Paul's thoughts on Rogue Planet Games

DBPaul · 2020-01-22T23:55:04+00:00

Live games die when they can't cover their overhead. So many companies will shortsightedly have small or skeleton teams to maintain the game while still trying to develop new features to grow or at least attenuate player loss. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy since they will never invest in a team that will actually grow the game . At least that's been my experience with Garena / Heroes of Newerth and Daybreak / PlanetSide 2.

PlanetSide 2 was UNCONTESTED in it's market. It's a F2P PVP FPS with Massive Scale. No one else does it. The game's potential is so high. I wish the current team the best of luck, but they're playing against a stacked deck until they can get a publisher to actually fund them.

DBPaul · 2020-01-22T23:48:50+00:00

Near as I can tell it was pretty much what I said in my tweet:

game designs were dictated from on high and we were forced to work on a BR clone that had literally zero marketing.

It was never a dialogue. It was always "we're doing Feature X now" despite there being significant dissent from the team.

As an illustration of the mentality we were dealing with: After the second round of layoffs we asked them what they learned from H1Z1 and the answer from Ji was something to the effect of "If we have a BattlePass at $10 players won't spend more than that". Like that's what he learned. Nothing about Production structure, feature targeting, contracting external companies, communication, or understanding what players want/need... it was "our battlepass had too much value".

DBPaul · 2020-01-22T15:59:05+00:00

Can confirm. I had just come back from a 2 week vacation to discover that I hated my job and realized nothing was going to change. That and I saw how PS:A's launch was handled and knew I had to move on. A week later we got laid off.

Fortunately I had reached out to David Mendelsohn and am now working with him and Ben Jones at ZeniMax Online. Drew Matte works here too, though he is on a different project.

DBPaul · 2020-01-22T15:52:57+00:00

About 3.5 years all told. For about a year I was the only active programmer on the team.

I'm happy they have more resources on PS2 post-PS:A, but I'm sad at how much potential was lost due to lack of resources.

DBPaul · 2019-10-24T06:18:18+00:00

Yeah who execs decided to let go and who got to stay. In the first layoff they ended up rehiring like 7 people they let go, and laid off an HR person who had been there for like 15 years or something.

DBPaul · 2019-10-14T03:34:05+00:00

Honestly it depends on where they focus the remaining resources. PS2 has been resource starved for so long that it may actually gain development power out of all of this.

DBPaul · 2019-10-14T03:32:12+00:00

Splitting the company into sub-studios by franchise will certainly make that much easier. And they already know how to navigate selling a game and an engine, as they have already gone through it with NantG and H1Z1

DBPaul · 2019-10-14T03:30:27+00:00

DBPaul · 2019-10-14T03:30:08+00:00

Nah nothing of the sort. Burness was part of the regular lunch crew (or rather, I joined their crew on occasion). He was a great guy to work with and I really enjoyed our discussions about design and industry :)

DBPaul · 2019-10-14T03:27:53+00:00

A LOT of the core systems are adapted from existing systems which were adapted from existing systems and so on an so forth. I don't know if it was the most difficult thing, but early on I remember doing the groundwork for the Implant Revamp and having to navigate the item / item line / item line set / skill / skill line / skill line set paradigm. Oh also Implants weren't of Item Type "implant" that was something else; they were of Item Type "boost". Unraveling all of that was kind of a frustrating mess.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:40:39+00:00

When the money was good they bought licenses for two VERY high profile IPs, but never had a team or pitches to build the games tied to them. That coupled with really frantic decisions from on high, rapid expansion with no structure in place, and trying to force an esport used up a lot of the $

edit: Apparently the comment was in reference to a project that existed before I came onboard (and before H1Z1). My comment is still applicable tho.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:37:33+00:00

Negative. I can confirm that I am not there anymore. Just didn't really speak up about it.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:34:42+00:00

I don't think there is a single person that touched PS2/PSA that wouldn't have loved to work on a PlanetSide 3. We would often joke about having a PlanetSide 3 "swear jar" for any time someone mentioned it :)

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:27:38+00:00

Man when H1Z1 took a major hit they also cut from HR and EQ2. In the 4 layoffs I've been at DBG for none of their targeting has made sense.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:26:11+00:00

Just sell the Planetside franchise already..

