Over the last month I've noticed two things. One is an increasing number of negative comments about how long things are taking. More than one have mentioned that we haven't shown nearly as much progress as we should have after 4-5 years. While it may seem counterintuitive I am reasonably sure that this trend is a reaction to the significant PROGRESS that has been made. Patience is easy when you know you are years and years away from the goal. Patience is ...less easy .... when if everything goes JUST right you may be a year or less away. Speeding up by three months when you are four years away hardly seems to mean anything. Speeding up by three months when you are a year away is HUGE.
Note that I am not saying that we are a year away or that speeding up by this much is possible. or that saying so would be good even if it was possible. I am trying to put myself in the shoes of the people whose comments I am discussing. People that have supported the game far longer than I have so I intend no disrespect or criticism. I don't see the comments as a sign of abandonning the game I see them as a reaction to GOOD things such as the huge win in voting for most looked forward to MMO, the last stream, release of more and more details etc. I suspect that, having gotten the impatience out of their systems with a few ...pointed ..... comments on how lhe process is going, we may see less of that for a while. Then again we may not, I am no prophet.
Note also that when I say "increasing number of negative comments" I am referring to a very SMALL number of comments in either absolute or percentage terms. Notable only because the tone here has been almost uniformly positive since I have joined so that even one negative comment stands out. The great bulk of posts here remain quite positive and even the less positive ones contain at least as much in the way of constructive suggestions as criticism.
I said two things. The other, and the reason for this post, is a regular stream of new pledgers some of whom have contributed significant amounts. The number of new people introducing themselves this late into the porcess is nice - we are not running solely on what was raised years ago. This brings me to the caption for this thread.
Kilsin said in the recent finale to another thread "take into consideration how much progress we have made over the 2.5 years since we scrapped the game and started fresh with a lean but mean team of devs." Anyone newish that hasn't done a fairly extensive look through old threads here may be taking the references to our being 4-5 years into development as a really negative thing - it shouldn't take that long unless things are going quite badly. Frankly, being newish myself although relatively active since I joined, I took it at face value and occasionally said to myself "oh Gods have I jumped onto a sinking ship here?" I had NO idea that the CURRENT game is 2.5 years into development. Granted it is not a GOOD thing that that the team had to start over, and 2.5 years is not a SHORT time period. But the current rate of progress and where we are now and the ramping up of the team makes me feel that things are going WELL given the nature of the funding. Games with many many millions of dollars poured into them by major corporations take years too. Whereas if we were 4.5 years into development with no restart I wouldn't want to say it here but I would be thinking that the odds on the ship going down weren't all that low.
So since the 2.5 year comment at the end of a different thread seemed enormously positive to this relatively new person who hadn't bothered to research the history of the effort before joining - compared to the 4-5 years since the very first efforts started - I thought it was worth highlighting it in a separate thread with a caption calling attention to it.
Thank you for giving us such an honest post. It is true that waiting can be hard. You see, its not just how long it has been in development. There is a lack of great Fantasy MMO games to choose from. I imagine the community could agree that anticipation of a great thing over a long duration can cause a rolercoaster of doubt and excitement. Just keep doing what you are doing and we will all rally and celebrate your efforts in the end. Thank you and the team for working so hard to give us that great MMO we are hoping for.
It's like they say "a watched pot never boils". Sometimes you have to step back and look away for a while, lest you get too impatient.
I know I've had to stop following the games development on more than one occasion, since the 2014 KS, and come back fresh many months later to see how things have progressed.
Well, you see, there is this 80/20 Pareto law which is more a 70/30 that any computer development (approximately) follows .
With constant ressources it takes 30 % of the total time to get 70 % of a project done and the problem are the last 30 % .
So if I directly apply this law to Pantheon, I conclude that it will be either 100 % finished around 2021 or it will be released earlier in a less than 90 % finished state .
Unless the ressources triple :)
Deadshade said:Well, you see, there is this 80/20 Pareto law which is more a 70/30 that any computer development (approximately) follows .
With constant ressources it takes 30 % of the total time to get 70 % of a project done and the problem are the last 30 % .
So if I directly apply this law to Pantheon, I conclude that it will be either 100 % finished around 2021 or it will be released earlier in a less than 90 % finished state .
Unless the ressources triple :)
That's some terrible math, how can you say that 70% of the project took 30% of the time, that's ludicrous, MMO's are the games that take the longest to create, VR doing 70% of the work in 30% of the time would mean they would spend the next 5 years doing the finishing touches? Ye I don't think so.
I will admit I am ready to play Pantheon now, even in a Pre-Alpha state. I know my wife and I would kill it even if it is unpolished. That being said, I want VR to take the time they need. Freaking out only makes you look silly when you face the fact. If they build an awesome game, you will play it, even if you have to wait another 2-3 years. Also, VR has never made a promise of a release date I can find. Just we hope to, we would like to. So there is nothing to get mad about.
I'll try to just boil this down to bare bones. Not directed at anyone specifically. Just some things I’ve observed from my own life and these forums, so they seem applicable to share here:
1. Expectations are the enemy of happiness. Think about it... setting any kind of expectation doesn’t actually do anything. It may make you feel good while you can dwell in your blissful delusion, but it just opens up the possibility of being disappointed when reality comes knocking at your door. When reality does not end up matching the predicted reality that you created in your head, that’s disappointment and it’s obviously not very pleasant. And the natural reaction is to then get defensive of your mental happy place, so it’s only downhill from there. Being promised something and then having that promise broken is one thing. But I can't think of anything that VR has actually promised. If VR says something vague and then you jump to the nearest conclusion that fits your ideal scenario, that's on you. No one else. People often do this more than they realize. Myself included.
