The Gaming Den

Interesting article in The Guardian on the debacle that was the WoD MMO and how it fell apart.

Apparently, CCP basically purchased White Wolf and put the entire team in charge of creating an MMO. Supposedly we might have gotten a game out of this if CCP hadn't, much like a vampire, sucked the blood of WW dry in order to fuel it's own undead lurching of Eve Online.

My favorite was the mention of an alpha test that suggested that to an outsider the IP and world was essentially lost on him. Yeah, welcome to the last 3 or 4 WoD games White Wolf put out. That's no mistake.

Anyway, it's an interesting read:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... white-wolf

Why would anyone try to turn TTRPG designers into AAA video game developers?

Yeah, they really could have done better by getting the licence to the IP and then not actually letting the WW crew so much as touch the system. Or anything else for that matter. Not just because the WW crew can't make good rules (although this is on public record as being one of the few actual proven facts in the universe), but because you know your existing team and what they can do, and you can probably communicate with them in getting the MMO you want. Without any baggage of "Well when we were doing this as a TTRPG..."

But then again, just squeezing it dry while pumping more into their spreadsheet simulator pretty much matches their profile. The people of CCP are really terrible people. If you meet one of them, you should piss in their shoes.

Amusing read. I wonder how they ever managed to get EVE going.

Much of that article is based on some deeply flawed premises. The fact that studios let go a bunch of staff when products ship is no more interesting for the video game studios as it is for motion picture studios. When you're making a movie (or a play, or a videogame, or a television series, or whatever), your studio needs to swell and add a bunch of workers. And then when it's finished, your studio needs to lay off a bunch of people. That is how it works. That is how it has to work unless you're as big as EA and have enough projects in the air at all times that you really can just shuffle people from one project to another rather than giving anyone walking papers.

The second big misunderstanding that the article has is the idea that White Wolf merged with CCP. White Wolf went fucking bankrupt, and CCP bought them. You can call that:

Article wrote:In November 2006, the two companies merged, with White Wolf becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP.

But that's extremely misleading. Yes, the two companies became one company, and that is technically a "merger." But people generally think that when companies "merge" that the result is a company with both parts - rather than one of the companies dissolving entirely and the other company taking control of all their intellectual property in exchange for taking on their debts.

The third big misunderstanding is the discussion of the fall of White Wolf. The article blames rising printing costs and competition with video games. That is fucking bullshit. Printing costs were lower in the 2000s than they ever were in the 90s. D&D 3e led the industry to a major revitalization. White Wolf lost the plot because they alienated their fan base and were unable to fight 3rd edition D&D with Exalted.

Which brings us to the bottom line on that article: if CCP actually did keep the White Wolf staff and tried to get them to form the artistic and management core of a video game studio... they deserve what they got. Because that doesn't make any fucking sense. You don't take the people who managed to spend six years driving the biggest name in the TTRPG industry into bankruptcy by masterminding the torching and failed reboot of the most popular game world in industry history and give them artistic control over the direction of your computer game intended to reboot the same world. That's retarded. You either go back to beginning and bring on the writers who made the world a success in the first place, or (more likely) you bring on people who have computer experience who happen to be fans of the world in question.

Under no circumstances do you put Justin Achilli, a man who helmed White Wolf's disastrous Exalted, Time of Judgement, and nWoD projects, in charge of the artistic direction of a video game. Not only does everything he is in charge of appear to fail spectacularly, but he has shown no particular ability in the field in question.

-Username17

It was really a world of darkness. But, that's nature.

I don't get the joke.

John Magnum wrote:Why would anyone try to turn TTRPG designers into AAA video game developers?

Taking people with a proven talent for designing systems with lots of moving parts (yes, I know we're talking about White Wolf, shut up) and turning them into software devs is not actually the worst decision you can make. Sometimes it's even a pretty solid one. Software development is one of those things people learn on the job all the time because they want to be undervalued by their employers in new and exciting ways.

