Pryde's page

I have never been more happy that I don't play MMOs, nor more annoyed that other people do, than the past week.

I think it's great that Paizo is stretching out and all, but it's starting to seem like Pathfinder Online is quickly eclipsing the tabletop game, and it hasn't even been developed yet!

Paizo, don't make me hate you. Seriously. I have nothing against other people playing MMOs. But I can't stand the whining, the crying, the complete breakdown, and the total dominance of this one forum anymore.

This announcement was cool the first day. I was happy for you. I was sure you would do a great job. The second day, I already regretted that you made the announcement, but fine, what can I do? Now a few days later, I am ready to have nothing to do with Paizo anymore. In a few days, I went from thinking you were the greatest company around, to seriously questioning your judgment, to the edge of disgust.

Stop. Seriously, people, talk about something else before your whining destroys everything you hold dear.

The haters can now cry at me all they want. Somebody was going to say this eventually. It just happened to be me this time.

Whining about whining, I love these posts.

Brilliant game so far, feels very raw and magical and adventurous to me right now. (I love it)

Some features need to be removed to improve the Alpha build. ( Which I think says a good thing about your progress so far)

Remove monster hit-point/stamina bar [unless I have anatomy skill or a wondrous item of see hitpoint bar]

Information is important in an MMO, especially when it comes to PvP. I would rather now have to play a guessing game as to the health of my opponent. I don't generally play MMOs for realism.

Remove Global Chat [unless everyone has a linked crystal ball or telepathic bonds]

MMOs are generally about socializing and convenience. By making a game inconvenient you generally make it less approachable, thus less accessible for the general public. It's a slippery slope when you start stripping MMO features (look at ESO).

Remove the World Map [let me buy a map or learn cartography skill]

Remove the Nav Map [Unless I have tracking skill engaged, let me physically spot enemies/players or learn what different resource nodes look like. Could take advantage of perception/awareness skills]

Hiding stock game features behind skills and such basically makes these skills a complete necessity. You also create an advantage between those who do, and those who do not.

Remove the Numbers from the Damage [ Hit/Miss/Critical or maybe the dice roll I got ]

This should be optional, and not forced on everyone. Not being able to see your performance makes it much harder to optimize your character. Look at ESO, where people get completely annhiliated and are left to wonder what happened to them. In pvp transparency in combat, and whats happening to your character is of the heightest importance. Being able to see status effects, incoming/outgoing damage, is an absolute necessity.

Remove some of the Character Sheet [ unless I have good appraisal skill, I don’t need this cheap way out to semi-identify items for me by figuring out which armor gives more resistance or protection while quickly changing between armors and looking for the differences]

You might not need it, but others do. Some people don't like to play MMOs in complete ignorance, they like to min-max. Finding the best armor sets, skill combos, etc. The game shouldn't try to hide this stuff. Making things trivial when they should be trivial is GOOD.

Oddly enough, there were zero negative comments about graphics overheard today at con, and many positive ones.

You generally want to listen to the negative comments. Look at how ESO turned out, the developers didn't take negative feed back well (I'm not saying this is the case with PFO or GW), all they did was listen to yes men, and now the game is a turd. I think the problem with kickstarter supporters is they're invested in the game, whether or not it looks good, or plays good, they'll try to defend their investment. Does PFO look good now? No, but it's acceptable for the size of the team, the stage of the development, and the resources available for developers. Now hypothetically, if the game looks the same as it does now 2 years down the line when it releases, I wouldn't say it would be acceptable. Over all the question is, how do you make a game that is visually great, and can support many players on the screen at the same time for situations like pvp.

Google UO, EQ, WoW or GW beta footage and they're all way more simplistic than PFO, and they're all from the late 90's and mid 2000's. Also recall PFO is in alpha and not beta yet.

If you then google pathfinder art, you will see PFO is similarly stylized to it.

Each to their own though I guess.

You're comparing games that are 14+ years old (uo, eq) to a modern day "next gen mmo"

We are a team of experienced game designers and videogame developers who have joined forces to make a next-generation fantasy sandbox MMO, called Pathfinder Online.

Taken straight from the PFO kick starter.

I hope the goal isn't to look like those games (and ryan has already eluded to what direction they want to take game, now it's just a matter of whether they have the resources to get there).

Either way I see "playable" get thrown around a lot here, well a turd is playable. In order to attract people, a game also has to look good unfortunately.

Combat currently is primitive. I'm curious to see what everything things about where it should go from here. The genre is slowly (but surely) shifting away from the anarchic tab targeting & "push and forget" system, and more towards faster paced action combat. I don't expect PFO to go that way, nor do I think it needs to (long as whatever combat system they settle on is fluid and responsive, something a lot of games get wrong). Either way I would personally like to see a few area targeted abilities. Another concept games are implementing is a way to break out crowd control. I think CC should have a contributing factor to a fight, however I wouldn't want it to get to the point where CC is the SOLE contributing factor to the fight. Take awhile the ability for other players to fight back for a long duration of time isn't something I'd like to see in PFO. However with that said, CC needs to be strong and effective enough to allow smaller groups some leeway to deal with larger groups. What's everyone else's thoughts?