2. Similarly, another way to guarantee your own unhappiness is trying/pretending to control things that you actually have no control over. People naturally crave control and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But let's be real: Regardless of how much money you donated, unless you're actually writing code, you have exactly zero effect on when the game comes out. In fact, nothing you say or do will make the game release a minute sooner. So if you can't just sit back and enjoy the show, you're just going to drive yourself crazy for literally no reason.
To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't voice their opinions about what they want. I know VR wants to hear from people and in some cases, it makes a tangible difference. That's awesome. It's just key to remember to keep things in perspective - that maybe your opinion isn't as important as you think it is or maybe there's more to the situation than you are aware of. In fact, there's always more to the situation than you or I or anyone is aware of. It is very difficult, yet very possible, to keep your emotions in check while also being passionate. Finding that fine line is the best place to be.
Well said Doro - I hope this thread does not end up in the gutter too.
While I don't disagree with your post, you have to realize that a lot of us here, have been here since the kickstarter which was what 4 years ago? The fact that the game was scraped and restarted (which depending on the person can be bad or good, for me its bad because I knew a couple of the old devs and they both did amazing work) doesn't change the fact that we have been here supporting the game for years and years. So some people are begining to feel that burn after so long. That doesn't mean they don't care or want the best for the game, they simply want to see progress.
More and more people have been coming to the game now. More and more devs are being added. But what's been shown for all of that? There has been no class reveal in 9 months (apart from the shaman reveal in the stream) when this was supposed to be a few a year if I remember correctly. There have been 2 new zones added, we haven't seen anything from them. It's like we continuously get the same rehashed stuff over and over from a different angle. So yes people who have been knowing all of this information for months, feel burned and slighted.
My hype level since decemeber has honestly dropped below that of the new EQ TLP now. The time line for the game is what a year or more behind now? No new info, not rehashed but actual new info. I get they want to keep things close and I agree with that but you have to feed people something new occasionally. Otherwise the only thing to do is sit on these forums telling all the new people about the past few years while telling everyone else to hang on its coming .... it's been coming for 3 years and it seems to be no closer.
Pantheon is only about 1.5 years into development. They basically started over in the middle of 2015.
Also keep in mind that "the game" as you saw in the Kickstarter was like a single area with really basic stuff. Then you consider the team left and they had to build it back up. They were not back developing until mid/late 2014. So they lost maybe 6-8 months of work by a handful of people due to starting over. I can't imagine it was a lot.
Also keep in mind that Brad recently talked about needing to hire more environmental artist and world builders. Building the world/art, I believe, takes the most time of anything in the game. Most of the work being done right now is on behind the scenes stuff that you don't see in the game; the code. Sorta like the plumbing and electrical in your home. What you see in screenshots and streams is the graphics which is actually pretty trival in the grand scheme of the game. New models, animations, etc., is low priority relative to game code.
>So yes people who have been knowing all of this information for months, feel burned and slighted. <
Definitely understood. I myself have encouraged VR to be a bit more specific in more than one of these threads. And I tried in this post to avoid any hint of criticism of people who are ...less than happy about the extent of information we have or the speed of revealed progress. They have more time and emotion invested in all this than I have had time to build up and a longer baseline of activity here against which to analyze current progress.
But I did think it was good to point out for those less familiar with the history of this effort that there had been a restart and why I thought this fact was a positive not a negative in terms of analyzing where we stand today.
For Clarification;
The Kickstarter failed on February 23, 2014, today is March 17, 2017, for the USA (March 18 for AU and other parts of the world at the time of this post)
That is 3 years 1 month, after the first 12 months (roughly) we scrapped 80-90% of the game and started fresh, so for accuracy we are 2.1 years into development of what you see now, in what usually takes ~5 years, we have explained that with Unity and current technology we can speed that up a lot and bring it down to 3-4 years if everything goes well (funding, no major issues or development hurdles etc.) so while we are still a way off the full release we are progressing very nicely, hitting all of our targets and milestones and continually showing measurable progress which is great to see.
If we had more money, we could hire more staff ion very time-consuming areas like world building, art, programming etc. we have a great team now, don't get me wrong and they are some of the most passionate and hard-working people I have ever worked with but they are only human and can only do so much at a time and some of us do the jobs of several people and are still able to produce quality work and lots of it but more help in some areas would help us pump out more things.
Hopefully, that helps clear things up and gives people accurate information to discuss and this should help put things into perspective.
Kilsin said:For Clarification;
The Kickstarter failed on February 23, 2014, today is March 17, 2017, for the USA (March 18 for AU and other parts of the world at the time of this post)
That is 3 years 1 month, after the first 12 months (roughly) we scrapped 80-90% of the game and started fresh, so for accuracy we are 2.1 years into development of what you see now, in what usually takes ~5 years, we have explained that with Unity and current technology we can speed that up a lot and bring it down to 3-4 years if everything goes well (funding, no major issues or development hurdles etc.) so while we are still a way off the full release we are progressing very nicely, hitting all of our targets and milestones and continually showing measurable progress which is great to see.
