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Auto Assault level comparisons
A friend of mine pointed me to this thread on the AA forums. Sort of interesting stuff. As a dev, I found some of the responses telling, but I'm not sure I should be specific as to why - I don't want to reveal any intentions that the dev team still has, inadvertently. Still, it's a quick read - if you're a player, give it a look...
I was a little disappointed to hear they'd killed the Blood Lake in the mutant starter zone, though. I guess they changed their minds; you see - the whole reason that lake existed in the first place was to teach players that the world can hurt them. It was a post apocalyptic game, and an aspect of the post apocalypse is that it's a harsh harsh world. Dangerous environments were meant to be a part of the gameplay - learning to avoid hazardous environments at top speed was supposed to be an aspect of the game where player skilled mattered... and it does, in the later levels, so it's hard to understand why they decided to remove the tutorial aspect of this as the result is a big "surprise asshole!" to players the first time they end up in the drink, in fetid -- which I assure you, was never my intent.
Ah well, I suppose it's the downside to having three separate teams doing the content. Without a strong leader to unify all three visions, there were bound to be differences that affected the game adversely. Since the other two factions didn't meet the tutorial spec in regards to hazardous environments, it made my mutants look like the "wrong" ones, even though that was absolutely not the case. I wasn't there when they decided to "fix" it, but I can only assume that it was a (pardon the latest industry buzz word) "low hanging fruit" scenario - where removing the hazard in the one tutorial was easier than adding it (Even though that was the original plan), to the other two. I can't say that's how I would have done it, but I wasn't there.
I'm sure that from their point of view they did what was best for the game.
- Snipehunter
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pffft!
sorry but as soon as ombwah and yourself left, i lost intrest in the game.
well no acutaly, it took about a month in beta for a great deal of us to realise that things had gone tits up, the rashly added outpost system which was deployed at the END of beta, leaving no room for feedback or adjustment, was a stupid move, especially since that was one of the high ranking reasons why people were psyched about the game.
it still looks like the mutant areas are alittle nerfed in comparison to the other areas, and i dont know about now, but during the first month of retail, pvp was a joke, 1 level advantage gave you a distinct edge, and more than 2 levels ment you could probaly solo them, and a freind and still come out pretty good for wear.
there were so many good ideas, stories and methods you showed us testers, and allmost all of them ended up on the cutting room floor due to what i can only assume was the mentality that you have observed, the low hanging fruit strikes again.. people too lazy to do the good thing, and rather would do the easy task
Outposts are the problem child
Yeah, outposts were a really problematic issue near the end there. There was a point where we realized that we probably weren't going to get them done - the engineering time involved was going to be epic and we knew we had, at best, a few months left before we could ship (it turned out to be 5 total, but even that wasn't really enough to get them working right). We really did seriously consider not including them, but I and a few others pushed hard to get them in, since we had promised them to the community.
Eventually I came in on a weekend and made them work using pre-existing technologies on my own time. It was a breakthrough - in that this method made it possible to include them for ship at all - but I came to the realization on how to do it late in the game (about 3 weeks before I left), so I hadn't been testing them enough before I left to realize how bad our desynch issue really was. In my own testing, it seemed fine, but since it wasn't in the beta yet, I couldn't see that large groups of players essentially guaranteed desych. I handed my solution over to Squiggly and the engineers involved and went back to focusing on my content. Then I left, so I never got to see how they looked once in and working.
Oi, was that a mistake. What we should have done was put up a simple 2-3 outpost test map specifically to test that (like an arena version of cGZ) and let the beta community hammer on it, rather than waiting for Squiggly and his team to get that map in and done. They likely would have found the desynch issue much earlier and be a lot further along in fixing it, had we done so.