Yes it was a very old alpha photo (as in an actual alpha, not a demo labelled an alpha) from 2002. That was the point. Those were the "12 year old graphics" you were harping about.

GW is not trying to compete with things like Landmark. It has been transparent about this from the beginning. EE is the minimum viable product. Anyone that was expecting more than the minimum viable product from the minimum viable product probably has bigger issues than their unrealistic expectations.

I'm not really talking about the EE so much as I'm interesting in where the game will be going visually (the lowest/minimal) to the finished product (the apex). Hence the title "What to expect visually from PFO" and not "Wtf this game looks horrible". Ryan already answered the question in what direction they're going, so we can only hope they get there. A lot of the people I talk to, trying to get interested in the game, they look at the released footage, and they say to me "Well, the game looks interesting, but visually, I don't really see it getting that much better".

That's one of the larger problems that Goblinworks has to deal with regularly: this new mass-misconception that "Alpha" and "Beta" basically means "Limited-Access Demo" and "Massive-Access Demo" of a game.

I'd like to think of it more like Minecraft, where it was in Beta for years, as they slowly implemented and developed features of the game, while still the game was 'perfectly' playable and people had to pay for it to play.

Hopefully, this "demo trend" will die soon. It's frustrating.

The only difference is that Minecraft didn't charge you a monthly fee for those gradual improvements. PFO is a long way off before we even get to that point. However when the time comes, and if PFO hasn't improved in area of "looks" (which I don't think will be the case), it's going to be a hard sell to people that the game will "eventually" improve visually while charging them an initial purchase price AND a monthly fee.

Graphics are packaging. Packaging is important, but not as important as what it wraps.

...

Didn't have the chance to play daoc in alpha (did play it from phase 1 beta to release however). That's obviously an old school alpha. Most alpha these days are marketing tools (look at eqnext landmark), even wildstar's alpha looked great. I was in the gw2 "alpha" / core test, and like I mentioned earlier, it was basically a closed beta, almost a completely polished game. Considering what peoples expectations and standards are now of an alpha, I'd consider PFOs "alpha" to be more of an early "internal test" than anything.

...

Thank you, and I appreciate all of the work that goes in to the visuals of the game. For the most part you've answered my question on what you HOPE the game to look like. I'm trying to sell some of my guild members on game, and they're intrigued by many of the proposed features and concepts, but they fear that what they see so far from the visuals, is the pinnacle of what the game come release will look like (which is supposedly, some time away). I know a lot can change in that amount of time, and I would like PFO to be successful. An off-topic question, how large is the team working on PFO currently?

Ryan Dancey (Goblinworks Blog: Kneel Before Zog: Alpha Test Information) wrote:

I just don't really see the point of an NDA for a game like ours. There's no plot. There are no "secrets". There's not going to be a race to see who does what "first". You are the content. You will all have "firsts" ("First time I died". "First time I killed someone". "First time I crafted something useful". etc.)

On the other hand there are going to be a ton of haters. People are going to come out of the wood work to talk about how the graphics suck, the animation sucks, the UI sucks, the design sucks, the customer service sucks, the players are toxic and suck, and how 17 years ago I ran a production system for a card game that didn't work.

You are going to be our defense against those people. We are going to say "look, we told everyone exactly what we were doing. These players, fully informed, have engaged and are having fun. Nobody has been mislead. We are committed to a process of continuous improvement and that means that the thing you don't like can and will be improved over time (except that thing I did in 1997, I really can't fix that)."

And then we're going to turn to you all and say "please tell them how awesome you think this game is and how much fun you're having!"

Oh wait, that might not be the one you were looking for...

Ryan Dancey (First Impressions) wrote:

We have to sell people on the idea that we will, eventually, have AAA class graphics and we will eventually have achieved the kind of aesthetic that meets or exceeds AAA expectations. But we won't have that for a very, very long time. Instead, we'll have a series of incremental steps where things get very slightly better, continuously.

I've read it, and it seemed kinda ambiguous to me. I guess my question is what does he mean by "eventually". We talking about some time during development, like before the game is "released" to the public. We talking about some time afterwards? Years after? I'm glad he's not making promises, but still. It doesn't really matter if the game has triple AAA graphics or not to me, I just want combat to be extremely responsive, for the combat animations to be crispy and fluid, and ultimately for the game to look good enough visually to be respectable and entice people to actually try it.

Guurzak wrote:

I suspect Ryan's answer to this would be very much along the lines that it will depend on how crowd forging prioritizes graphics versus other development, and on how quickly the revenue stream grows large enough to sustain more artist FTEs.

I think you are correct - something along these lines is the most likely answer.