If we had more money, we could hire more staff ion very time-consuming areas like world building, art, programming etc. we have a great team now, don't get me wrong and they are some of the most passionate and hard-working people I have ever worked with but they are only human and can only do so much at a time and some of us do the jobs of several people and are still able to produce quality work and lots of it but more help in some areas would help us pump out more things.
Hopefully, that helps clear things up and gives people accurate information to discuss and this should help put things into perspective.
Thank you for clarifying. This information has been discussed before but never at this level of detail.
dorotea said:>So yes people who have been knowing all of this information for months, feel burned and slighted. <
Definitely understood. I myself have encouraged VR to be a bit more specific in more than one of these threads. And I tried in this post to avoid any hint of criticism of people who are ...less than happy about the extent of information we have or the speed of revealed progress. They have more time and emotion invested in all this than I have had time to build up and a longer baseline of activity here against which to analyze current progress.
But I did think it was good to point out for those less familiar with the history of this effort that there had been a restart and why I thought this fact was a positive not a negative in terms of analyzing where we stand today.
It's been pointed out before by myself and others, but normally you don't even see the game at this point in development. If it was fully funded by a publisher it may very well not even of been announced yet. That's why it seems like other games "progress quicker" becuase most of the work is done before you even find out about it.
Personally I don't really get the negative comments. It's being built, the devs are obviously passionate about it and the vision is slowly but steadily becoming reality. It'll take the time it takes. Of course I'd love to play it now but that simply isn't happening yet. Patience is all it takes, I don't see a reason to despair. At all.
It would be fine if people discussed it as it being their feeling. That's ok of course. I do find it a bit obnoxious and silly tho when people start stating things as 'facts' and 'truth', and call everyone who has patience and faith 'naive fanboys'. The conversation basically ends there. It would be better if they'd contemplate whether they truly are wronged by the devs or whether it's simply (a lack of) managing expectations. To me it seems the latter but I may be missing something.
Also consider the success rate of MMORPG's in the past decade, I would say it's probably pretty low. When you think about it, how many companies started from where VR has and come this far in this field. VR has a great foundation of talented developers that seperates them from the others, and they will succeed because of it.
I have concerns and would do things differently here and there just like others. I even express it now and again in a proper way, but I don't bring a negative attitude with me everytime I post like it seems others do.
Sorte said:Manouk said:Deadshade said:Unless the ressources triple :)
*looks at pledge choices page and drums fingers while looking at current level compared to others and drums fingers some more*
You and me both :)
-sorte.
My gf and I plan on spending at least 300 more on pledges and getting 2 new computers in the next year. I need to see something that excites me before I want to spend more though.
My gf and I plan on spending at least 300 more on pledges and getting 2 new computers in the next year. I need to see something that excites me before I want to spend more though.
Catch 22'ish. Funding speeds progress in which to show you, but funding is withheld until they have stuff to show you.
I will step up and increase my pledge. And everyone play the lottery and become an investor if you win the millions ;) lol.
Truly, I do wish there was more I could do to help, regardless of how mundane. I wish they would create volunteer positions, legal reasons be damned.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and am not affiliated with any game studio, the Pantheon development team, nor do I have any specific knowledge of the Pantheon game architecture. Any opinions expressed about Microsoft products, other companies, or game development are my own, based on previous experience outside Microsoft.
I spent some time in the games industry and still get a little defensive by posts from people who believe making a full scale MMO should only take a few years. I can't tell you how many game play systems I worked on that were completely scrapped because what seemed fun on paper wasn't so fun when implemented in game. The fact that this team has made this much progress without 100s of people is quite amazing. WoW took 10 years with a team size that eventually ramped up to over 100 strong. Taking on the challenge of a full-scale MMO, with a small team, requires a significant amount of skill and experience, across all the industry disciplines, to pull off successfully. Even though my experience is mostly related to distributed systems, networking and server side game play development, keep in mind that a game is a lot more than just programming. All the disciplines involved in creating a game are focused on one common goal and that is to create a fun and exciting game play experience that tells a story, has meaningful entertainment value, and hopefully has a lasting impact on the players. A lasting impact means players will want to share that experience with their friends and when that starts to happen, you know you've delivered meaningful entertainment value. This effort takes a significant amount of time to get right and it MUST be right or it's better not to ship anything. In my opinion, delivering meaningful entertainment value is where the real reward is for both the developer and the player. All money does is pay the bills so you can keep living the dream!
What follows is a shallow attempt to try and provide some sense of why this effort is so time consuming, from my perspective. I will only be able to scratch the surface and by scratch, I mean a light nick. It's an enormously complex problem space. Using an engine like UE4 or Unity helps but to get AAA quality, it only helps a little. Under the hood, the foundation of many games looks like a mini operating system with memory managers, file systems, etc. If you think managed code (like C# or Java) saves you from memory management, you'd be wrong. Arbitrarily allocating memory creates garbage that needs to be collected each frame and you will see noticeable spikes in framerate if you don't properly manage memory using pools of pre-allocated objects or some other related strategy. So, one can't assume memory is infinite, based on a scale up model, or that the garbage collector will take care of everything. As minor and small as this example is, in the grand scheme of the whole game, it takes time and planning to get even this right.
