The Eurogamer article pretty much outlined why TR failed and NCSOFT interference wasn’t one of them. $100 million cost, 7 years of development, 50K copies sold at launch with dismal subscription retention. It had income south of $15 million when it was up. The ROI on the investment was terrible so NCSOFT cut and ran.
The Eurogamer articles does imply it at the beginning of the article. According to Richard Garriott himself,
""We started the game by bringing on a lot of staff by our Asian partner, and we decided to create a game that we believed could be popular in Asia. And we spent the first couple of years trying to create a game that had Asian style and Asian influence to make sure that we could be popular in Asia. But we kept getting feedback – accurate feedback I believe – from our Korean counterparts that said, ‘You know what, when you guys try to do Asian pagodas or Asian armour or weapons, it never feels domestic, it always feels like a foreigner making stuff for us.’
“The way it was phrased to us was, ‘Look, imagine we were going to do a European castle: instead of making the stone walls nice and straight, we’d make them sort of like an inflatable castle, slightly curved, like a marshmallow castle. We might not notice that it doesn’t look like a good castle, but you would immediately notice that it was cartoony versus strong and powerful.’ "
Translated from Asian business-speak to layman’s English: No, you can’t make your Asian themed game, Mr. Garriott. You have to make the game we want in our way.
That’s how TR went from being Asian themed-historical fantasy game (Garriott’s speciality) to a sci-fi game (which was way out of Garriott’s league.) I’m familliar enough with how business is done in South Korea.
How does it tie into Guild Wars 2’s Pointless Revamp situation?
There are times when I think that the pointless nerfs and revamps are Anet’s way of communicating that they don’t have control over their own game. It’s almost as if the devs are waiting for some high-top NcSoft person to give them the okay to add real content (new dungeons, adding paths to old dungeons, fixing exploits in Arah, adding new maps & areas for level 80 characters, more solo content, etc.).
Most game developers in other companies take initative to add stuff to an MMO, make a new expansion ASAP, or they start making a new game. Blizzard puts out an expansion every 2 years. Nexon has continuously updated MapleStory over the last 9 years with new maps, monsters, events, dungeons, etc. Most devs make tons of new content for games. It’s not a job for the lazy and people who win awards can’t rest on their laurels like movie stars. Taking initiative is a soft skill that is taught to all new students at the 2 commercial game dev schools in the Seattle area. I’ve met many game dev students who work the 12 to 16 hour days just focusing on their projects and homework.
The Anet team who worked on GW1 had 2 expansions out in GW’s second year (Factions & Nightfall).
With the GW2 team, it feels as if the devs are maintaining the game instead of working on adding new content (just like TR).
