Posted by Carmac @ 15:42 CDT, 13 August 2008 - iMsg
QuakeCon 2008 was not just an opportunity to see how QuakeLive plays in competition or to have a shot at winning a car. It was also a very good place to find out more about id's games.
John Carmack's keynote revealed a lot of stuff. You can find out more from SK Gaming's interview with the QuakeLive producer Marty Stratton. Among other things he talks about the QLive match-making system, broadening the audience for the game and what it would take for id to make another Quake Arena game.
I think having competition at every single level of the kind of the skill spectrum is really something that we've.. you know.. really.. nobody's done a good job of yet
It's called ICCUP.
It's no longer can you sell a quarter million copies or 500,000 copies... back in, you know, back in '98/'99, you know, you sold a half million copies, that wasn't bad. Now, if you don't sell 4 million copies or 3 million copies, you know, it's tough
This is stupid as hell. Back in '98/'99, there were a lot less people playing games. Only within the past 2 years has the gaming industry really taken off, and even grown larger than the movie industry. Boo hoo, it's not 1998 and you now have competition in an exponentially larger market. It's easy to blame the demand instead of taking the responsibility for the unfinished games that you've been releasing for the last decade.
He tries to say that part of the problem is that people need to understand the level of skill involved in order to make it more interesting, but that's incredibly ignorant. As amazing as it is to see some professional dart thrower hitting the center every time, I'm still not going to watch or play darts. No web interface is going to change that.
The rest of the rhetoric is all just the same old crap that they've been repeating since Doom 3. This is SEGA all over again.
So veteran players need to be nice to new players, so new players will bring their buddies in and stay in. New players need veted players for guidance and to submit suggestions for the game for it to have depth and be sucessful.
"Making games better for hardcore players generally results in a better game for everyone, because newbies don't notice the impact of moving an RL, but they also benefit from things like getting rid of the cripple effect just as much as the better players do".
It's surreal to see someone at id (or ANYWHERE outside of CPM) finally understanding this, let alone actually talking about it. (SyncError doesn't count - we expect it from him).
Maybe they were actually out there working on games, instead of playing them all day and finding "problems" which only bother a small % of their consumers?
You seem so wrapped up in your own little bubble world where you think devs should actually spend 99.9% of their time to reach a level of play only .1% of the market gets to so that they can then go, "oh yeah this placement sucks" and base the entirity of their game around the smallest % of their market.
It does not matter, moving the RA to here or there won't make any difference to attracting new players or getting better reviews by mainstream journos (i.e. the one's that count), because the chances are by the time it becomes glaringly obvious what a problem it is, the game is years old, received all its reviews and every single nickel the game as earned has been paid. So willit's had a bad day when he placed RA and MH on dm6. No one's perfect.
When you're paying people by the hour and trying to meet dead lines, you might actually realise how blind you really are in the grand scale of things.
No, the rocket launcher was deemed to be too unfriendly to newbies and was replaced by the Homing Missile Gun which has a 100% hit rate. Now newbie’s can connect up and get hundreds of kills without the need for nonsense like aiming the gun.
John Carmack is predicting that this change will lead to between 50billion and 5trillion people playing the game.
as far as the inteview goes, I'm very comfortable with this guy being at the head of the train. He knows what he's talking about and he makes valid points every step of the way. Good perspectives, i see.
Overall good impression however I have few big concerns.
Basically id wishes for 2 to 4 millions of people playing/trying the game (more or less regularly) and only then they will consider whether to create another Quake title or not. OK, so we can say already at this point good bye to another Q title.
Are they really so optimistic? I mean 2 to 5 MILLIONS?! In an online FPS game? In a 9 years old game? They really think that words like "free" and "matchmaking" means so much these days for average pc gamers? Seriously, for them, who don't know Quake that much, there are TONS of better "free" games, where you actually get not frustrated so much and so often. Not to mention, that even CS, the most popular FPS title (which is really easy to hop in, play and have fun, because you actually get frags without problems) HAS NOT THESE KIND OF NUMBERS and it's cheap as fuck.
They're thinking in "world of warcraft" categories in terms of numbers and what's sad, that they're really believing in and hoping for those kind of HUGE numbers. Wow, seriously, they'll be so disappointed with the outcome. It's sad but true. Millions? I would have rather thought in maybe "300-100 thousands users" category at the beginning, and then after few months maybe ~50-20k of active players.