But I think we want to know what his vision of the game is. What would he like to compare it to, once it's fully-functional and they start working on minor improvements (like more "content"/fluff etc.).

This is pretty much it. I'd really like to know what his expectations are of the visual aspect of the game once most of the features / mechanics are in place. I'm a firm believer that a game should not play nor look like something from 12+ years ago. When you say you're building an MMO, you automatically open yourself up to all sorts of critique, and most people won't care how small the team is, or how much financing was behind the game. I guess questions should be: Can we expect a near complete overhaul of the graphics / animations some time between now and release? Is the current graphic / animations merely placeholders? If they had to pick a game to compare the end production visuals to, what would it be? Now don't misunderstand me, a game good look great and run like complete a*++#~~ (Wildstar for example). Regardless tho, people have standards and expectations. GW needs to make money to sustain the game, and how the game looks will be a considerably factor in whether or not people bother supporting it.

If you're looking for a reason to dislike the game, you'll find one. It's that way with every game (save possibly Portal).

Mechanically, if GW follows what it has stated the intent is, PFO will be mechanically superior to Darkfall and Mortal. It's a very different game.

Neither of those have anything to do with the question you asked, about the engine and reasons for using Unity over Unreal.

When I say mechanically, I generally mean how characters move, and interact with the world. Combat mechanics and such. For instance, you have a game like archage that is visually stunning, yet in most areas mechanically, it's archaic. PFO is looking to possibly launch against games like EQ Next (which will be a sandpark of sorts), which is looking to pretty much eclipse any title coming out the same year, and to a lesser extent camelot unchained (well if you've been keeping up with that game, is surprisingly similar in a lot of ways).

Getting way off topic now, but really I'm just curious what the goals are for the game visually.

It doesn't look like trash even now. It isn't skyrim.

Then again beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and wisdom in the ear of the listener.

Understandably the game won't look like skyrim, even x amount of years from now. Performance and optimization should obviously come first. I'm highly skeptical of small studios tackling projects like MMOs that have a lot of moving parts. I remember looking at the pantheon kickstarter "demo" and thinking to myself "I'll never support this", based entirely on just the look, even realizing it was on a tech demo. I'm just curious what GW's goals are for the game visually. Camelot Unchained has posted some renders, animation videos, and even some in-game footage, and while it's far from AAA quality graphics, it's respectable. From what I've seen of PFO, I wouldn't really consider it alpha grade quality, and the game looks like a pre-alpha (which is absolutely fine). Now I'm not here to bash the game, as someone that might be interested in buying in to the game, I'm honestly curious what the goals are for the "look" of PFO. Reading what ryan said sort of answered a few of my questions, but it also posed some more. I guess the question ultimately is what quality of graphics will be good enough to entice people to support the game enough to sustain it. I'd say in this day of age, anything less than vanilla wow quality is a no go.

Unity tends to be much, much faster to develop with than UDK. The newer UE4 is a lot faster to learn than the previous version, but still isn't as easy as Unity.

This basically boils it down to team size and how fast you're trying to develop. Unreal tends to be better for larger teams with a longer development cycle, and unity tends to be better for smaller teams with shorter development cycle.

What you're talking about with visuals though comes down more to the art department and resources. Advanced graphics that "blow your mind" take a lot more time, personnel, and money than GW development model supports right now. They're intent was minimum viable product that they can slowly advance as time moves on.

Unity can do very amazing things with graphics. It is very portable. However, it hasn't gained traction with a AAA title that has the resources to do those things really. Most unity games look similar on the graphics end because they have similar sized teams, with similar resources and similar development cycles.

I believe Ghost of a Tale is using Unity, and it has some pretty impressive visuals to me at least. Then again, the creator is an experienced animator, so that eliminates a lot of the graphics cost right there.

It was a good read, but I have a hard time believing it will work out. Trying to sell "the game looks like trash now, but in a couple of years, with paying subscribers, it's going to look great" is going to be very hard. You also have to factor how releavent will the game be by the time it's released not only visually, but mechanically in to the equation. There are decent looking indie mmos right now (dark fall online, mortal online) that don't even have the subscriber numbers that gw is looking for. Regardless I wish them the best.

I'm curious on what type of graphic / game engine PFO is being built on. I read some where that they're using Unity (which seems to be the go-to engine for just about every indie studio in existance). I guess the question is why not the unreal engine (epic seems to be pretty friendly towards smaller / indie studios), and it seems to bee extremely scalable. I haven't really encountered a Unity game that blew my mind visually. Obviously graphics aren't everything, but noone wants to play a game in the year 2014 (or 2016/17 when the game is supposedly going to be more open to the public), and have it look like something that was dragged out of the EQ-era. I guess the question is would this really be called an alpha, or an internal test. The term alpha has really changed in recent years (guild wars 2's alpha/core test was practically a complete and polished game. EQ Landmark is basically the alpha for next, and the game is very visually appealing). Either way, the game seems to have interesting ideas, and the developers seem committed.