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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."
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.
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.