Quote of the Day
“To combat the negative player feedback and press that results from a game experience that isn’t perfect, [Jack] Emmert said that he is completely changing the way that Cryptic makes videogames. The biggest development is making the game playable as soon as possible so that they can refine just how fun it is.”
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- Posted in: Quote of the Day
Sigh. Good old Jack “Facepalm” Emmert. Every time he opens his mouth these days I feel an overwhelming need to /facepalm.
I thought he had some pretty good ideas back in the early days of CoH development, but at some point his “vision” of what players think is fun took over, and it all went downhill from there.
I’ll give him credit, in his “mea culpa” type letter a few weeks (months?) back he recognized a lot of the flaws with cryptic’s development process. The fact that he didn’t see those flaws until AFTER releasing two games is completely facepalm worthy though.
Sigh.
I am pretty sure I understand what he meant but isn’t this what they do already? Ship a game as quickly as possible to make money quickly…I mean be able to properly test what is fun and what isn’t. *Says the person who bought a lifetime sub for STO* Space combat is still the best system in the game and I am ok with that. Mostly.
To be fair, I don’t think he’s talking about shipping as quickly as possible, but getting the game to a playable state for internal/beta testing ASAP.
Yeah : ) like I said, I was pretty sure that is what he meant but the only difference between that concept and their current development cycle is when the game is playable. Someone should tell Emmert/design team to add a few years to their cycle.
Man what would CO and STO be like if they had a few more years?
Welcome to reality, Jack. Players have only been asking for this for several years now. Though, I do applaud him for being one of the few big devs to admit their design process was bass ackwards.
I think this illustrates the player/developer divide perfectly. “They” approach their games mostly from a business angle while “we” approach their games from a looking for a fun and polished experience angle.
Most often business priorities just don’t align with what we’re looking for, even though they should.
I think they’re finally starting to realize that you can’t please investors first and players second. You need to please the players first and it will have a funnel effect back down to your investors.
So they are changing back to what they supposedly did before? Reading some of the material that was produced long before CO was released, this was pretty much the message they had then.
Regardless of what people may think of CO and STO, I actually applaud that Cryptic was trying to release two decent MMOs in a short time – the problem is more with the business model approach IMHO than specific shortcomings in the games.
If one wants to release early and change/improve the game based on player feedback, do _not_ base the business model on a subscription fee + cash shop. And certainly do not sell lifetime subscriptions.
Cryptic has probably learned a lot more with these two game releases than they would have at this point if they applied the more regular 5+ year cycle. Of course, they might have given a bit more thought about what was actually good and unique with CoH before they released CO, instead of just improving/adding some stuff that CoX did not have.
Either way, a company is more than one man, so even if he says “From now on we realize that the sun is yellow” I would not hold it against them.