Friday, August 6, 2010

Random Shots: Surprised By Cryptic

  • Ten Ton Hammer recently posted an interview with CO XP Shannon Posniewski that looked back on The Serpent Lantern and also at what is coming up next. All the chatter about the whys and wherefores of SL were good, but that's not the reason I'm bothering to post this.

  • In response to the question about how long it took at make The Serpent Lantern, Poz explained that it took about two months to make the content, a few weeks for testing, and then a few weeks for Test server feedback and tweaking. Since that comes out to four months and they want to put these out quarterly, I'm sure you can see the problem. How do they get around that? I'd better quote this verbatum:
    We handle this by having two teams working at the same time on different packs. This also explains why we know a lot about the next one coming up in a couple months even though we just launched Serpent Lantern.

  • Huh. Cryptic have enough people working on Champions that they can have two teams working on content? I know that it's probably just a few people one each team and there is a lot of overlap in art and programming resources, but it has to give you pause. There is a lot of unfortunate talk that Cryptic is circling the drain. But if they can have parallel teams working on adventure packs as well as constantly review and update the game, that has to be a good sign. Cryptic obviously hasn't given up and CO and I'm not ready to either.

  • On a side note, I initially dismissed a comment about the interview that I read over at Massively wherein the commentor regretted resubcribing to CO since the adventure pack was so small. Now that I've thought about it, I have to agree. It's definitely good content, but it's not enough to overcome the activation energy required to sign up again. It's good to know that Cryptic is committed to making adventure packs work. But if you are a lapsed subscriber seeking more content, you might wait for a few packs to accumulate before returning to the game.


© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the bump. CO actually has plenty of content left for me since I never got past 18 or so in the first place. However, the longer I wait to sub up again the more content I'll get for my money. They also mentioned filling in some "thin spots" in the low 20s in the next big patch during the interview, which would be perfect for me.

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  2. I don't play CO but I can understand the sentiment behind being surprised by Cryptic. Recently I have become increasingly pleased with what they've done and pleasantly surprised by their progress. Their games are still far from perfect, but like you pointed out they are certainly not giving up on their games and playing STO I can see they're really trying.

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  3. @ Yeebo - That's one of the things that I love with these packs. Since they are level scaled (as well as player and difficulty scaled), you can use them to at any level where you need a boost of XP. I wish they were coming a little faster, but there will be a good variety eventually.

    @ MMOGamerChick - You are right. You can see them doing the same thing with STO. I think the patch timeline they laid out was brilliant. I wish more games would do something like that.

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