MichaelMayhem :
Winterthur :
- I just thought of a story to share
- my favorite moment in my entire time at Gaz
- Now that it's all over, NDA's be damned right?
- Can talk about whatever we want
- So after Doomsaw left we were bringing in all these big wigs and hot shots from the industry to both oversee MH, but also get us a new game concept that the team could rally behind. We kept bringing up people and found no one that was a good fit for us (or that we could afford, I imagine). So after enough of these I said to the CEO (at the time I was acting Lead Designer, so CEO was pretty much my supervisor), "If we aren't able to find someone and the hat's still taking names, I'll put mine in. Let me make you a pitch".
So I set out for about 2 months (maybe a bit more) building this game idea. Something original, but still would work out for us. I called up my old mentor and friend mr. Rawr to help me out with this process, since he and I always had great creative game jams when he was still working for us. He and I worked every single night as soon as we were off work and most of the time on the weekends on this thing. He got so excited about it, he agreed to come back to Gaz to build it with me if it got approved and funded.
- But that's not the memorable part. The memorable part was when, before going to the board of directors with it, I called up Brevik asking him to receive my pitch in-person and get his feedback on it. He agreed and I was so stoked.
- But... the executive producer, really nice guy who had worked with Brevik for a long, long time, said to me "I know you are excited for this but you have to gauge your expectations. I've seen dozens of pitches thrown at Brevik, and he turns down or dislikes pretty much all of them. An "eh, its alright" from him is a huge positive."
- And so I brought him in, we got coffee, first time really 1 on 1 with him. I wasn't in a position to do so working at Gaz before he left, I was an under-under-underling. And nervous as hell, I pitch it to him. We wrap up and I'm waiting for him to just tear it to the ground, and he just gives this nod of approval and says "this is great stuff. you guys should totally do this, it makes perfect sense for the studio"
- That's really the end of the happy moments
The board did hear it, they tentatively approved it but knew console had to get shipped first to make enough money to fund such an endeavor, and here we are.
- but Dave's approval meant everything.
- Diablo guy liked my design??! Trash Panda! ?!?
MichaelMayhem :
- Kittyattack : My favorite moment was getting MichaelMayhem to make pumpkin bombs a spender for Green Goblin
- answer : @KittyAttack I wish we supported the lock on for PC like we did console. I toyed with the 3rd party program that let you lock on and Green Goblin instantly became the most enjoyable hero for me to mess with.
MichaelMayhem :
- Not many know this but I wasn't even on the MH team since ... august? I think?
- july maybe
- I was working on new projects team within gaz. Making pitches, writing design docs
- trying to figure out what we were going to do next
- it was another action RPG in a more traditional fantasy setting, post apocalyptic. it focused on the idea of the 'ladder' or seasons being the entire game, and integrated directly with the lore & world. there were 10 classes, you picked one and then spliced another later in progression (dual class), and at the end of a season, however well you did in the season would give you voting strength. One class from the top 5 performers was voted to rotate out. One class from the bottom 5 performers was voted to rotate out. One brand-new class never before seen would come in. One formerly-removed class from at least one season ago would come back. All controlled by the players and how they voted, so the playerbase gained direct control over how the meta shifted.
- It was also a Roguelike, so your character was never permanent. After a certain amount of completion you'd 'ascend', and your character would become a permanent part of the game. You might see them as an NPC later on, training other people or being a merchant
- but that way people wouldn't feel too bad when a season rotation happened because they're used to characters not being completely permanent anyway
- and no, that game was hand-crafted for Gaz. I wouldn't try to make it myself, it's too big of a beast
Winterthur and MichaelMayhem :
- there's also of course, as with any digital voting system, the ability to... you know... fudge here and there if we thought something was truly a problem
- like a certain rainbow bridge opening progress bar.
- community did maybe 60% of the work required there. We kept fudging the rest
MichaelMayhem :
- Winterthur : I'd like to state one more time that the movement changes were good
- #provemewrong
- MichaelMayhem : I'll say it for the first time. They weren't. #provedyouwrong
- Winterthur : Wait you don't think they were?
- MM : They were good. For design, for health, for a billion other reasons we said.
- But the game was out for almost 4 years. it wasn't ours any more. We should'a just left PC as it was.
- Winterthur : Oh god I can stop pretending I loved them
- Player : Who's idea was it to remove the teleportation from the Ziggurat?
- Winterthur : Not mine
- MM : Honest answer?
