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Mulligan's First Ryzom Letter
Jessica Mulligan, new Executive Producer for Saga of Ryzom, has put up her first top-down look at the Saga of Ryzom dev process. From the article: "Without boring you with obvious details, it became obvious that we needed to do some work on our tools, continue to work on content and redesign or upgrade some existing game systems. What we've done with this reorganization is to combine all the various "pools" such as coders, level designers, et al, into one large Live Content team, and then create 'strike teams' within that organization to deal with specific issues." It's also worth mentioning that Saga of Ryzom's next expansion is going for the brass ring of online worlds in their next expansion: Player Created Content. MMORPG.com has some first hand impression of Ring of Ryzom.
I was happily surprised to find out Saga Ryzom runs on an Open Source Game Engine (Nevrax.org) a few weeks ago. Unless your making tons of money off them like Epic or ID, there's no reason to keep your game engine proprietary...the engine is not what makes your game unique it's the content built on top of that engine that makes you the money.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
He/She whatever had a successful colum once but then also worked for Themis which does not seem to be a force in the MMO industry other than these small microniche markets of which many just peter out and die.
Course why leave Turbine if things were going fine or are they?
They pulled a Mulligan!!
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
But where is the Endoplasmic reticulum
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I mean, yes, I was in the beta and it was kida fun but I haven't heard anything about the game since. It's kinda generic and there's a lot of grind, especially when you're trying to craft.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I thought the quality and performance of the Ryzom engine was quite poor for a commercial title (and this is on my P4 3.2 Ghz w/2 GB DDR 400, Radeon 9800 256 MB and 10K RPM SATA HD). This, and the *HORRIBLE* UI configuration put me right off Ryzom quickly and permanently.
/specific/ player placeable structures, not Rebel or Imperial placed player bases or for NPC towns, but entire large player towns or facilities would simply pop up out of nowhere at 100 yards (to the extent that if I was going more than 200 yards out of town I would set a way point so I could find the town again, even I was in the middle of open dessert).
When companies like NC Soft (Lineage 2), Blizzard (WoW) use engines from companies like Unreal the difference in performance and quality is staggering, Epic offer a staggeringly adaptable platform for both FPS titles and MMOG's, which can handle both large outdoor arenas and tighter more complex maps.
(Though equally, I found the EQ2 engine to be pretty sophisticated (though clearly suited to 'Power Users' and long term use, given the vast number of options configurable), and the engine used for City Of Heroes to be excellently suited to purpose.)
Ryzom is not alone in my dislike for it's engine though, I also disliked the poor engine in SWG, which had the *worst* LOD handling for terrain I have ever seen (simply fixing the LOD at a lower level would have been a far superior solution, both visually and from a playability standpoint). It also featured *horrible* pop up for
I would urge any developer to use an off the shelf commercial or open source engine, unless they had a very compelling reason not to (e.g. for a more truly unique title such as PlanetSide, which even then could arguably be equally implemented with a customised Unreal Warfare engine I should think).
i've played ryzom for a while, i will say it's a pretty game and great eye candy.
however there is a big lack of content and stuff to do in the game, the major feature of outposts are not implimented yet, the quest system isn't fully working yet.
as for the support, it's kinda lacking. if you have any technical issue, they unfortunately just blame you. personally i have an issue where i crash in one specific spot and they get me to change settings instead of reporting the bug to the developers. i've had other issues where after patching the game i stopped having the problem that they were trying to blame on me.
i will say that the north american community does miss the old support team as this current one decides to allow major abuses of their eula and letting players kill steal as well as harrass other players however if you criticize their "support" you will get banned