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Kristoff Atruin
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Test Alliance Please Ignore
2259
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Posted - 2015.03.03 18:40:00 -
[1] - Quote
What has been announced for Legion so far is open world scavenging. That sounds fun, but it isn't enough for a compelling game. What they need is what Dust was supposed to have, a meaningful outcome for battles which affects a shared world. That means somehow being linked to the sovereignty game in Eve. Unfortunately the mechanics in Eve for that haven't been updated in a very long time and are so ball-achingly painful to participate in that it started creating the blue donut. Because of this they've been spending the last year or two trying to figure out how to make it fun again.
Fortunately, today they announced how the new system will work: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/politics-by-other-means/
I think this is why there's been so little news about Legion. The game appears to be function, but is lacking gameplay...which they couldn't design until the Eve team figured out what their design was. From the quick skim I've done of this blog there seems to be a lot of room for Legion / Valkyrie to get involved. The old system was a binary state, either you won the fights and kept control of the system or you didn't and lost everything. The new system gives different levels of defensive bonuses with the possibility of other kinds of bonuses linked to other structures. This means there will be mechanics connected to the sov game that other games can help or hurt without creating a sudden drastic change in the other game that seems completely arbitrary and makes no sense.
Some ideas:
1) Disabling a station service requires a ship use an entosis link and be vulnerable for up to 40 minutes. Why not also be able to fire a boarding pod at that module on the station so that troops can sabotage it? Station owners could defend by buying stockpiles of merc clones, which they could buy from corps that own clone producing facilities like in PC. When a boarding pod is launched it gives a window where mercs who are marked as friendlies can join in on the battle, or they could open it up to randoms to defend.
2) Battles on the other sov structures to temporarily decrease their defensive bonus level.
3) Ground based facilities that give defensive and other bonuses to space for controlling them. Like fighter bases or listening posts. A non-defensive structure idea could be an ore processing platform, which increases the yield miners get from the asteroids in space. This speeds up mining so they make more money, but also helps them to increase their industrial index and reach a higher level of defensive bonus more quickly. They tried to do this with PC, but there just weren't enough Eve mechanics for Dust to influence that would actually be something interesting that people cared about. With the new system, that is no longer the case.
So they're not showing us what they've got planned at fanfest because they haven't known enough to be able to plan yet. Now they can plan, it's just too late for it to be ready for fanfest.
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Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2259
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Posted - 2015.03.04 14:36:00 -
[2] - Quote
Quote:
Please tell me why any of this can't be done in dust?
Because the PS3 didn't work for them as a platform. Two problems. Firstly the very obvious issue of hardware limitations. Legion runs the same engine as Dust. They've spent so much time customizing UE3 that it makes more sense for them to keep using it than switching to UE4 and recreating their customization. Compare the legion vid to the dust vid. Look at how smoothly it runs while looking far, far better. Look at how poorly dust runs. Granted, this has improved in the last year, but they're still having to remove content from the game because the PS3 just doesn't have the ability to use it without having performance issues. The PS3 simply isn't capable of executing the gameplay that they want to create.
The second problem is the really big one, which comes down to project management limitations. CCP uses an agile methodology, where you release early and often (even if that release is just to a test server). This is particularly helpful when you're creating something entirely new and huge that your customers are already using, because you can get updates to users much faster then get feedback about the updates and use that to inform you for the next update. It speeds things up tremendously. On the PC platform they control their own servers and can release updates every day if they want. On the PS3 if they make any kind of server side change development basically stops for two weeks while PSN decides whether or not the update is approved. This also means that they can't give us a test server where we can log in and find all the nasty, unexpected issues introduced with an update. On PC you just create a copy of your client, change a setting and it logs into the test server instead. These things severely slow down the development cycle. This is probably the biggest factor in why we got a year worth of bug fixing and failed balancing attempts after release. No test server for players to find how changes can be abused, and when problems are found it can take a long while before they get fixed because you have to wait for Sony to approve any changes before your fix can be tried in a real environment. Then you find out your fix doesn't quite do the trick and you have to go through the whole hassle all over again. In an environment where you control the server it goes more like:
1) Deploy fix. Didn't work exactly as you wanted.
2) Alter something and deploy again.
3) Is it how you want it to be? No? Repeat step 2 until you're satisfied.
You simply can't do this on a console. It just isn't an option. Choosing to go with a console was ambitious, and from a market perspective it was the way to go. There's far more money to be made there. But from a technical perspective it was the wrong place to start. They should have created a game that matches their vision on PC first with console limitations in mind and then, once it was feature complete, push it out to a console. I'm hoping this is what will happen with Legion.
They *could* still create some links between Dust and the new sov mechanics, but they'd have to create a lot of new content and server side changes to support it and the project management limitations imposed by the console platform are just not a good match for that. And in the end it still wouldn't be the game that they actually wanted to make. I'm expecting Dust to continue on as an eve themed shooter that is very lightly connected to Eve, while Legion will become the one that is heavily linked.
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Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2260
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Posted - 2015.03.05 15:06:00 -
[3] - Quote
Yeah, I know a bit. I've been a professional developer for 10 years now.
"It didnt run on any engine"
And this is where I can tell you don't know a bit, and I'm not reading the rest of that blob of text until you learn to use paragraphs. An engine is just a platform for a game to run on which basically handles the graphics. It has nothing to do with servers, or finished game design. You can go download a copy of the unreal engine right now, load up a map and run around in it. Bam, you're in an engine with no servers and no game. If it didn't run on an engine, it didn't run at all and the video we saw of CCP devs playing around in Legion was actually a mass delusion, caused by hallucinogens in the water supply. When Legion was announced we thought that maybe they would put it on UE4, but they outright told us it was the same version of UE3 that Dust runs on, which they went to GDC to present their customizations for long before Dust was in beta. They didn't create the customizations *for* the PS3 platform. They would have made those before the PS3 platform was even chosen on a PC and then ported the code over for the PS3 version of the engine.
The architecture difference was a hurdle no doubt, but it wasn't why we got a year worth of slow development. Every time a patch went off for approval development stopped for what seemed like two weeks. If you release once a month that means 50% of your manpower is wasted on an external dependency. There might be some small tasks that devs can work on in the meantime, but it is nowhere near the level of productivity. I've seen it personally time and time again. The whole release strategy depended on being able to update the game frequently, which is something the platform chosen did not allow for.
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