The Hero That Was Left Behind

Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes is a success in the world of Massively Multiplayer titles. Not everyone involved with its creation has enjoyed that success, though. Gamasutra has an interview with Rick Dakan, one of the founders of Cryptic Studios. From the article: "It was a fairly complicated situation. We had grown from our original handful to about seventeen at that point, which seems tiny now, but it was overwhelming at the time. I certainly didn't have a lot of management experience, and no one else did either. So we were making good progress, but we were off track in a lot of ways too, just kind of stuck in the mud. So Mike [Lewis] stepped in at that point and started looking at things. There were problems with the CEO position, and with my position. In programming there were three big people who left right in that same week. There was me, who got basically asked to leave, but I asked to become a consultant in the same breath. So I stepped down as a designer, from the sort of working in the office aspect of my job. Our producer got flat-out fired."

Comments

Interesting, interesting...suddenly lost interest

[Supercrunch]

I'm a CoH fan, but this still was a boring article. An "idea guy" finds he's not suited for project management so he steps aside and does a little consulting instead. This happens every day in the business world, it's not really a big deal. The only thing of interest was that he's now written a novel about a software company.

Positions

[Osmosis_Garett]

Why didn't they fire the guy who was responsible for the decision to make 'Door missions'? CoV is starting to make the game interesting again, but once you hit lvl 30 in CoH every mission was the same.

Re:Positions

[snuf23]

Well when CoH first launched, there were even less map types, villain types and no "outdoor door missions". So they did add some variety in, as well as adding the trials and new zones/villains.
The biggest problem I have with CoV is that at the start you get missions with a little added flavor in terms of cut scenes and a little mission unique architecture (the last Snake bad guy, the completion of the Ghost Widow story arch) but this stops pretty quickly. I don't think I've seen anything like that since I was about level 10, and my character is at level 32 now. I haven't had time to do the strike forces so I don't know if they are any more interesting than the ones in CoH. Right now for me, CoV is suffering from the "every door mission" syndrome is pretty much the same problem, with a heist thrown in once in awhile to mix things up.

Re:Positions

[MaWeiTao]

I have to agree... I played the City of Villains beta up to about level 12 and except with some minor differences it was essentially the same exact thing as City of Heroes.

I also intensely dislike how they reuse models and environments. The office environment is identical in CoV and CoH, the only difference is the color scheme. It also gets tiring travelling through the city and seeing the same few buildings repeated over and over again.

It's a theme consistent throughout the game. The game is gets very repetative and there's no way to improve a character other than reaching the next level and either getting a few enhancement slots or choosing a new power. The lack of loot has its positives, but it also means there's no way to improve a character outside of levelling.

Skills which have been promised since the early days of CoH still aren't close to being ready. They've been completely revamped 3 times already because the developers felt the system they had wasn't fun enough. Considering all the delays, whenever those skills are finally introduced they'd better be amazing, superior to anything ever seen before.

CoH/CoV are great games, and City of Villains certainly improves things somewhat, but they really lack the kind substance necessary to keep players hooked.

Re:Positions

[Walkiry]

> The game is gets very repetative and there's no way to improve a character other than reaching the next level and either getting a few enhancement slots or choosing a new power.

Actually what killed it for me were the massive nerfs that basically meant "you build your character the exact way we want you to or you're FUCKED!". One of the things I liked about CoH was that I could build characters that were somewhat "underpowered" by using interesting power combinations that could be considered original, and had a good time playing them because it wasn't too hard to build enough power to stand up to even-level enemies.

In that respect it wasn't too unlike the original Diablo, where I played and played the same game using different variants (in Diablo these were more item-tied, but still very doable). Then the nerf came... and I left. I knew what the game was like with the "standard builds" well enough, and I had little room to deviate from it. Such a shame.

Better than that

[carterhawk001]

Put the guy who does the Circle of Thorns indoor missions in charge of ever indoor mission. Those massive aztecan underground maps are some of the most striking and beautiful in the game. Very Wonderous

Crappy interview

[Anonymous Coward]

What a crappy interview. It was very confusing. Almost like big chunks of information got editted out.

Not much to read.

[garylian]

TFA was pretty boring. What is so special about a game designer finding out he can't do Product Management?

There is a reason most business models have a project designer and a project manager. Let the design guys come up with all their great (or whacky) ideas, and let the managers decide what will and will not work. Most people aren't geared to wear both hats, much less both at the same time.

Product Management is all about making sure the development pieces all fall together, and get done in a (yeah, right!) timely fashion. They shouldn't have to spend their time doing design, and you don't want your design folks managing.

In a nutshell, I read this as more of a "Don't make more out of my being asked to step down from a position I really didn't have the skills for" type of article. As far as that goes, kudos to Rick Dakan for being man enough to admit he wasn't cut out for the job.

There is nothing wrong with a designer saying "I couldn't cut it as a product manager". Product management is only fun when the project is done and done well. Otherwise, it is a nightmare. Design can be a blast, though.