Post by Wintergreen on May 30, 2013 20:16:12 GMT -6
A lot of them are extremely busy. Rynol has been permanently retired from all things HoI for a while. Xiong was somewhat interested in the possibility of a successor sim but he retired and hasn't been on since then. I imagine much of the v2 staff would be burned out. It was a...very long process. I suspect Blizz would be burned out if he had tried to muscle through those chaotic 8 years without any breaks.
1) Support for a game like this is hard to come by right now, however I think interest (and potential interest) is as high as it has ever been. Now, let me explain what I mean. Everyone who knows Heroes of Ivalice right now, knows it as a once great game that unfortunately grew stagnant. Truly, as the premier Tactics RPG environment on the internet at the time, any successor to it will also unfortunately have this stigma attached for a while.
There probably is still a lot of interest in these types of games. However, you may have to do some reach out to alert people. I'm confident you can find interested players--it just might take some effort and strategizing down the road. Even in v2 we were constantly looking for ways to find and engage new players.
2) I would have to echo Kablizzy's sentiments in assuring everyone this will not be a crash and burn project right out of the gates. I have had varying degrees of investment in Heroes of Ivalice over the years, ranging from wildly active poster and roleplayer, to occasional lurker making a quick check to see if there had been a game turn that month, all the way up to Roleplay Master at the beginning of v2. Over the entirety of its existence however my interest and support for a game like this to be successful never dropped despite my overall activity level.
Good to hear! Honestly, the biggest thing that will help prevent crash and burn is a long and thorough development cycle. Don't rush it. That kills things.
Now I don't believe it is the staff's fault at all that Heroes of Ivalice ultimately was not able to continue. From what I have learned over the past few months developing this game, and harking back to my original experience with Heroes of Ivalice both as a player and my brief stint on staff, is that the foundations upon which v2 was presented to the public was faulty from the get go. Many of the skill sets I see now at HoI look like our rough drafts before they get dissected and adjusted by all of us. I've also been told some stories from Blizz about his experiences staffing the game at that particular time, and the environment in which they were all working in. This all of course due to the abrupt ending of v1 and hurried launch of v2. I think if v1 was given a chance to be played out in full, making any adjustments and balancing changes then, v2 would have been a much more stable game mechanic overall and we would perhaps be well into v3 over at Heroes of Ivalice right now.
This is correct but I think you might be underestimating the amount of effort it took to keep HoI running. We would still have seen massive staff burnout even if v2 had launched in a better state. Running skirmishes was hard, yo. Running campaigns was almost impossible. The lesson here is that you will need a lot of staff and you will need to ensure the game is structured in a way to avoid staff burnout. Thinking up ways to minimize stress and maximize the rewards of staffing is always a good idea.
So I would disagree with you fundamentally with the idea that what we are developing here isn't at its core essence Heroes of Ivalice. This project is the budding leaf growing out of the old withered stump of v2 HoI. Every single person here so far found this forum through Heroes of Ivalice, save for Smash I think who is the only one who has joined from FFH. Everyone who has contributed so far has had vested interests in the success of Heroes of Ivalice and this game as a whole. As Kablizzy stated, many people throughout the course of the past seven years for better or worse have come to recognize the "FFT Online RPG" to be Heroes of Ivalice, and will expect this game to be the only legitimate representation of the concept on the internet.
For this reason, coupled with the realization that original game is now more or less defunct mechanically, I would consider it counter productive and against the best wishes of the entire player base that has experienced this game over the past six or so years to not connect this game with the name and environment we have all become familiar with. With the original Heroes of Ivalice closing up shop, we would not be genuine to the community if we try to present such a similar product and try to brand it something it isn't.
We might be working with different ideas of identity here. The core concept is the same and the playerbase will largely be the same--as you mentioned. However, I view this as fundamentally different from HoI due to a lack of continuity in world (you guys have your own unique setting content), a lack of continuity in mechanics (the common mechanical elements are all from FFT itself; you don't appear to be using much that was unique to HoI), and a lack of direct staff continuity (you don't have anybody who was involved with the last 6.5 years of HoI; that being said, staff identity is constantly evolving--most people now probably associate Zack as head admin rather than, say, Kairo).
None of those are bad things, by the way. But in my mind they make this something different from HoI. Same concept. Lots of common players. But not precisely the same thing.
Break everything down to its most simplest form, and try to get a balanced, streamlined game capable of producing quick, scheduled game turns. We are going to to achieve this through the beta version of the game which we are going to run first, which will be a fluid, open development environment where there will almost assuredly be many adjustments to the game mechanics.
It is very very very very very good that you realize this from the get-go. I would especially emphasize a game which is streamlined not only on the player side but on the staff side. You won't be able to keep many staff for very long if the game is exhausting to run. This was the main source of turnover and burnout in v2. There's a reason I stopped running player-side mech work and transitioned to creative and management work (before starting up v3 dev). It was just grueling. And endless.
So I apologize that all of the work that was accomplished by you guys over the past six and half years won't be making it into the final version of the game
Rest assured, that isn't going to bother anybody.
you have my word that no work that wasn't directly developed by or under the supervision of Kablizzy when he staffed the project, will not be present in our version of the game without expressed consent. The last thing we want to do is steal or alienate the original game.
This is very good to hear (and was one of my biggest concerns when I heard there was a new FFT sim). Still, I would err especially heavily on the side of caution when using things Blizz may have supervised. Supervision in the dev cycle was very indirect and people were often self-guided. There was also never any understanding that work we did for v2 would be used for a different concept. We all understood that these were "communal" intellectual properties, so to speak--but they were communal in the context of the game we were currently working on. We never envisioned any of it would be used by other people for a different project later in the future. It would be good to ask specifically if you are using something that Blizz didn't personally create.
That being said, this is more of an issue for lore/characters than it is for numbers. Nobody is super partial to formulae. People do get defensive about "creative" ideas, though. I don't think y'all will hit any serious issues. I just want you to be careful. I know I wouldn't be pleased if I found out writing or creative content of mine had been appropriated without my consent--and I'm confident many players and staff would feel the same way.
Oh, as for Blizz's point about running things by hand being really hard? He's not joking. It was really really really really really hard.
As for me staffing? I dunno. Maybe. I'm not actually that good of a staffer. That being said, I'm always happy to offer advice or input. If you have something particular in mind you want from me let me know and I'll see about it.
