Think you can make a better game? Show us.

[Hunters' Moon]

It gets old seeing people being so critical in UHall of every little thing that EA/Mythic publishes or adds as a feature that may not be liked by people "that have been playing since beta". With that said,I would like to throw down a gauntlet of sorts. Think you can produce and develop a game that plays better than UO? Show us. Yes,I am being serious.I'd be more than happy to be a tester for you and nit pick your game to death as much as you (general/plural) seem to enjoy to do the same to UO. Post here when you got a sample level or a newby area ready to play in ohh...about a year to 18 months? I'll be waiting.

 

[Vlaude]

Not to detract from the challenge, but if someone is willing to take it up I'd recommend using Kickstarter to get your initial funding. There's a lot of neat things going on there. If you do go that route, let me know, I'd happily contribute to a game being developed by someone from the Stratics community, even if it isn't trying to "play better" than UO. That's my spiel. I kind of do hope someone will take it up

 

[Woodsman]

You're talking about millions of dollars, because you'll need dozens of people at a minimum, and many of them will need to be experienced in their fields of expertise, whether it's client programming, server programming, artwork, or whatever, and experience costs a lot. The days of just getting a bunch of people together to throw together an MMO on PCs and Macs are over. Unless you're aim is really small and you don't plan on a lot of people playing. If you have a bad launch and first month, you can kiss your chances of being relevant and really growing goodbye (see Warhammer: Age of Reckoning). That means you have to get the right people and do it right and release it when it's ready, not when the accounting or marketing people tell you to release it.

We pancake because we think UO can be better and could bring in more people if BioWare would give it a chance.

Now asking people to make and run their own shard is more realistic, but probably against Stratics TOS.

 

[Hunters' Moon]

My point is simple. It is too easy to second guess those that actually do the work of producing and developing the game we enjoy. It would be same if I called Alabama head coach Nick Saban and asked him why,in a critical tone,he decided to call a running play on 3rd down and 7,instead of calling a pass to the slot receiver.Saban would rightfully laugh at me before he'd hang up. What I am saying is that it is too easy to try to "arm-chair QB" the Dev team even though we don't know 90% of what's going on behind the scenes. That's why I made the challenge to those "arm-chair developers" to put their money where their mouth is.

 

[Woodsman]

The problem is not with the UO teams over the years, it's with EA.

 

[Raptor85]

It gets old seeing people being so critical in UHall of every little thing that EA/Mythic publishes or adds as a feature that may not be liked by people "that have been playing since beta". With that said,I would like to throw down a gauntlet of sorts. Think you can produce and develop a game that plays better than UO? Show us. Yes,I am being serious.I'd be more than happy to be a tester for you and nit pick your game to death as much as you (general/plural) seem to enjoy to do the same to UO. Post here when you got a sample level or a newby area ready to play in ohh...about a year to 18 months? I'll be waiting.

Would freaking love to, but it's against the stratics TOS to promote my own stuff here...but since you challenged I'll play with fire a little...It's been a while since i've gotten an infraction for talking about other games. Why not just come over to TIGSource though where such games get made by 1-2 man teams on a regular basis? I play quite a few that I could only wish had the userbase of UO. (Makin the game isn't the issue, marketing afterwards and getting a playerbase tends to be, without a large enough playerbase in a MMO users get bored and leave)

This may be hard to believe for someone on the "outside" but with all the libraries and engines available out there, if you're willing to abide by their restrictions, even a MMO is quite easy to develop these days....hell, as a matter of fact, here, the engine that EA used to develop Star Wars: The Old Repblic is free to use and basicly drag & drop HeroEngine. Unfortunately it's platform restricted though, only can be developed or played from Win7, but it is there for those that could want to use it. (Yep, EA, probably quite wisely seeing their track record, didn't develop the vast majority of the new Star Wars game themselves, they bought a copy of an existing engine anyone can use, then had someone draw some wookie art and copy the levelup grind from WoW)

Once I get the isometric renderer added to the current "incarnation" of my general purpose game engine as well it would also be a simple matter to clone the UO client entirely in it (should be putting up a "tutorial" video of how to make a simple physics based platformer in it in a week or so, it's not public release at the moment and I'm just cleaning it up enough to have it more usable for LD23). Granted that's not really what it's for, though it was designed for a RPG and does have working network code, but it is there as a possibility if you would like to front the cash to fund it