more gems from that thread
Turbine on Marketing
Quote: Since IC was after my time, I'll relate a (slightly redacted) explanation I got from a friend at the company related to why a mutual friend-a 10 year Turbine vet-was laid off last fall.
"So, infinite crisis was costing 4mil a month to make. And they dumped all their marketing budget into a 'twitch' campaign....which is a new sorta web thing where you can watch people play games.....and unless you are Korean and playing starcraft, no one gives two fucks about. It resulted in Infinite Crisis peak concurrency being....less than 1,000 people. Hell most people had no inkling the thing even came out.
So, hemorrhaging money, total failure, we gotta make it look like we are doing something to fix the faucet of losses. So, they shifted ______ to a lead on infinite crisis....and laid him off. See, we're saving money!"
Turbine ESO on making sure everyone is on the same page
Quote:To make a long story short, I was amazed they finished it at all. There was no hope of it being a great MMO regardless. As my friend, a ZOS producer (and a former Turbinite), commented, half the team seemed to think they were making a single player game, the other half, WoW. When you get 50 cooks in the kitchen trying to make one cake, if you get it done at all, be sure it isn't going to be a masterpiece. The days when you had one guy with a vision field generaling development (a Sid Meier, for example) started to go out the window when the industry got corporate. On another side note, I sometimes think money becomes somewhat unreal when you get into the tens of millions. An exec who will shout about being overcharged for an oil change can be strangely sanguine about a project that costs millions a month.
Turbine on the peter principle and bugs
Quote:And arguably had Turbine been a more conservative and less ambitious company, LOTRO never would have been made in the first place. As someone who loved LOTRO it did drive me nuts that we didn't always have the best people in the right positions. We had too many management and lead positions occupied by people far more concerned about staying in a comfortable bubble of job security than pushing any envelopes. And that atmosphere tended to foster aquiesence; it was a miasma of mediocrity that pulled people in, regardless of department. Criticism was either ignored or pushed back; the art director's policy on art figure bugs was simple: closed, there were no art bugs.
Turbine on player retention and easy mode
Quote:The trend towards easymode gameplay was really more of a reaction to the problem of low new player retention than specific player complaints. We found that many new players would play through the trial period or until maybe level 20 and then fade away. So the thinking generally was, if we speed along new players further into the game, they'll consequently become more invested and stick around. It didn't seem to matter to anyone that even WoW had a massive new player turnover rate. In fact their average player 'lifespan' according to a study done around 2010 was six months-three months less than LOTRO and a full year less than City of Heroes (those CoH players loved their game!)
Turbine's relationship with WOTC
Quote: It was always a little hazy to me (I should hit up some old Turbine hands on that one) but the gist of what I heard was that the DDO team felt that WOTC was at best disinterested in DDO and provided marginal assistance in the lead-up to development (I do distinctly remember the QA director commenting that 'they really wanted nothing to do with us'). Not permitting the Forgotten Realms setting for the game was seen as undercutting the game right out of the gate. Maybe there were legal reasons for that restriction? I don't know. But for an old-timey D&D player myself (meeting Zeb Cook on ESO was a starstruck nerd moment for me), the lack of an FR setting turned me off on DDO certainly.
Also, let me say that the actual lawsuit was with Atari, not WOTC, so that should be clarified. All of that kind of blended together to me as an outsider (as a LOTRO person).
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