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The Future of Gaming
nvembar writes: "The International Game Developers Association has the text of the lead designer at ION Storm, Harvey Smith's keynote address. In it he addresses "high fidelity similulations" entering games, making them more flexible and realistic. It's an interesting read on the future of gaming."
Penny Arcade had some interesting things to say about the 'future' of gaming as well. I have to agree with him.. where exactly did the whole VR concept go? I can relate to the specific VR game he's talking about, I stood in line for an hour to get up on a platform and be confused for about one minute.
Penny Arcade News (VR)
For those unaware, Spector is the genius behind the Ultima Underworld games as well as System Shock, Thief and Deus Ex. If anyone can bring true entertainment and flexibility into next generation computer games, Spector is the man.
This is also ironic because Spector's previous development house, Looking Glass Entertainment, had to fold because Eidos couldn't prop them up with necessary short term cash ... probably because they gave all their money to ION Storm for Daikatana development. And now Spector is a leading figure there. This is an interesting turn of events indeed.
Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
No. Dominion3 failed utterly and completely, but then again it was just a failed game which ION bought the rights to when the previous developers went bankrupt. Diakatana failed miserably despite all the hype, time, and expense. Deux Ex did quite well and was critically hailed, earning many many "game of the year" honors, despite being not-so-hyped. Anachronox was apparently pretty run-of-the-mill, but it barely got any hype at all.
You, like many people, are unfairly painting all of ION Storm with the brush of Diakatana. Of course, John Romero--project leader for Diakatana (which was actually really called John Romero's Diakatana)--was the founder of ION Storm, and the reason ION got so much hype and publicity and money in the first place. And Diakatana was not just a flop but an apocalyptic fiasco: they plowed something like $50 million and 4 years (after promising it would only take 8 months) into a shockingly mediocre game, all whilst buying the top floors of a lavish skyscraper to serve as their development house, and even once causing their entire programming teams to resign en masse.
But Deus Ex was probably the best game of 2000. One reason for the diparity is that ION Storm actually had three completely seperate teams in seperate cities, so Deux Ex and Diakatana were really developed by the same company in name only.
I wanted to relay a post that came up during a Slashdot discussion about the Anarchy Online release a few months ago, and share some of my comments regarding the gaming industry.
I left my job at an ISP as an engineer and systems administrator last year and started seeking a new job. I found myself working for a gaming company that was to release a new persistent online environment role playing game (I hate calling them MMORPGs or whatever). They brought me on board because they had needs in regards to technical infrastructure, like server hardware, server software, networking equipment configurations, collocation staging needs, etc. Basically, they had nobody there who knew how to open up a computer, nobody that knew a thing about networking outside of the TCP/IP stack for Windows, nobody who knew a thing about collocation, telecommunications technologies, security of any kind, and they were to release their first public beta in three days.
Least to say, they were five days late launching that first beta.
Now, you think that they would have learned their lesson -- that their schedule was over accelerated and that they had severely neglected a critical part of the product. They had neglected to consider back end technical infrastructure completely and totally, and yet they seemed to not even care. Time after time I pressured about how they were heading for serious problems, and it came down to my job being threatened because they thought I was being a negative influence upon the company, "bringing down their vibes," "being a nay-sayer."
This gaming company just does not get it. They are going to have a miserable launch, like Anarchy Online, like Ultima Online, like all other online gaming companies that have totally failed to consider the "online" part of their game. Their online game is going to turn very offline when they realize that their server side application efficiency is so bad that it brings down the whole server with as little as 200 people on it. I know this -- I have seen these modern dual processor systems at 40% utilization with no clients, and with an additional +5% linear increase in load per additional client.
Why don't they get it? What is keeping these people from paying attention to this very serious oversight? Why is this epidemic?
As best as I can tell, management is more concerned with meeting their media provided launch date than providing the customers with a good ready product launch. They want to meet this holiday season selling time frame, and they do not want to delay the game a single day due to any problem. The quote, "we can release it now and patch it later" has been used multiple times by individuals in management and some of the developers. Some of these patches were the ENTIRE CD! 400+ MB, no kidding. They got upset when their whole 20+ beta players stopped playing, they just could not understand why.
Lack of qualified personnel is a problem. They are more concerned with hiring their friends than hiring qualified people to do work. Former bus boys, DJs, fast food and gas station attendants (NOT kidding!) all make up graphical artists, testing, customer service, and other departments. Most of the staff are younger people, like myself, but many of them had not previously held jobs, coming straight out of college or high school. Management is not much better off, just older and lamer. Only one has any real previous managerial experience, and none of them have any technical qualifications in coding, design, multimedia, sysadmin, netadmin, or anything technical -- they are all sales, paper pushers, HR managers, etc.
Drug usage is rather high. Pot and alcohol are the drugs of choice here, and they have no problem getting out the bottle or the smokes in the office. Think that is a problem with management? The CEO is a pot head himself! Think about this the next time you pick up a title.
Finally, after over two years of development, this company is running out of cash I suspect, and will be releasing their product to the public, ready or not.
You may wish to check out reviews before you buy any games this holiday season. I know at least one that is going to make a lot of people very upset.
Below is a post made some time back. I highly recommend it for reading. Cinnamon has it right on.
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My experience in working for a game company... (Score:5, Informative)
by Cinnamon on Thursday July 12, @06:02PM EST (#274)
(User #15309 Info) http://www.pft.com/~cinnamon
I speak with some authority here, having worked for a multiplayer game company (Who shall remain nameless) for four years. We didn't write games ourselves, but ran a service that multiplayer games could run their matchmaking on, as well as wrote network code for some major developers and did full-blown hosting for some games.