Squiggly knew as much as I did - that we were doing this under the wire and knew we really didn't have the time to do it right - but we both felt that delivering on the promise of outposts at all was better than not doing it, so he went ahead with it. I left a few weeks later, but I can tell you that even at that time, we didn't' realize how bad desynch really was - it seemed like a totally rare, not likely to really happen, problem. You're right - they should have, at the very least, delayed the ship date from april to may so that they could test outposts (or ship with cGZ turned of and continue to test it on a test server during that first month of live), but I can only imagine that the last couple of months on the dev side were an utterly chaotic mad dash to the finish line... so I'm sure they felt like they didn't have that option. It's easy to make that mistake when you've got deadline pressures mounting, a "brain drain" problem (where you talent is all looking for work elsewhere or already leaving) and a shoestring budget, like ND did. Exacerbating that was the fact that as devs, most of the ND team were 1st timers or "sophomores," with little to no real experience on how to role out products of the scope of Auto Assault. Many of us who had shipped previous products were already gone during the last 4 months of the game's push to launch. I think that cost ND more dearly than they expected. :(
I wish I had waited to leave, but that wasn't entirely my choice, so that's an idle regret - pretty much no matter what I did, things would have turned out that way. Truth be told, that was one of my frustrations as a dev on AA - no matter how experienced, you can only do so much, as a single person. We needed more time. We needed more people. We needed leadership that we didn't really have. We needed a publisher who was willing to commit both the time and money needed to make that happen, and we didn't have it - not by then.
- Snipehunter
Good times
Who was it that walked through the office and said "We can ship without Outposts or PvP - no-one will care." ?
I seem to remember those words...
Aye...:-(
I want to preface this with the fact that i love AA and when i can play it, up to the endgame it is a absolute blast. I love the 1-60 content. It is the 60-80 content i abhor.
Because of my new job my time with AA has gone to near Nil. The wife and other games have taken a priority. (Notably the Wii [Holy crud the wife is playing Zelda!!! My dream fantasy has come nearly true...now all i need to get is her with one of her friends....] and some PC and 360 games)
But to be frank, i kinda felt burned out. Without a significantly dedicated team and hours upon hours of heavy, heavy boring grinding i just stalled in the end game content. Scant missions are a big problem. It is very hard to find any missions to complete even in a group. Most are forced to group grind the coliseum or a specific boss creature for hours upon boring hours.
It really does feel like the 60-80 content was tacked on at the absolute last second with no real storyline or missions to tie it together. You come from excellent and heavily story driven 40-60 content that is nearly perfectly paced to a brick wall once you pass that GZ threshold. It fells like the only way to level is to repeatedly bash my head against that brick wall hoping that one day it might actually come down and i can join in on the PvP.
Now i am not sure how you guys felt about your partners down south, but I do feel that Andrew and his team are trying to do their best. Well as best they can with what they have got. He is a great guy and I really do believe that he loves this game and is trying to fix the problems with it.
The game was rushed to market too early, and I feel some bad marketing decisions beforehand cut the umbilical cord before this baby even was born.
We complained about how slow leveling was when they opened up GZ for us to test with level 60 characters. They should have known there was a big problem then when at 60, the level that we were supposed to be at when we entered the area, that it was nearly impossible to level. They really did not fix that except add a few dozen missions. Far from enought to level up.
But there is nothing that can be done about the past really. I guess that the best that can be done is to look at the errors made and just hope the project you are working on now does not fall into the same pitfalls this one did.
AA had some amazing potential. I feel really sad that so much of that was ignored by the public and some poor decisions left it half the game it could have been.
Now this is only my idea and from someone who has never made a game, just beta tested several. So take this with a huge heaping of doubt as to how good this idea is:
But what I would have done is to push the game with a soft cap at 60. Work on the arenas and keep them up and running to let the players have PvP. Then test like hell GZ and eventually when you feel it is ready open it up to public beta testing.
Zzyn, Moogle, Pann? Those folks?
They rocked! I *LOVED* working with them. Between them and the folks on our side who worked directly with me, I was actually pretty damned happy. I'm still rooting for AA and ND, in fact. NCSoft as a company, I'm not entirely sure about, yet. Blaming AA for their money problems felt a lot like dirty pool to me, and I'm not sure how I feel about that... but the people in the company like Andrew? They were very cool. I'm very glad to have worked with them.
I have my regrets about AA, but they're not really about people, they're about choices we made, or felt that we had to make, under the circumstances we dealt with. I wish I'd had the chance to address those regrets, but honestly even not being able to do so... I'm damned proud of what I and folks like Ombwah and Zirp managed to accomplish. In a lot of ways, we did the impossible; I just wish we'd been able to do more.
