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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.'""
I guess there's always Duke Nukem Forever to look forward to...
Instead of being cancelled, they should admit that instead, a peaceful, diplomatic resolution was found, and thus, the war doesn't have to happen.
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Why should Sony work hard on something original and interesting when they can just keep reselling Evercrack?
Prototype early. If the fun isn't there in the prototype, you're just playing for "luck" to make it a success.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It never really had the magic
then it wasnt really an rpg, was it???
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Although the main site for this massive-multiplayer game by Sony (once known as Verant)
I'm pretty sure the Sony Corporation was never known as Verant.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Who needs that when you have Earth 2025?!
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?
I saw Sovereign at E3 2000 and the graphics looked like ass back then. It scaled up from a single tank to an entire planet, though. The game had some neat features, but it didn't seem to solve any of the obvious problems a MM strategy game would have. In most current persistant world games you don't regress if you haven't been logged on in a while. That doesn't work in a strategy game, so what do you do?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Ambitious in nature, the game had hoped to replicate a continuous global war that supported up to 500 players.
And at Ambitious $400,000 a month subscriber fee, they might make their money back.
I am sure it will still be usefull when DukeNuken is released.
;).
Yeah, as a paperweight.
Thanks, you really set me up for that one
The more realistic you make a war game, the less fun it is.
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
Sorry but thats just to long. 4.5 years ago (1998 July)the tools to develop (geforce?) and the platforms available (win98 etc)limit the possibilites available to the dev team. We see this currently with games like Duke Nukem, (..waiting...) and Doom3 where the stated goal for system compatibility is GF3 and higher.
I am sure some elements of the game are able to be reused, however all the coding and optimization would have to be redone to suit current systems, meaning more time spent waiting. "the magic wasnt really there" is a shocker statement though...was the concept good or not? If it wasnt scratch the game. 4.5 years sheesh, the intial code is obselete before the 4th years even begun!
Do you need a website upgrade?
Ah, to be funded for over 4 years to work on a project that would never see the light of day. Endless hours checking /. while getting paid. Good times..good times.
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.
4 years of looking at pretty concept art and whiteboards then last week someone asked "Let's give this to the programmers.. we did hire programmers in '98, didn't we?"
Trolling is a art,
Though not a RTS, Planetside offers commanders the same type of control over their troops.
Planetside.info
This game sounds too much like the classic board game "Diplomacy". I am not surprised that they couldn't capture the magic of Diplomacy in a MMORPG. The whole point of the game Diplomacy is to be a complete bastard to your friends, and win through underhanded tactics, deceipt, treachery and eavesdropping. It's not the sort of game that I would care to play with a bunch of strangers, I don't really see the point in it.
Unfortunately, failures are part of the creative process - not everyone or everything can succeed.
c rap" hanging round its neck for the next five years. Which is more than can be said for some game developers...
For every Van Gogh there are a million artists (with and without both ears) who are never recognised for their talents. Sometimes it's because they don't have any luck, sometimes it's because they just plain suck.
Sony realised that Sovereign wasn't going to set the world on fire. Rather than waste more money launching what they considered would be a flop they canned the project. Sure, money has been wasted, but not as much as could have been. More importantly, Sony's games division doesn't have a "it-took-you-five-years-to-develop-that-piece-of-
Sony should be applauded for its decision. Sure, we want games but we want good games, not ones that even the developers aren't happy putting on their CV.
BTW, if you're after cheap games, then there's a simple solution: don't buy them when they're launched, just wait six months or so. All titles, especially on the PC platform, are discounted a few months down the line.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Last year in Japan there was a very popular anime series called .hack//sign about goings on in an Everquest style game called The World. A series of three playstation games directly related to the series came out also and as far as I know these games are SINGLE PLAYER !
Anybody know what the story is with MMORPGs in Japan or if I'm wrong about the single player nature of these games ?
The anime series was very good by the way and if you haven't seen it already I'd recommend you check it out.
Happily, the US government has indicated their interest in continuing the development of a continuous global war. Sources have even leaked a demo!
Flash demo of GULF WAR 2
Ok, it's obvious but I had to post it.
When Theodore developed Sturgeon's Law it wasn't that 90% of all writers are crap that he had in mind. It was that 90% of *everything written* was crap. What he was driving at was that 90% of everything written by a *great* writer was crap, but one of the main differences between a great writer and a hack was that the great writer didn't *publish* the crap.
.until the artist shows him the trunk full of hundreds of the previous inferior renditions the great artist disposed of before hitting the masterpiece.
Thoreau's Journal is one of the most interesting works in literary history because it gives us an inside view into some of this. His journals are full of bits of Walden and other works while still under development. Of course, Old H.D. was a great writer, so even his journal was heavily edited and polished before publication.
This applies to Van Gough as well. We don't see his crap because he himself made sure we didn't.
There's also a story about a king who commissions a drawing of a rooster and when presented with the final bill balks. .
The king was paying for the *total* labor required, not just the final product.
So Sony is merely doing what any wise artist, writer or businessman would do. When the first draft goes bad, and then the second and third, on the trash heap it goes.
Crap is as crap does. Admit it before it drags you down to hack status, and at a loss.
That's the true application of Sturgeon's Law for those with any real talent to peddle.
KFG
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.
http://ps2.ign.com/objects/017/017477.html
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/385/385585p1.html
"I think that when you become a Republican, you don't get to score any more." -- Butt-head
MMORPG is for roleplaying games.
This was for a real time strategy game. MMORPG is incorrect. Not all massively multiplayer games are roleplaying games.
open source it?
(this isn't flamebait)
-neil
Global warfare with diplomacy sounds a bit like Eschaton. (Fingers crossed that that game doesn't meet a similar fate...)
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
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,
I think that should be changed to any *rich* artist, writer, etc.. The only reason why this game didn't get released is because Sony is a big company with a lot of money. If this was some smaller game development company, and they spent over 4 years of their time making a game, and scrapped it, they will probably go out of buisness. If it was a smaller company making this game, my guess is that the game would have released and would have probably not done that well. That happens a lot more then a company just giving up after 4+ years..
It was wise for them to do this though, I believe that the market for games that require a monthly charge (which im guessing this game would have done, i couldn't find anything mentioning that) is a pretty hard one to break into, you are going to need something thats gonna hook a lot of people for many many months to make money on somethin like that. I just hope they do something with all the work they did...
Reading the above, I have no idea whether the graphics looked good or bad. Specifically, who's ass are we using as a reference? Jennifer Lopez's? Strom Thurmond's? I need more information!
The more realistic you make a war game, the less fun it is.
The beta testers' number one complaint about Sovereign was the napalm-spraying USB peripheral included in the box.
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.
My favorite Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Game is Slashdot. You get competition, very intelligent opponents, cute graphics, and a persistent score. You can play with a modest PC behind a dial-up line, and you don't need good fine motor skills. Best of all, you can play without paying a monthly fee. How can EverQuest compete with that?
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I have a feeling that there's only a certain population out there willing to play MMORPG's. The more that come out, the more you'll find with hardly enough players to support an interesting world. No point in playing a MMORPG when it's just you and a wombat ::)
-- taking over the world, we are.
All they could get the game to do was keep spitting out. "They only way to win is to not play the game"