The Gaming Den

http://www.golem.de/news/eve-only-ccp-b ... 05862.html
Edit: Here, have an english article instead http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... rkness-MMO

I know, you're all positively shocked by this totally unexpected turn of events , right?

Err, for the non German speakers, the article basically says 'CCP games, after already gutting the staff working on the project, is finally shutting down development of the WoD MMO, choosing to instead focus on their already successful MMO/cashcow Eve Online.'

Now we just wait for the Pathfinder MMO to admit that it's vaporware.

The Pathfinder MMO has actually shown progress.

WoD Online had not so much as a screenshot or core feature to its name.

edit: apparently the "progress" is a fairly ugly video with terrible animation and general combat feel, but that's more than WoD had.

It' s probably fair to say that projecting their current velocity would see 2015 come and their game still looking and feeling like a school term project.

So what does White Wolf do these days anyway?

sake wrote:http://www.golem.de/news/eve-only-ccp-b ... 05862.html
Edit: Here, have an english article instead http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... rkness-MMO

I know, you're all positively shocked by this totally unexpected turn of events , right?

Rawbeard wrote:So what does White Wolf do these days anyway?

Sit under it's parent company and collect faint praise and false accolades from it's cultish player base.

Rawbeard wrote:So what does White Wolf do these days anyway?

Probably sit on their asses praying that some game developer will come along, that too stupid to realize WW doesn't actually own the concept of 'secretive clans of vampires in an urban fantasy/horror setting', and give them lots of money to make another VtM game.

WW is licensed out for probably a pittance to one guy who prints the Onyx Path shit. So it's basically free money. How much money it's actually worth vs what they spent on WW plus what they spent on developing the game though is questionable.

50 people working for 10 years on a game and having literally nothing to show for it is fucking highway robbery. As much as I would in theory like a WOD MMO I can't blame them for dumping this.

Rawbeard wrote:So what does White Wolf do these days anyway?

White Wolf went bankrupt in 2007 and doesn't exist. White Wolf's Intellectual Property was purchased by Icelandic Videogame makers CCP. For a few years, CCP kept them going as a shovelware imprint. Their first product was Scion, a shovelware "game" with so little editorial oversight from the host company that it is over a thousand pages long and does not have an action resolution system. It tells you how many dice to roll, but not what you need to roll in order to do things. Seriously. That is a thing that happened.

After a few years of trying to squeeze blood from that stone, CCP decided that even that wasn't worth doing, and proceeded to lease the IP out to whoever wanted it to do whatever they wanted with it. So now the lines are being leased by "Onyx Path," which is actually one dude who used to be a White Wolf art director. What he does is put up kickstarters to "keep games alive," pockets most of the money raised, and uses the rest to finance print on demand runs of shovelware pdfs slapped together with mostly fan labor.

If it wasn't for the fact that we live in the future and people can make short print runs off of pdfs on glossy stock, we'd basically be back to the days of mimeograph fan zines being made out of a garage. There is no White Wolf company, there are no traditionally published books, there's no staff, there's no materials in stores, there's no nothing. It's over. Caput. There's just one guy who has rented the rights to stamp "official White Wolf Product" on whatever material he feels like scooping off the internet and selling it in pdf form to whoever will buy it. Essentially, we're at the Cyberpunk stage where Mike Pondsmith made that book with the photos of plastic toys fighting for art. And only the most insane fans on RPG.net refuse to accept that the whole thing is over.

-Username17

I can't help it, I feel a certain amount of glee. How did they manage to go bankrupt in the first place? Did their goth poser customer base grow up and nobody told them, or something?

AFAIK, White Wolf didn't die right away after being acquired by CCP, but it's been over two years since CCP fired the last White Wolf employee and started doing everything via ascended fans freelancers.

At this point it's safe to say CCP is ready to cut their losses and sell White Wolf's IPs. The longer they take to do it, the more likely they'll end up selling another MySpace.

