Matobar
Onslaught Inc
RISE of LEGION
250
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Posted - 2014.05.04 14:08:00 -
[1] - Quote
So, things happened. People are angry. I'm not really surprised.
Most of you don't know me. I just lurk on the forums a lot. I'm not the most dedicated player or the most knowledgeable one, but there's one thing I can do really, really well.
Write a freaking awesome essay.
So I'm going to use my writing skill to explain exactly why what CCP did was really, really bad, dumb, stupid, ******, nonsense, and all those other adjectives.
Some things to note: I use a lot of outside material for this write-up, so please at least glance at the links I post if you want to get as much out of reading this as possible. I also want to acknowledge all the things I source and thank them for their contributions to this write-up.
In addition: I love that this is the first response to CCP's devblog announcement. It always makes me smile glancing at it.
Part 1: Before Fanfest:
So, apparently, DUST 514 was being retooled for PC as of "months ago," according to the CPM. Which is all well and good in and of itself, but it speaks to CCP's continued lack of business savvy or simple followthrough. According to CCP's own VP of product development:
Sean Decker wrote: Sean Decker is the VP of Product Development at CCP, and he told Polygon the days of waiting a few years to show off a game while hoping the fans like it are done. "Put it out in front of them, see if they like it,"
You can find his full statement here. So let me ask as simple a question as I can: if your own VP doesn't think you should keep developments a secret, why was Project Legion kept a secret from us, your DUST 514 players? According to EVE Vegas, you remained Laser Focused on the PS3 as of November. That's half a year ago now, I know, but when did it switch from "Laser Focus" to diverting staff from DUST 514 to this new project of yours?
Simply put: you let the DUST 514 players down. Here we are, all 100,000 of us, playing a game you know is bad (as admitted by Sean Decker in the Polygon article), and you've been diverting resources to something the majority of us, as console players, will not see. Remember CCP, it was your decision to put DUST on the PS3. It was your decision to include console fans in your EVE Universe. You have every right to try again, however you want to, but doing a 180 and saying the PC is the future amounts to a middle finger for the people who have been playing your self-admitted bad game for the last two years.
We, the players, deserved to know. We deserved to know about Project Legion as soon as it was being considered. We deserved to know it was going to be on PC. We deserved to know its development, or pre-development, or whatever, was taking resources away from the development of the game we were playing. We deserved to know about this well ahead of Fanfest. We deserved to know you were taking all of our DUST feedback over these last months and putting it into a game a lot of us won't be playing. We deserved to know that time taken from Fanfest, time you at CCP labeled as DUST 514 time on all your schedules and devblogs, was instead going to be all about something you people even admit has not yet received a greenlight from your superiors! We deserved better to be blindsided in this way.
Part 2: Fanfest
So the project was announced at Fanfest. In possibly the most dickish way possible. According to Nova Knife's blog, the entirety of the CPM had warned and pushed for CCP to announce Project Legion months ahead of Fanfest. Months. So, more than one? Ripard Teg's own take on this also explains that he and others knew, in advance, that this reveal would not go over well. I think we can safely say it hasn't. CCP, if you're not going to listen to the CPM, the people you brought on to represent us as the DUST 514 community, and announce your project ASAP, what kind of message does that sent? Do you just not take this community seriously? Did you honestly think we'd be happy with this news, especially in the way it was revealed?
Ripard Teg's piece goes into why he thinks the DUST 514 Keynote was poop. I'd like to add my own thoughts to this as well. The only time the console crowd was mentioned, in any capacity, was during the beginning of the Keynote, when JC asked everyone to applaud Sony for their contributions to DUST 514. That's really it. Afterwards, we saw some interesting stats, and then the focus shifted entirely to touting Project Legion. And the PC. And the tech demo. And then it was over.
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Matobar
Onslaught Inc
RISE of LEGION
284
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Posted - 2014.05.04 18:34:00 -
[4] - Quote
Pliny Eldritch wrote:The part about this that really gets me is CCP's burning desire to go off and make a new mercs-on-the-ground game with blackjack and hookers. This is shown especially in this bit from the Digital Spy article: Quote:"The thing with Dust 514 is that it's a full-on product in flight," he said. "I say in flight, because it's really difficult to change the engine of a plane in flight, and that's what Dust 514 is.
"You could not, I feel, iterate without putting that plane down, fixing it, and putting it back up. I'm not about to do that with Dust, because Dust is a really good experience out there, and that's something we should all remember Really? Have you heard of a company called CCP that took a pretty graphical skin on top of TradeWars 2000 and iterated it into a massive open world sandbox game? A straight port to Unreal Engine 4 on both PS4 and PC would keep the current player base playing and give CCP the technological breathing room they need to evolve Dust into the game they want Project Legion to be. It would also seriously reduce the risks involved in developing an entirely new game. A badly received patch doesn't make nearly as much news as a botched game launch.
What is funny to me about that is that he's saying DUST 514 is a good experience, when Sean Decker, who I quoted in the original essay, said it was a bad one that needs to be redone.
I guess CCP confuses itself sometimes.
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