Did you learn nothing from Neverwinter Nights?

[VulcanLogic]

Let me reflect on the latest world event. I thought it was pretty cool. But you know what? This is something any competent NWN scripter could have done (and many did). I'm serious here, because I've done it before and seen it before, in both modules and persistent world events (in fact the event reminded me of a PW server DM event). Now that's not to put down the event or the team in any way; I liked it and would like to see more events. My complaint is in the "spacing" of these events. Why do they take so long? Why such a gap when these things are comparatively small projects?

 

Let's talk about what kind of bottlenecks we're looking at. How much new art content was in the world event? The Chevin models and maybe the speeder? The bowcasters have been in art assets since beta, and the pet and armor are simple retextures. You used existing terrain, so no slowdown there. IP holder approval? LA approval can't be taking that much time. QA? Well, yeah, maybe you do need more QA, given that there were bugs, but that's a staffing question. The actual code behind the missions in the event was trivial (or at least should have been), so why not speed up the pace?

 

You could be putting out these world events much faster, and rather cheaply. If not, your tools are suffering from a functional deficiency that should be remedied immediately. Everything in the world event could have been done with the Aurora toolset (and a hakpak for VO work) by a single amateur, in under a week, and if it were me, it would have been bug free because I QA the hell out of my own work. And you have staff for that. Professional staff. Events such as the one I just played should not be on an 18 week schedule as they're too cheap and too easy compared to ops and WZs. You know it, I know, and the players now know it.

[Cavell]

You expect an awful lot out of two dudes on contract and an EA accountant, man.

[VulcanLogic]

You expect an awful lot out of two dudes on contract and an EA accountant, man.

 

Funny thing about that is, two dudes (Adam Miller and Fabian Cerutti) by themselves put out more content for NWN in their spare time than the entire staff of Bioware has put out for SWTOR in the last 5 months. Development costs and times, given good tools programming and practical use of middleware, should be going down, not up.

[DarthSabreth]

OP I for one am very grateful that they are making events, in my opinion i loved the rakghoul event allot, this event was fun but way too short but it was fun. I now have a nice Bowcaster and its awesome.

 

It may be taking them along time because they might be on a skeleton staff at the moment, layoffs are horrible for any company and they are prolly doing the best they can for now. it would be great if they ran these events at the same time each year, if they do the Rakghoul event its PVP fun in WZ'S all over again \o/

[VulcanLogic]

OP I for one am very grateful that they are making events, in my opinion i loved the rakghoul event allot, this event was fun but way too short but it was fun. I now have a nice Bowcaster and its awesome.

 

It may be taking them along time because they might be on a skeleton staff at the moment, layoffs are horrible for any company and they are prolly doing the best they can for now. it would be great if they ran these events at the same time each year, if they do the Rakghoul event its PVP fun in WZ'S all over again \o/

 

Oh yeah, definitely not putting down the event, I have two bowcasters and a full set of soon-to-be-legacy adaptive armor, which is nice. I'm just thinking about one, these kind of events driving persistent world servers in NWN, some of which are still running today, 10 years later, and two, that other MMO with its dozen world events. This is easy stuff. Some placeable objects, some code, a little bit of art and sound assets, QA, LA approval, and presto--fun for the whole family. Warzones and operations required an order of magnitude more art and QA. Still want to see those, too, don't get me wrong. But these fun little events, particularly if they are new writing and not mostly static like those in the other MMO, could make the game stand out.

[Jamus_Divinus]

Nvm, excuse my tired attempt at discussing your point. Edited August 22, 2012 by Jamus_Divinus

[VulcanLogic]

OP I see your point but I imagine there are some variables you haven't taken into account. I say that because no MMO releases events as quickly as your post suggest they could do. If it only takes a week or so how come no other MMO in history releases monthly/weekly events? There must be a reason you're overlooking.

 

I'm not suggesting weekly. The content created by an amateur NWN scripter or module designer isn't held to the same kind of scrutiny as a AAA MMO. But that's an individual, not a specialized team. Here's how it would go.

