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."

Comments

A friend was talking about

[trilucid]

this sort of thing with me the other day... he just quit his job as a programmer with a large accounting software maker to go to work for a gaming company. They're working on new tech for MMRPGs these days.

We had a rather *long* conversation about new stuff coming down the pipe, wherein we discussed different models for the I.T. infrastructure to support this sort of thing. Basically, we ended up going back and forth on the merits of p2p tech when it comes to reducing primary server loads and increasing playability.

The biggest obstacle we could see at the moment is (of course) still the latency on a p2p network. While users with high-bandwidth connections would whiz along fine, those on modems would have a tough go of things. Another point we covered was the continuing advances in PC power we're seeing (Moore is still right ;-] ), and how this relates to the ability to offload a bunch of the world computation to discrete units (each gamer's PC). In this model you'd use spare cycles on your own box to perform calcs for other portions of the environment.

The problem with that, of course, is that gamers will always want to play with the highest detail, color depth, etc setting as possible. This would tend to "max out" most gamers' boxes, reducing that particular advantage of the p2p structure.

What sort of thoughts do others around here have about this stuff? C'mon, I need some ammo to go back to my friend with ;-]. I just *can't* let him keep winning every argument we have about this stuff...

Re:A friend was talking about

[elfkicker]

P2P will always have latency issues. Depending on how you do it, you either going to hit a bandwidth obsticle or high hop counts. And with games, you're going to run into cheating issues because the data is coming from untrusted clients. I'd suspect a central server would be more equipped to deal with this.

Perhaps it could work well in a setup like IRC where you have many central servers all interconnected. That way you'll save on bandwidth and hops. There will still be trust issues, but it's better than pure p2p. Just watch out for server splits.

Re:A friend was talking about

[trilucid]

Good points there :). With regard to bandwidth, I suppose time should improve that aspect of the problem (although maybe not so quickly if major providers keep going el Chapter 11). I like the concept of having several servers interconnected though; it seems to merge the benefits of "client server" with "peer to peer".

With regard to cheating issues, what about incorporating some sort of encryption scheme, wherein each machine exchanges keys with the others when a game starts? Maybe the "master box" (the one starting the game off) could serve as a keymaster of sorts in this case. I know Q3 Arena has a pure server option to help alleviate cheating, maybe adding ecryption on to that sort of thing would be beneficial.

Just one more note: what do you mean by "server splits"? I apologize if it's something horrendously obvious; I'm a little frazzled from coding atm. :).

Re:A friend was talking about

[The Cat]

Before approaching publishers, be fully prepared.

..to be turned down. Don't waste your time.

If you want them to hire you to develop games for them, bring several demos of different kind of games your team created. Do not just do PC games - the PC is a minor segment of the overall game business today.

..and the only segment that doesn't require an upfront five-figure investment, in addition to the thousands of man-hours you'll need to invest in order to produce "several" game demos.

You need to make demos for Game Boy and PlayStation as well (NOT Xbox!). It's kind of a chicken-and-egg Catch-22 dilemma - you can't develop games for consoles until you have a contract, and you can't get a contract unless you develop games for consoles - it's not easy but you can find a way.

Don't waste your time. Make a really good PC game and publish it yourself. Forget the Byzantine publisher agreement submission routine. Even if you somehow luck out and manage to get an agreement, you've just signed away all of your value in the product and 85% of the gross.

If you want them to publish your game, you need to finish the game first.

I have a better idea. Walk in with 50,000 unit sales and a pre-written agreement signed off by *your* attorney. If nobody signs it, sell another 50,000 units and retire.

If you're going to invest 30,000 man-hours to develop a game, why would you go sign it over to some other company?

I recommend you bring them several finished games, in different genres and for different hardware formats.

Oh, come on. Do you hear yourself? You're talking about hundreds of thousands of man-hours here. Don't bring them anything. Build the game. Sell it. Use the proceeds to build another. Sell that. Repeat.

The economics of brick and mortar computer game publishing are broken. It isn't possible to make money, because the shelf space is too expensive, the development costs are too high and the market is too small (right now). The publishers will make it your responsibility to solve this problem before they publish your game, and the only way you can solve the problem is to give them a gargantuan percentage of the sales. It is a waste of time.

