Putting Hellgate back on track.
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Tag: Bill Roper
Bill Roper Is Back And He’s Got Hellgate
The Return of Bill Roper: New Worlds To Explore In SpatialOS
Bill Roper has returned to the world of MMORPGs. Following his tenure at Flagship Studios and Cryptic Studios (during Champions Online’s launch), Bill Roper left the genre to head up the gaming division at Disney with its Infinity line of products. Now he is back, joining SpatialOS creator Improbable to create new worlds.
Those of you who have been keeping track will recall that Improbable is putting together technology to create more permanent, persistent worlds. The company is picking up some big names, including Jagex, who are interested in incorporating their technology.
“The possibilities for not just massive worlds, but highly detailed and truly persistent worlds built on SpatialOS are exciting. I believe the games that will define AR and VR are yet to be realized, and the type of simulation that can be achieved with our platform can be an integral part of these new experiences,” says Roper.
SpatialOS is making its way into a bunch of games, from Chronicles of Elyria to Worlds Adrift, and more to be announced.
(Source: Gamasutra)
MMOrning Shots: Go To Hell
Today’s MMOrning Shot is a very old screenshot from Hellgate: London, circa 2005. I could be wrong, but I’m not entirely sure that the demon pictured above ever made it into the final game. Is Hellgate even running anymore? The website says yes but the forums appear to be offline constantly.
Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Falling Out #7: Paid to Play
After a week break due to vacation, Falling Out is back.
Cryptic Rushed Star Trek Because Of Strict License Deadlines
Good news, fervent defenders of Star Trek Online. The guys over at the STOked podcast managed to snag an interview with Stephen D’angelo, Executive Producer of Star Trek Online at Cryptic Studios. In the interview, which you can view below (it starts at 11:20), D’angelo talks about the deadlines that Cryptic faced when developing the MMO, most notably the fact that when Cryptic acquired the license from Perpetual Entertainment (the previous developer that had gone under), they also inherited the game’s due date for completion. For Cryptic, this meant starting several years behind schedule.
So now when time someone tells you that Star Trek Online was rushed because Bill Roper loves money, you can strike them with facts.
Marvel Appoints Bill Roper As Vice President
At one point working on MMO Fallout excavated a tiny part of my brain, and replaced it with a long list of industry names and their associations. So any time I hear the name Bill Roper, David Bravik, or Max Schaefer, the “Flagship Studios” red alert goes off and won’t stop buzzing until I finish writing the article.
I received a few emails after I wrote the previous article as to why I picked Bill Roper’s name first in the list of people who incite arguments, if I knew something I couldn’t talk about or if there was some connection between Bill Roper and Marvel. Anyway, my point is that my readers are fairly prone to conspiracy theories, knowing my past history of jokes and mild hints coming true.
Anyway, Marvel announced today that Bill Roper has been appointed as Vice President. The ex-Blizzard, Ex-Cryptic Studios developer joins the team and will undoubtedly have his eyes set on the gaming portion of Marvel. It’s worth specifying that this is Marvel that Roper is VP of, not Gazillion Entertainment, makers of Marvel Super Hero Squad Online and Marvel Universe.
“We are pleased to have Bill join our team. With 17 years of experience in the worldwide gaming industry, we are confident that Bill has the creative vision necessary to help guide the next wave of development and product for DIMG’s Marvel Games.“
You can all just leave your wallets at the door.
Source: Massively
Looking Back, Moving Forward: August 2010
Video of the month.
There is no doubt that All Points Bulletin stole the show this past month, showing up on MMO Fallout at least once every three days heading towards the middle of the month onward. Although Realtime Worlds announced APB carrying 130,000 active players, I have to question how many of those players are actively paying subscriptions, as I have my doubts that Realtime Worlds would be going into administration if the grand majority were pumping cash directly into the cash shop and game time veins at RTW.
August was filled to the brim with news that makes you scratch your head and question reality. Bill Roper is gone from Cryptic, I was sent a legal threat by David Allen, I had my wisdom teeth taken out and pretty much immediately went back to writing up articles despite being heavily drugged on hydrocodone, I was featured on Biobreak and Tobold’s blog.
On another good note, however, MMO Fallout now has five active backups going. For the sake of my own embarrassment, I won’t mention the incident that lead up to me being paranoid about losing my information, but irregardless I now have five flash drives, each carrying a backup of MMO Fallout that I update on a weekly basis. I backup this website daily, but I only transfer it off of my computer every Saturday.
I’m still disappointed that the Atari versus Turbine lawsuit resulted the way it did. I personally love legal drama (when it doesn’t involve me) and would have enjoyed seeing something come out of this other than secret settlements.
Warhammer Online fans rejoiced this month. Although BioMythArts Entertainment (or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays) isn’t giving specific numbers, they are willing to announce that Warhammer Online is indeed profitable, with tens of thousands of new players streaming in thanks to the endless trial system.
Over on Sony’s front, Everquest is once again proving that although their alternate rule servers are unique, they more often than not crash due to low populations. Such is the case with Everquest’s 51/50 ruleset servers (players start at level 51 with 50 level AP) which are due to be merged into normal ruleset servers.
