World of Darkness Studio Sheds More Staff

[Karloff]

World of Darkness Studio Sheds More Staff


CCP lays off 15 from its Atlanta studio, remains committed to the franchise.

Reports of its death may be exaggerated [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116507-World-of-Darkness-Not-Dead], but CCP's undead MMO World of Darkness certainly isn't looking healthy. CCP has confirmed that 15 jobs have been terminated at its Atlanta studio, as a result of "our evaluation of the game's design and ongoing development needs." However CCP is still keen to go ahead with its vampire project.

"While this was a difficult decision, CCP remains committed to the franchise and our promise to make a compelling, rich, and deep World of Darkness experience," said CCP. This isn't the first time CCP's had to lay off staff [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113740-CCP-Refocuses-on-EVE-With-Big-World-of-Darkness-Layoff] in Atlanta; in October 2011 20% of its people were ushered out the door. The reason given then was that CCP was refocusing on EVE.

Currently the game isn't even in beta, and there's no release date. Not good, for a title that was first announced back in 2006 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103767-CCP-Teases-New-Vampire-the-Masquerade-MMO].

Source: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-12-ccp-re-evaluates-world-of-darkness-looses-more-staff]


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[Pebkio]

So you're basically saying that CCP is... undead? Bwa ha.

This actually loks more like a Vampire the Masquerade game. I guess they gotta start somewhere but... c'mon! WoD is the mortal setting. They're weren't awakened, embraced, kidnapped by the fae, approached to make a deal by a wraith... and I'm basically being an overthinking nerd here, aren't I?

 

[TilMorrow]

So you're basically saying that CCP is... undead? Bwa ha.

0/10 Bad Joke. Did not laugh. See me after class.

OT: If anything it's pretty clear that CCP are not really interested in actually making the game if they're further scuppering the staff trying to develop it and nothing substantial has been shown off or mentioned in the last three years. Maybe they've had a hard time with trying to convert VTM to a mmo format and settling on a pricing model.

 

[Something Amyss]

So you're basically saying that CCP is... undead? Bwa ha.

This actually loks more like a Vampire the Masquerade game. I guess they gotta start somewhere but... c'mon! WoD is the mortal setting. They're weren't awakened, embraced, kidnapped by the fae, approached to make a deal by a wraith... and I'm basically being an overthinking nerd here, aren't I?

WoD is the overall setting, meaning that it deals with all of the above. Even in NWOD, WOD is just the core book.

Besides, what do you really expect from a White Wolf game? Or from a game that is described as a "vampire game" for that matter.

Aaaanyway, anyone remember when they were going to do a Werewolf game in the 90s and it just sort of died? I'm getting those vibes.

 

[Ace Morologist]

So is anybody from the old White Wolf days even left at CCP North America anymore? It's kind of sad to see this keep happening.

[And now a complete tonal shift.]

I'd love an open-world sandbox single-player Vampire: The Masquerade game. Like Grand Theft Auto 5 with fangs. That would be awesome.

Hell, I'd even take a new Hunter: The Reckoning game set in the World of Darkness if you could do it like a Rockstar sandbox game. You know, you could run around causing havoc on your own or seek out random monsters holed up on the world map or follow the story breadcrumbs to finish a sprawling gothic punk noir epic. That would rule. I do not feel the same way about a WoD MMO.

--Morology!

 

[infinity_turtles]

Yeah, I've been steadily getting more annoyed at CCP for buying White Wolf. They've gutted the company. As short as this post is, just writing it has actually managed to make me a lot more angry at CCP. Rather than annoyed, I want them to go fuck themselves now.

A lot of White Wolf fans had hope about CCP buying White Wolf. They were understanding of the slowed production of tabletop stuff as some staff was pulled to work on the MMO. And a decent number subscribed to EVE just to show support. And now CCP should go fuck itself.

 

[Pebkio]

WoD is the overall setting, meaning that it deals with all of the above. Even in NWOD, WOD is just the core book.

Besides, what do you really expect from a White Wolf game? Or from a game that is described as a "vampire game" for that matter.

Aaaanyway, anyone remember when they were going to do a Werewolf game in the 90s and it just sort of died? I'm getting those vibes.

That's because Mage is the only setting that would really do well in a video game sense.

That, or the actual WoD where you play a regular person who becomes entangled in the supernatural. Yes, WoD is the overall template, but it's written with regular characters in mind. There are no templates for vampire player characters or werewolf player characters. In WoD it's just you, an unsupernatural human, maybe some kung-fu training and two dots in Occult would be helpful. That would make a great horror survival game. Vampire would seem the least likely, besides maybe Changeling, to translate into a video game. Sure there are adventures you can have, but mostly it boils down into political moving and shaking.