Do not just bring PC games - the PC is not the #1 gaming platform. And the Xbox is not the #1 console. And also bring several demos of other games you're working on. Maybe nobody will publish your game, but they might hire you to develop a game for them, if they like your work.

Sure. Bring an arcade game while you're at it. Cabinets aren't that expensive. Let's see. $20K for each of three console licenses, 400,000 man-hours to build several completed games, and $10,000 per pitch to each publisher in materials, travel and time. For this investment (several million dollars, in all likelihood), the publisher will *think about* giving you 15%, but you'll probably get turned down.

When you have prepared your finished games and demos, and you have the contact information at the game companies, call and find out who is in charge of receiving submissions (if you are looking for publishing) or who is in charge of hiring developers.

Also known as the "Search for the Appropriate Wastebasket"

At my last job, there was no one person in charge of hiring developers. Each producer was in charge of hiring developers - which means you might need to pitch your services to 10-20 guys at a large publishing company. It might be best to do a mass mailing, followed up by selective visits.

After an unbelievable amount of effort and time invested (while your demo gets more and more dated and no money is coming in), you might have a game that makes back the royalty advance on bargain-bin sales or a $40K/year job testing setup programs.

If you want to make games, just make games. If you want to negotiate publishing deals, get a law degree and a phone headset. Before submitting to a publisher, have a nice large number of unit sales. At the end of the day, there are few cynical publisher responses to solid unit sales. The statement "50,000 units sold in six months" tends to shut the "yeah but" crowd up.

As always, YMMV.

Re:A friend was talking about

[TotallyUseless]

I imagine there is no technical reason why there couldnt be a redundancy scheme, but when talking about irc, it is probably more the cost of adding on servers... just to run irc. This would be a great idea for a game that shares servers, but I think most people dont want to invest this heavily in irc servers... it is just irc after all. Im sure I will now be flamed by all the irc lubbers out there, lemmie get the flame suit real quick

Re:A friend was talking about

[TotallyUseless]

"If you want to make games, just make games"
This is the best advice anyone interested in making games can receive. You want to make games? Make games. Make mods. Make models. Make maps. If you are very lucky, you might get hired by a game developer... if not, at least your still making games!

Re:A friend was talking about

[WNight]

Well, mostly...

You can hand the client a copy of all the information you're making public...

For instance, clients can be hacked to display health numbers of monsters, but if you display it as a health bar anyways, it's not an issue.

Using this information the client can run the simulation while lagged, so the client doesn't notice it as much.

What you can't do is TRUST the client. When you un-lag, take the input from the user and process it on the server. If it's different, update the client. If it's an acceptable error (like the client over-extrapolating) then simply correct the client, if the client did something that it couldn't have (ie, dealt more damage than possible) then you can flag them as cheating...

This is done in Quake for instance, because if you had to talk to the server every time you pressed jump, you'd never go anywhere because it'd be too lagged. Instead the client is allowed to move you, but the server maintains the right to put you back where you belong in case of an error or hacked client.

Re:A friend was talking about

[Jace of Fuse!]

This is the best advice anyone interested in making games can receive. You want to make games? Make games. Make mods. Make models. Make maps. If you are very lucky, you might get hired by a game developer... if not, at least your still making games!

One major wall some people have is doing ALL of the work. Not everybody can write music. Not everybody can do graphic work. Not everybody can code. Some people can do ALL of those things at least to some level, but don't have TIME to do ALL of them.

It's hard to get together a team of people who all want to "Make a game" just to "Make a game". Most people don't want to contribute their time without getting something out of it.

So while I agree with the statement "If you want to make games, just make games" entirely, I think it should be kept in mind that most people do not have the resources (time, money, etc) to just up and make a game no matter what kind of talent they may have.

Penny Arcade's Views

[deth_007]

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)

Re:Penny Arcade's Views

[Kris_J]

I can tell you where that VR game is, at least here in Perth. I took a picture through the window of a closed shop back in April. I sent it to Tycho, but I don't know if he'll do anything about it...

I wonder how much of the much hyped stuff of today will end up as a junk pile in an abandoned store.

