Mark Jacobs Talks About the Mythic/EA Merger

Grimwell writes "Mark Jacobs (VP EA) joined a discussion in our forums and shared his personal thoughts about the Mythic/EA merger: 'Another thing that has almost brought a smile to my face is that they are willing to embrace new IP that is not just WoW 2007 but IP that can stand on its own two (or three) feet without having to rely on the WoW userbase for its success.' Included in his hopeful thoughts was a healthy dose of realism: 'As always, I expect people to believe it when they see it.'"

Comments

Enter the first Massive On-Line sports game

[Bruzer]

The first Massive on-line sports game. EA 100 man dodge ball, or EA super Soccer.

Re:Enter the first Massive On-Line sports game

[The Living Fractal]

And enter the seven-hundred-millionth whine in the history of the shooter (which is what your dodgeball game would be): LAG!!!!

Seriously, in most MMORPGs your ping is never anywhere NEAR low enough to achieve the kind of reaction times needed to be truly on the competitive edge of human capability. Have you ever played a FPS with a 200 ping? Yea, that's only a fifth of a second, I know. But that can be the entire duration of some battles in games like Counterstrike.

TLF

Re:Enter the first Massive On-Line sports game

[yourOneManArmy]

With 100 men, it'd be pretty hard to dodge balls.

Re:Enter the first Massive On-Line sports game

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

man you must be new school. I remember the days when we played with 300-600 ping -- and loved it! This was back in the glory days of HL. Back when it was unclear which mod was more popular: CS, DOD, TFC, or Firearms.
christ, I still remember the days where you didn't even have a ping, back playing Duke3D over 14.4k modem. . .
I call bs on you!

Re:Enter the first Massive On-Line sports game

[The Living Fractal]

Naw, I am as old school as the FPS gets.

Wolfenstein was my first. I then went to Doom over modem. That was like a whole new realm of video games. Then came QTest. It was revolutionary. I was hooked and played Quake deathmatch until my eyes bled.

One thing I remember about the old-school Quake matches was there was no net prediction code. When you pressed move forward you literally didn't move forward until the command went from you, to the server, then back to you to. Whatever your ping was, you could pretty much double it and that was how long it might take to finally see you move forward.

I played pretty competitively with my dial-up. Then as time passed they came out with Rocket Arena. Then Clan Arena and Quakeworld.

By then there were people I played with who had pings in the 20-30s. Even though they weren't as skilled as I, they often beat me by sheer fact that they had the ping advantage.

There was an acronym for these people, maybe you don't remember it. It was LPB. Low-ping Bastard. They were hated.

Then they became the norm. And the acronym became HPB. High-ping Bastard. And they were hated too. But mostly because a lot of them would whine and say it was only the ping that made them lose. Sometimes they were right, mostly not. I was one of those HPBs who still put a massive hurting on guys with much lower pings. Me with my mid-200s beating down those with mid 20s.

Point is, skill being equal, the person with the lower ping will win. I'm not saying that a MMO sports game is impossible. But if you think you've seen whining before... Just wait until a thousand people log in to a server and pings are so bad that good reaction times mean jack shit.

Then ye shall see whining in all its glory.

TLF

Quick link to the interview

[Anonymous Coward]

http://gamasutra.com/features/20060728/sheffield_0 1.shtml

World of Sports gambling

[192939495969798999]

EA (sports giant) + MMORPG with virtual money = Online virtual sports gambling! Play bookie or betting junkie, and buy more credits with real money! Now with extra realism -- If you can't pay, they come and break your virtual leg and your real leg too!

Re:All games should be open source

[fotbr]

Have you looked at open source games? Most (but not all) suck. Infighting over who's in charge, and what needs to be done end up killing most of the projects. While this is true of more open-source stuff than just games, its especially true with game developers, since they tend to be more opinionated about the "best" way to do things.

People make games to make money. Remove that incentive, and most developers will move on to other more productive enterprises. Or they'll go back to showing off their l33t graphics skills with old-school intros, etc.

Variationon an Old IBMJoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: What do you get when you merge EA and Mythic?

A: EA

New cash cow

[sinij]

EA will whore out, milk dry Mythic and then will toss what left aside, just like they did to OSI, Westwood and many other once-great studios. I feel for Mythic employees, I hope they will like working 60-70h/week destroying souls of thier games one penny at a time.

Open source works best when copying ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

Open source works best when copying an existing game, not developing something new. As the parent mentioned it is difficult to get folks to agree on a design, an implementation, etc. The advantage of a pay oriented development model over a volunteer oriented model is that people are still motivated to do work when they are not getting their way. Come to think of it, other open source projects that were design heavy went well when they were subsidized/financed and were issuing paychecks.

Oh, the irony

[swordgeek]

Everyone is expecting EA to gut Mythic like a just-caught fish, and they're probably right--that's what EA does.

But there was a time, when the industry was young enough to not even be properly called an industry, that a group of dedicated programmers got together to form a company with the sole purpose of taking excellence in games to a new level. That company was Electronic Arts, and they revolutionised the computer gaming world, to begin with.

Sigh. All good things eventually die or become evil.