Free (but old) FPS online game, even with matchmaking system, doesn't sound so "awesome" anymore. It's 2008, not 2002. Therefore QL won't provide that kind of numbers. It's just impossible. From an average pc gamer's point of view QL is really nothing new and nothing innovative. Hell, I bet even if CS would have been free, it would have not provided 4-5 millions.
"It is a free product. We are not creating initially a version that is immediately out of the box or off the web, going to be able to have all these functionality features for a close LAN tournament. But if it becomes successful and we get a lot of people playing it, we can look at all these different types of possibilities because it would make sense."
So basically he says = we will give you a rather unfinished game at the beginning (at least for us [hardcore Q gamers] it will look unfinished), without all these kind of useful features (which are again important only for "us"), and only if the game becomes successful ( --> millions of people O_o) we will actually try to make that features happen and eventually create them. I know it's a free game, but it's so sad that QL's future is already so much dependant on numbers.
I understand the marketing stuff etc, but the truth is that they don't give a shit about Quake gamers and the community. I saw the whole interview, I know he talked much about esports, community impact etc, however for them most important are always average gamers not the Quake whiners.
I only hope that they'll actually finish/fix the game for us before abandoning it completely when it fails. I hope that they'll give us all features that CPMa/OSP created for us over the years (for e.g. GTV, alt_lightning, netcode, superhud, better picmip/nomip usage etc.)
I'm not being skeptic here, I'm just being realistic.
I only hope that they'll actually finish/fix the game for us before abandoning it completely when it fails.
On the down side, if the game does fail (as I'm sure it will), due to it all being handled via the website, everyone would have to migrate back to original Q3.
I think their goals are fine, they just shouldn't (and probably don't) expect to achieve such a player base within 6 months to a year after launch. If the game is good and they nurture it, the community will grow over time.
I understand the marketing stuff etc, but the truth is that they don't give a shit about Quake gamers and the community. I saw the whole interview, I know he talked much about esports, community impact etc, however for them most important are always average gamers not the Quake whiners.
You cannot pretend they care about the existing elite community when they have a business to run.
A pro is the tip of the iceberg. No average players? No spectators? A pro is just mr. nobody wasting time on a unknown game, to say the best.
I think it's already a lot that they spent all this time/money to give q3 another shot. Complain about them not caring of the elite community requests is naïve.
Do you really think that after spending, let's say, even only 5 mln USD on developing the game and seeing that only 100k people play it after six months they would bother to create even another one, this time more advanced, with higher budget and not free?
How many ppl watch GTV? 2k-3k? That's nothing. That's hardly important feature to have right out of the box if you want your game to be succesful. It's not a live-or-die feature.
id Software is a commercial company. It's not a bunch of guys trying to please ESR community.
All in all, I think the only way Quake Live has remotely a chance to hits its target numbers, would for it to be as easy to access as any flash game AND be very widely known. Think about it - so many people are looking for FREE games. I don't know how many times I've heard of people asking for a way to play counter-strike ($9) online. If people that start playing the game aren't demolished by some guy that just shot you in mid air with a RL then as you were falling down got railed...uhm..instead of that the players actually fighting against other people of their skills then it will succeed! Quake 3 is fun! Period! Its not like as a game gets older it all of a sudden seems less fun (unless your becoming more mature). Quake 3 is FUN and people will stay playing the game if they are getting kills against people at their skill level. IMHO, if Quake Live gets good media and people start seeing why its so much better than other FPS games THEN it might have a good chance at success!
Constant: Quake 3 = Fun
If Players find Quake
and can KILL in Quake
Players have Fun!!
Well, if they can get about 10,000 regular players, they'll be level pegging with Team Fortress 2. And since I despise that game, I wish them the best of luck.
Getting more than that and I'd be very surprised tbh. Initial numbers might be very high due to the buzz, but seeing what they drop too will be the real test.
whatever they do, they have to make sure that there wont be a single link or mentioning of esreality on the quakelive page if they want to keep some of the new players ;)
It's great to hear someone from id who seems to really understand the competitive nature of games like Quake and I'm glad to hear they are moving in that direction.
ceppy
oneroomdisco
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