06-03-2009, 12:39 PM
amins Wrote:I'm against public vewing...I dunno. I don't have a lot of faith in small ventures for MMORPGs.
If this actually becomes something, finding start up funding isn't difficult. This kind of venture has always appealed to me (along with developing a sat or sun morning computer animated sci-fi/fantasy 30 min show on the net).
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The Fallout MMORPG was looking for $75 million to produce the game. I was thinking more along the lines of $30 million, but maybe $75 million is what it takes these days.
You really need top notch programmers. I think Shadowbane's #1 flaw was that they were simply in over their heads on technical implementation. You'd also ideally like to get top notch artists. Even if you don't/can't do the game in high detail, million-polygon models where every hair is lovingly rendered, you still need good art to make the low polygon graphics look acceptable (like WOW did).
And then there's server hardware (and our "living world" idea would probably require a lot of hardware to run all of this NPC AI), network connections (which gets very expensive when you reach MMO levels), etc.
Basically I hold no hope whatsoever of ever seeing the kind of money or expertise required to try and do a game like this. And if I did have $75 million, the first thing I would try to do is wrangle a real producer who knows how to produce a game, and probably a real designer who could take our ideas and fashion them into a real design.
It would take Blizzard or Bioware or something like that to accomplish this -- all of these game companies with more money than God but really unimaginative designers who have less experience playing games than probably anyone on this forum.