J.E. Sawyer

Our hosts don't exactly seem to be batting a thousand. The first time we set up the server there were issues too. They didn't fix our problems by 6:00 last night so we just raided a random pub server and wrecked fools. Upon more reflection, I've decided that the PKM isn't as horribly powerful in practice as some people say. Don't get me wrong -- it's a very good weapon, but there are limitations to it and firing it draws a lot of attention. The DAO-12, on the other hand, is pretty much the Hand of Death.

Players are no longer able to emulate the tried-and-true Daffy Duck military tactic of hopping around the map while shooting/throwing C4 twenty feet. I'm not sure why they don't just make jumping something that takes stamina. One jump = half your stamina. So if you jump twice in a row, you're done jumping for a while and you're not running either. Of course, they'd still need to fix the games of C4 frisbee that packed servers with giggling SpecFors. Dolphin diving was actually a pretty legit tactic and taking it out seems more artificial. I used the SAS support gun tonight and I was shredding people from rooftops forty yards away. Those machineguns are devastating from a prone position now. They almost feel like Wolfenstein MG-42s.

BREAKING NEWS With the arrival of the Obsidian Phat Pipe (OPP) and DICE's patch that makes the support class useful, BF2 play is resuming! Dark Timmy has arranged for a server and it should be up in the near future.

FYI, Dave Maldonado is working on Starcraft: Ghost and Leonard Boyarsky is now at Blizzard.

Dead hard drives are the quietest of all.

* Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow * Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones * Guild Wars * Battlefield 2 * Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

After a long time without any significant upgrades (just 512M to 1 gig of RAM for WoW), I'm finally replacing some important components in my home system. * ABIT KN8 SLI Socket 939 Motherboard * AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice Processor * eVGA 256-P2-N516 Geforce 7800GT * 2GB PC3200 Kingston ValueRAM * 74GB 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor HD * Antec TRUEPOWERII 550W Power Supply I guess all I'm really keeping are the ATX case, DVD-writer, 3.5" drive, and external firewire hard drive. Oh, and my two reliable (but dark) Hitachi SuperScan 21" CRT monitors. I considered running RAID 0 with two 36.5 gig Raptors, but it turns out it doesn't make any significant difference in desktop applications. Trying to stay up to date with consoles, handhelds, and my PC is expensive. By the way, the 74 gig Raptors are now ~$155 at newegg.com.

Okay, then go over to the BioWare board and ask them, point blank, if the total revenue from Jade Empire exceeded the total costs of developing the title, marketing it, and putting it on retail shelves, after returns. They don't even have to tell you how much it cost, how many units it sold, or anything of that nature. It seems pretty simple to me. They haven't said or written anything like that; you're making completely nonsensical assumptions based on critical acclaim from the devs/pubs, which has no necessary correlation to its financial success (or failure). If it were financially successful from half a million units sold, it would defy the economics of developing a game of that size and quality.

Actually, sometimes it does. Prince of Persia didn't sell very well, but Warrior Within sold much better. The original game had a small but enthusiastic following, with word of mouth allowing more copies to be sold at a reduced price later on. That collective awareness of the quality of the original title helped the sequel sell even more at full price (regardless of the sequel's quality). EDIT: Also, development costs are sometimes lower because a lot of technology from the first title provides a solid base for moving forward.

RalliSport Challenge 2. It strikes the right balance between simulation and arcade-y fun. The damage modeling is great, and there's nothing like finishing a race with smashed out windows, a missing hood, and an exposed rotor.

By the way, the game I mentioned that had a total production cost of $30M -- it didn't sell 2M units. It didn't even come close. But that didn't stop the publisher from kicking off a sequel. Company reps have spoken very highly of the first game's critical acclaim and how happy they are with the attention it received. So who cares what BioWare and MicroSoft say about Jade Empire as a franchise? It doesn't necessarily have any correlation to how well the game sold or if it made/lost money. But I'm extremely doubtful that it did make money unless BioWare has x-treeeme mastery of underbidding and/or development cost control.

To be realistic, you have to include the costs of marketing and distribution. Considering that Jade Empire had television advertising, I'd guess that the total was between $15M and $20M. Edmonton has a much lower cost of living compared to Southern California, which helps with the overall development price, but it's still probably pretty high. I'm basing these figures on what I've recently seen for other current-gen (now old gen, I guess) original IPs with 2+ year development cycles. Another single-platform game with about the same development time (slightly longer) and high profile ad campaign (slightly bigger) came in at $30M. That game needed to sell 2M units to start being profitable. Next gen games are going to make that look like chump change. But in any case, when you dump a hundred people on a project and run television commercials, the monthly burn rate is very high.