FrankTrollman wrote:There is no White Wolf company, there are no traditionally published books, there's no staff, there's no materials in stores,

The horror! PDFs are no real books. They are useless! Don't use 'em! Don't care for OPP!

If you can't walk into a store and buy it, that really hurts your sales. A huge number of games only sell at all because someone goes into Mind Games* for more Magic cards and sees "Badger Wars" on the shelf and grabs it as an impulse-buy or whatever - or they're browsing the merchant hall at a convention because they have money and want to buy stuff and it's there.

If your game only exists in digital format, then you're not selling that. Your best bet is just a link on the website of an existing company, or going to DriveThruRPG for some pennies. You haven't streamlined the experience, you've just fallen into the little leagues where you don't matter.

Anyway, I'm not sure how the VTMMMO could really work: Vampire practically demands the kind of thing that has "making shit up" and "Living actual ST to adjucate shit" and "player-generated content". Beyond what MMOs tend to offer, even the fairly open-world ones like Eve Online. They presumably realised that, and that's a problem when your game is an MMO that requires hooking people in to constantly throw money at you - a normal game, you can sucker them in by slapping the logo on it, and then they've given you their money so you don't care how shitty it is (and of course you can, for a single player game, just put a strong story in and make the player the main character and everything, so it doesn't have to be shit).

*Or where the fuck ever

They've tried to have MMO players be the ones to "create stories" without ST or GM before. This tends to be the result: http://spla.sh/bp/oldstuff.htm

Rawbeard wrote:I can't help it, I feel a certain amount of glee. How did they manage to go bankrupt in the first place? Did their goth poser customer base grow up and nobody told them, or something?

They went bankrupt near the end of 2006, having horribly overproduced their "New World of Darkness" crap that no one liked. CCP bought their IP in a firesale for the explicit purpose of making an Old World of Darkness Vampire based computer game. For a couple of years, they let the people who worked there print up whatever the fuck they wanted to for the shitty new game lines with smaller and smaller print runs and less and less production staff. A few years in, and there was literally no one left in-house and they leased the IP off to whoever wanted it - keeping the videogame rights to the more lucrative old world of darkness to themselves.

The Vampire MMO has been in development hell for a long, long time, so it's not all that surprising that the whole thing imploded. Still, I'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't make it work. After all, this is a property for whom you could basically slap some graphics on a BBS MUX and people would be OK with it. If you straight up said "No combat, mostly player driven roleplaying, final destination" you'd have a quite vocal portion of the fanbase thank you. I really don't know how they could fuck it all up, considering how little functionality the fanbase actually demands. But even well financed projects with clear visions sometimes collapse under the weight of unworkable code or half-time rewrites, so it's not at all strange that something with as much baggage as this would get stranded in development hell.

As to Fucks... I genuinely don't know what his deal is. White Wolf objectively doesn't exist and there hasn't been a tangible product made with any of their IPs in years. For some reason, he thinks that it is somehow premature to talk about White Wolf in the past tense. It's weird. Really not sure what would have to happen for him to give up hope on the company. What if St. Rein*Hagen moved to Eastern Europe to write anti-Russian propaganda and attempted (and failed) to kickstart an illustrated poker deck? Would that convince him that White Wolf is well and truly over?

-Username17

I don't get your idea that PDF-only products aren't true products and therefore useless. That's all.
I don't care wether WW or OPP is trying to squeeze out a few more dollars from gamers, just am curious why you deny PDF-only products any rights to exist.

White Wolf is a company, Fucks. Where are they currently incorporated?

fectin wrote:White Wolf is a company, Fucks. Where are they currently incorporated?

In RPG.net as moderators?

No, really. Last time I checked, around 90% of their moderators were working or had worked for CCP.

I know, right? Great for keeping a community's opinions neutral and all.

Even if you want to argue that CCP is somehow still the same company just because they bought the IP, the fact is that WoD and the like doesn't have a writing team anymore. From what I understand its just one guy cobbling stuff together from various forums and fan works. I think a PDF only book would be fine, if there was actually any kind of design team behind it.

