Slashdot Mirror
Sony's MMORPG "Sovereign" Dead
Gudlyf writes "Although the main site for this massive-multiplayer game by Sony (once known as Verant) was updated at some point late last year, it seems that according to CNN Money, it's gone quietly dead after 4.5 years in development (reminds me of why I posted my vote in a previous story on vaporware): "Work on 'Sovereign,' a massively multiplayer real time strategy game, has been terminated after more than four-and-a-half years of development. Ambitious in nature, the game had hoped to replicate a continuous global war that supported up to 500 players. Diplomacy would have played as significant a role as the player's tactical abilities. 'We came to a decision that it was not going to be what we wanted it to be,' said McDaniel. 'It never really had the magic.'""
Why should Sony work hard on something original and interesting when they can just keep reselling Evercrack?
I remember it being announced and thought they were crazy. It really felt like Brad McQuaid and team just went with the first idea they had after they knew Everquest was a hit. "Hey, let's try a massively multiplayer RTS!"
My question: Why did it take them 4 years to figure out that it wasn't going to be any good?
will still put you back fifty bucks, even though it could turn a profit for less than half that.
Just as in the book and movie businesses most games are complete busts, after *first* sucking up years of time and millions of dollars in development.
For the company overall to ever show a profit the ones that *do* hit have to sell for enough to not just make a profit on that one game, but also to cover the losses of all those games they had to develop just to find out *which* one was going to be the winner.
Want major releases to only cost twenty bucks? It's easy, just find an infallible way to predict before development starts which potential projects will be the best sellers.
It's an "easy" way for you to become a multi-millionaire in year or two as well.
Good luck.
KFG
Part of the attachment of any RPG/MUD/MMORPG is playing a charater. You have a persona and that persona has a story. As long as different things happen to that persona, you keep going back. The story keeps changing and the character develops and changes with the story. Moreover, most online RPG's tend to be more open ended than ones you play alone.
The bigger factor online is the interaction with other characters, whether that's actually playing together or just chatting. RPG's lend themselves to this interaction more than first person real time strategry and slightly more than first person shooters (though I admit that games like CounterStrike and Battlefiled 1942 have more of a social factor since you play on a team).
It sounds like Sovreign had neither of these things going for it.
AutoDuel (car wars), now there's a game for a MMORPG. Arena fights at scheduled times, a real economy, cross country errands, and friends. Perhaps there is something out there like it?
There isn't a month that goes by that I don't wish I was playing it.
----------------
OnRoad: What racing games do to you. My favorite kind of GPL.
You've _GOT_ to be kidding me. This is what the article says:
Meanwhile, "PlanetSide" is nearing completion, with a public beta test scheduled for the end of this month.
So far, so good... now here's the kicker:
The game, which has seen "drastic design changes in the last four months" according to McDaniel
So basically Scott McDaniel, which is the vice president of marketing and public relations for Sony Online Entertainment, is saying that instead of the QA-only sessions meant to go at the end of a project, they've just implemented DRASTIC DESIGN CHANGES and they're going to release it soon?!
Hello, anyone home? The PR-guy is basically confessing that this is going to be a fucked bugfest which was largely developed with no clear design in mind.
Sound great. Gotta admire the honesty though. Haha.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
on that crappy game just developing the idea, didn't they?
Everyone does it. Some just catch it earlier than others.
What's more, even in their sucessful games they make a lot of wrong moves and throw out a lot of bad ideas and code that we don't, as the public, see them throwing out.
All that goes into the total overhead of a production. Even a successful game can actually lose money if too many costly mistakes are made in getting there and many revered small houses, with nothing but "success" on their resume, have been suddenly trashed by their corporate masters over the bottom line.
Of course what most of those corporate masters have yet to grasp is the concept of the "status" product. GM hardly makes a dime on Corvettes, but having Corvettes in the line up sold a lot *Chev*ettes. Nissan did away with the "Z" because they were losing money on it, and have had to bring it back because the whole *company* lost tremendously by its absence.