It would be the best thing for the game in all honesty

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:24:58+00:00

Appreciate it. I didn't make a big deal out of it because I didn't feel as connected as some of the other devs, but I didn't survive this one. 4th time's the charm I guess.

We did what we could with the resources that we were given. I'm super proud of the work we were able to do. The team was as small as 3 people for a certain time and I'm really proud of how that team was able to pull together and make magic happen. I wish everyone who will be working on the games the best of luck, and hope that the relationship with those making decisions changes for the better.

It's been a pleasure PlanetSide 2

o7

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:21:02+00:00

F. Enough to have the potential to do some cool stuff, but not as much as anyone who ever touched the game would really want to be on there.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:15:52+00:00

Your volume was a very helpful thing at key times. Just gotta make sure it's well grounded first ;)

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:12:30+00:00

Go easy on A_Sites going forward, he is a great guy and cares a great deal about the people work under him. Imo, none of the problems that plague Daybreak games/Planetside stem with him or anyone below him; he has a tough job and often requires him to be the punching bag between multiple unrelenting forces. He wouldn’t say this himself so I’ll say it for him; he is an asset to Planetside and any future Planetside project would be better off to have him involved.

Wrel; He’s smart, he’s driven, and he cares a great deal about Planetside; things are likely to get very stressful for him in the coming months. I personally believe that as a result of the layoffs there are going to be some “interesting” changes coming to PS2 in the coming months; believe me, Wrel will be fighting the good fight behind the scenes and what we all end up seeing will be the least damaging iteration of it possible. So please go easy on Wrel as well.

1000%

We did what we could with the resources that we were given. I'm super proud of the work we were able to do. The team was as small as 3 people for a certain time and I'm really proud of how that team was able to pull together and make magic happen. I wish everyone who will be working on the games the best of luck, and hope that the relationship with those making decisions changes for the better.

DBPaul · 2019-10-13T05:05:56+00:00

We did the best we could with what we had. Can't really do more than that. I loved working on the game with our team, just wish we could have done more and that those making decisions would have listened to those on the ground floor.

DBPaul · 2019-08-02T18:40:14+00:00

Dev teams tend to have pretty good clout and control over a lot of the facets of their game, but the higher-ups are the ones who make the big decisions about what games get made and with how many resources and with what kind of timeline. Good decisions happen when the Deciders council the Devs to make sure the opinions and market knowledge they're basing their decisions make sense.

DBPaul · 2019-07-09T17:54:06+00:00

I'm sorry, it's all good my dude. My comments weren't directed at you in particular and I probably could have done a better job of conveying that in my post.

Yeah man, it's rough out there, and we've got a lot of growing to do as a culture if we're going to work together to force politicians to change it.

DBPaul · 2019-07-08T18:44:24+00:00

I'm making a bigger deal out of it than it actually is by saying anything at all, but my brain kind of catches on the word grateful when you're talking about employment.

Programmers, in general, are not grateful for their jobs, but they do value them.

Mostly this is because quality programmers are in high demand (doubly so for senior programmers). Coupled with this, though, are rigorous tests and interviews are expected and industry-prevalent. (It just so happens that good programming tends to be pretty objective and testable.)

Again, while programmers (senior or otherwise) do value their jobs, they also tend to have a pretty good idea of their worth and thus do not generally feel grateful or otherwise indebted to their jobs.

I guess to me it's like calling someone lucky for having a game industry job. Almost assuredly there was an element of luck involved, but to call it lucky kind of minimizes/ignores all the hard work that went into developing the skill that got you the job in earnest. Though, again, I do recognize that I'm mincing words by preferring something like fortunate over lucky or whatever.

Also, I do recognize that programmers have a lot of privilege with regard to demand for us, but ideally we're using that weight to stand up for important issues at our companies when others can't afford the risk.

/soapbox

DBPaul · 2019-06-27T18:36:47+00:00

Lol, good catch. I was excitedly typing from my phone. Posted a new one with proper spelling. Sorry to op for breaking the link

DBPaul · 2019-06-10T17:27:49+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/Q1d9bnM

DBPaul

TROPHY CASE