Nathaniel Chapman

sighhhhhhhhhhh

Sozzy looks awesome. Best contribution to these forums from Volourn EVER and anyone who says otherwise is A LIAR. Such a high bar!

If you think being funny will lead Volourn to forgive you know that it won't. Also know that it is spelled sozzy not "Soz-ey", r00fles! yeah but sozzy just looks... wrong. Also, I mean, if I was looking for forgiveness from people on the internet I would be a sad, sad human being. I REGRET NOTHINGGGGG

as one of the designers who worked on SoZ I am chiming in unhelpfully to say that "SoZ-ey" is my favorite adjective. that's all. also you guys are being kind of nutty about BETRAYAL involving people changing jobs in the game industry. Sometimes people make life decisions for personal reasons or professional reasons that extend beyond moustache twirling?

AAAAActually, that's not really entirely true. While I definitely played quite a bit of X-Men Legends (as a tester) we didn't really look that much at the Marvel games as an influence for DS3. The bigger influences on the combat actually WERE games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. Our dodge mechanic was pretty much straight from NG, and aspects of DMC inspired early thinking about the ability system. Obviously the other big influence was games like D2, WoW, etc.on the more stat-y/ability/levelup progression side of things. There were some other odd influences (Demon's Souls, ICO and League of Legends actually influenced some aspects of boss fights, for instance). I will also say that Rich (project director) and I are huge fighting game fans. If you dig down, the resource mechanic (which Rich came up with and was awesome IMO) is VERY fighting game influenced.

Again, D3 is a traditional client/server game. It's not a matter of being "halfway" - services like Gaikai are OnLive are pretty fundamentally different technologically. Which isn't to say that they can't be successful, but it's a very, very different process and requires an even greater level of network reliability. There's a lot less ability for a client to "smooth over" rough patches in a connection when the client is doing literally none of the simulation/rendering.

This is why I thought cloud gaming had an upper hand. It doesn't require maintenance from the user side, who indeed, need to invest on their connections, though. The companies can collect user data more freely since it is the user who is allowed to use their servers. This solves most part of the "piracy" issues, too, - A better control on IP form the greedy IP holders. ...Well, at least, it seems the distribution, or more precisely, the service has a certain advantages for both publishers and the users. Then, again, this is just a view from a gamer, who doesn't have any inside-industry experience. Cloud gaming is technically tricky, has huge upfront costs (that cloud costs serious dough), is even trickier to work out licensing for, and has fundamental latency issues for many people (with much less ability to disguise latency using client side interpolation). It's definitely very promising but it's not really totally prime time ready for all types of games. Maybe, but I think blizzard is trying it, at least halfway with Diablo 3. Much of the information, including the character you play is kept in what some could call a cloud. It's a cloud on their own computer network, but some clouds are bigger or smaller than others. So not total cloud, but probably a halfway point. According to them they sold 6.5 million copies. Not that I think it was a great idea (a counter argument could point out the massive problems that arose upon Diablo 3's launch as well as some continuing problems). Just my thoughts. Diablo 3 is more of a traditional client/server model, though. Very similar to Guild Wars. Whereas, usually when people are talking about Cloud Gaming they are referring to a model where all of the game's simulation and rendering is handled by a server, which then pipes output to your "client", which operates more like a terminal in the old mainframe sense. The only things your machine does in a cloud gaming system are to gather and pass input to the server and receive and present output. This is why you can have Arkham Asylum running on tablets with OnLive, the tablet is basically streaming a movie (that is obviously an oversimplification, but the idea is the same).

This is why I thought cloud gaming had an upper hand. It doesn't require maintenance from the user side, who indeed, need to invest on their connections, though. The companies can collect user data more freely since it is the user who is allowed to use their servers. This solves most part of the "piracy" issues, too, - A better control on IP form the greedy IP holders. ...Well, at least, it seems the distribution, or more precisely, the service has a certain advantages for both publishers and the users. Then, again, this is just a view from a gamer, who doesn't have any inside-industry experience. Cloud gaming is technically tricky, has huge upfront costs (that cloud costs serious dough), is even trickier to work out licensing for, and has fundamental latency issues for many people (with much less ability to disguise latency using client side interpolation). It's definitely very promising but it's not really totally prime time ready for all types of games.