For that matter GE has been looking for a way to do away with their lightbulb business for decades, and haven't been able to figure out how to do it. To the public the entire GE "nation" loses value ( even though profitablity would go *up*) if it doesn't make lightbulbs. I mean, that's what GE *is*, right?
Stop making lightbulbs, stop selling as many financial services too. That's just the way it is.
As it is, Looking Glass is simply gone. Jesus I wish the games companies would buy a clue.
KFG
See, that's the thing. I'm sure most people at SOE know this. But the multi-million dollar question is: how the hell does a game that's so far from mainstream get strung along in development for this long?
I doubt it'll happen, but I really wish Game Dev Mag could get one of their really insightful and honest post-mortems for this project. It'd be an excellent case study of all sorts of things to watch out for.
I followed Sovereign from when it was first annouced then lost interest as the years kept ticking by.
It started off as an incredibly cool concept, a modern day world with modern units. You inhabited a single planet, scalable to support to 500 "countries".. so each world would be server. Then had some awesome looking models functioning in the alpha.. aircraft carriers, fighters, nuclear subs. Battle tanks etc. It look like things were progressing smoothly, they had a nice look UI finished, you could zoom into a single infantry man all the way out to the whole planet.. this was supposed to be scaled to what your Satelite technology was. Resource system was in.. you had a character.. which effected how you ruled your empire/citizens.. such as Diplomat, Theocrat, Warmonger etc...
THEN... they completely ditched the concept and basically started from scratch. So it was 4.5 years for the name "Sovereign" but them dumped the first game after about 2 years and started all over again. The new concept was retarded and thats when I stopped following it. They moved it from modern times to into the future.. where you controlled an entire planet with space ships and other junk. All the cool modern-era tech was replaced with goofy space-shit and all the gorgeous models were replaced with cartoony crap.
The original concept was ambitious and amazing, too bad they didn't have the balls to make it work. Instead they opted for Trade Wars 2002 MMORPG and it tanked. Glad it happened too.
"want to play a game?" "global nuclear warfare" *misses the good ol days*
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
There's no way they'll do that. The risk that it could be turned in to a fun, free MMORPG and take revenue away from Evercrack is too great. Besides, they may find a buyer for the technology that they can foist non-compete contracts on.
Eventually an open source MMORPG will happen. I have a scalable tileable 3D object server with dynamic bandwidth throttling and an on-demand object-seeking client running that I hope to hook up with some OpenGL gurus someday, and I know I'm not the only one tinkering with that kind of thing.
5 years to develop a massively multiplayer title isn't that far off. You are not only developing a AAA title game (3 years), but are also building a thin-client app and a server farm to support it. Your applications must be optimized for speed, graphics, low-bandwidth, and impregnability. Since you are developing an ap that the average user will spend 6 hours per day over the course of four months on, you need to develop major in-game tools to create a content load that makes Master of Orion 3 look like Advance Wars. If I'm not mistaken, the world in Asheron's Call 2 is about the size of Texas. Can you imagine filling Texas with intruiging content?
And after 5 years the code is not obsolete. Code is just that: code. A lot of that 5 years went to optimizing the code for a server farm and a computer speed that didn't exist before. If they started their server farm 5 years ago on BSD, their code is binary compatible. If they started 5 years ago on NT, their code is binary compatible. Solaris? Linux? Still going strong. In fact the only major changes they would have to make over that time would be to take advantage of multithreading, and a few other speed-up tricks that modern hardware pulls. But since that is backend, they could always compensate for that by buying more servers. On the backend what they optimize for is bandwidth costs, and if they were designing for 56k modems, they should be OK. As for the clients, It's never hard to take advantage of larger texture buffers.
5 years was the development cycle for Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest 2. It takes a very, very long time to make a networked world large enough to entertain thousands of people for thousands of hours. This isn't unreasonable.
-Chris
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.