Crap

[Red Moose]

No, the future of gaming is when people like Romero, Carmack and the rest of the talentless (regarding GAMEPLAY) cesspool-of-patch-release inhabitants quit the crap and stop making games like Quake 3, etc., . It's a real cop-out to say "it's multiplayer only" and therefore they don't need to bother making a half-decent game but just make a fancy 3D engine to sell.

Deus Ex was a GREAT game, and has a lot of factors that you won't find in big name releases; how about the incessant crap from Romero and Daikatana? and it turned out the less hyped game whupped it and most other games of 2000 collective asses.

End the tyranny of arcade shoot-em-ups! Death to the FPS and bring back a decent PLOT structured game to the PC!

How about C&C Renegade or whatever it is. It's another FPS, just like ANY other standard fare shootemup, but woohoo you can blow up a stealth tank or an obelisk of Nod because it's in C&C land so that obviously makes it the "biggest" game of the year.............fucking cretins. And Peter Molyneux and that 15 year old bloke from Theme Park have gone nuts. Black & White was a big tamagotchi, and this Republic just stinks of utter un-gameness.

Fuck this, I'm off to play Speedball 2. Wake me when Speedball Arena comes out - now THAT will be the way future games will go.

Re:Crap

[Junks Jerzey]

Death to the FPS and bring back a decent PLOT structured game to the PC!

I think the call for better plots and storylines is becoming rather trite and empty. The more plot and storyline a game has, the more linear it becomes. Final Fantasy X is a great example. Great graphics, brilliant cutscenes, zero game. When people say they want "plot" added to a genre, I'm starting to think that it really means a genre is creatively dead. It's like saying "What this unrealistic action movie starting Jackie Jan needs is more of a literary quality." Or "this porn has terrible acting." The complaint is about a trifle; there's something more fundamental at stake. Namely that no one watches Jackie Chan movies for their literacy and no one watches porn for the acting ability of the stars. These complaints are like a ten year old putting down Teletubbies as being dumb and beneath him, when he's really just outside of the target audience.

Re:Crap

[Xibby]

From Quake onward id hasn't been playing in the fields of game design, they've been playing in the fields of engine design. Quake, Quake2, and Quake 3 were good games and good successes for id. Let me think a moment, what was made with the Quake engine? Hexen, Heritec II? I dunno...something like that. The Half-Life engine is based on the Quake2 engine. Quake3 powers Alice, the Star-Trek Voyager game, Jedi Outcast, and a bunch of others.

id knows what they're doing, and it isn't making deep storylines. It's making the technology so others can focus on the story.

This is believable

[Jucius Maximus]

This is a report that I am willing to believe. The idea of "entering games, making them more flexible and realistic" seems plausable because WARREN SPECTOR is working at ION Storm.

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.

Freedom in Games

[Alien54]

For instance, some clever players figured out that they could attach a proximity mine to the wall and hop up onto it (because it was physically solid and therefore became a small ledge, essentially). So then these players would attach a second mine a bit higher, hop up onto the prox mine, reach back and remove the first proximity mine, replace it higher on the wall, hop up one step higher, and then repeat, thus climbing any wall in the game, escaping our carefully predefined boundaries.

This is a continued problem in some forms of game design, an alternate version of the one million monkeys typing. Any huge number of gamers will find holes in the system.

I think that eventually you'll have to have some system that can be used to implement an indefinitely large world.

My own idea / fantasy project is to have an earth type planet that would have the suerface area of Jupiter. Then you could effectively block off areas, at least for lower levels by having vast areas of ocean or desert or whatever.

The point being is that you would have to have a completely different system to manage something that is that large scale

ION Storm rule.

[OdinHuntr]

Yeah, Daikatana sucked. (I hear that it rocked in multiplayer, though...) ION Storm also released two of the best PC games i've ever played, Deus Ex and Anachronox.

And if you want to stick to monopoly, check my sig. :p

Simulationism vs. Gameplay

[Bud Dwyer]

The bottom line: Is a better world model and more detailed graphics going to make the game better to play? I know plenty of people who still play the original Doom, despite the fact that it's graphics are blown away by its antecedents, such as Quake III. Why? Gameplay. Quake III is an awful game, despite the graphics. Quake III could be photorealistic and get 600 fps on my P3, but that wouldn't make it a good game. If you want a photorealistic, simulationist game, take a step outside. You could probably use some sun, anyway.