 

Writers come up with the concept for the event. There wasn't a whole lot of dialogue involved in either yet released event, but it still needs a story. I can't see this taking more than a week. They pass this to the technical designers and artists, and then go back to writing other things. The technical designers come up with the code for interacting with placeable objects, spawning enemies where needed, along with cutscene work and dialogue node work, then onto the item creation (stats), then go back to technical design on other things. The artists, if needed, make a new model or two, or rebake a few with new textures, then go on to other things. Script is passed to the sound guys, and the VO is recorded in a day or two (and you get the picture). Then it's passed to QA for a week or two, depending on scope. The final revisions are sent to Lucas Arts for approval, and then it goes live.

 

Seems like a month to 6 weeks, right? Well that's because it is. But each component could be done with different departments only spending a week or even a few days each on it. And we're not even talking about whole departments here (other than writing, they are going to get together), just a few guys and gals here and there. If it's not as trivial as I am describing it, then the underlying tools architecture is quite simply, not even as good as the Aurora toolset from 10 years ago. Which is my point. They should have learned from that.

Edited August 22, 2012 by VulcanLogic

[ChazDoit]

This is a very interesting post, OP. But remember, there are several teams working on Bioware and guys that put together the events probably moved on to work on other projects.

 

While putting together a little quest might be easy. I remember it took me 3 months to create an entire city with NPCs dialogues and it was a lot of work balancing the encounters to be challenging for everyone, specially for clerics since they were so incredibly OP.

[Karasuko]

Very intresting post. I guess the NWN guys didn't have the following to deal with.

 

Electronic Arts management.

[Thornsbane]

I know what you mean, however I imagine it must be in the testing. I made a bunch of the HoF modules for NVN and while you could put something together its the endless bug reports that come in afterwards that really boiled the goose, especially when you have tens of thousands of people downloading it immediately. I learnt a lot from that on the first mod. So naturally they must test a LOT more for SWTOR since any bugs at all make people QQ endlessly.

 

I do wonder about the length of time between updates as well though. This event, from what little I saw of it, was simply placing a few npc's and loot objects around an already made environment.

[VulcanLogic]

This is a very interesting post, OP. But remember, there are several teams working on Bioware and guys that put together the events probably moved on to work on other projects.

 

While putting together a little quest might be easy. I remember it took me 3 months to create an entire city with NPCs dialogues and it was a lot of work balancing the encounters to be challenging for everyone, specially for clerics since they were so incredibly OP.

 

Heh, don't i know it (OP clerics). But what happened with this world event was Nar Shaddaa was already built. So were Coruscant and Dromund Kaas. So was Tatooine on the previous event for that matter. A better comparison would have been to have taken your completed city, and put the event in that city, because that's exactly what happened here. And it was 10 quests, which barely exceeded the level of content for the story quests of one class for one or two planets. There are thousands of quests in the Old Republic. If 10 quests takes months, this game should have been in development for decades. That's all I'm sayin'.

[Goretzu]

Let me reflect on the latest world event. I thought it was pretty cool. But you know what? This is something any competent NWN scripter could have done (and many did). I'm serious here, because I've done it before and seen it before, in both modules and persistent world events (in fact the event reminded me of a PW server DM event). Now that's not to put down the event or the team in any way; I liked it and would like to see more events. My complaint is in the "spacing" of these events. Why do they take so long? Why such a gap when these things are comparatively small projects?

 

Let's talk about what kind of bottlenecks we're looking at. How much new art content was in the world event? The Chevin models and maybe the speeder? The bowcasters have been in art assets since beta, and the pet and armor are simple retextures. You used existing terrain, so no slowdown there. IP holder approval? LA approval can't be taking that much time. QA? Well, yeah, maybe you do need more QA, given that there were bugs, but that's a staffing question. The actual code behind the missions in the event was trivial (or at least should have been), so why not speed up the pace?

 

You could be putting out these world events much faster, and rather cheaply. If not, your tools are suffering from a functional deficiency that should be remedied immediately. Everything in the world event could have been done with the Aurora toolset (and a hakpak for VO work) by a single amateur, in under a week, and if it were me, it would have been bug free because I QA the hell out of my own work. And you have staff for that. Professional staff. Events such as the one I just played should not be on an 18 week schedule as they're too cheap and too easy compared to ops and WZs. You know it, I know, and the players now know it.

