Les devs sont passés pendant plusieurs heures (en gros une douzaine d'heure) sur le Discord Marvel Heroes pour discuter "un peu". (Ne travaillant plus chez Gaz : Ryolnir, Amthua, Psilocke. Y travaillant encore : MichaelMayhem, Winterthur, Calypso, Zwolfiez, AgentNikki, EricGladstone qui est dialoguiste, et Missnoodle qui est une des productrices.)
(De manière assez surréaliste on a aussi assisté à une AMA du type qui gérait le site de BOT et vendeur d'item etc. Ils étaient deux à gérer ça, un Américain mais aussi un Français. Ils étaient en contact avec Gaz, qui leur a proposé de les embaucher mais ça nécessitait un trop gros déplacement pour eux etc. Il a publié la liste des 5617 comptes ayant utilisé leurs bots mais aussi les revenus générés via l'utilisation d'un programme exploitant le systeme de coupon etc. il a aussi expliqué la guerre des spammers puisqu'il avait aussi déployé des bots pour reporter les bots des autres "groupes". Il était personnellement à un peu plus de 30 000 infinity points (ce genre d'anomalie est une des raisons pour lesquelles gaz n'a jamais voulu communiquer sur ce sujet en particulier) )
Concernant les devs en eux même :
- effectivement ça faisait en gros un mois que les devs avaient interdiction de communiquer.
- concrètement ils ne savent pas ce qui s'est passé. Ils n'ont pas spécialement plus d'info que nous pour l'instant. (et ils ne font pas de commentaire vis à vis du PGD).
- à propos du fait que microsoft dit aux gens qui demandent un remboursement qu'il ne s'agirait que d'une fermeture temporaire et qu'un autre développeur pourrait prendre le relais, les devs n'ont rien entendu allant dans ce sens pour l'instant.
à propos de la direction qu'aurait voulu prendre MichaelMayhem :
I would've gone with more characters, fewer powers. Essentially the 'costumes with powers', but the whole game was that. No costumes, alternate characters ARE the costumes. Like you have Iron Man, Stealth Iron Man with stealth powers, Hulkbuster Iron Man with melee powers
(Il a mentionné spécifiquement Future Fight en exemple, qui effectivement rencontre pas mal de succès).
NDA's can't be damned. Still employed there after all. But I really wish we got to do more work on Danger Room. The original proposal was a lot more than what we were able to ship. That could've been so much more that what it was, and we kept saying we were going to work on it, but other priorities kept coming up.
We're not doing much at the moment. There's notice around about what's going on but I'm not saying it Just kinda waiting to hear some news on what we're doing next.
à propos du type d'EA ayant produit une partie de la série des CoD qui s'était intégré à l'équipe :
He actually was more concerned about how we were running the studio than anything regarding monetization or the players. He helped fix some production & communication issues, got us some outside contract help in areas we were weak
à propos du changement total de design des items omegas (qui sont actuellement sur la version console) :
the honest response was the one I posted. We revealed three concept items and didn't actually implement them. They were mockups. Turns out the amount of time needed to make that concept was super underestimated and we just couldn't do it in any sort of reasonable time frame. It wasn't so much the modifying of powers that was the problem, it really was the NUMBER of them we'd have to make. We thought of only the implementation scope of an individual affix, which was sub 1-hour
the omega sets final one that we shipped with was built in maybe 2 weeks. and we built an extra 20 sets that never shipped
Vis à vis du doublage de Blade :
I tried to sneak in a tax evasion reference, but they caught it
à propos du retrait des F4 :
"I can't, but you can make a pretty educated guess." "No. Can't comment. Math is easy though"
Vis à vis du fait que Doom est resté en revanche, ils n'ont pas répondu directement mais ont discuté entre eux pour nous faire comprendre qu'en gros Disney leur avait fait une fleur parce qu'il était bien trop important pour la trame du jeu et que donc le retirer c'était déjà juste enterrer le jeu.
vis à vis de leur compétition :
we were pretty far from PoE. I kinda always liked that, as our main competitor, we were really hitting two very different audiences
they played a really good card by making 'revisits' to previous zones as future chapters. Honestly, I wish we thought of doing that. It's a smart move. Like after skrull invasion, EVERYONE'S A SKRULL and you have to reclear the story but with variations and new events and things. That's pretty much what PoE did
Oh yeah and if you guys are looking for a aRPG fix. Grim Dawn all the way
Red Axis :
Red axis :Never happened Luke. Never even started. to my knowledge.
Spiderwoman :
Spiderwoman was ready to ship. Fully complete. Sad that of all heroes we don't get to ship, it's her
community demand and all ( fun fact - she was designed and built by an intern.... yeah, make all the jokes you want. But that intern was one of the best designers I ever worked with. First gig in the industry and he blew me away. He did a fantastic job)
Des persos et costumes qui étaient dans les cartons :
- Ok, so the next stuff I was going to prepare for was King Thor
- Erik Killmonger enhanced costume
- Drax Playable
- and Gamora Playable
- Playable Kamala was in the cards.
- I can say it - cloak & dagger were on the 2018 maybe list
- Madrox shoulda been playable. biggest regret tbh. He was on the 2018 maybe list.
- i wanted to do a playable thanos but it wasnt very far along. still a hair early if we decided to do him for infinity war it would've started probably early 2018
Michaelmayhem : Dink's still there as far as I know. But I'm not there, so.. I've been keeping it hidden but I became a remote employee a little while ago. I moved away from the bay area
There's a reason Winter Soldier has relatively few lines. 1) He's not much of a talker and 2) we were supposed to get Captain America to record some "memory lines" that would have effects on them
Q : Were there any plans for Agent Venom as a new enhanced costume for Venom? Like the new horsemen ones?. A : Yes, but wasn't going to happen till next year at the earliest. I was a huge advocate
à propos du départ Soudain de KomoriMan
It kinda was like that for us too. Just one day he wasn't around any more. That's kinda what happens at studios with layoffs.
