Out of Pod Experience

https://goblinworks.com/experience

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Just found this by chance today:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-a-fantasy-sandbox-mmo/ - only 5 days left.

Interesting part, is it claims to use a passive skill training plan like EVE. Kind of cool, and intended for sandbox MMO style gameplay where you build and own everything yourself.

..and, then I discover the developer is the old CMO for CCP. I don't suppose I should really be surprised given the intent to use a passive skill training system like EVE has. Still, quite a group behind this one, including Lisa Stevens of Paizo publishing, who apparently started with White Wolf.

It's an "Everythings connected Man *paranoia*" moment.

Still, the basic idea of the game is very interesting, though I see a few features that could be reinvented and changed. Also, his marketing isn't so hot, even if the product model is mostly good. Needs Moar!

I think my initial thought on watching the video was regarding the Hex mapping. That was my primary wtf moment. Old school, classic hex grid map with vague details of trees and stuff, but nothing particularly defining. Doesn't exactly instill confidence.

Then I read up on Lisa Stevens and discovered she was one of the ones that helped with getting Wizards of the Coast up and running, and bringing about the eventual downfall of TSR, following which she moved on to Magic while WotC mangled what was quite possibly one of the best games in history and came up with D&D 3.0.

Thanks for that.

Of course, it looks like Pathfinder will be moving towards a more classic style of fantasy, which is something I always appreciated in the original AD&D 2E.

But, there is very little detail with intent to design and develop the characters themselves that I saw; just a bunch of environment and character modeling and animations, plus goblins and an environment object destruction which was rather splinter-effect, but not really impressive..

307K for that; that was my 3rd thought.

And then, I felt I should talk to this guy; it doesn't look like he's going to make his funding goal anyway. Could be a great game though. Also, I feel he needs to follow someone on Twitter; it makes him seem rather anti-social that he hasn't bothered.

Sad. I've been waiting for a classic style, fantasy MMO that would really gather my interest for what seems like forever.

That was actually one of the issues I had with it, though not actually the fact it had passive skill training, but more the fact that it was only intended to have passive skill training.

It's a great system, but for a game like this, there should be an advancement curve that is at least partially affected by activity. Sure, a Wizard might gain skills and abilities primarily passively, but what of a Fighter? There is a limit to what physical training and practice can achieve with regard to practical application.

So, my thought was that it should be a little of both, either dependent on training focus, or attribute focus of the skill you are training. (i.e: in order to effectively train a physical skill, you have to go out and do what it is you are training at, else it will take far longer to achieve your training goal.)

That's my way of thinking anyway.

Also, I didn't like the whole "Mark of the Lady of Graves" thing. Thought it was stupid to be perfectly honest, and a bit of a rip-off of AoC which uses the same conceptual means of explaining re-spawning, or resurrection if you will. It lacks originality, and it's a poor means of explaining the process of continuously dying and respawning as a character.

I get that it's a tool, but I don't have to like it. It's too simple, too easy, and far too convenient.

I have my own ideas about all of this to be honest, and how such a game should be developed, but I'm still not certain I want to share them in this way.

This company already did a fundraiser and raised 300k USD to make that P.O.S. tech demo they are showing. I laughed my ass off when I saw that and my wallet thanked me for not spending a dime on their project with an obviously incompetent development team.

I mean, the developer of Sui Generis created their engine alone without begging money from the crowd and their engine sweeps the floor with this crap. Of course, it's not an MMO engine, but then again we don't have any evidence if the Pathfinder engine they are making is capable of running an MMO either.

I can hold only so much hope and dreams in this body

That's basically what I saw. I was fairly convinced anyone could have made that demo without a whole lot of effort. It doesn't say much about the game, and besides the point and click interface for basic character movement and animation, I think there was very little game mechanics involved.

From what I saw of the Unity site, I suppose it's entirely possible that much of it was developed by a 3rd party and adopted for the demo, while the real work went into concept art, (they seemed fairly focused on that at one point), and 3D modeling of that art. There's no way they did that 3D modeling with the MATX boards with integrated CPUs and GPUs they purchased for their workstations either. Those things couldn't have cost much more than $300 a piece to build from what I saw.

I didn't look that closely I'll admit, but basic familiarity tells me they weren't anything even remotely special and it probably would have proved more productive for them to buy Lenovo's and add-in some discrete GPU upgrades. Probably would have cost more though.

My own PC wouldn't effectively model and render those graphics though, as you need a proper workstation to do that sort of thing effectively. Consumer GPUs can do it, but often they end up causing more problems with the modeling process than it is worth for the lesser expense. It's much more effective to have ECC RAM and CPU functionality, and a workstation GPU. Same goes for code.

Of course, and basic coding can be done on the machines they have, I just wouldn't expect them to be able to compile it properly, which is the important part.

That said, there are some great consumer grade programs out there now for 3D modeling applications. Just check out Steams Software section. Stuff looks great and it's affordable for people like me, provided we really have the interest in making said investment. I can't reconcile it myself atm, as it is still an expense, and ultimately not one that I am likely to see any real return on aside from my own personal enjoyment.

Honestly, that was more something that would have really grabbed my interest years ago; where I'm now well past the stage where learning it is fun. It's certainly not something I would consider productive or particularly engaging as a hobby anymore sadly. In the end, a 3d model you've made is nothing more than a bit of data read by your computer, that you can look at in the program that created it.

