as jumping in and starting to build the game, but it forces you to think about the consequences of each design element you add. It's much easier to change the design at this stage rather than lose 2 months of development time because something added on a whim breaks another gameplay mechanic or renders something redundant. Trust me, I've seen it happen.
Having a robust design at the start of the project doesn't mean that it won't change over time. Many features you just can't really tell how "fun" they're going to be until you try them. Having the documentation there as a foundation will allow you to make changes more easily with minimum impact on the rest of the game. We've found it easiest to use a design wiki, so that the documentation can be kept up to date without too much hassle.
I've refused to work at companies that don't put in the effort at design stage; one company told me that in games development you don't have time for design - they closed down about two months later. And from the other side of the table, candidates who don't show the necessary appreciation for design will not do favorably in interviews. Call me a design nazi if you like, but I've wasted too much of my life poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly thunk-out projects.
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
Some folks have never had a good design doc to work from, and can be excused for not appreciating them.
Others, in my opinion, are more interested in following their own pet features, and find building the game as designed too constricting.
May these folks someday run a studio full of employees just like themselves.
It's like building a bridge, where half the team is following the plan, bridging across to 10th street, and some others are of the opinion that 12th street would be a better term
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
most people don't realize how much collaboration and team effort is required THROUGHOUT the development process in order for a game to be innovative and successful.
it's a fine line - having too little (or mislead
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
Sure, but if you don't have a design document then it will be something else far more nebulous that everyone fails to read. By having a design document, whenever there's a possibility that there's going to be a conflict between coders, one of them (or both) will check the relevant bit of the document and figure out "Oh, I'm wrong. Shucks." and stop getting worried about their ego so much.
Design documents are a bit like mission
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
If you drop a 500 page tome in the middle of the room and expect people to start at page 1 and not stop until they've read through to the end, then yes, you're going to be disappointed.
It needs to be a source of reference, not an epic novel. I need to be able to flip to the AI section, spawning subsection and find a list of parameters that need to be definable when I'm preparing to implement that bit in the editor. If I have to trawl through
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d (Score:2)
class foo : bar {}
?
The idea of XP is that the design document should be a quick thumbnail sketch. The rest should be thrashed out in the real world of code and computers with a minimum of gold plating, with a massive set of tests set up to make sure that the process of thrashing things aroun
Communications gap (Score:2)
However, there is a general principle worth noting here which the article illustrates very well regardless of the veracity of the interview. A game designer who doesn't speak the language of the developers cannot possibly control the product being developed without creating a static definition of some kind.
This definition doesn't necessarily have to be a document (for example, for defining quests it could be through a simple interactive state machin
Re:Communications gap (Score:2)
Not only that, but even if true, this is not just a failure of the designer. This is a failure of everyone on the design team, and everyone on the dev team as well. I get verbal requests from forgetful people all the time (and often get some contradictory requests later in time). I make it my responsibility to confirm the requests
No need for grain of salt, he's right (Score:4, Informative)
From never recieving pre ordered copies of the game, to the game shipping on just run of the mill blank cd-r's, the game was plaqued with horrendus management.
Go try to read the official Mourning forums. Notice how they only go back to a certain date? They've deleted their forum database more than once. Not just a typical pruning but completely cleaned it cause so many of the fans, players, and even development team staff & moderators spoke out aganist it.
Imagine if one day a huge portion of say, SOE's player base (for any game, just as an example) spoke out aganist a huge list of problems, failures and broken promises. In this huge group of people is several key people in your production team, a good portion of your long time forum and community moderators, and even some of your own sponsors. Now imagine SOE just basically giving all those people a big middle finger, deleting the forums, and then rule over the "new" forums with an iron nazi fist (quite literally, meaning NO negative opinions). If you can piture all that, that is exactly what it was like for the Mourning players.
Link for ya (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/load/forums/l oadforum/51/loadthread/37720/setstart/1/loadclass/ 35 [mmorpg.com]
love the screen shot of the official GOLD game just being spindles after spindles of cd-rw's (note they DID ship just run of the mill burnt cd rw's in a small box with no artwork, as the official game....)
Summary of Interview (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Summary of Interview (Score:3, Informative)
true, it seems... (Score:2)
Something Awful trolled these guys once (Score:2)
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2706 [somethingawful.com]
They also put a banner or something on every page that said "Mourning sucks" or something of that nature. Basically, the people behind the game obviously had no skill at dealing with trolls, turning a snarky capsule preview into a big legal battle to decide the fate of the universe. Since I'm sure MMORPG developers have to deal with trolls on a regular basis, this couldn't have made them look good to anyone.
R