La refonte de Musp (pour console à la base mais ça allait être adopté sur pc aussi)
ou guys also won't get to see the new Surtur raid... that thing was BONKERS amazing.
- One of the coolest things is that it didn't have random stuff like Hellfire and Brimstone anymore. It had official marvel characters. it started off as just some updates to make it a 5-man... then a new environment... then new bosses... Surtur himself was the only thing left of the old raid. Fire King, Sindr, and Hrinmeer I think were the ones we went with
I don't think they were going to push lootboxes onto PC DFall, but to be honest I'm not sure
honestly after the main story everything after that was just pieces we added here and there. except for Chapter 9, but even that was almost not a story chapter for quite awhile early on
Gladiator Thor was referred to as Unworthy Thor in all my documents, so he's super depressed in the VO. while skin we all saw looks like the movie soooo
we had a whole poison omega set ready to go with spiderwoman's release. it let you do corpse explosions and stuff
My favorite keywords we never added to items "Light" and "Dark" lol For Loki's magic. My only regret is I didn't push mike for an Elemental keyword ><
(je crois que ça n'avait jamais été officiellement annoncé ?)
Costumes and pets no longer drop
Anecdote sur Taskmaster :
It's February of like 2014, and Doomsaw comes to me with this crazy idea to do an April Fools character of a playable Doop. Full release hero, with just like 2 powers. I said it was crazy to do all that work (there's a LOT of work nobody realizes on releasing a hero - icons, 2d art assets, etc) just for a joke people would forget about ina couple of days. He insisted, kept insisting, and I knew I'd have to do the work. So I said on a Friday 'give me the weekend to do a playable Taskmaster instead. I can hack together the animations and powers from other heroes, just let me do it and see what you think." And so Saturday and Sunday, all weekend long I churned out a playable Taskmaster prototype with nothing but powers I cobbled together from other heroes. Stolen animations jury-rigged to his model, etc. Come Monday I showed him the prototype, and the look of pride and joy on his face was something I'll never forget. He gave me a nod of approval and off we went to get the remaining work completed. He was so happy to pop in on April 1st as the only person in the world playing Taskmaster, getting flooded with PM's and people yelling in social chat on how he was playing Taskmaster. The hardest part for Taskmaster was the VO. Characters are begun months in advance before they are released, so to do one in something like 6 weeks from idea to release was insane. We had to rush job everything. (continuing on the story, wish Ryan was still around), in talking to our audio director, she says the VO is impossible to get done in that time frame. Simply can't be done, we can't ship on April 1st. No way. Ryan stands up and says "Wait, it's Steve Blum for our Taskmaster right? Let me call him, he's local, he'll probably do it tomorrow if we want". So Ryan ends up getting Steve to do a rushed VO recording session almost immediately so we can get it in-game in time to launch
à propos de la débacle qu'a été le prestige Omega et qui a explosé la communauté console :
Omega Prestige recent ...'changes'... were probably the most heated. I was an advocate for dialing it down, I saw it as a path to p2w we wouldn't be able to avoid. Asros very much defended the purchases players already made and said it was too late to change it, we only would piss off people that had already been supporting us, and that we have to deal with it in a better way than to "rip people off" (not his wording but i can't remember what he used to word that better). also note that he had nothing to do with the original design and the power it granted.
I'm very sad that it went out the way it did. I was actually off the MH team during that time
Pull up a chair. I'm going to discuss "balance" briefly. When I got hired by Asros I was all like SUMBITCH THIS GAME ISN'T BALANCED, I'M GOING TO FIX IT. Then I realized, the more balanced stuff was, the less fun it became for this kind of game. The more we balanced, the less we could add really neat game breaking items/powers. Some level of balance was obviously needed so IW wasn't sitting at 10s and Hulk 20 minutes for the same kill, but overall too much balance in a game like this really does hurt it.
I will say this. Whenever I thought about balance and asked Psilocke "is this too broken?"
He would respond "That's what test center is for""
the tuning of the game was one of the first real big projects I remember. It was pretty much useless, we had to start from scratch. power duration was super code-driven. it was simply "does this random thing have a duration? INCREASE IT!" which created a ton of issues. we had a lot of things like "this cooldown buffs your other attacks while its on cooldown" but it was liiiies with power duration 8s cooldown, 8s(*power duration) duration. and some of those stacked. because we never told them not to because who knew power duration was going to be such an issue
"what was your least favorite stat to balance LOL" "brutal. f'ing. strike. I hate that stat."
Anecdote caffouillage
one day we were trying to solve some big global game tuning issue, all hands on deck, and the systems designers kept changing mob health/damage... and the content designers kept changing region-wide modifiers... and we kept going in circles for like 3 hours before anyone caught onto what was happening. and we all uniformly threw our hands up in the air and walked out the door and decided to come back the next day with sleep
MichaelMayhem :
we're still employed Tao. Game closed but we haven't. I'll be working on my own independent project for the time being. There are people still on other projects. I'm just not on those teams. Might be, who knows
but for now i'm going indie. and it is 100% not a dating sim
I had a line about Ms. Marvel writing Wolverine slash fiction that went so long before getting caught.
the voice actor Strike didn't affect the game since it was being produced before the cutoff date
I don't know if it ever got implemented, but we recorded a bunch of new lines for Hand ninjas, and one of their dying screams was "I need healing"