Unfortunately, another month brings another game shutting down. After a year of promises and well wishes, Playdom announced the shuttering of Chronicles of Spellborn, after the Facebook gaming company acquired Acclaim. Although Acclaim’s two other MMOs 9Dragons and 2Moon were transferred to other hosts, Chronicles of Spellborn was shutdown late August.
Speaking of which, Earth Eternal came very close to shutting down. The most adorable non-Asian MMO hit a brick wall running when Sparkplay announced that the company had laid off all but two employees, and that the game would be sold at auction, with high hopes that a buyer would pick up the title. Luckily, a buyer did indeed pick up the title, and we’ve received information that many of the Sparkplay employees may be making a return soon enough.
Alganon-WAIT IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK- ditched the initial client purchase completely by going 100% free to play earlier this month. While the free title is restricted in how many quests you may partake in daily, as well as a shorter level cap, players can remove these restrictions with a simple cash shop purchase.
While we’re on the subject of departures, Bill Roper announced that he would be leaving Cryptic Studios. In unrelated news, I’ve been receiving emails of gratitude for reporting on this story.
On yet another sad note, Realtime Worlds and their newly released MMO “Absolving Perot’s Blame” (or APB for short) have been pretty much a weekly staple for MMO Fallout news. What started out as a simple announcement of standard restructuring took a turn for the worst when Realtime Worlds went into administration (Bankruptcy) and announced that they were looking for investors with what was left of the team. With the recently released patch offering major updates to the game’s driving and shooting, we can only hope that these much needed enhancements didn’t come too late.
Cryptic Studios: Now With 100% Less Bill Roper!
Anyone who has played Champions Online or Star Trek Online knows Bill Roper, who took over for Jack Emmert after the latter left developer Cryptic Studios. And if you know him, chance states that you probably have some strong feelings about him, whether they be in the “Bill Roper is the devil,” “Bill Roper is the greatest developer ever,” or just “meh.” Knowing that, the gaming public will be either sad, jumping for joy, or casually nonchalant in their reaction to the news that Bill Roper has left Cryptic Studios.
In the following post on Champions Online’s website, Roper posted:
For the past two years I’ve had the extreme privilege of working with an amazing array of talented developers and just plain great people here at Cryptic Studios. Over the past few months my entrepreneurial spirit has become restless, and I’ve made the difficult decision to move on and look for new opportunities.
You can read the whole thing at the link above.
Hopefully Bill Roper will find success in whatever venture he chooses to move on to.
More on Cryptic Studios as it appears.
Why You Shouldn’t Preorder For The Bonus Items
I’ve been quite critical of Cryptic in the past, mentioning that they have the most convincing cardboard cutouts pretending to be community relations, and going as far as advocating that people never buy straight from Atari.com, ever… Whatever the case may be, writing articles on Cryptic has become something of a repetitive task, as generally the news that I would put on here comes in the same package: Cryptic did something, annoyed a lot of their customers.
Today’s news comes from the latest massive update to the Cryptic Store, making almost every preorder bonus (sans playable Borg) available to players for a fee. Needless to say, once again, the forums are in an uproar. I’m finding a lot of the issue comes from players not angry that the previously exclusive items are being sold on the cash shop, as this knowledge was known before the game launched, although a small number of items did not carry this. The manner in which Cryptic went about doing so is what is getting feathers ruffled.
Foremost, the phrase “too soon” comes to mind. Ignoring the several days of head start, the items remained exclusive for a whole four and a half months following launch. Many players believe that, even though Cryptic said that they would eventually make the items available on the cash shop, that they should have waited a longer period of time before doing so. A second major complaint I’ve seen is that only a certain group of the bonus items are available, while others remain exclusive. A number of players are crying foul due to a feeling of favoritism of some preorder options over others.
I have to agree with the complaint relating to the item shop versions being much cheaper than the bundled package. As someone who purchased an enhanced version of Star Trek Online, the same perks I paid around $30 more for are now available on the Cryptic Store for pennies on the dollar. Time is one factor, and as I have already pointed out, that extra cost became virtually useless in the matter of four months. Not only this, but I distinctly remember Cryptic employees recommending that players purchase numerous copies of the game in order to get all of the bonus items.
Perhaps the most relevant complaint, and the reason I decided to write up this article, is based around trust: Essentially, exclusive and unique are made subjective, fit to change at Cryptic’s discretion (which in the terms of these items, comes down to when newer players ask for them to be on the cash shop). This will put a lot of distrust around various Cryptic promotions, as anything listed as “exclusive” will no longer be viewed as such by the community, simply an attempt to lull players into making a purchase, and then sticking the item on the cash shop some months later for a drastically reduced price.
I’m not calling on Cryptic’s destruction, as anyone who reads MMO Fallout would know I stray away from. What I am saying is that there will likely be noticeable drop in certain preorder packages for Cryptic’s third MMO, to be announced this summer. Cryptic looks to lose some cash from those people who preorder just for the exclusive items, and yes those people do exist despite some of us (me) wishing people wouldn’t prepurchase five different copies of the same game for digital items.
If your purchase relies on the presumption that only you and a select group of people will ever be able to use that item, and if anyone else gained access to said item you would quit the game, do yourself a favor: Cancel the order before it finishes. It’s a fairly easy way to save money, especially for someone in your position.
MMO Fallout 