What they have put out in the last 2 decades doesn't come close to aligning with that amount of work.
Everwild by Rare [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XPA]
- Thread starter AzBat
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That feels fairly unfair. SOT is effectively nearly an MMO at its core operation and that is significantly harder than any traditional game. The whole world is synced, waves included to ensure all players are on equal ground.
the type of success that SoT enjoys is entirely niche, there is no game like it, they don’t have a formula to follow here.
Everything they roll out they can’t roll out too quickly because a mistake could destroy their population. They only have themselves to ruin the game and the player base wants to be fed content all the time.
this alone makes SoT behave very similar to an MMO without having to rely on FOMO hooks or progression loops. Every pirate starts the same on equal ground every time they enter the game regardless of experience and tenure of hours played. The only differentiator is of course actual player experience.
It’s not easy to make a content style based game like that fun for all players while keeping it fresh. Most MMOs will use class/skill progression and loot drop mechanics to keep their players hooked. Neither which exist in SoT.
So I would say pretty unfair comparison. The experience that Rare has and the formula they’ve created is indeed Rare. Having learned how to make SoT and being able to apply that education to Everwild is exactly what you want if you again want to build an MMOlite without class/loot progression. These are complex sandbox games that are designed in a way to remove as many player restrictions as possible and let them play the games the way they want to play.
If they scratched it to restart I think they understand more behind that reason than just bad leadership. If they don't want to release a bad product, that's probably a sure fire reason that MS is backing them in this. I would much prefer this over shipping a bad product that cannot recover, and to be honest, there are very few games in this niche category of games to really compare to. So big risks are being taken here whether they scratch or shipped.
blizzard hasn’t done much since WOW. But I don’t know an company that wouldn’t want to be the owner of the most successful paid MMO ever made. The tuition value and experience that team can bring to any game is monumental. They are literally recognized as being a pivotal consultation group to saving Destiny.
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SoT doesn't really have the level of networking complications that a "normal" MMO does. There's not a lot of players per instance and the ocean system is basically a pre-generated animation from existing sets so you just need to tell each client what the current weather and ocean is for that and surrounding cells. There isn't any kind of interaction with the water that has to be synchronized between clients. The ships are likely more complex for ensuring consistency between clients.
True, but they have more network complications than most multiplayer titles however. There's a lot of stuff going on in that game, and it's fairly deep.
Perhaps. As an outsider looking in it can be hard to grasp workflows. I haven't played SoT but from what I've seen and read its very content light and not at all comparable to typical MMOs which have deluges of content. Also seems very art asset light and what is there seems like it would require much less time to author.
Yea and that makes sense to hold that opinion or perspective of things. But I would say it's not necessarily true, a lot of games focus around building new loot drops, new class skills and talent trees, and new quests and encounters, and world building, and every once in a while they introduce new gameplay mechanics. Which is a change to the client and server.
SoT has skips out the stuff on loot drops and skill trees, but they do have new environment building, new quests and encounters/monster types, but more importantly they are often iterating on the gameplay mechanics. And that part I think is tricky which may take more time to figure out and test. But they've had a lot of changes to the client and server over what players can do in the game, and it's quite analog about how they do things compared to how these things are typically handled in other games.
But yes, I understand how someone would think SoT is a fairly low effort job compared to others, but in my experience this isn't the case. Sometimes it can be incredibly easier to make a lot of straight forward quest content (repetitive kill and pick up/find quests) than it is to constantly add new gameplay mechanics, in which you have to figure out all the things that can go wrong, and how to support all the graphics, animations and effects, and gameplay code that are needed for those new mechanics to work and feel good!
Just want to clarify, low effort is not what I was getting at. I don't think they are just sitting in their offices slacking. I just wondered how much work ends up thrown away/wasted due to a lack of focused leadership.
yea, I imagine a lot considering their rate of progress.
SoT seems to be on a stride now, I think they know what they are doing with that title.
but Everwild, yea. Pretty curious to see what will happen.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Rare gets dogged on a lot, but I liked most of the stuff they've done since being acquired by MS. They were in charge of Kinect titles for quite awhile and they did a good job with the hardware they had.