Then there are the other related subsystems like graphics, physics, etc. Again, using a 3rd party engine helps, however, one should remember that an MMO typically uses an authoritative server architecture, which means the game runs on the server, not the client. This is a mechanism used to help prevent people from cheating. If the entire game ran on the client, one could patch memory, remove obstacles, etc. Typically, the client's only purpose is to render static geometry and a view of game state, from the server, on a periodic basis. It may also use prediction algorithms to make the simulation appear to be running in real-time, between server updates. So, while a game engine like Unity or UE4 may exist on the client, the server is either all custom code or some combination of custom code mixed with instances of the game engine running in headless mode for physics, ai, etc. For example, one game I worked on involved exporting geometry from unity, converting it to a physx serialized format, and then importing that into a custom C++ based PhysX server instance for server side movement, collision, etc. That one system and related tools took many months to get right.
With an authoritative server architecture, one must make sure that all connected clients are kept in sync with the server based simulation, while still maintaining the appearance of a real-time simulation on each connected client. This is another example of a time-consuming system that players take for granted. For example, if I were to press forward on my keyboard a prediction algorithm might provide me with immediate visual feedback, however, it may take 10 milliseconds (or longer depending on distance and other factors) to propagate the move update (speed/velocity) to the server and then to your client for rendering. How do clients compensate for this time delay, imposed by physics, and still maintain the fidelity of a real-time experience on every client? There are a few strategies (dead reckoning is a simple example), but it boils down to using prediction algorithms, between server updates, while leveraging smoothing algorithms to interpolate the remote player towards the server stated position when a server update arrives on a client. Another challenge to consider is how should updates to thousands of remote clients be prioritized to avoid network saturation? One way to manage this is leveraging an "area of interest" algorithm to make sure that clients only receives updates for objects that are in "view". I'm greatly over-simplifying this problem but this is a huge amount of work for a small team, especially when you consider the scale requirements of an MMO.
Depending on the architecture, the world is typically divided up into regions and each region is managed by a different server. As you roam around the world, your state is transferred from one region server to another. In a seamless world, how would area of interest work when you're at the edge of one region looking into the space occupied by another region server? Remember, the region server that owns your player state doesn't know about objects in other regions so how do you get updates for objects in other regions when the server your state resides in has no knowledge of those objects? Then there's server based entity/actor systems, general game play features that we all interact with, GUI design, persisting game state to storage (sql/nosql database or possibly in memory cache backed by a durable store), collecting telemetry, logging, and networking, etc. Many games don't use stock network protocols. For example, you may need the connectionless transmission properties of UDP but also require some of the reliability features provided by TCP. That means someone must layer the additional reliability features on top of the UDP protocol. There are also a host of new architectures out there to consider, like the cloud (AWS, Azure), micro-services, using the actor model with frameworks like Microsoft Orleans or Akka. Again, huge over-simplifications, however, these problems require time consuming research and effort.
What about the build system, content pipeline, etc.? Designers, programmers, and artists all generate content that must be assembled, compiled, and then packaged to produce a game build. I've only touched on a few network/server related systems but consider the countless hours that graphics/game play programmers, game designers, artists, producers, sound, and other industry professionals put in to make a fun and immersive game play experience while managing the expectations of the community at the same time. Consider the countless hour’s artists put into creating compelling content that must capture the vision, look, and feel of the game. This isn't just about churning out a bunch of random models. It's all about the culmination of small details that are combined in a masterful way to create an immersive game play experience that properly lines up with the games vision, art style, etc. Small details like, does the base color used for an outdoor environment work for a given scene or does the lighting need to be tweaked to create the mood the designers had in mind for the level. Camera angles, animation speed, shader tweaks, rules and lore (this is another big one), etc. It takes a huge amount of time, consideration, and experimentation to get all this these things right.
Making games isn't about rushing a game out the door as quickly as possible, to meet the demands of impatient players. As I mentioned previously, it’s all about creating an experience that connects with players, in a meaningful way, and delivers entertainment value that you can take pride in. I can provide a firsthand example of what happens when games are rushed out the door with no care or concern for fun. Just look at Zynga's stock price today compared to just before going public. When Zynga bought our studio, it was the beginning of the end. Zynga makes games where fun literally goes to curl up in the fetal position and die a slow painful death. I still have black stains on my soul from working there. They did not care about fun or creating a meaningful experience for players, they were all about driving game development through telemetry that determined what features made the most money or by copying other games. Your game genre or vision was totally irrelevant. If telemetry said a feature made money, come hell or high water, that feature was going in your game. If your studio wasn't ticking off 1m in revenue a day with over 10k DAU, it was a five-alarm fire. In no way am I comparing Zynga to VR. I'm simply providing an example of what happens when we focus on the wrong things. The focus needs to be on delivering fun and entertainment value not catering to impatient players.