Ion Storm.

[mindstrm]

Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
This is a serious question, btw...

Re:Ion Storm.

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

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.

When do we get past the mouse?

[PopeAlien]

no matter how 'realistic' graphics and AI get, if you're dealing with a flat screen and a mouse/keyboard it's not much of a 'simulation'.. Even pedal/wheel controllers are better, but whatever happened to the headset/glove controller idea? Surely we can approach something 'affordable' soon on this front..

Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[mindstrm]

Is a proximity mine with a strong magnet not cabable of such a feat in real life? is it not at least somewhat realistic.

I witness Urban Terror - Rommel.. this map has a number of interesting locations that possibly the designer did not intend for people to reach.. but through, say, standing on another player's shoulders, you can reach them. This is not unrealistic.. it simply requires teamwork.
Now.. using the shotgun to 'launch' someone really high... that's not realistic.. but still.

It's exactly this mix of things that can make a good game GREAT. Witness Streetfighter 2... yes, it was well designed... but was everything in it intended? Some of the combinations? The timing that made certain combinations of movements unbeatable? I know in later games they were intentional.... There were also a few 'elite' tricks with a few characters.. essentially bugs in the game, but they simply made it that much more interesting.

I think a realistic game engine MUST allow for things the game designer didn't intend.

Re:Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[Alien54]

I think a realistic game engine MUST allow for things the game designer didn't intend.

Precisely the point. In that case, I would have made the mines sufficiently small or narrow or rounded that they would have been a precarious ledge at best.

but a very large world with lot of possibilities would allow the flexibility that you had with the old paper and pencil games, where you at least had a referee to judge to the long term consequences. Or to take advantadge of the possibilities that were opened up.

To some extent, some of the problems you have with games like everquest comes when you have people running around looting stuff from other people, without an easy place of safety at hand.

I wonder what would happen if social stations were handed out more at random instead of having to come up just through the levels. The equivalent of "You are 13 years old, and have reached Manhood. You are a member of the Royal House of Saud, one of 5,000 plus people running the Kingdom." In this case, you are rich, but you have political responsibilities as well. Don't mess up!

The advantadge of a world of truly huge size, as mentioned above, is that you could have a thousand such kingdoms to be affiliated with, and yet you could travel elsewhere if someone really messed up the kingdom or the war went badly.

but now we are getting into the specifics of a game design

Re:Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[Elwood P Dowd]

No, a proximity mine with a strong magnet would not be capable of attaching to many of the surfaces that you can use this technique with. How many metal walls do you see in an average day?

Re:Is that a problem, or a benefit though?

[sheetsda]

Not originally, it was changed to that after the effect was discovered and came into wide spread use. As odd as it seems today, rocket-jumping in multiplayer was for a time, considered cheating.

Re:"Future of Gaming"

[nomadic]

Deus Ex is by no means mediocre; it's one of the best computer games that I've ever played. And I'm one of those people who hates most new games and drones on and on about how great wasteland and bard's tale and zork were...

Mix the Generas!

[anzha]

Here is something that I have been saying to friends for some time but haven't seen come about.

Mix the generas!

Think about it. You could have Joe RTS playing his game, making marines, orcs, cataphracts, krogoths, whatever, and commanding his armies like he likes best. Then also you have Jane FPS running along as a sniper or commando in the same game just that everything appears 3d first person. Then Bob flightsim could even join in. Or Nicole Harpoon. or...

Different clients, different engines all interpretting the same data.

Potentially P2P could be used to eleviate problems with needing a massive pipe and uberservers.

Make it a massively online game with a persistant world.

Mix well and you get an awesome game!

Just imaao, of course.

Re:The future of gaming...

[Jubedgy]

Well, not the corner of game developers I watch...Bliizard Entertainment certainly seems to be doing well...every single title since warcraft 2 (maybe even warcraft) has been a wild success, and sold an amazing amount for its time period...Diablo2, for instance, had something like 2 million units pretty close to the release date (it had some huge number of pre orders). What's 2*10^6 * 50? one hundred MILLION dollars...and a significant number of people also bought the $35 expansion...

