Todd McFarlane Interview, Copernicus Info

[agra]

Interesting follow-up post regarding the acquisition of the two VP's, today.

It has nothing to do with 'not having cards to show', we just simply don't want to show you anything right now. (that's mostly everyone but me btw..)

We didn't need to hire two 'big'un's" (whatever that means) to change ANYTHING, we hired both of them to reduce our risk.

They've both built MMO's from concept to ship, 4 actually, and that's huge.

That's 4 AAA (in budget and dev time) MMO's, who else has shipped as many MMO's as John Blakely? In this space? Argue with the games and your like or dislike, that's fine, but it shows a clear lack of understanding of how games, especially MMO's, get made. JB is brought in to make the game launch on time and on budget (for anyone that knows the space you understand just how hard that is), not to get PVP in a game, or housing, or make class, race choices, they're there to ship the product and get it done to a shippable quality level (a company driven decision) at a determined budget and schedule.

The crux of this being:

"
... they're there to ship the product and get it done to a shippable quality level (a company driven decision) at a determined budget and schedule.
"

As always, there's quite a wide range of ways to interpret such a statement, but I'm going to hold off for now and think about it for a while.

[Kurik Lein]

Thanks for posting that Agra, Curt has always talked about quality and setting the bar very high so I think the reasoning for hiring them was simply to make the MMO launch as smooth as possible both in terms of quality and financially. I'm not sure who was already with the company in that department but I'm guessing they wanted some more experience to work with.

[Fozzik]

The more I've followed various developers as they move around the industry, the more I've realized that single developers don't seem to end up having THAT much of an impact on a total product in most cases. These games are just too big, and too complex, with too many people working together to create them. It never seems to be very reliable to say, "oh, that guy was behind X system in Y game...he's going to make that system again!" Because nobody does anything by themselves. It's a massive team effort over a long span of time...and ends up being a "sum is greater than its parts" kind of thing.

Sure, they love to put the stuff on a resume like they did it all by themselves...like saying they shipped multiple games, but I'm willing to bet it was a group effort. I'm sure they've hired the best people they can, but I really don't think you can glean anything at all about what Copernicus will be like based on the names on the team and what they've done before. THIS whole team has never shipped a game. They have no reputation. We'll have to wait and see.