When a game is truly fun, immersive, and engaging it provides a meaningful entertainment experience that is worth something. It also has the potential to have an emotional impact on players. This is worth being patient for! If a movie is successful in delivering a high-quality entertainment experience which, viewers connect with, people will not only pay to see the movie once, they'll pay to see it more than once as they try to recapture their original experience. Furthermore, when people see a movie like that, they are more likely to invite friends so that they can share the impact of their experience with others. I want Pantheon to be that kind of movie! So, waiting the appropriate amount of time required to deliver that kind of experience is worth the wait, unless all we're interested in is a Zynga cow clicker. In which case I will proceed to gouge my eyes out with a pencil :)
It used to suck all the motivation right out of me when I would hear player complaints that were grounded in unrealistic expectations because they didn't fully understand or appreciate the monumental effort required to pull this off successfully. There's this thing called "crunch" in the games industry. For our studio that meant 12 to 14 hour days 7 days a week, sometimes for months. If you did something like that in corporate America, the whole team would quit. This is a passion industry and getting it right is important. Delivering engaging game play, in the form of an MMO, where the technology is specifically designed to emphasize an experience that provides meaningful entertainment value which, has a lasting impact on the players is what it's all about. If I were in the industry and didn't think I could achieve that, as a developer, then I may as well go back to the drawing board until I figure it out. Shipping nothing is better than shipping crap that provides no entertainment value.
Bottom line, complaining about anything, related to development time, is totally insane at this point. The progress I've seen in the short time I’ve been part of the community is amazing, especially considering the team size and the short amount of time the game has been in development. Not to mention that this progress is AFTER starting over once. Crazy! It's a testament to the skill, experience, and commitment of this team. I'd rather wait a few more years, if that's what it takes to deliver a meaningful social game play experience that connects with players and delivers durable entertainment value. That's what I want to be part of and that's the experience I'm betting on with my investment. The concept of delivering meaningful entertainment value has been totally lost in the sea of assorted "theme park" MMOs where they check off a bunch of feature boxes but don't deliver any value that engages players.
EDIT: Oops, just noticed I had one last update sitting in the browser that I hadn't submitted yet, just grammatical stuff. :)
ScoutSniper said:Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and am not affiliated with any game studio, the Pantheon development team, nor do I have any specific knowledge of the Pantheon game architecture. Any opinions expressed about Microsoft products, other companies, or game development are my own, based on previous experience outside Microsoft.
I spent some time in the games industry and still get a little defensive by posts from people who believe making a full scale MMO should only take a few years. I can't tell you how many game play systems I worked on that were completely scrapped because what seemed fun on paper wasn't so fun when implemented in game. The fact that this team has made this much progress without 100s of people is quite amazing. WoW took 10 years with a team size that eventually ramped up to over 100 strong. Taking on the challenge of a full-scale MMO, with a small team, requires a significant amount of skill and experience, across all the industry disciplines, to pull off successfully. Even though my experience is mostly related to distributed systems, networking and server side game play development, keep in mind that a game is a lot more than just programming. All the disciplines involved in creating a game are focused on one common goal and that is to create a fun and exciting game play experience that tells a story, has meaningful entertainment value, and hopefully has a lasting impact on the players. A lasting impact means players will want to share that experience with their friends and when that starts to happen, you know you've delivered meaningful entertainment value. This effort takes a significant amount of time to get right and it MUST be right or it's better not to ship anything. In my opinion, delivering meaningful entertainment value is where the real reward is for both the developer and the player. All money does is pay the bills so you can keep living the dream!
What follows is a shallow attempt to try and provide some sense of why this effort is so time consuming, from my perspective. I will only be able to scratch the surface and by scratch, I mean a light nick. It's an enormously complex problem space. Using an engine like UE4 or Unity helps but to get AAA quality, it only helps a little. Under the hood, the foundation of many games looks like a mini operating system with memory managers, file systems, etc. If you think managed code (like C# or Java) saves you from memory management, you'd be wrong. Arbitrarily allocating memory creates garbage that needs to be collected each frame and you will see noticeable spikes in framerate if you don't properly manage memory using pools of pre-allocated objects or some other related strategy. So, one can't assume memory is infinite, based on a scale up model, or that the garbage collector will take care of everything. As minor and small as this example is in the grand scheme of the whole game, it takes time and planning to get even this right.
Then there are the other related subsystems like graphics, physics, etc. Again, using a 3rd party engine helps, however, one should remember that an MMO typically uses an authoritative server architecture, which means the game runs on the server, not the client. This is a mechanism used to help prevent people from cheating. If the entire game ran on the client, one could patch memory, remove obstacles, etc. Typically, the client's only purpose is to render static geometry and a view of game state, from the server, on a periodic basis. It may also use prediction algorithms to make the simulation appear to be running in real-time, between server updates. So, while a game engine like Unity or UE4 may exist on the client, the server is either all custom code or some combination of custom code mixed with instances of the game engine running in headless mode for physics, ai, etc. For example, one game I worked on involved exporting geometry from unity, converting it to a physx serialized format, and then importing that into a custom C++ based PhysX server instance for server side movement, collision, etc. That one system and related tools took many months to get right.
