Portalarium Brings In the Heavy Hitters
The most recent update to the Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter page brings news of some exciting additions to the development team at Portalarium:
We have added 4 new Developers to the team this month and so far, they have hit the ground running! Many of you have met Scott Jennings, our resident Web Guru, in the new and improved SotA IRC Chatroom, and he’s not the only new Scott! Scott Jones, former Art Director for Ultima 9, has also joined us as an Environmental Artist. Rounding out the new Devs are Bill Kirkman, Content Designer, and Michael Hutchison, who will also be working on Environmental Art as well as level design. If you want to get to know them a bit better, just watch this week’s SotA Developer Roundtable.
Scott Jennings should need no introduction to fans of online gaming; his “Lum the Mad” persona was a powerful voice of commentary and criticism in the world of MMORPGs. As Lum, he commented on a wide range of games, including Ultima Online. His unique writing style, mixing humour with white-hot anger, earned him a dedicated and massive following, which included no small number of MMORPG developers. He continued writing as Lum the Mad until 2001, during which year he was hired by Mythic Entertainment. He also started a new website at that time, Broken Toys, where he continues to blog to this day.
He left Mythic Entertainment in 2006, and went to work for NCSoft in Austin, Texas. He remained there for two years, then returned to the company again in 2010, before leaving it in late 2012.
Scott Jones worked at Origin Systems from from 1994 until 2001, and was (notably) the art director for Ultima 9 during his time there. After leaving Origin, he founded SHARD Studios, who have been working on the pen-and-paper RPG Shard — an adaptation of Dárdünah; World of the False Dawn — for a number of years now.
Another of the rather sizeable crew at Portalarium who worked at Red Fly Studios, Bill Kirkman worked as a game designer both there and at Lightbox Interactive. A relative newcomer to the gaming industry (he has been a game designer since 2008), he has nevertheless amassed a sizeable body of experience and the praise of his peers in that short time.
Michael Hutchison has worked in the game development industry for over two decades, at a variety of companies including Sierra On-Line, Pandemic Studios (where he worked on Star Wars: Battlefront), NCSoft (where he worked as a world designer on Tabula Rasa), BioWare Austin (as an environmental artist on Star Wars: The Old Republic), UTV Ignition Games, and Vigil Games (where he worked on environments for Warhammer 40k: Dark Millenium Online). He has also worked as a contract 3D artist for Somnio Solutions, maintaining and enhancing a Unity 3D-based demonstration application for them.
In other words, Portalarium has added some serious talent to its development team. The inclusion of Scott Jennings, in particular, is a keen nod to the MMORPG fans that comprise a sizeable portion of the support base for Shroud of the Avatar, and also communicates a certain fundamental seriousness in their web presence strategy going forward. The remaining three bring a very diverse range of talent and experience to the team, but all three are unimpeachably solid game developers whose presence can only serve to make Shroud of the Avatar that much better.
Naturally, we’ve added all four men to our Shroud of the Avatar developers page.
As long as what the talent is set to do is awesome, so will be the game.
It should be noted that Scott Jones was also Lead Artist on the original iteration of Tabula Rasa. He was amongst the people laid off (along with Bill Randolph and Carly Staehlhin) when the game was revamped from futuristic fantasy to…well… Halo.
I love the Ultima series as much as anybody. I’m very excited about this project, and put down $100 to vote with my wallet in support of it.
I have two concerns.
1. What is proposed sounds like a very interesting marriage of the best parts of single player and MMO games that should be everything to everyone. I just don’t know that you can pull off such a feat on a meager budget. And when we’re talking about MMO systems and content, even a few million is a very meager budget.
2. Portalrium as a company hasn’t demonstrated that it can make great games yet, though these hires certainly help.
It could be said that due to my lack of involvement in the industry that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but based on my personal experience in design and programming it’s not budget that pulls off these sorts of feats but skill. I think most of the budget of the common MMO goes into the creation of art assets and content, not basic infrastructure and network design. That more programmers are being hired and not more artists is a good sign. I just hope the chaos is contained and directed by Garriott or another project manager so the project doesn’t go from tight and focused to all over the fucking place, as is the nature of expanding projects. I think the premise is entirely doable, even on a modest budget if the staff is competent.
Almost all MMOs with huge budgets are those that are build from the ground up, with a new engine, extensive asset requirements, etc, that will go through multiple phases. SotA is using Unity, a very full featured engine with a modest price tag. They are creating their own assets rather than outsourcing them. Additionally, they are crowd-sourcing content (talented fans will be able to submit assets to them which, if accepted, will be added to the game). They can get by on a much smaller budget because they have done all of this before; look at their resume!
The only proposition that I’m still wary of is the prospect of PvP, which doesn’t seem to have been fleshed out very well. If that is left until the end, it will seem tacked on and everyone will hate it. Just judging by the comments on their forums, there is a large crowd of PvP enthusiasts already backing the game, so I hope they are putting the best foot forward and making it fun, seamless, and worthwhile.
Unity is providing a rendering engine for graphics. Unity doesn’t provide:
Day/night schedule
Crafting skills
Magic system
Pathfinding
AI
Inventory
Combat
Network stack
Travel systems
Online/Network stack
PvP
Pets
Master/Apprentice system
Other MMOs spend years and tens of millions to get a base game off the ground. Star Wars: The Old Republic cost $200 million for initial development.
Developing all those systems takes lots of time and money. I think people often assume that picking up Unity gives you a lot more than it does. It took Obsidian months of development on Project Eternity before they could place a door in the world and open it.
MMOs are complex beasts with lots of systems.
It doesn’t provide that out of the box, no, but more than half of those systems are available on the Unity Store, and many of the others have already been developed for the prototype and only need tweaking.
The Old Republic is a horrible example; yes it cost $200 million, but the vast majority of that was for voice work, or was wasted on competing systems so that half of them were eventually scrapped. The same game could be made without voices for a fraction of its cost.
Shroud of the Avatar is *not* a traditional MMO, and Portalarium has people who are familiar with the needs of an online game. Wait until the developer-level chats start, where a lot of the more detailed systems will be laid out. There is more already in place than you expect.
Even without voice acting, SWTOR took a huge team over 5 years to develop, and it was missing many key systems at launch that people expected from an online game.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a successful MMO developed in 18 months, let one an audacious MMO that can also be played offline, and with as many unique features/systems as Portalarium is promising.
If it was so easy to roll out an MMO in Unity, why is it that we’ve never seen a single one?
Unity is probably the best approach here for something low-cost and simple to jump into (that also supports multiple platforms like Linux!), but you can’t just buy a few modules from the Unity Store and roll out an MMO.
SOTA is not a MMO. Just sayin’.
Depends on your definition of an MMO. The meaning of the word “massively” in particular. If WoW only supported 100 online players simultaneously per shard, would it just be multiplayer and not massively so? What about 500, or 1000? Maybe the best way to answer that would be to examine games that wouldn’t think of claiming to be MMOs but offer substantial multiplayer support to see how many clients per “match” they allow. If the average was 16-32, then perhaps it could be argued games supporting more than 100 were massively multiplayer since they’re significantly above the average.
In any case, the fact that my dumb ass can pull off something even resembling an MMO in three years in my spare time with practically zero budget leads me to believe that if Garriott and team can’t do it then no amount of cash or time would save them.