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:gPH2eeM6r70:w ww.diabloii.net/+diablo+2+sales+figures&hl=en

"Guinness, Anyone? - Gaile [20:38:PST]

The 2002 Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records includes two pretty remarkable entries:

Battle.net is listed as the World's Largest Free On-Line Gaming Service. The entry features a lovely image of the Sorceress, and states that since opening in 1997, more than 8.2 million active accounts log more than six million games daily. Peak concurrent usage tops more than 210,000 players per day.

Diablo II is listed as the Fastest Selling Computer Game, having sold more than one million copies within the first two weeks of being released in June 2000, and with 2.75 million sold worldwide. (Yes, both figures are lower then the true sales figures, but hey, even then it made the book!) Additionally, they cite Diablo as having sold in excess of 2.3 million copies since its release in 1997.
Thanks to Prysym for the note."

That's just diablo 2! Then you can factor in starcraft, the starcraft expansion, diablo 1, even the warcraft series. Warcraft 3 is going to sell extremely well too it looks like, and the new game, World of Warcraft, will probably provide an assured source of monthly income for the company (assuming these sales figures continue).

"Your game is going to be late, overbudget, buggy and outdated, or really, really short." Late, sure, but that's np...later and better is better than never. Overbudget? Maybe, depends how realistic you planned it. Buggy? there may be a few bugs...Starcraft was extremely late but also 1. hardly buggy at all and 2. very VERY well balanced. Was it outdated? sure a few RTS's used 3d engines (Total Annihilation for ex.), but it's still wildly popular even today, years after its release. It may even out do quake 1 for longevity (depends when starcraft 2 is released, hehe). As for shortness, well...depends on the game type...Quake 3 single player is extremely short...but it's not supposed to be played for that. Max Payne is also short (it took me ~15 hours to beat the first difficulty level...didn't bother doing New York Minute or the other ones after I finished) but it's single player only so that's less acceptable (but it was so fun to play I didn't really care).

So...what? imho the future of gaming is rosy for the companies that 'get it'...electronic darwinism or something...As for consoles well, I don't follow consoles at all so I don't really care what happens to 'em...

--Jubedgy

Make 16-Bit games again!?

[Maul]

Seriously, all these 3D games are great and all, but nothing beats pulling out the Super Nintendo and playing the 16-Bit Final Fantasy games, or pulling out the Genesis and playing some Sonic.

People forget what made these games great when they start focusing on making the next 3D Engine.
It ultimately wasn't the graphics.

Re:Make 16-Bit games again!?

[WNight]

Ok, you, out of the pool.

Final Fantasy fans are *not* allowed on a thread about Deus Ex. Final Fantasy is the perfect example of static, non-interactive gameplay that PC games are striving to distance themselves from.

FF and Zelda are held up as the pinacle to which games should aspire to, but PC gamers tired of that when Ultima 4 brought out a free-form world for the exploring. Games like Deus Ex strive to include a very NPC-interactive plot, but also to let the gamer influence it.

It's not really the fault of console designers, you can't make anything very interactive in a system with very little RAM and only the ability to save between 16B and 1K per game. But it sure is a piss-off when you go back to a level and find it exactly as it was the first time, unchanged by everything you did there before.

I hope Deus Ex include something like Red Faction's "Geo Mod", where you can blow holes in walls. It'd be cool to come back to a level hours later, step over the bodies of the dead, and use your new-found explosives to blow through a wall and get to a previously inaccesible area.

Re:Make 16-Bit games again!?

[Kris_J]

I don't think the same as the people that write these "open-ended" immersive games, thus I quickly end up bored and/or trapped. However, when the game is simplified down to the odd bit of lateral thinking and some half-decent reflexes I really enjoy it.

I also really enjoy the technology that used to be thought up for console games. I've just bought myself a Sega 32X, which was an amazing peice of hardware totally crippled by petty in-fighting. I've just found out about the "Lock-on" feature of one Sega game that lets you replay older games with new characters. Now that's innovative and interesting.

