@Kiwasi - what do you mean by nasty trick? I’m not taking umbrage btw, just interested.
No offense intended, you actually did me a favor. Completing the post mortem for Pond Wars and the discussion that followed made me realize I have no more interest in the game and developing it. Its finished, but I was hanging on because I didn’t want to let go. Now I’m happily writing something new.
I say nasty simply because it was quite a shock to come to that realization. And I suspect some people involved in the discussion knew I was done with the game before I did.
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I’ve had a few of those realisations myself. One can be too close to a project to see things clearly.
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I’m probably confused. The Feedback Friday thread helps developers to get feedback about products that are in progress. More info is in the thread.
Gigi
Maybe so, but is it set in stone that one has to take note of the feedback i.e. that one is obliged to make changes suggested? At the end of the day just expressing an opinion on the design decisions made even on a finished game still provides feedback that may influence the design of a new game.
Is the product still evolving? If so, feedback is appropriate. If it’s done, dead, or finished - then “FEEDBACK Friday” is probably not the right forum. What you do with the feedback is up to you.
Gigi
I bow to your exalted majesty’s righjt to control your own forum - of course if I ever need feedback from someone that makes the equivalent of flash games I’ll come crawling on hands and knees to “FEEDBACK Friday”. Lol
I am working on something…trying to create…a quadrilogy…(I think I have O.G.D!! (Obsessive Genre Disorder)
Ace WWI Dogfighter beta
Ace WWII Dogfighter v3.4
Ace WWIII Dogfighter beta
Ace Galactic Dogfighter beta
Hopefully… I can get this out of my system…soon
p
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I’m in the process of tackling the impossible. A cyberpunk MMO! 
I know, I know. Fortunately for me though, I have a few years experience in the industry, a top-notch team of pros and a pile of funding to make it happen. 
And I am more than happy to rant and rave about our development, both on the development side and on the business side. aaaand, shameless plug!
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Good luck!
Obligatory: You’ll need it! 
Seriously, though, can’t wait to see what you come up with.
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Thanks.
My team has tackled some big fish already. My Art Director has worked on Final Fantasy, Fallout, Parasite Eve and a pile of other awesomeness. 
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@khanstruct_1 - Holy cow! Surprising. Good luck!
Gigi
PS - What research shows that a cyberpunk MMO will succeed? Cyberpunk is kinda niche. Niche can be good, though maybe less so, for an MMO.
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It’s kind of a huge niche, though, covering everything from Blade Runner to The Matrix and more. Then again, The Matrix Online only lasted a few years. Good luck, @khanstruct_1 !
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Is it even possible to do any meaningful research on something like that?
I mean, I’m sure that guys can put together charts and statistics (smoke, mirrors and lies) but I seriously doubt that you could actually put together truly meaningful data on something like this. At best you’d be basing it off of seriously random stuff like Matrix ticket sales, general MMO demographics and the maybe one real cyberpunk game made in the last 5 years (shadowrun). At best any kind of statistical market research on this would end up just being a sales pitch with very little quality as a predictive tool.
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The MMO problem isn’t even networking really, it’s content. The reason blizzard canned the idea of doing another MMO on the scale of WoW is the fact it has a decade of actual content. This is the problem for any competing MMO.
If you don’t have content you can’t keep people long enough for them to pull friends in and grow it or sustain it, it does not reach critical mass. So you need think about those problems and how to solve them. Networking isn’t your main problem.
How many people here successfully made a game with the same number of quests and activities as elwynn forest? There are around 35 quests there. Each quest has npc behaviours, dialogue trees, item management, and so on. There’s so much to it. It doesn’t even factor in the nearby stormwind or the auction house, shops, and stories. Even doing those 35 quests would be a nightmare to achieve within a year for any 2 man team.
And that’s just quests. It’s not art, sound, design, bugs, or any other development issues.
You would start cutting corners, and once you start cutting corners, you start having a lower quality product than WoW and why would anyone downgrade? So MMOs can exist, but they must be dramatically different from what WoW’s template provides.
So when I see a tiny studio attempt an MMO, I have to say it, because I don’t want to see people jump into flames pointlessly. If they still will not heed the advice to rethink then I wish them the best (and don’t forget your fire res).
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@hippocoder - I 2nd that! Well said. … I’m skeptical. And, at the same time, I like @khanstruct_1 . I wish their team amazing success along their journey. In other words, I hope Hippo and I are both wrong.
Gigi
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I think you may be underestimating what’s possible with a skilled team. I think this amount of content can be produced in a quarter of the time you’re suggesting. This is of course assuming you really know what you’re doing, and you cut the right corners.
I’m definitely not for encouraging newbies to take on huge projects, but I think that in 2015 a truly experienced, skilled team can put out some incredible results.
I couldn’t do it at my current skill level, but I also realize that I’m still very green.
Well, I factored in the developers having maximum experience. It’s just this content takes time to author due to physics. Artists can’t go faster. Dialogue cannot be written quicker. Design can’t go faster. People need to eat and sleep.
It’s not even a technical problem, it just really takes an explosive amount of time. How experienced the developers are doesn’t shorten authoring content for MMOs. You could make a pile of gibberish and filler that everyone hates, but I’m assuming WoW-level quality or better.
The solution for a tiny team is to go balls out procedural.
The problem is if you want to use WoW as a baseline, they did cut the right corners and do know what they’re doing. Cutting any more than that gives you an inferior product.
And of course, the Elwynn forest area isn’t anywhere near enough content for a full game, it’s just an example of really looking at the work involved in content generation of a good quality.
Side note:
One of my main skills is milking the maximum bang for buck or cutting corners as you put it. We already cut the biggest corners using Unity itself. Next up, you dump premature optimisation and you forget fancy bespoke shaders and so on, just sticking with the baseline Unity and asset store, an experienced team would struggle to fit the pieces together in a cohesive whole. Once this is done you’re onto raw content generation, and this isn’t something that’s easily accelerated with consistent quality (apart from procedural content).
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@hippocoder At a previous job, I wrote and scripted quests and I could easily complete 35 quests in a month, not a year. Of course this is writing, scripting, testing, and supporting art (icons) only. But to say 35 quests, content and scripting only, takes a year is ridiculous. I agree with you that one of the huge bottlenecks is content, but it is art and environment content, not quest content.
Did you test it? Did you run it by focus groups? Beta testers? Did you have to iterate the quest at all?
Doing something the right way makes it take longer…usually. However, you might have gotten lucky, and found a great workflow. What game did you work on? I’d like to see some of the quests your team created, and compare and contrast.