One of the things that always amazed those of us who worked there (Both sysadmins and engineers) was that game companies *do not get it*. For whatever reason, the whole concept of online gaming is completely foreign to the developers, producers, directors, and distributors. It entails engineers having knowledge in areas that most game companies do not hire for, and require a dedication to quality assurance that most software companies in general eschew in favor of 'getting it out the door, we'll patch it later.'
As far as we could tell, these companies thought online gaming consisted of:
Write game
Tack on network code
Write sloppy matchmaking interface
Set up in a WinNT server at corporate HQ
Release game
We'd sit down with these people and try to make them understand the requirements that online gaming have, the almost-unsolvable problems of cheating, the necessity that if you want people to stay you need as close to 24x7 uptime as you can, but it fell on deaf ears. Why? Because most often, *even for the online games*, the network/server requirements portion were an afterthought. Despite writing these games with the full expectation that they would be played exclusively online, they worried for weeks about game play, and usually didn't even bother to hire a network programmer, just usually got some dude who did the sound or something to whip up a quick interface.
I have game developer friends who work for Blizzard who worked on Diablo II, who complained constantly about the stupidity of the battle.net people. Anytime they wanted to do anything the so-called engineers there said their code couldn't handle it. Wonder why until this expansion pack the stash was so small? Sorry, their stuff can't handle more than that. Major code rewrites were necessary to handle it in the expansion. They wrote poor, non-reusable code that crippled the game's online experience, a common problem.
This sort of thing is endemic in the game developer community. We were approached by the Ultima Online people before UO was released, asking us what it would cost for us to host UO for them. We came up with a price, gave it to them, and they ran screaming. "No no, we'll do it ourselves!" they yelled, resulting in months of instability, server overloading, user complaints, and their being outshined by EverQuest (Which has it's own problems.)
Why? Because the price we quoted them was for 24x7 uptime on enough servers to handle their expected load 3x, knowing full well they'd fill that capacity and explaining this to them. Even if they didn't get that many users, network code is often buggy in ways that swallows system resources on servers at an insane rate (Memory leaks being the number one culprit), requiring a factor of at least 2x more resources than was anticipated during testing. Don't try to tell that to the beancounters, though. Or even the developers! They seem to think their code would NEVER EVER break, and would NEVER take more memory/cpu/disk than they expect.
What really shocks me is that this problem is still around! When Quake came out and we saw the network code problems we thought that would have made companies realize how critical the network/server portions of their online game was. Year after year we'd have these meetings, talking in dumbfounded tones that they *still didn't get it*. Suckass game after suckass game was released and CONTINUES to be released, with massive strides being made in better realism, graphics, speed and gameplay -- And they can't get the frickin' network code right. It's not that it's impossibly difficult, talks with developers at these companies proved that time after time the managers never saw fit to hire anyone with server or network coding experience, instead relying on programmers with no knowledge in that area to write probably the second most critical portion of the game. (Gameplay being first.)
When is it going to get better? I don't know. Perhaps experience will amass, despite evidence to the contrary, and companies will be able to/willing to hire experienced programmers who've done online games before and can benefit from their mistakes. I'm just floored that it's still not happened.
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
There were several branches to Ion Storm. The Dallas office was home to Romero, Todd Porter, Jerry Flaherty, and was responsible for the execrable Daikatana.
The Austin office of Ion Storm, however, was where Deus Ex was made, headed up by Warren Spector who has made some of the best games ever produced. Harvey Smith, the author in question, came from the Austin office.
It may have taken them several years and tens of millions of dollars, but Ion's publisher Eidos finally showed some sense when they closed down Ion Dallas, but kept Ion Austin running. They're making Thief 3 and the sequel to Deus Ex. For the most part, they know what they're talking about
Waren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm not sure I'd go so far as "genius", but I'll grant that he has a good eye for successful games. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. To call Warren "THE genius behind" [emphasis mine] the games he worked on is both inaccurate, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
Yeah, but Romero isn't even a part of it anymore. If I recall correctly, he left it to create a company that develops games for PocketPCs. So now you can think of it as the company that gave you Deus Ex, one of the best PC games in recent history. Or as the company that Warren Spector, inarguably one of the best game designers out there today, is a part of.
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Sometimes there's no other way to win, except by falling.
http://www.sflit.com/novaexpress/13/embraceyourwei rd.html
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
At this moment, GameSpy is showing about 50,000 CounterStrikers, while there are about 194,000 using Battle.net right now...most of those in Diablo2 and StarCraft.
CounterStrike is undoubtedly the 600-pound gorilla of online shooters, but it is not the single most popular online game. If you also count parlor games like cards and chess, CounterStrike isn't even close.
When Sims Online comes out, I think it will dwarf CounterStrike. It will be a slow-paced, social, online game that will have low system requirements, and low bandwidth requirements. It's why designers and publishers are already gunshy about the hardcore gaming market - while there always will be money to be made by offering the best graphics, the most content, and the most features, in doing so you also shut out all the PC owners who don't know a GeForce from a ham sandwich, and have no interest in learning what it takes to get a 'net game of Unreal Tournament running. Why bother, when Rollercoaster Tycoon works right out of the box and is fun to boot?
There will be a demand for Deus Ex and Doom III, and so there will be a supply. But there will be a much bigger demand for Sims Online, and clones. Accordingly, there will be a much bigger supply of those.