- WT : I tried to keep the zigg movement thing in
- MM : We didn't have time to make items slottable in powers with the new UI. And there was only one anyone cared about, Zig, but we didn't have time to make it work. So off it went.
- WT : I should have defied Asros and made it a random displacement teleport
- MM the powers and items HUDs were completely separate and didn't talk to each other
- unlike PC's UI which had them both on one screen
- it wasn't a proposal, it was "hey this doesn't work, what do we do" "do we have time to make it work?" "no." "then change the item I guess"
.
- i do think teleport needed a nerf super bad. It was soooo busted. But the charges were the thing that hurt us most, the infinite-mobility from the get go was so hard to work around
- but teleporters were just so much better than dashers that we had to nerf teleporter's entire kits to make up for it
- if we could do it all over again, just leaving PC as it was and making a separate game for console probably would've played out better. But that would've required more staffing, and thus more risk
- Player : @MichaelMayhem one thing i've NEVER been able to fathom, if the end goal was to get parity between the PC and Console, WHY did the console release so vastly different? Especiaally in regards to items and crafting
- MM : oh man....
- hold on a sec
- Winterthur : I just don't think we paid enough attention to what was being changed witrh crafting overall to say no?
- Items were changed through due to changes in Powers/ect and @MichaelMayhem is about to cover that.
- MM : @Maggot it was intended to be the other way around. Console parity into PC.
- It just took a looooot longer to get there than what was planned.
- and there's reasons for that...
- why the hell not.
- Winterthur : Sure. Well, here it comes folks.
- MM : i dont know if i caaaan
- so... when you build a 'new' game with an existing one below it with 3+ years of players, everything's a lot harder to build. You have to take into consideration what every single action you do is going to affect a player's Live accounts. What happens if you change this item, delete this power, delete this item, delete this entire map/story mission
- And... something happened... that made us kinda not care about that for awhile.
- So we started taking an axe to things. And then we needed to undo all that, and that turned out to be a nightmare.
- player : what happens if you just delete the whole game
- sorry too soon
- Winterthur : Funny story @Dude85632
- Basically people were kind of wrong about the PC contract and it had already expired. We were renegotiating it while creating the console version and basically this axe almost came to PC about 6 months ago
- So when we thought for sure we were going to be closingn the PC version
- we started to blow up those systems to improve them for console
- We were about 3 days from informing you guys about the wind down on PC when it was renewed
- MM : it was a sudden "it's saaaaved!", and while most of the office was celebrating... I knew what damage we'd done. I knew there was no going back.
- Winterthur : and when we got the news internally we basically went
- "Well Trash Panda! . This puts a new wrinkle in everything we just blew up"
- MichaelMayhem : that's why it took so long for the PC to get the console's changes. We had to work backwards to make it actually work
- MissNoodle : I love that we can finally tell all y'all what went down
- Winterthur : Well, when we thought PC was dead
- We stopped asking "but what about the pc people with these items ect"
- since that question stopped existing
- and in turn we blew Trash Panda! up trying to make it better
- Every time we wanted to change something we had to think about what you guys had previously earned before that
- I honestly believe we needed a few more months (about 6-8) to turn things arounnd
Winterthur :
- Player : So @MichaelMayhem If Disney didnt pull the IP would it still of failed?
- MM : @Organik Maybe. Tough to say at this point. We had a LOT of good stuff lined up, but the numbers were falling.
- maybe it could've turned around during the holidays when everyone is spending and playing
- summer's always a tougher time
- Winterthur : We were about to put a significant amount of time investing into fixing our end game loop, which we needed to fix
- Player : you guys ever think aboiut removing ES entirely? any quick moneymaker/saving methods that never made it in? like more cards or something. or stopping the deals/bogos?
- MichaelMayhem : Dfall - hell no. ES was probably the one saving grace of the game
it didn't have it originally. and it tanked super hard
- ES was always considered good, but the problem is, the economy was built for the year 1 scale. 1 hero or more per month
- as soon as we shifted off of that, the ES economy started to hurt hero sales
Winterthur :
- We had some cool concepts coming up with things like : SHOCKER has sent his Dinosaur Army to New York under the orders of MODOK
- and it would change the bosses, mobs, and locations
Gambit reworked :
- ok I gotta confess 1 thing though
- Thanos was probably not going to be a raid
- Sorry
- Downscoped
- Amthua : i just remember for thanos, the designs i did...required insane VFX. and weren't gonna happen. so we had to downsize them bigtime
Helicarrier team-up :
Ericgladstone :
- MichaelMayhem : hahaha. the helicarrier team-up. oh man
- Winterthur : The helicarrier team up is actual genius
- MM :i can't believe we actually made that
- Winterthur : You did that in what? 2 days Mike? We had to get a TU done fast and didn't have time for a model
- MM i didn't. I made @zwolfiez do it. But I suggested it.