- Snipehunter
aye!
The few times i was able to talk to Pann she was great. I even was able to on occasion talk to both Moogle [Fluffy] and Zzyn. Both are amazing guys.
Andrew really has passion for the game and has let us know on the forums some amazing things he hopes to eventually get done. I believe that the latest updates like the auction house, new cars, e-mail, etc. were because of his efforts to make the game more enjoyable to play.
Moogle is just a funny guy. :-)
I absolutely love this game. It ranks as one of my favorite and memorable experiences in gaming. I still love just jumping in a car and smashing everything I see. :-)
If you put half of the effort i saw in AA as you will in your next unnamed game [hopes for a true Planetside successor, maybe even a Tribes Online MMO type game] It will be a great game story wise and design.
Now Ombwah and Zirp if you are reading this: get off your arses and let us know what you are doing so we can follow it. It might seem like kissing arse, but it is not. You guys showed alot of great ability to tell stories and create engaging levels. Why not support that in your next endevor? :-)
"Watch out for falling coconuts!"
i'm still interetsed in
i'm still interetsed in finding out what snipes current project is! :D
heh!
Super top secret, again. :( This one is like double plus top secret, too - I don't know when we're announcing it, at all... and it's "we'll kill you if you talk" until we announce it.
I can say, however, that I'm working with this guy. And let me tell you... That guy gets it - When I rant about what I think online games are missing, he understands. Not only that, but he's spent the last couple of years breaking new ground in directions that address damned near every issue I've ever had with online entertainment. I'm stoked to be a part of this. It's big. :D
- Snipehunter
*Heart Pounding* Dare I
*Heart Pounding*
Dare I say..a new Might and Magic? O.O
That's really exciting news, especially with you working it. Can't wait to hear about this project.
Pax Bionicus
Actually, it's TRIPLE-plus Top Secret...
*loads sniper rifle*
*aims at Snipehunter*
*throws self between the
*throws self between the bullet and Snipehunter*
*screams loudly in slow mo*
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo
Pax Bionicus
Blood Lake
Actually, we made blood lake non-lethal because it was probably the most complained-about feature in all three tutorial levels :-p.
I'm guessing the threads are still there in the forums with people complaining about their repeated deaths in Blood Lake. And that's only people who were hard-core enough to actually post on the forums about their experience. I'm guessing the casual players got massacred. ND was under the impression that the tutorials were still too hard for most people, and this seemed to be an easy way to make the tutorial less frustrating.
I certainly understand the ideals behind making the lake the way it was (I enjoyed it myself), but it just didn't seem to be working out all that well. And yeah, it's the low-hanging fruit thing - rather than try to re-make the area and improve it to better teach about hazards it was easier jsut to make it non-lethal.
Isn't that what I said? ;)
Isn't that what I said? ;) Sure I didn't outright say it, but why else would ND change its mind? If the player's weren't complaining it wouldn't have ever come up. However, I posit that the reasons players were complaining to the degree that they did is two fold:
1) There was no counterpoint in the other factions, making it a sole frustration for mutant players - that is, not a right of passage or a learning tool as it was intended, but rather a form of punishment reserved for the mutants, alone. This is why it was a huge "issue" instead of "oh I remember that, that was hard."
2) The truth is that their frustrations aren't even really about the water, they're about the crappy jump line on the bridge to get to the island, players just never realized that was the core of the issue. Had we fixed that, it would have been a non-issue regardless of the lack of parity between factions and the disregarded spec. That's where team green really dropped the ball on this issue. That's my gaff, and my cross to bear, sadly. We didn't spend nearly enough time getting the ramps on the bridge to work as intended, making it 10x more the chore than ever intended (you were never supposed to touch the water, falling in was supposed to be "possible" but "improbable" instead of the certainty that it pretty much was, at ship), but fuck what were we supposed to do? The fact that we got them at all was a minor miracle considering how crunched we were at the time.