I'm not what I would consider good enough that I'd be able to do more with it.

..anyway, my own reservations about such things aside, they are really great looking programs and iirc they are, some or all of them, commercially licensed if you are willing to pay for it.

That said, I'm not sure what the point of that tech demo was, aside to show us some art. The environment was very basic, the animations seemed good, and I like the style of the character art, but the end product of a 300K investment by someone, is still just an art exhibit.

They could have more productively worked on refining the character art and animations and shown that instead. The environment was effectively a wasted effort, (probably not much of one really), but the thing I noticed about the character modeling was that it was only technically accurate. On closer inspection, it was actually not that good outside of the armor modeling itself.

I suppose that was the important part, and it matters very much where that sort of thing is concerned. I know I never appreciated the dual mesh design of many character models in MMOs, with the very simplistic texturing and load reducing simple poly design. Of course, I can appreciate that for its intended purpose, and it isn't so bad when you consider it.

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tl;dr: I generally agree that the whole effort was ultimately for a product that could have been done with a lesser investment. I would have expected someone to be able to produce as much for around 20K in 2-3 months, by themselves, at home.

Of course, I shouldn't really have any idea what that's worth, but I saw nothing to indicate it was anything really special. I suspect the majority of the investment went into covering some other expenses.

I actually read about their design philosophy a bit further. Does sound awfully similar to a certain space MMO doesn't it? :D

If they can pull it off, it should be awesome. I'm really on the fence here about this project. I need to check their environment Unity demo and think about it.

I've been waiting for a Fantasy EVE ever since I tried EVE the first time.

If you read their design philosophy, one of their main points is to discourage meaningless player killing. How well they will accomplish it is of course a different story, but at least we know where they stand. They also state they will not tolerate griefing, whatever that means in practise.

Also, chokepoints? Stargates...?

Honestly, a fantasy MMO that is emergent, open-ended, with player generated content and a good skill system to eliminate the need for in-your-face grinding has great potential. Should anybody come up with one, I'd be willing to play it. I might even truly enjoy it.

This doesn't look like it however, despite having many of the basic principles that would make the game great incorporated into the fundamental design. It unfortunately finds itself lacking in some very important areas, and ultimately, it has a very limited scope and projected level of development.

In short, as mentioned above, in different words, it's too small and shortsighted.

..I never supported it either, but more so because I lack the ability to at this time, before it reaches the end of the kickstarter crowd-sourcing period, than because I really don't like it. Also, based on the length of that period and the limited funding it has achieved to date, I couldn't see my investment going anywhere.

That said, I have myself considered a kickstarter crowd-sourcing for game development with my own ideas. Unfortunately, I live in Canada and suspect that my crowd-sourcing would be limited in that regard as Canadians seem more interested in books about plants, or multi-tools. ..little joke there, but still fairly accurate in some regards.

"How to **** in the Woods," is a book that was grant funded by the Canadian government some time ago iirc, and a project that they seemed to think was well worth the investment as it was definitive of Canadian culture in their minds. Just shows you what we're dealing with up here.

I think they gave them $50K for that particular project, which covered the year it took to do the research and write it.

...


Basically, nothing passes inspection up here unless it's backwoods stupid and thoroughly harmless as far as I can tell. If you do anything else, they're likely to lynch mob you.

I do have the design fairly well worked out though. I've been thinking about writing a new ruleset for a fantasy RPG, (PnP), for years, and started considering ways to develop an MMO of the same sort some time ago. I know what I want anyway.

..then, there's this guy, who comes up with a ridiculously simplistic RPG system, puts it on kickstarter with a funding goal of $3K and gets nearly $300K so far, with the promise to write additional books for Worlds and such in the 3 months following the release of the first book. None of them have been written, but apparently he has the Core book, and expects to be able to achieve the writing of an additional 5 books in 3 months.

No idea what planet he's on, but I think people are nuts for giving him money; in that quantity at least, which is well beyond his projected funding requirements. Of course, the other thing of note about that, is that I wouldn't have known it existed if this guy hadn't tweeted about supporting it.

Fricken amazing. Makes me think I could sell people a 13 page leaflet as a full book for 230K dollars.

60 hours to go, more than $ 200k off target.... some how I am not feeling it.


B.

I just saw that Ed Greenwood and some other great fantasy authors and designers are involved in this. Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms world for AD&D, and is probably one of the best fantasy game designers there is imo.

Honestly, if they are involved I don't think it matters who owns the company, provided they are willing to listen to the experience of these veterans of the RPG genre. If they actually have, (imo, particularly Ed Greenwood), any great amount of interest and motivation to create the world content for, and mechanics behind this game, it could be exceptionally well detailed.

Reading down I see they are using a hireling system for crafting, where you build the appropriate structure to craft items, then assign assistant or craftsman to do the work and produce the product that you intend to make. No more endless crafting of bs tin bars and trinkets.

Also, I doubt very much those designers will recommend anything less than appropriate materials for any kind of crafting, and the game system will likely allow for some rare and interesting metals, stone, and wood as a result. I always appreciated Ed Greenwood, and other designers for that they never did anything half-arsed, but went full in with a creative and engaging design process.

Maybe it won't be so bad after all. And if this Kickstarter doesn't make it, then perhaps they'll take another shot at crowdsourcing for it, with some basic world design and game mechanics to get people more motivated to fund this project. Honestly, after seeing that, were I to have something to back it with before the end of this, I'd do it now.