Yeah, I mean, the TRD at least has multiple people assembling it.

EDIT: And I don't like the fact that TRD seems more like Turd than Cock.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Rawbeard wrote:I can't help it, I feel a certain amount of glee. How did they manage to go bankrupt in the first place? Did their goth poser customer base grow up and nobody told them, or something?

They went bankrupt near the end of 2006, having horribly overproduced their "New World of Darkness" crap that no one liked. CCP bought their IP in a firesale for the explicit purpose of making an Old World of Darkness Vampire based computer game. For a couple of years, they let the people who worked there print up whatever the fuck they wanted to for the shitty new game lines with smaller and smaller print runs and less and less production staff. A few years in, and there was literally no one left in-house and they leased the IP off to whoever wanted it - keeping the videogame rights to the more lucrative old world of darkness to themselves.

The Vampire MMO has been in development hell for a long, long time, so it's not all that surprising that the whole thing imploded. Still, I'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't make it work. After all, this is a property for whom you could basically slap some graphics on a BBS MUX and people would be OK with it. If you straight up said "No combat, mostly player driven roleplaying, final destination" you'd have a quite vocal portion of the fanbase thank you. I really don't know how they could fuck it all up, considering how little functionality the fanbase actually demands. But even well financed projects with clear visions sometimes collapse under the weight of unworkable code or half-time rewrites, so it's not at all strange that something with as much baggage as this would get stranded in development hell.

As to Fucks... I genuinely don't know what his deal is. White Wolf objectively doesn't exist and there hasn't been a tangible product made with any of their IPs in years. For some reason, he thinks that it is somehow premature to talk about White Wolf in the past tense. It's weird. Really not sure what would have to happen for him to give up hope on the company. What if St. Rein*Hagen moved to Eastern Europe to write anti-Russian propaganda and attempted (and failed) to kickstart an illustrated poker deck? Would that convince him that White Wolf is well and truly over?

-Username17

Considering that CCP has had their share of scamming the playerbase, picking favorites in the "totally player driven game" and turning on God mode for those favorites, and helping friends scam what amounts to real money out of other players by enabling item dupes and shit like that...

My guess is that they couldn't figure out a way to monetize WoD *enough*.

CCP somehow stays in business despite basically being caught committing fraud multiple times on it's player base.

They're the only sandbox game in town. So long as they have that monopoly, people who want to participate in player-driven stories will stick around. Even if they aren't entirely player-driven, they're still way closer than even things like Guild Wars 2 can offer.

Chamomile wrote:They're the only sandbox game in town. So long as they have that monopoly, people who want to participate in player-driven stories will stick around. Even if they aren't entirely player-driven, they're still way closer than even things like Guild Wars 2 can offer.

True, but having played the game it's the closest I've ever come to actually paying to work at an unfun, grueling, frustrating job.

I mean, the game has a fucking *spreadsheet* in it. And not as a boss screen.

EVE Online is not a very good game at all. The very second that another sandbox MMORPG comes along that is even slightly good as an actual game, EVE will be in huge trouble. Now it will probably be able to survive because it has an entrenched playerbase who own megacorporations and don't want to abandon five years of subscription fees and the accumulation of resources and influence that comes with it, but it'll almost immediately start hemorrhaging everyone on the factory floors who puts up with the spreadsheet grinding only because this is the only game that makes stuff like the Battle of Asakai possible. I'm not sure if I want to see someone make that game so I can play it, or if I don't want to see someone make that game so I can beat them there.

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:They've tried to have MMO players be the ones to "create stories" without ST or GM before. This tends to be the result: http://spla.sh/bp/oldstuff.htm

But occasionally it's this.

Chamomile wrote:I'm not sure if I want to see someone make that game so I can play it, or if I don't want to see someone make that game so I can beat them there.

Supposedly Pathfinder, the MMO, is taking their shot at this.