And indeed, the article makes it sound a fuckton more like management problems than skillset problems. And while the article is obviously biased, I kinda believe them. Keeping a project in development hell for eight years isn't easy. If you can't show progress against incremental benchmarks, it's obvious that the project is in deep trouble. Development hell happens when you do make progress against incremental benchmarks, but those benchmarks don't translate into a finished product because someone is a dumbass/they keep changing/no one is taking responsibility for the project's ultimate direction. It's like running on a treadmill - going nowhere takes a surprising amount of work.

Rawbeard wrote:Amusing read. I wonder how they ever managed to get EVE going.

I'm guessing that the core EVE developers stayed on at EVE, and someone else was put in charge of the WoD project.

While WoD Online was still in early development hell, Achilli's facebook page described him as a game designer for CCP if I remember right, not lead designer or other title that suggested he was in charge of anything.

FrankTrollman wrote:Much of that article is based on some deeply flawed premises. The fact that studios let go a bunch of staff when products ship is no more interesting for the video game studios as it is for motion picture studios. When you're making a movie (or a play, or a videogame, or a television series, or whatever), your studio needs to swell and add a bunch of workers. And then when it's finished, your studio needs to lay off a bunch of people. That is how it works. That is how it has to work unless you're as big as EA and have enough projects in the air at all times that you really can just shuffle people from one project to another rather than giving anyone walking papers.

The second big misunderstanding that the article has is the idea that White Wolf merged with CCP. White Wolf went fucking bankrupt, and CCP bought them. You can call that:

Article wrote:In November 2006, the two companies merged, with White Wolf becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP.

But that's extremely misleading. Yes, the two companies became one company, and that is technically a "merger." But people generally think that when companies "merge" that the result is a company with both parts - rather than one of the companies dissolving entirely and the other company taking control of all their intellectual property in exchange for taking on their debts.

The third big misunderstanding is the discussion of the fall of White Wolf. The article blames rising printing costs and competition with video games. That is fucking bullshit. Printing costs were lower in the 2000s than they ever were in the 90s. D&D 3e led the industry to a major revitalization. White Wolf lost the plot because they alienated their fan base and were unable to fight 3rd edition D&D with Exalted.

Which brings us to the bottom line on that article: if CCP actually did keep the White Wolf staff and tried to get them to form the artistic and management core of a video game studio... they deserve what they got. Because that doesn't make any fucking sense. You don't take the people who managed to spend six years driving the biggest name in the TTRPG industry into bankruptcy by masterminding the torching and failed reboot of the most popular game world in industry history and give them artistic control over the direction of your computer game intended to reboot the same world. That's retarded. You either go back to beginning and bring on the writers who made the world a success in the first place, or (more likely) you bring on people who have computer experience who happen to be fans of the world in question.

Under no circumstances do you put Justin Achilli, a man who helmed White Wolf's disastrous Exalted, Time of Judgement, and nWoD projects, in charge of the artistic direction of a video game. Not only does everything he is in charge of appear to fail spectacularly, but he has shown no particular ability in the field in question.

-Username17

I agree that the article contains a number of inaccuracies, and they read like someone who really doesn't know fuck-all about TTRPGs had 3 minutes to google the history of White Wolf for the intro of their article.

More interesting to me was source reports of the inner workings of CCP/WW. Namely that when the buyout occurred (and I remember they did announce it as a "merger" and not a buyout) that WW as a publishing entity was completely dead, even if they were reluctant to say otherwise.

I'm also highly amused that apparently even the shitty ass art department of WW was somehow superior to CCP's art department.

I'm curious at this point if they'll look to sell off the IP. I mean, I know there's the Onyx Path abortion which is basically free money, but it just seems... crazy that during the Eclipse/vampire/Tru Blood/young adult fiction craze the great granddaddy of the TT genre... er... languished in torpor.

Somehow I doubt it, given the ego that seems to permeate CCP. At least now I understand how all those scandals with Eve and CCP cheating and letting their friends cheat came about: They have no fucking management apparently.

Great article; thanks for sharing.