These strategy/RPG/FPS/3D games are all too complicated. I'd rather whack a cart into an old console and screw around for 15 minutes, than have to spend hours trying to second-guess some programmer who thinks his game is "open-ended" even though the dozen or so perfectly legitmate solutions I come up with don't work.

To sum up; I bought an Atari 2600 today and I'm probably going to play "indy 500" with the padles longer this weekend than I've spent total time on all 3D PC games released after Quake 2. Computer games should be abstracted, not more complicated than life itself.

Re:Make 16-Bit games again!?

[majcher]

I think that you may enjoy reading the scratchware manifesto, which urges a return to the gameplay we loved in the older games...

technical infrastructure pains

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

________________________________________

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.

Re:future is free gaming

[Spankophile]

Yeah right - and in a similar light, the low cost and high quality of digital video cameras everywhere will have people producing free movies that rival Hollywood quality.

Gets me to thinking though. Is it a parallel scenario that game-designers seem to just wanna push the eye-candy envelope ignoring aspects of gameplay, as Hollywoord has abandoned thoughtful movies to cranking out dick-flicks, chic-flicks and teen/highschool/first-lay movies?

If so - god help us.

Re:Oh lord....

[Nematode]

Ion Storm [daikatana.com]? Aren't those the guys who released that pile of executable diarrhea, "Daikatana"? This whole article reads like, "And now, from the people who brought you Daikatana... WE PRESENT TO YOU, THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!!" ..Sounds to me like one last gasp of a company on the brink of failure trying desparately to associate its name to The Next Big Thing (tm)..

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 :)

Due Credit

[AlexxKay]

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.

He has some good points...but

[Anonymous Coward]

This article sounds like it was written 5 years ago. The reason I say that, is that the auther doesn't seem to understand why multi-player games are so succesful. The most popular PC game in the world is not Black and White, it's not The Sims, it's not Baldur's Gate, it's not even Diablo II. The most widely played game (for some time now) is Half-life Counter-Strike. A team based FPS, with no character AI elements, and extremely simple physical simulation(friction, gravity, collision detection, and...that's about it). So how can a game that de-emphasizes the authors points(no AI, not much simulation) be so successful? (successful == people love playing it).

Remember other people?

In the article, the author doesn't mention Counter-strike, Everquest, or any other MPG. In the entire 7 page article, he makes only a one paragraph mention of MP games at all:

"Most of us have accepted MP as the future. But if AI entities were as smart as people, wouldn't narcissism dictate the desire for SP? Would you rather have 4 obnoxious roommates or a really good dog?"

Frankly we aren't even close to achieving AI that is 1/100th as sophisticated as a dog. And when AI entities are as smart as people, we'll have solved the single greatest problem in the history of computer science. Wake me up when that happens. Here in the real world however, the numbers seem to show that people want living breathing opponents/allys. Gamers know the difference, and will continue to know the difference for a very long time.

But that's just the playability side. What about the design side? The author wants the users to enjoy an ever widening space of possibilites in the game environment. He wants gamers to be able to express themselves by thier play-style, but they are in HIS sandbox. Now don't get me wrong, we need things like physical simulation and standard constants of gravity, and we need an underlying engine to hold it all together. But what about the creative side? What makes game designers think that they are the experts?

Luckily, not all of them do. There are a few shops who are taking a different approach (Bioware, Lucas Arts, etc). Building environments like Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Galaxies. Games which welcome all kinds of possibilites in terms of empowering the gamer. At places like Bioware, there is tremendous focus on building tools. NWN will include a very advanced scripting language which is freely available to everyone. Users can create thier own dungeons, thier own quests, and thier own cultures in NWN. Star Wars: Galaxies takes this a step further, and includes an intricate system of commerce/trade/barter in which players can assume the roles of shop-keepers, smugglers, pirates, dignitaries, or even state officials.

The point is, if a game designer is truly interested in expanding possibilites of play, let the users in the door! Tired of "canned" conversations and predictable NPC's? Let us role-play! Gamers provide AI that you will never be able to fabricate(not in our lifetime). Tired of power players? Let us assume different roles! We gamers love to build, enrich, and contribute to the world in which we play. And now, for the first time in the history of computer gaming...it looks like we will soon be in a position to do just that.