With an authoritative server architecture, one must make sure that all connected clients are kept in sync with the server based simulation, while still maintaining the appearance of a real-time simulation on each connected client. This is another example of a time-consuming system that players take for granted. For example, if I were to press forward on my keyboard a prediction algorithm might provide me with immediate visual feedback, however, it may take 10 milliseconds (or longer depending on distance and other factors) to propagate the move update (speed/velocity) to the server and then to your client for rendering. How do clients compensate for this time delay, imposed by physics, and still maintain the fidelity of a real-time experience on every client? There are a few strategies (dead reckoning is a simple example), but it boils down to using prediction algorithms, between server updates, while leveraging smoothing algorithms to interpolate the remote player towards the server stated position when a server update arrives on a client. Another challenge to consider is how should updates to thousands of remote clients be prioritized to avoid network saturation? One way to manage this is leveraging an "area of interest" algorithm to make sure that clients only receives updates for objects that are in "view". I'm greatly over-simplifying this problem but this is a huge amount of work for a small team, especially when you consider the scale requirements of an MMO.Depending on the architecture, the world is typically divided up into regions and each region is managed by a different server. As you roam around the world, your state is transferred from one region server to another. In a seamless world, how would area of interest work when you're at the edge of one region looking into the space occupied by another region server? Remember, the region server that owns your player state doesn't know about objects in other regions so how do you get updates for objects in other regions when the server your state resides in has no knowledge of those objects? Then there's server based entity/actor systems, general game play features that we all interact with, GUI design, persisting game state to storage (sql/nosql database or possibly in memory cache backed by a durable store), collecting telemetry, logging, and networking, etc. Many games don't use stock network protocols. For example, you may need the connectionless transmission properties of UDP but also require some of the reliability features provided by TCP. That means someone must layer the additional reliability features on top of the UDP protocol. There are also a host of new architectures out there to consider, like the cloud (AWS, Azure), micro-services, using the actor model with frameworks like Microsoft Orleans or Akka. Again, huge over-simplifications, however, these problems require time consuming research and effort.
What about the build system, content pipeline, etc.? Designers, programmers, and artists all generate content that must be assembled, compiled, and then packaged to produce a game build. I've only touched on a few network/server related systems but consider the countless hours that graphics/game play programmers, game designers, artists, producers, sound, and other industry professionals put in to make a fun and immersive game play experience while managing the expectations of the community at the same time. Consider the countless hour’s artists put into creating compelling content that must capture the vision, look, and feel of the game. This isn't just about churning out a bunch of random models. It's all about the culmination of small details that are combined in a masterful way to create an immersive game play experience that properly lines up with the games vision, art style, etc. Small details like, does the base color used for an outdoor environment work for a given scene or does the lighting need to be tweaked to create the mood the designers had in mind for the level. Camera angles, animation speed, shader tweaks, rules and lore (this is another big one), etc. It takes a huge amount of time, consideration, and experimentation to get all this these things right.
Making games isn't about rushing a game out the door as quickly as possible, to meet the demands of impatient players. As I mentioned previously, it’s all about creating an experience that connects with players, in a meaningful way, and delivers entertainment value that you can take pride in. I can provide a firsthand example of what happens when games are rushed out the door with no care or concern for fun. Just look at Zynga's stock price today compared to just before going public. When Zynga bought our studio, it was the beginning of the end. Zynga makes games where fun literally goes to curl up in the fetal position and die a slow painful death. I still have black stains on my soul from working there. They did not care about fun or creating a meaningful experience for players, they were all about driving game development through telemetry that determined what features made the most money or by copying other games. Your game genre or vision was totally irrelevant. If telemetry said a feature made money, come hell or high water, that feature was going in your game. If your studio wasn't ticking off 1m in revenue a day with over 10k DAU, it was a five-alarm fire. In no way am I comparing Zynga to VR. I'm simply providing an example of what happens when we focus on the wrong things. The focus needs to be on delivering fun and entertainment value not catering to impatient players.
When a game is truly fun, immersive, and engaging it provides a meaningful entertainment value that is worth something. It also has the potential to have an emotional impact on players. This is worth being patient for! If a movie is successful in delivering a high-quality entertainment experience, that speaks to the viewers in a meaningful way, people will not only pay to see the movie once, they'll pay to see it more than once as they try to recapture that initial experience. Furthermore, when people see a movie like that, they are more likely to invite friends so that they can share the impact of their experience with others. I want Pantheon to be that kind of movie! So, waiting the appropriate amount of time required to deliver that kind of experience is worth the wait, unless all we're interested in is a Zynga cow clicker. In which case I will proceed to gouge my eyes out with a pencil :)
It used to suck all the motivation right out of me when I would hear player complaints that were grounded in unrealistic expectations because they didn't fully understand or appreciate the monumental effort required to pull this off successfully. There's this thing called "crunch" in the games industry. For our studio that meant 12 to 14 hour days 7 days a week, sometimes for months. If you did something like that in corporate America, the whole team would quit. This is a passion industry and getting it right is important. Delivering engaging game play, in the form of an MMO, where the technology is specifically designed to emphasize an experience that provides meaningful entertainment value and has a lasting impact on the players is what it's all about. If I were in the industry and didn't think I could achieve that, as a developer, then I may as well go back to the drawing board until I figure it out. Shipping nothing is better is better than shipping crap that provides no meaningful entertainment value.Bottom line, complaining about anything related to development time is totally insane at this point. The progress I've seen in the short time I’ve been part of the community is amazing, especially considering the team size and the short amount of time the game has been in development. Not to mention that this progress is AFTER starting over once. Crazy! It's a testament to the skill, experience, and commitment of this team. I'd rather wait a few more years, if that's what it takes to deliver a meaningful social game play experience, that connects with players and delivers real entertainment value which, has a lasting impact on players for many years to come. That's what I want to be part of and that's the experience I'm betting on with my investment. The concept of delivering meaningful entertainment value has been totally lost in the sea of assorted "theme park" MMOs where they check off a bunch of feature boxes but don't deliver any value that engages players.