That's because you don't know anything about game development.

Yes, better on console. Part of that is doubtlessly because PC SKUs are almost always secondary or tertiary SKUs. It's rare for something to be developed for PC and ported to console. It's much easier to build to the specs of the console and port to PC. Morrowind was a game in a PC franchise taken to console. The Elder Scrolls had a good following on PC so it shouldn't be surprising that it sold better there. When did the Xbox version of Morrowind come out compared to the PC version? I honestly can't remember. It's possible. Then again, playing Jade Empire on PC without a controller would be infuriating. I think BioWare/MicroSoft made the right decision for Jade Empire considering the type of game it was. I don't think $14M would exceed JE's development, marketing, and distribution costs. Yes, it would generally be requested by the publisher. There are occasions where a developer really wants to do one and, if their contract allows, they can take it to another publisher. By the way, this has no reflection on the perceived quality of Jade Empire. It certainly received very high reviews across the board. I think JE's problem was that sadly, not enough people found the Chinese mythological concept interesting in an RPG.

Decemberish reports put Jade Empire at less than half a million units sold through. And certainly a good portion of that was at reduced cost. I can't even get creative enough with math to make that anything but a big loss. We're talking about something that sold Icewind Dale numbers and conservatively cost three times as much to make.

There's no financial information in that article at all. I'm very doubtful that JE was financially successful given the following factors: * The length of development and size of the development team. * The large advertising budget. * The quick fall-off in price at retail. Games generally don't fall off in price quickly if they are selling well. You can get Jade Empire for $20 new at Best Buy.

By the way, I suppose I should cover all of my statements in this thread with this general idea: I would like a fair amount of people to play the games I make. If I were only interested in pleasing my own sensibilities, I probably wouldn't try to make CRPGs. I'd write stories or make pen and paper games for myself and my three closest friends.

Oh, I've read them many times. But what's written in the books and what's used with actual characters and settings, especially today, is quite different. You're right, different writers do approach these definitions differently, but in the Forgotten Realms of 2006, it's pretty shallow. Sorry to reduce my reply to the foundation of what you wrote, but I think we both recognize that the reality of how alignment is used in D&D today is typically far from what was written in the 1st Ed. DMG. Similarly, the way White Wolf wrote up the tendencies of the clans in Vampire, you'd think that there's a lot of room for exploration in the characters across all different clans. But that's not the way most people play them. They get flattened to the most obnoxious absurdities of the archetypes. No, I'm also thinking of the D&D settings, especially the Forgotten Realms. This doesn't change the fact that the Master was going to wipe out the entire human race, which I think most people would consider worse than the Vault Dweller wiping out every citizen of the Den. I wasn't trying to say it was. Fallout is the example with the grand vision of destruction. You don't need much of a moral compass to understand the threat that the Master/the Enclave pose in Fallout and Fallout 2. Compared to what? The cost of individual games isn't rising much. The cost of development is what is rising. A lot of sports games get by with almost no innovation at all and each iteration is barely more interesting than the one before. Not on a publisher's dime. One of the reasons I'm not too keen to write stories for published games is because it's being done to someone else's standards. I'll be more than happy to write NWN2 modules once the game's released.

Maureen - Full Throttle Saduj - Ultima V Skullcrusher - Pool of Radiance Cassidy - Fallout 2 Doomsday - Wing Commander Herb - Bard's Tale 2 Lady - Devil May Cry 3 Tom Nook - Animal Crossing Revolver Ocelot - Metal Gear Solid The Fury - Metal Gear Solid 3 EDIT: The Hanged Man, Van Buren T__T

The victims of GTA protagonists are either huge scumbags or faceless citizens. Anyone named is usually a pretty sucky person. The victims of Agent 47 are also almost always huge scumbags. Is Max Payne really a morally ambiguous character, or is he just angsty?

If Sony wants to project an image of being more developer-friendly, it might help to actually support 1st party developers.

The key was "unrelenting", Volourn. In American History X, Derek Vinyard is a hardcore racist, but he changes over the course of the film. It's easy to accept Derek because the story is about him becoming not racist. If Wulfgar remained a racist, I don't think people would accept him as a hero.

I know he's a pretty bad guy at times in Pitch Black, but I wonder if he gets the Deadpool treatment in Chronicles. Deadpool was the first Weapon X project, before Wolverine. When Deadpool appeared prior to his two mini-series, he was an anti-hero. In his second mini-series and the subsequent series, he became a sassy jerk with a heart of gold. I think it made him a lot less interesting.

Not exactly a cash flow problem, but... http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/02/technology...onic_arts.reut/