Re:He has some good points...but

[Nematode]

The reason I say that, is that the auther doesn't seem to understand why multi-player games are so succesful. The most popular PC game in the world is not Black and White, it's not The Sims, it's not Baldur's Gate, it's not even Diablo II. The most widely played game (for some time now) is Half-life Counter-Strike.

At any given moment, there are usually more people playing EverQuest than there are playing (online) CounterStrike, Q3, and UT combined. You used to be able to check the specific numbers at www.everquest.com, but in the last two weeks they've taken out the specific numbers. The last time I compared on a weeknight however, there were about 35,000 CounterStrike players online, compared with about 80,000 EverQuest players.

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.

Re:He has some good points...but

[Kris_J]

Bah! This LAN-based multiplayer stuff is crap. There are now so many LAN games on the market that the chances of two people legally owning the same game is almost nil. That's if any two given friends even have PCs within an order of magnitude of power of each other. Give me multiple players on the one machine any day. Saturn Bomberman supports ten players on the one screen with the one deck. That means that only one of you needs to make the outlay and keep the equipment running. I paid over A$6,000 for my portable computer a couple of years back and I can almost participate in a LAN game of Quake II.

Bruce Sterling on What Gaming SHOULD Be

[Nova Express]

This is the text of a speech Bruce Sterling gave at the Computer Game Developers Conference in 1991 that I subsequently published in Nova Express. Despite the intervening decade, I think the general principles addressed still stand up quite well...

http://www.sflit.com/novaexpress/13/embraceyourwei rd.html

Re:Deus Ex

[nomadic]

I didn't play System Shock, but I did play Thief, and while I enjoyed the latter, it just wasn't as fun. What I liked about Deus Ex was that it seemed more open; there were several ways to surpass each obstacle, rather than two or three. Plus, it just seemed to handle better.

Halo on XBox

[JohnG]

I think a big deal is load times actually. If you've seen Red Faction for PS2 (which I just rented yesterday) the load times (or more specifically the frequency of disc accesses) is pathetic.
I've read on IGN that Halo on XBOX has very little load time and had a freind tell me that XBOX has zero load time because of the RAM. I think people might be getting confused about load time though, Load time (as far as I am concerned) is the amount of time it takes to copy the data from the CD to the RAM, alot of RAM would affect the frequency of the load time, but that is still a good thing.
That is the biggest barrier to realism for me though. I was very impressed by the size of the levels in many PS2 games and the continuity makes a really big difference, in the heat of real battle you don't have to wait for your game to load.
The same can be said for QuakeIII and such, the load times even from the hard drive are very very long to enter an arena. The key difference between QuakeIII and Red Faction is that Red Faction makes you wait to load a new section of the arena you are already in. So I would say at this point the biggest thing I would want if for developers to either load the whole level in at once or give some consideration to load time.
Of course if XBOX really has the "Zero load time" that IGN and others are talking about it might go a long way to solve the problem, but somehow I doubt a DVD drive (or hard drive for that matter) is really going to give zero load time for large levels.

a few points....

[TotallyUseless]

"You need to make demos for Game Boy and PlayStation as well"
They are currently talking about doing mmrpgs... I hardly think the GBA and Playstation are the best platforms for massively multiplayer online games are they?

"And the Xbox is not the #1 console"
Until it is released, it is not a console at all, just an upcoming product. Waiting until it is released before you make your determination of whether or not it is #1 is probably a good idea.

What goes around comes around

[Ukab the Great]

For years, people in the mac gaming community have raved about Marathon, citing its entertaining plot and playability. And they were told by the PC gaming community to shut up about some game made in 1994 and to stop screaming about innovation and creativity and get a "real gaming machine" that would be taken seriously at a gaming party. Now all the same people who said this are deluged with an armful of FPS's that are basically doom with better graphics and its *them* who are complaining about a lack on innovation. The macintosh is the future of gaming--it's users expect things from their games today that PC users learn the hard way to expect 5-6 years from now.

Re:Deus Ex

[QuantumG]

Was it just me or did everyone else find level III of Thief to be a total cop out. Here we are playing this cool game that isn't about slashing and killing everything and then wham, we're shoved down a mine shaft shooting at zombies and stumbling around mazes. Lame lame lame.