That was a good read, thanks ScoutSniper, hopefully, it will help others who are not in the industry understand a bit more of what is required when making a game of this magnitude :)
Thank you so much for this post ScoutSniper. It's refreshing to see posts like this where someone truly gets the enormity of the effort involved in producing a game like Pantheon.
I fully agree with all of your points, and I would like to confirm that for us, above everything else, Pantheon is a passion project. Our focus is solely on creating an immersive, deep, rich, fun, and rewarding experience for everyone (and that includes us).
We have no interest in cutting corners or making game play / mechanic decisions that are financially motivated - it's all about giving the players an experience that we ourselves would love to play.
Last 3 posts - nail on head. I don't work in gaming but I do work in financial services so I also understand how much more complex technology development is, than many realise. All this with just 15 devs - my hat is really off to you guys, and yes please don't cut corners - I hope you focus first on design for low and easy production support, max bandwidth for bugs and future development. It'll take as long as it takes.
Oh, and don't forget to stick in FFXI like skillchains, should only take about 5 man-days from spec to unit test, ta! ;)
ScoutSniper said:Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and am not affiliated with any game studio, the Pantheon development team, nor do I have any specific knowledge of the Pantheon game architecture. Any opinions expressed about Microsoft products, other companies, or game development are my own, based on previous experience outside Microsoft.
I spent some time in the games industry and still get a little defensive by posts from people who believe making a full scale MMO should only take a few years. I can't tell you how many game play systems I worked on that were completely scrapped because what seemed fun on paper wasn't so fun when implemented in game. The fact that this team has made this much progress without 100s of people is quite amazing. WoW took 10 years with a team size that eventually ramped up to over 100 strong. Taking on the challenge of a full-scale MMO, with a small team, requires a significant amount of skill and experience, across all the industry disciplines, to pull off successfully. Even though my experience is mostly related to distributed systems, networking and server side game play development, keep in mind that a game is a lot more than just programming. All the disciplines involved in creating a game are focused on one common goal and that is to create a fun and exciting game play experience that tells a story, has meaningful entertainment value, and hopefully has a lasting impact on the players. A lasting impact means players will want to share that experience with their friends and when that starts to happen, you know you've delivered meaningful entertainment value. This effort takes a significant amount of time to get right and it MUST be right or it's better not to ship anything. In my opinion, delivering meaningful entertainment value is where the real reward is for both the developer and the player. All money does is pay the bills so you can keep living the dream!
What follows is a shallow attempt to try and provide some sense of why this effort is so time consuming, from my perspective. I will only be able to scratch the surface and by scratch, I mean a light nick. It's an enormously complex problem space. Using an engine like UE4 or Unity helps but to get AAA quality, it only helps a little. Under the hood, the foundation of many games looks like a mini operating system with memory managers, file systems, etc. If you think managed code (like C# or Java) saves you from memory management, you'd be wrong. Arbitrarily allocating memory creates garbage that needs to be collected each frame and you will see noticeable spikes in framerate if you don't properly manage memory using pools of pre-allocated objects or some other related strategy. So, one can't assume memory is infinite, based on a scale up model, or that the garbage collector will take care of everything. As minor and small as this example is, in the grand scheme of the whole game, it takes time and planning to get even this right.
Then there are the other related subsystems like graphics, physics, etc. Again, using a 3rd party engine helps, however, one should remember that an MMO typically uses an authoritative server architecture, which means the game runs on the server, not the client. This is a mechanism used to help prevent people from cheating. If the entire game ran on the client, one could patch memory, remove obstacles, etc. Typically, the client's only purpose is to render static geometry and a view of game state, from the server, on a periodic basis. It may also use prediction algorithms to make the simulation appear to be running in real-time, between server updates. So, while a game engine like Unity or UE4 may exist on the client, the server is either all custom code or some combination of custom code mixed with instances of the game engine running in headless mode for physics, ai, etc. For example, one game I worked on involved exporting geometry from unity, converting it to a physx serialized format, and then importing that into a custom C++ based PhysX server instance for server side movement, collision, etc. That one system and related tools took many months to get right.
With an authoritative server architecture, one must make sure that all connected clients are kept in sync with the server based simulation, while still maintaining the appearance of a real-time simulation on each connected client. This is another example of a time-consuming system that players take for granted. For example, if I were to press forward on my keyboard a prediction algorithm might provide me with immediate visual feedback, however, it may take 10 milliseconds (or longer depending on distance and other factors) to propagate the move update (speed/velocity) to the server and then to your client for rendering. How do clients compensate for this time delay, imposed by physics, and still maintain the fidelity of a real-time experience on every client? There are a few strategies (dead reckoning is a simple example), but it boils down to using prediction algorithms, between server updates, while leveraging smoothing algorithms to interpolate the remote player towards the server stated position when a server update arrives on a client. Another challenge to consider is how should updates to thousands of remote clients be prioritized to avoid network saturation? One way to manage this is leveraging an "area of interest" algorithm to make sure that clients only receives updates for objects that are in "view". I'm greatly over-simplifying this problem but this is a huge amount of work for a small team, especially when you consider the scale requirements of an MMO.Depending on the architecture, the world is typically divided up into regions and each region is managed by a different server. As you roam around the world, your state is transferred from one region server to another. In a seamless world, how would area of interest work when you're at the edge of one region looking into the space occupied by another region server? Remember, the region server that owns your player state doesn't know about objects in other regions so how do you get updates for objects in other regions when the server your state resides in has no knowledge of those objects? Then there's server based entity/actor systems, general game play features that we all interact with, GUI design, persisting game state to storage (sql/nosql database or possibly in memory cache backed by a durable store), collecting telemetry, logging, and networking, etc. Many games don't use stock network protocols. For example, you may need the connectionless transmission properties of UDP but also require some of the reliability features provided by TCP. That means someone must layer the additional reliability features on top of the UDP protocol. There are also a host of new architectures out there to consider, like the cloud (AWS, Azure), micro-services, using the actor model with frameworks like Microsoft Orleans or Akka. Again, huge over-simplifications, however, these problems require time consuming research and effort.