The PC gaming market is plenty healthy. The current console generation is probably reaching market saturation, especially at the current price levels, I'd guess. I don't know many folks (then again I mostly know gamers, so...) who would buy a 360 but haven't yet. From my knowledge: games can lose plenty of money on consoles and they can lose plenty of money on PC. They can also make money on both platforms. Cross-platform games tend to do better on consoles, however 1) PC development is substantially easier and thus generally cheaper and 2) there are some types of games that are not feasible on consoles for various reasons. I think there's an opportunity for both to be successful and it's absolutely possible for them to co-exist in the market. All of this has very little to do with relative power of the hardware, by the way, so I doubt that the next-gen consoles will do any worse if they are weaker relative to PCs when they come out when compared to the previous generation relative to PCs of that time. For many of the people who buy console games, PC gaming might as well not exist, and vice versa.

In regards to the hit/flop mentality, I'm curious why a publisher would even fund a project they forecast will "flop". Financially speaking, what's the point in even allocating funds for a project if they don't think it will sell well, or at all? Or is it a case of them sinking as little as possible in the off chance that it will actually make money? Sort of a low risk investment that could pay off? Note that flop doesn't mean financially unsuccessful, it just means non-huge sales. In practicality, it means they limit their risk by investing as little as possible, targeting a certain amount of sales, and very tightly controlling the budget so that it can be profitable at that amount of sales.

It's not that publishers don't care about quality, per se. It's more that, for AAA development, it's a hit/flop mentality. If a publisher thinks something will be a hit, they will sink a ton of money into it and try to make it as good as they can. If they don't, the assumption is it will be a "flop" (meaning not sell millions) and they'll try to get it out as cheaply as possible to recoup losses or make a modest profit. The biggest problems with this are that players pay the same price for both kinds of games, and feel cheated when they get a game that a publisher hasn't invested enough in, and that not everyone at a publisher is great a recognizing ahead of time what will be good and what will fail. So even if they do care about quality, they're not always in a position to recognize it (this can also be true of developers, not trying to single out anyone in that equation).

Cancelled games are always better than released ones You said that Obsidian was gonna knock it out the park or whatever the idiom was! And now you're retracting it! I feel betrayed! P.S. : To be less ironic, as much as Morgoth likes to troll, I think there's a point. Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park don't really seem to be the kind of projects Obsidian's audience expects. I guess that's just fair, since Obsidian's fans alone don't really make it financially viable for the company to survive, and I have high hopes for South Park (Dungeon Siege III has been treated fairly harshly, but besides some questionable design choices, its biggest fault was really just that it was merely decent in my opinion), but you can't blame people for being disappointed that projects that looked like they had the potential to be closer to what they wanted were canceled. There's nothing fundamental about any game's concept or design that will spell out whether you guys (or anyone else) like it. Game development is 20% good ideas, 80% execution, and execution is basically impossible to judge on an unreleased project. If it helps you feel better about a cancelled game, realize that as cool as it may sound in design docs, it could always have fallen apart in development! Not saying that Obsidian's cancelled games wouldn't have been awesome - but just, don't get overly bummed out about any particular cancelled project. If you give talented people resources, time and control they will make awesome stuff, regardless of IP or other constraints.

Cancelled games are always better than released ones

... How do you know that Vermont and Aliens weren't "utter nonsense"?

I appreciate the (mostly!) warm regards. And I know to ignore Morgoth as he's trollin' much of the time The reality is if working for Obsidian wasn't great I wouldn't have stayed for almost 7 years. That's quite a while in game industry dog years. And, since I personally know that OEI has kick-butt projects coming out and awesome people to make them, I'm not exactly worried about the future for them.