- Winterthur : it was a super quick turn around
- MM : Yeah, we were super tight on time and I suggested "what if we just stole a bunch of different aerial bombardment powers and called it SHIELD air support, away-style only Team-Up"
- i remember it confused the hell out of the entire pipeline
- they were like "how do you summon it... it's a team-up right?" "no no, it's not a REAL team-up..."
About Brevik :
- They made me cut jj lines when she referenced alcohol
- and hangovers
- The massive headache line was kept though
Winterthur :
- Zwolfied : I also remember having this image of Brevik when I first got hired, then seeing him in his infamous Cap shirt, no sleep, earring in his ear...
- MM : oh yeah, his media appearance was so different than his 'in the office' appearance
- But there were those days
- those days you know someone important was coming around. Cause Brevik was in a button-up shirt and tie. Pretty sure the same button-up shirt and tie every time
- You sit up straight those days. Don't be slackin off
- Zwolfiez : Not true. Everytime he flew internationally he had to buy a new suit.
- MM : hahahhaa. i'd forgotten about that
- zwolfied : So he says
- MM : poor man kept losing his luggage on airlines
- Winterthur : Oh man. His f4 Rant. when he was streaming once. Legendary. Likely cost us big though lol
- MM : I remember Brevik's teachings well, and honestly we should've remembered them more
- but i remember changing something with a hero, or proposing something, and i explained a very sound, reasonable design decision and why I did what I did, and that others had agreed. and his reply was just something like "But I had FUN with that the way it was."
- And that was all that needed to be said on the subject to him.
- We ended up keeping the change and he adjusted to it, but that really was his bottom line.
- Am I having fun? Great, this works
- Winterthur : It's true though. Simply having fun is awesome
- It's why I keep buying these lego games
- Mm : I wish we could've just shipped a box product
- then it is all about just fun. When it's a game as a service, f2p, relying on microtransactions, needing to pay bills... things get a lot trickier
- with a box product you can do those things and it's just part of the game experience
- if you have a lot of fun and burn out after 10 hours who cares, you bought it and had fun for your 10 hours and probably thought it was worth your cash
- Winterthur : I'm a bit selfish but I kinda wish we had the news last week during the BF2 drama. so we could just go quietly under the radar
- MM : i mean, we're pretty quiet. There's a lot of coverage but not a lot of comments
- people generally don't click on marvel heroes articles
- Winterthur : I think it's a Trash Panda! stigma. Super hero games that is. I HOPE Spider-Man breaks that stigma
- We try to pretend we're a part of a billion dollar industry with Super Heroes but games are different. Many gamers still think of super heroes as the red headed step child. We're not CoD"
- We're blessed by the movies taking off really
- I mean there's another super hero game around where the heroes look like you'd expect them to, and they're fun to play, but when you see their powers you just go "Well this is 100% not from the source" and that's ok even.
- Zwolfied : I always thought the problem with a game like ours was there really was no way to make everone balanced and maintain the fanboy-ism.
- Winterthur : I think the fanboyism is great, but also dangerous at times. I gave Storm's legendary a fire tornado and people freaked out over it
- You people called yourself "Frostitutes"
- You were a bit on the too hardcore side haha
- IF We did finish our Thanos raid
- I think you would have been pleased by what I was doing with loot
- Thanos Raid would have introduced the first item tier in MH
- I was going to make the loot drops more like WoW's tier sets
- and drop from specific bosses for your hero in there
- So say, Thanos would drop Slot 1s for Melee heroes, Slot 2s for Magic heroes, Slot 3s for Psychic heroes, Slot 4s for Mutants, Slot 5s for Ranged
- but the boss before would drop them differently
- I was designing the omega sets to drop from there
- I spoke with @Calypsohrt about it a few times. I wanted to make gearing a conscience choice. "Do I want to bring Punisher for fight 1, or do I want to bring Dr Strange? What items do I need? What benefit do I give my group?"
- Embrace the large roster