Werewolf might also be acceptable, but that seems more "furry" than any of the other ones...

---

But you know what I think is really killing the game? MMO. Sure, it's a nice thought to have everyone interconnected like the setting but all the systems are written for a gaming group that is 3-7 players. You could pull off eight in a very Diablo way but White Wolf games are crying out for self-contained stories that are only colored by outside events. If they had done that, the game would not have taken a decade to even get off the ground (if ever).

 

[Psychobabble]

Yeah, I've been steadily getting more annoyed at CCP for buying White Wolf. They've gutted the company. As short as this post is, just writing it has actually managed to make me a lot more angry at CCP. Rather than annoyed, I want them to go fuck themselves now.

A lot of White Wolf fans had hope about CCP buying White Wolf. They were understanding of the slowed production of tabletop stuff as some staff was pulled to work on the MMO. And a decent number subscribed to EVE just to show support. And now CCP should go fuck itself.

It didn't help that they also put all that work into Dust 514. Hows that workin out for ya these days CCP?

 

[Pebkio]

From what I understand, you actually start the game as a human and can become a vampire later on.

Emphasis on -can-. Apparently it's not mandatory to be a vampire, hell it isn't even mandatory to be a ghoul.

Personally I'd play the MMO -entirely- as a human, if only because I have a thing for keeping my humanity in tact. Well, that and the sheer fact that humanity manages to not only survive in a world full of things that can rip them to pieces, in the Hunter: The Vigil setting, they can honestly fight back.

Personally my favorite organization would have to be the Barrett Commission from Hunter: The Vigil. Sure they don't hunt and kill like regular hunters, but we're talking about a group of politicians and businessman who play chessmaster with beings hundreds of years older than them, and while they haven't exactly succeeded in their end goal of cleansing the U.S. government entirely of vampires, they're an honest to god thorn in the Vampires' side. That's right, a race of supernaturally beautiful monsters more than capable of mind control that live in a society all about backstabbing politics, and they still are given loads of trouble and stress by mere mortals that are generations behind them.

That takes -balls-.

See that's boooorrrring... in a video game. Oh man, that's so much fun at the tabletop or even some some refreshing live-action roleplaying but how are you going to keep that interesting in a video game?

I'm reminded of one of my favorite games from the 90s. Forced Alliance by Ripcord. Some good ol' fashioned pew pew space dogfighting. You could eventually make allies from enemies... backstab partners... or make truces. It was fun. Until you got to a high enough rank and then the missions became a checklest form in which you sent out the people who's names you thought were cool and then you got a report at the end. You stopped going on the missions and all you did was handle the politics.

And it was boooorrrring! Neat concept, boring section of the video game.

 

[Something Amyss]

That's because Mage is the only setting that would really do well in a video game sense.

Depends on what they do with it. The first Hunter game was a fun shooter that deceptively had almost nothing to do with HTR but advertised the PnP game. I could see awesome games from most of their big franchises if they played fast and loose.

But you know what I think is really killing the game? MMO. Sure, it's a nice thought to have everyone interconnected like the setting but all the systems are written for a gaming group that is 3-7 players. You could pull off eight in a very Diablo way but White Wolf games are crying out for self-contained stories that are only colored by outside events. If they had done that, the game would not have taken a decade to even get off the ground (if ever).

Plus, real roleplayers hate game mechanics, which is why New WOD sucks.

No, but I could see a WoD MMO working, but I doubt it's in the same way these guys are doing it.

Of course, y favourite thing about White Wolf is houseruling the hell out of it, so I doubt I'll care about this game. Just saying.

 

[Pebkio]

Plus, real roleplayers hate game mechanics, which is why New WOD sucks.

No, but I could see a WoD MMO working, but I doubt it's in the same way these guys are doing it.

Of course, my favourite thing about White Wolf is houseruling the hell out of it, so I doubt I'll care about this game. Just saying.

But that would be a good cause of the failue of the potential game's popularity. If it were to come out and get terrible reviews from tabletop players. But in production, because even a beta isnt out yet... the prospect of trying to build an MMO is just killing the studio. MMOs take a long long time and a lot lot money. They are massive time sinks and trying to make an MMO off of a game, not electronic but still a game, that wasn't originally designed to be an MMO is probably adding even more overhead.