 

 

Don't think the Chevin models were new, I've seen them around in places since Beta.

[Thaed]

Chevin models were already in the game

[ChazDoit]

I would love to see monthly events, since we are paying a monthly fee.

 

But as I said before, I belive the teams that desinged the events moved on to work on other projects.

[jmnormand]

Im not sure if the problems is lack of staff, funding, or just all the red tape that comes with ea and bioware level companies, probably all of the above. But i fully agree this event although a fun little distraction, it was not at all AAA level content. Im really wondering if they ran in to major problems with the real content and just had to throw this in so they could say, yes we are adding new content. This event really feels like a weeks work for a very small team of programers at best. Throw in the lack of qa on this event, and it really worries me about what is going on behind the scenes at this point.

 

Really it points to two possibilities, they are either stalling till F2P goes live, or the potential sale of ea has put the breaks on all major development until they have a clear view of the companies future.

Edited August 22, 2012 by jmnormand

[_tegrof]

OP I see your point but I imagine there are some variables you haven't taken into account. I say that because no MMO releases events as quickly as your post suggest they could do. If it only takes a week or so how come no other MMO in history releases monthly/weekly events? There must be a reason you're overlooking.

 

Check out Rift. It was a new event almost weekly it seemed.

 

Constant new things to do and items to buy with the "comms" that dropped.

 

Code/Art re-use.

[Nydus]

I would love to see monthly events, since we are paying a monthly fee.

 

I think monthly events of this scale or perhaps smaller (a unique boss that pops up every once and a while) are exactly what this game needs and not beyond the resources of the dev team.

 

Larger events (like the Rakghoul Plague), it is completely understandable that those take longer; perhaps quarterly should be their target.

 

- Arcada

[Sir_Raston]

Asheron's call was doing monthly story updates/events before it was cool... it is possible, but given the (what I believe unnecessary) complexity of today's games, I'm sure there are things that need to be handled that NWN scripters (of which I used to be one too ) never had to deal with.

[VulcanLogic]

Asheron's call was doing monthly story updates/events before it was cool... it is possible, but given the (what I believe unnecessary) complexity of today's games, I'm sure there are things that need to be handled that NWN scripters (of which I used to be one too ) never had to deal with.

 

You hit the nail on the head, there, with "unnecessary complexity". This is the point of the thread, and if true this is absolutely a design flaw on the part of tools programming. No art was added, it seems, as the Chevin models were already there as well, so this should have been literally a drag and drop quest chain, with minimal technical design elements and next to no art (possibly none).

 

You know, I wrote a persistent quest system for Neverwinter Nights. Everything was done with templates, and all the designer had to do was plug in variables from a simple table to make everything from repeatable dungone lockouts to loot to camera angles work automatically, even with multiple players vying for the same result and all the abuse they could throw at it. If I can do that, with previous training only as extensive as QBASIC from the 1990s, there's no reason it couldn't have been made easier for the professionals of today. None. You can still have very robust tools without unnecessary complexity. That is the lesson that should have been learned from NWN.

Edited August 22, 2012 by VulcanLogic

[BrianDavion]

Asheron's call was doing monthly story updates/events before it was cool... it is possible, but given the (what I believe unnecessary) complexity of today's games, I'm sure there are things that need to be handled that NWN scripters (of which I used to be one too ) never had to deal with.

 

 

and turbine has now said that they won't do world events because they're not cost effective.

[SpazCats]

Im not sure if the problems is lack of staff, funding, or just all the red tape that comes with ea and bioware level companies, probably all of the above. But i fully agree this event although a fun little distraction, it was not at all AAA level content. Im really wondering if they ran in to major problems with the real content and just had to throw this in so they could say, yes we are adding new content. This event really feels like a weeks work for a very small team of programers at best. Throw in the lack of qa on this event, and it really worries me about what is going on behind the scenes at this point.

 

Really it points to two possibilities, they are either stalling till F2P goes live, or the potential sale of ea has put the breaks on all major development until they have a clear view of the companies future.

 

This has me worried too. The last event, although appreciated, had many bugs and, frankly, there just wasn't much there to do at all. Something must be going on behind the scenes if this is the "content" they release, especially being that we have been starved for new content for quite awhile now.