Still, had all three factions met the spec, and done what we'd committed to doing, it would have been an entirely different issue that we would have had to solve "right" (polishing the whole hazardous environment experience), but because only the mutants did it, at all, the "obvious" fix is to address that one isolated area, in order to conserve time and resources. As a result, the entire game suffers - there's water elsewhere, so we should have made that work right instead of just cutting out the parts people complained the loudest about. Had we done so the entire game would have improved, instead of one area doing exactly the opposite. As it stands now, any water in the game still generates some ill-will and complaints. By addressing the community's complaint instead of addressing the community's issues, ND let the chance to improve slip away. I don't even fault them for that - I know how that happened and I'm sure had I been there it still would have happened that way, I'm just saying it's not the decision I'd have made, personally. But Scorch and crew all knew that, I railed about this ages ago, before I left ND - before you guys even changed the lake.
But that's neither here nor there; what's important is that Squiggly has posted on our comments! Dude, how's it going Squiggly? It's been a bit! How are things going with you? Are you still hard at work on Ground Zero and the PVP content? Or are you on Lego or Warmonger, now? Fuck for that matter, how's the whole CO crew? I miss you guys. :D
- Snipehunter
Mr_Squiggly!
We'll hear much more from Mr_Squiggly pretty soon ;D
Pax Bionicus
Huh, that's interesting...
...So there I was, pounding a diet rockstar at 1am, realizing I was going to be up for a bit and looking for something to do. What do I do? I go browse the AA forums (don't do it, it's depressing) and run across this thread again as I look at Yolanda's great post about the human levels.
Now, I don't actually agree with Yolanda, of course. The mutant experience is - of course - vastly superior to anything the other 3 factions has to offer. ;) However, it's a great post, and I have to admit that in terms of pure visual splendor, the back range was quite literally the best looking map the game had to offer when I was there. But what I found really interesting was his summary.
You see, in it he mentions the various subplots for each faction, which he lists as:
- Human: Zendigs
- Mutant: INC
- Biomek: Tempernet
I was on the way to violently disagreeing with Yolanda (my point of disagreement being that he's got human and mutant backwards) when it suddenly occurred to me to really think about it and figure out how Yolanda came to that conclusion.
After all, in my mind Sanctuary and its Zendigs, or perhaps the Scavs throughout, formed major subplots (at least in my mind :P ) for the mutant story. But you know, as I thought about it, it occurred to me that that's not really true.
INC is the only story besides the main arc that actually progresses through all zones (a player's career), in mutantdom. I used the scavs more as a plot device (or in some cases as a voice of reason in a surreal world), and the Zendigs were really, as one poster said about the human's Zendigs, more an "interlude" than a full arc.
I personally wrote all of the INC missions in the 3 mutant zones. I did not write all of the scavs. While I did write the Zendigs in Sanctuary, I only wrote those Zendigs. Really Omie's zones did all the heavy lifting for the Zendigs (though I admit a specific fondness for Sanctuary over all other Zendigs), too. Yolanda is right.
Without even meaning to, I had written INC as a major subplot. INC's story is so cool and I wanted to give players as many hints as I could without giving it away that I'd tied all the missions together (though not obviously so in some cases) into a single story (your getting deeper and deeper into INC's inner workings) without actually intending to do so. I really only started writing the INC missions to support and back up what Omie was doing with them in the human land, the whole time intending to leave the major "meat" of INC for Stalwart tower on the Human side. We wanted the only ways to get an even remotely clear picture of INC to be playing both factions or - better yet - discussing what you know with the community at large.
I'm really happy with the INC stuff from both factions and I have to admit that I get a big grin and go "daw!" when I see people unraveling the mystery of INC on the forums. Unfortunately, I wasn't involved with the INC missions in Ground Zero, they were after my time so I actually don't know what parts of that little enigma were revealed there. (I ruefully admit that I haven't gotten a character to 80 since I left and back then many of the missions weren't yet in GZ)
Though I never did actually ask Omie, I always sort of suspected that INC was meant to be his major subplot. Stalwart being the cherry on the sundae, you know? I wonder if the massive Zendig presence was something of the same ilk as my INC "subplot."
Anyway, I found the whole thing sort of interesting, and I wanted to give a shout out to Yolanda - he was right even if I didn't mean it to be so, when I started writing those missions. :D
- Snipehunter