I like to reference other games and I have a good one: Kingdoms of Amalur. By all accounts, Reckoning was going to be an MMO at first but then switched to a contained story. I'm thinking that NEVER would've seen KoA hit any markets if they doggedly kept trying to make it into an MMO. Same thing is going on with the WoD game, I think, except CCP is doggedly trying to keep it as an MMO and we might not ever see it, ever.

 

[Kahani]

That's because Mage is the only setting that would really do well in a video game sense.

Vampire already did do really well in a video game sense. Not an MMO, and I have no idea how that could be made to work, but I don't see why any of the settings would be a particular problem for a single player game.

 

[Pebkio]

Vampire already did do really well in a video game sense. Not an MMO, and I have no idea how that could be made to work, but I don't see why any of the settings would be a particular problem for a single player game.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to put on my elitist hat for this answer:

You weren't playing a true Vampire: The Masquerade Game.

VtM is a chapter of WoD that deals primarily with the social interactions between monsters that suck blood. Sure, you can sometimes get into fights, but if they aren't pitched by planned-out policitcal maneuverings then you aren't doing it right. Still thinking I'm wrong? There is a built in mechanic in VtM that is a determinate on if your character is actually an equal to your oponent in a socially-interactive kind of way.

How are you going to translate that into a video game without yanking the controls away from the player?

Now, that's not saying you can't take the settings and characters and the concept of vampires and put them into a video game... but that is not a Vampire the Masquerade game. That might as well be "The Adventures of Vampires Commonly Seen as Characters in Vampire: The Masquerade". Or "Dark", for short.

See? It's called an elitist hat for a reason...

 

[Scars Unseen]

Plus, real roleplayers hate game mechanics, which is why New WOD sucks.

No, but I could see a WoD MMO working, but I doubt it's in the same way these guys are doing it.

Of course, y favourite thing about White Wolf is houseruling the hell out of it, so I doubt I'll care about this game. Just saying.

Frankly, I thought the old WOD sucked mechanically. It's definitely showing its age, in any case. There are much better systems for playing a narrative game these days. Games that have mechanics that actually support the narrative. On the far end you have FATE, and I hear some varieties of Cortex are good at that as well. A game that strikes a good medium between narrative and more traditional combat-heavy design is Fantasy Flight Games' new Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game(even if you don't like Star Wars, I like the mechanics of that game enough that I'd be tempted to lift them for a conversion).

Can't comment on the new WOD though.

 

[Something Amyss]

Frankly, I thought the old WOD sucked mechanically. It's definitely showing its age, in any case. There are much better systems for playing a narrative game these days. Games that have mechanics that actually support the narrative. On the far end you have FATE, and I hear some varieties of Cortex are good at that as well. A game that strikes a good medium between narrative and more traditional combat-heavy design is Fantasy Flight Games' new Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game(even if you don't like Star Wars, I like the mechanics of that game enough that I'd be tempted to lift them for a conversion).

Can't comment on the new WOD though.

I was an active participant on the WW forums for years and years, and the joke was basically the way that the userbase often takes the extreme attitude that people who complain about the mechanics sucking are munchkins and rollplayers and should go back to D&D (which was often used as an insult because reasons).

So yeah, basically the joke was made BECAUSE the mechanics suck (and people would defend it) NWOD even got a lot of hate from fans of OWOD simply because the mechanics were...Functional.

On a side note, I've been curious about EOTE, but the whole "custom dice" and "different dice in skill pools" has always sort of put me off.

 

[Scars Unseen]

On a side note, I've been curious about EOTE, but the whole "custom dice" and "different dice in skill pools" has always sort of put me off.

I wouldn't worry about the dice issue. The general consensus of the player base is that it reads more confusingly at first glance than it actually plays. The strong point of the unusual dice system is that it allows for multiple outcomes on a single roll. This is possible because the game has multiple axes of success.

You could, for instance, be trying to repair a malfunctioning hyperdrive while fleeing from an imperial patrol. You roll the appropriate dice for your skill and end up with a success and a despair. Rather than canceling each other out, both happen at the same time. The GM might declare that you successfully jump away, but upon reaching your destination, the hyperdrive is completely fried, and will need to be replaced entirely.

Another thing I like about the system is that it encourages people other than just the GM to control the narrative at times. In the situation I described above, the GM interpreted the result of the rolled despair. Had the player rolled a triumph instead, it would be the player that declared the roll's meaning. Additionally, players can spend Destiny points to try to affect the narrative.

Take for instance, the beginning of The Matrix. Trinity is being chased by an Agent. Desperate to get away, she uses a destiny point to declare that there is a window at the end of the hallway with another within jumping distance on an adjacent building. Now she just has to make the roll for her leap between buildings...

It really is a fun system to play around with.