You say you want more hype and excitement.
Maybe you've got a point.
I've been really, really cautious about making promises for the game or what features it will have. I've kept it really, really narrow, even though I think we will be able to do more now that I understand the Unreal engine much better. It's hard to get people excited if you don't paint a vision of a fantastic game full of features. I can tip my hand a little here, I can let myself show you what I'm really excited to do here with Em-8ER. Maybe it's time.
Then we have to back that vision up with gameplay. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you feel things are not feeling life Firefall. We were never trying to copy that game, but to make a new one based on the principles and best parts of what I designed for Beta. I think what you mean is that you loved the gameplay of Firefall, and that Em-8ER doesn't show gameplay yet. It will come. To give you an example, the art to make the THMPR, back when it was just Joe part-time, took 6 months by itself, but the Unreal engine part of the THMPR patrolling and letting you drill and triggers its emotes only took myself 1 week. Once our art is in the game, you're going to see gameplay progress at much faster levels. Right now though, all I can do is try to help finish the art so we can get it into the game, then switch to coding up everything.
Let me tell you a story. Back when we were starting to make World of Warcraft, the team had to do weekly presentations. Every week the team had to give a demo to the whole company of the progress of the game. To try to impress the company, the team produced huge mockups of gameplay and functionality. They shoved it in and then gussied it up with a lot of temp art. But it wasn't real progress, and all the shoe-horned and hacked features and art had to be thrown away and was unusable for the final game. And despite all that, all of Blizzard remained unimpressed and said the project was doomed to fail. They called openly for it's cancellation and a meeting was called with the founders of Blizzard, the (former) team lead of WoW, and myself. They all voted to cancel World of Warcraft.
Then I came in. I was overseeing production for all of Blizzard's titles as manager of product development back then. But they were going to cancel WoW and I said "no, don't do it, this is the most important project for the company and we can do this." I personally guaranteed the project and joined them full time as team lead.
You know the first thing I did? I immediately cancelled the "gold plating" efforts of the weekly demos. "Just show them what we have, no matter how little, just show progress, no matter how small, each step, but make it REAL." We were no longer going to do a mountain of work just to make an "exciting" video, that we would just have to throw away and redo again for next week. Instead, we did the real work, the ugly work, the unexciting looking work of making the REAL game.
And when the weekly demo came around, we just showed what we had, without trying to make it look uber spectacular each time with a lot of fake stuff. In fact, our first demo was just the human male, walking around an Elwynn forest without tress or buildings...and it wasn't much different each week after that. But then of course, as we had more and more REAL systems to build on, the demos grew exponentially more exciting. But it took many weeks and months to reach that point. The team had turned around, and we gradually went from the biggest "failure" inside Blizzard (despite their fancy weekly demos), to a respected team, and then a major internal project, and then...well, you know the story here.
So, I'm going to continue to do these videos. Many of which are not going to be exciting at first, but over time, you're going to see more and more and more, as we BUILD the foundation with real things, not faked up stuff from the Unreal marketplace, or temp code and white cube art and anims we have to throw away after the video is done.
We're going to do the videos this way because..well, I know it worked. It worked when I helped save WoW and turn in around inside the company. And I know it DIDN'T work to do a lot of hyped up fake stuff just to look good for a demo and then throw it all away and do it again next week.
I know you're a fan, and are still a fan. Bear with me on this. It's going to get better and better. Nobody will remember the videos we do today, but one day, looking back, I think people will say "look how far we've come."
Meanwhile, we're going to keep making progress, no matter how boring, or incremental, or slow it may seem, and SHOW you, instead of hiding it.
Thanks for listening, and keep holding the torch. We're not stopping here until we've got a great game.
- Markus
