Reply With QuoteRut Ro! The END IS NEAR!
Rumor is, Raph's leaving.
This is Kotaku, so take that with a:A mole sends us word that Raph Koster has left the SOE to start up a new games studio. Cindy Armstrong, head of Business Development, has taken an offer to become the new USA honcho for Webzen. Moreover, Lucas Arts is not extending their Star Wars license. Yikes.
Grain of salt.
Rut Ro! The END IS NEAR!
I'm more of a what have they done for us recently sort of guy...so, why do I care of SOE loses that which they call talent? Their games definitely haven't been up to par.
Yeah, I haven't played an SOE game regularly in many years (although I occasionally do a month or two-month stint in Planetside). The whole company could go under and I wouldn't care. And I've never played a Koster game because they get such bad reviews, and have never heard of Cindy Armstrong, so that stuff is sort of a shrug-and-back-to-what-I-was-doing thing too.
I think Raph should team up with John Romero and make Daikatana Online.
It's not a rumor that Raph is leaving, since Bioware announced last week that they hired him to work in their Austin studio.Originally Posted by zabuni
Austin is like the wonderful vagina of the games industry. Everyone wants to get in.
That was Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton, Koster's name wasn't mentioned at the time. We still don't know where, and if, he's going.
Oops. I always get Rich Vogel and Raph Koster's names mixed up. God knows why.
Whew...had me scared there for a minute.
AFAIK Raph didn't have anything to do with EQII, my drug of choice at the moment, so while I like Raph a lot, personally, and wish him well wherever he ends up, I doubt it'll make much difference to my gaming in the short run.
I still think SOE has a lot of ability, institutionally, and a lot of good ideas.
Marvellous!
SOE...the SOE? Sony Online Entertainment? That division/company? I just ask because it's not often you see "ability, institutionally, and a lot of good ideas" used to describe SOE.
Hopefully if he does start on a new MMOG there is one lesson hear learned:
Players should not be able to build houses in the game world.
UO was a clusterfuck, and then within a week SWG was just as bad. I fortunattly saw tatoine before housing in beta. There were some large planes you could run around and you actually could explore.
Then they turned on housing and withing a week every scrap of buildable ground hasd something on it. There were no more wilds, just forests of houses.
That's just wrong Deep T. Only messes were around big Starports like Coronet, Mos Eisley, and because of a cheese factor I won't get into - the mining outpost on Dantooine.
Anywhere else you might find a lone house, little complex or a city scattered around but it wasn't that bad. My character spent quite a bit of time enjoying the solitude of the wilderness and hunting/surveying on many worlds.
Smartest thing about SWG was player cities and player owned property. Kept my community around quite a bit longer than anything else the game had to offer. Some are still there. I think the city we founded in our first week on SWG is still there. If there are any players left here and one ends up on Starsider they'll find Vagabond's Rest remains relatively active on Naboo.
I didn't play it in retail, just beta. It beta it was all packed with houses or ore extractors or factories or whever. It was just around starports either. You could have gone to the most far outreaches in tatoine and it still would have have been packed with houses. Maybe its differant in retail, maybe because hardly anyone plays it anymore.
Well let's quantify this.. you're talking about housing in the beta.
I played SWG for quite a long time, way over six months, and Tatooine was not like this at all. There were still very wide expanses of absolutely nothing.
Which is not to say that there weren't wide expanses of poorly laid-out housing, tons of farms/mines and later on player cities, but there was still a lot of places that had absolutely nothing.
--- Alan
On the bright side, it's now back to absolutely nothing. Lucas takeover FTW!
Isn't that kinda what Tatooine is supposed to be like, though?
"What a desolate place this is."
So what kind of MMOG would bioware do, espeically with Raph there? Weren't they trying to develop their own fantasy world or something? I suppose its to much to hope for a non fantasy based MMOG, or at the very least non pure fantasy based like steam punk or even high tech and high magic.
Rumor confirmed.
Link?
I heard another rumor today that Bioware might be getting the Star Wars MMO license if/when SOE loses it.
What are you stupid? Just go to HRose's blog, look back about 6 months. Its all there.
Heh, I have no problem swimming upstream on this one. I have spent a lot of quality tiime with EQ and EQII, and with Planetside. IMO EQII is a very good and very well supported and run MMO at the moment, and yes, from what I've seen of the expansions and tweaks SOE is making and has made for it, they do indeed know what they are doing.
I admit that SWG was something I could not at all abide, and that SOE's attitude at times in the past has been troubling. But I emphasize "at times," and note that they really are a schizoid bunch. Some products/teams are top notch, others seem like their from Pluto or something.
Last edited by TheWombat; 03-23-2006 at 08:45 PM.
Wombat, I don't argue the joy you took out of it, but SOE hated it's customer base when it was running EQ. With a white hot passion of a thousand suns hate. I can't speak for EQII, but SWG has had a million problems and planetside just isn't worth a monthly payment of 12 bucks...at least not for me.
SOE has never been top of the line and though they did a great job advancing the MMORPG industry when it was just a baby, I wouldn't say that was what they did so much as that was what some artists and all of the design work put into MUDs did.
*shrugs*
I heard that as well, through the grapevine. Can't vouch for the accuracy, since it's an unreliable source who often confuses things and gets them wrong, but I'd say it's not impossible.
Raph didn't leave SOE, he just transitioned into a New Employment Experience.
For some reason that I have yet to figure out, the EQ2 community reps are the only ones I've seent that do a good job at handling things. The SWG boards are a mess.
I won't mind going on record for saying that I will probably try the next Raph Koster game, whatever it might be. I really like his core game design philosophy. The original UO (reffered to in another thread today as "the lawless years") is still the MMOG that I have the fondest memories from. It might be because it was all new back then, but I think that there's more to it... And SW:G was very close to being a good game. In fact, if meaningful loot had been added, I think I might have continued playing SW:G.
UO and SW:G was the MMOG's that most resembled "persistent gaming worlds" to me. I felt as if I had an effect on the world. I had a house (also there when I was not logged in), I ran a shop (ditto), etc. Whereas DAoC, EQ, AC, Jumpgate, AO, WoW and all the others all feels like a game I log into to play for a while. Log out again, and have not really left a trace or "made a difference". I really enjoy playing these games though - but they are exactly that. Games I enjoy to play. UO, in particular, was an online world I enjoyed being a part of.
So best of luck to DesignerDragon from me. I, for one, am looking forward to the results of your next project!
Raph's posts on QT3, and his calm and intelligent response to various forms of criticism have basically ensured that he'll always get the benefit of the doubt from me. SoE will never get it, but I think it would be ridiculous to blame all of SoE's failings on him.
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