What about the build system, content pipeline, etc.? Designers, programmers, and artists all generate content that must be assembled, compiled, and then packaged to produce a game build. I've only touched on a few network/server related systems but consider the countless hours that graphics/game play programmers, game designers, artists, producers, sound, and other industry professionals put in to make a fun and immersive game play experience while managing the expectations of the community at the same time. Consider the countless hour’s artists put into creating compelling content that must capture the vision, look, and feel of the game. This isn't just about churning out a bunch of random models. It's all about the culmination of small details that are combined in a masterful way to create an immersive game play experience that properly lines up with the games vision, art style, etc. Small details like, does the base color used for an outdoor environment work for a given scene or does the lighting need to be tweaked to create the mood the designers had in mind for the level. Camera angles, animation speed, shader tweaks, rules and lore (this is another big one), etc. It takes a huge amount of time, consideration, and experimentation to get all this these things right.
Making games isn't about rushing a game out the door as quickly as possible, to meet the demands of impatient players. As I mentioned previously, it’s all about creating an experience that connects with players, in a meaningful way, and delivers entertainment value that you can take pride in. I can provide a firsthand example of what happens when games are rushed out the door with no care or concern for fun. Just look at Zynga's stock price today compared to just before going public. When Zynga bought our studio, it was the beginning of the end. Zynga makes games where fun literally goes to curl up in the fetal position and die a slow painful death. I still have black stains on my soul from working there. They did not care about fun or creating a meaningful experience for players, they were all about driving game development through telemetry that determined what features made the most money or by copying other games. Your game genre or vision was totally irrelevant. If telemetry said a feature made money, come hell or high water, that feature was going in your game. If your studio wasn't ticking off 1m in revenue a day with over 10k DAU, it was a five-alarm fire. In no way am I comparing Zynga to VR. I'm simply providing an example of what happens when we focus on the wrong things. The focus needs to be on delivering fun and entertainment value not catering to impatient players.
When a game is truly fun, immersive, and engaging it provides a meaningful entertainment experience that is worth something. It also has the potential to have an emotional impact on players. This is worth being patient for! If a movie is successful in delivering a high-quality entertainment experience which, viewers connect with, people will not only pay to see the movie once, they'll pay to see it more than once as they try to recapture their original experience. Furthermore, when people see a movie like that, they are more likely to invite friends so that they can share the impact of their experience with others. I want Pantheon to be that kind of movie! So, waiting the appropriate amount of time required to deliver that kind of experience is worth the wait, unless all we're interested in is a Zynga cow clicker. In which case I will proceed to gouge my eyes out with a pencil :)
It used to suck all the motivation right out of me when I would hear player complaints that were grounded in unrealistic expectations because they didn't fully understand or appreciate the monumental effort required to pull this off successfully. There's this thing called "crunch" in the games industry. For our studio that meant 12 to 14 hour days 7 days a week, sometimes for months. If you did something like that in corporate America, the whole team would quit. This is a passion industry and getting it right is important. Delivering engaging game play, in the form of an MMO, where the technology is specifically designed to emphasize an experience that provides meaningful entertainment value which, has a lasting impact on the players is what it's all about. If I were in the industry and didn't think I could achieve that, as a developer, then I may as well go back to the drawing board until I figure it out. Shipping nothing is better than shipping crap that provides no entertainment value.Bottom line, complaining about anything, related to development time, is totally insane at this point. The progress I've seen in the short time I’ve been part of the community is amazing, especially considering the team size and the short amount of time the game has been in development. Not to mention that this progress is AFTER starting over once. Crazy! It's a testament to the skill, experience, and commitment of this team. I'd rather wait a few more years, if that's what it takes to deliver a meaningful social game play experience that connects with players and delivers durable entertainment value. That's what I want to be part of and that's the experience I'm betting on with my investment. The concept of delivering meaningful entertainment value has been totally lost in the sea of assorted "theme park" MMOs where they check off a bunch of feature boxes but don't deliver any value that engages players.
EDIT: Oops, just noticed I had one last update sitting in the browser that I hadn't submitted yet, just grammatical stuff. :)
This was an exceptional post. Real good read and a real eye opener.
Great post Solid.
>Zynga makes games where fun literally goes to curl up in the fetal position and die a slow painful death.<
Wonderful description - I have never played a Zynga game but I've played more than my share of bad games by others and this was just wonderful imagery.