 What's up everybody I'm the man goose you are awesome and today we're going to be talking about the fall of gigantic now There's some facts some rumors some suspicions a lot of stuff that we don't know and we never will know because we're not a part of The motega team and those are the only ones that really know and you know, it's all clouded by NDA and I of course know you know, I never played gigantic So I know the least amount of this of anybody so I've brought in the turtle duckman and failco punch to help me out So the turtle duckman tell us a little bit about yourself brother. Hey, my name is turtle. Uh, I am a I'm a game artist in training right now. I play gigantic ever since Pre-alpha, so I've been playing it for a long time following the game It was one of if not my favorite games just ever and so I'm really excited to talk about Unfortunately, how it fell down and Also joining us from the team at project stamina is failco punch. How you don't failco? Hi, you have a really nice radio voice. Has anyone ever said that to you a couple times. Yeah So, yeah, I'm Velco punch. I'm the art director on project stamina I'm an artist. I do you I UX on mobile games professionally and I Was so obsessed with this game that I would bring my entire PC home during the play tests So, you know during breaks so I could be sure I played it I also was one of the coaches that would be there at packs helping them out teaching people and I streamed this game And if you've seen this game, you probably recognize me as the person who raged a lot in all of her videos You probably recognize a lot of failco's work on her YouTube videos because I use that a lot as a background Thank you once again failco for allowing me to do that since I have zero gigantic footage Then also before we get into the meat potatoes of this I wanted to give a shout out to everybody in the project stamina discord that participated in the conversation that brought This about everybody likes a little shout out. There was meow storm debonk Lubberjack Requiem Leah a mastica retro the plat potato pouty cotton tail and flim so thank you so much for engaging in this Conversation with us and if you are not part of the project stamina discord I'll have that linked in the video description below and you can jump in there and talk with us but we had this list that total duck man posted of Various reasons why gigantic failed and I did a little bit of research added a little bit to it and We're going to go through these one by one and discuss them starting with a Gigantic was originally going to be a Microsoft exclusive and was meant as promotional material for Windows 10 However, they didn't get the game ready by the time that Windows 10 launched so the rumor is this isn't I can't back this up I couldn't find any factual evidence of this but The rumor is that Microsoft pulled their a lot of their funding if not all of their funding yet still held motega the company that made gigantic Responsible for their end of the contract. So I don't know much about that. Turrell duck man. What do you know about that? Yeah, so like you said a lot of it's a lot of its rumors We know that they needed funding eventually because perfect world had to save them from bankruptcy And so we know that something took away the funding that they were originally given to by Microsoft whether or not that was Microsoft pulling consistent funding Or Microsoft just gave them a bunch and they wasted it at all. That's kind of impossible to figure out unless we have and had a motegan here but You know the game wasn't originally Windows 10 exclusive It actually No, it was a lot of the game was actually built. It was something completely different. It was called raid It was like you have a team you fight a giant monster with your teams. It was completely different game There's like art floating around with the characters. Marguerite had weapons Margaret weapons inside Margaret's have Marguerite still had weapons at the very beginning or gigantic didn't he? I'm trying to remember. So I'm pretty sure on his like on the video that Show cased him. He still had it. He had a bunch of all of his abilities were exactly the same But they all used weapons which he still had the demon arm So it was weird because he had the demon arm and also weapons So like his R&B was him flailing a mace all around and his mace his basic attack was this giant axe So it was a completely different game though is what you're saying. Yeah, it was it was very different It was like too ambitious. It kept changing like What it was over and over again So during that time before the deal for the windows 10 deal They were kind of flailing around like they didn't know what the game was going to be They wanted to make something different and I think they lost a lot of time and money like in that stage and Then so like when windows 10 like that deal finally came through they got much needed money But it kind of screwed them over in a lot of ways because oh All of a sudden all this coding like they had the chat feature in the game long before that They had to rewrite all that stuff. There wasn't chatting that game for a while They had to like remake the game from the ground up after that deal So and that's a that's something as the turtle duck was saying was that because of all those rewrites They ended up with a lot of spaghetti code, right? Yep, so there was a lot of there was a lot of like rewriting the code because they had to make it work with it's W UWP I think the Universal Windows platform. Yeah, that's what it is Because Microsoft basically told them okay now you have to make your game run on our platform But they were still using Unreal Engine 3 and they so they had to like combine those and make them work with each other and So they Basically, they lost a lot of development time to that that that led to a lot of the spaghetti code They kind of had to rewrite the whole engine to work with that thing not to mention When Microsoft didn't tell them how to how to code in that in like that system Because the documentation just wasn't really great. So they had to like figure out a lot of stuff on their own Which led to a lot of bugs that they just had no idea how to fix because it was just there was so much technical debt that they They just couldn't fix a lot of things And for people who aren't super savvy to programming technical debt is basically where you have a bunch of systems that you build up By themselves not thinking about how they'll interact with the whole System as a whole and then you have to go back and fix those and rewrite them basically to make them fit fit with the whole So the more systems you have that don't work with each other And are kind of like roughly in the more technical debt you have Okay, so that was kind of the first domino that started the the chain It seems um, would you agree with that felco? Yeah, I would say like it might have been a godsend to get that money at that time But I feel and I'm not entirely sure but it it sounds kind of like They didn't get the extra people they needed to help them actually reach the goal and reach the milestones that Microsoft wanted for them. So that kind of It makes me mad, but What can you do? We're all mad Yeah, I get mad about paragon this one. I can look at a bit more objectively. I think Yeah, especially like if you I feel bad that you haven't gotten to play it, but at the same time like you have Dodge the bullet of just like the pure despair that I felt when this game Yeah, that's true The worst part was when they announced that the servers were shutting down six months before the servers actually shut down So you were just playing the game like hollowly like I can't try because there's no reason to get good at the game anymore Yeah, and the final stream. I I just have to the final stream was the final stream people couldn't even get into their accounts so And was hosted by motiga. It was was hosted by so fetched at that point all of motiga had been fired It was the full like extent of like how much things have crumbled like you couldn't even log in for your last few games man Yeah, it was a really good stream though. Yeah, that sounds that sounds terrible It sounds way worse than what happened with paragon. Oh, yeah Gigantic was like such a cult such a cult A lot of vertical fans Yeah And so we just like we we all love the game so much that uh, it made it that much worse When it eventually came crashing down. Yeah That whenever paragon went down a lot of my subscribers were like, hey, you should you should try this gigantic game. Um I instead went with smite, which was a Not not a good decision. I wish I really wish I would have would have played gigantic even though By that time it would have been decision or was it a bad decision It was because I played slight for about a month and was like Fuck this shit. I'm out He didn't probably dodge the bullet of grief like we were saying. Yeah, I guess so yeah Now we got project stamina. So hopefully you'll get the experience Hopefully so hopefully so The alpha has the the one little alpha test session I did was amazingly fun And I just cannot wait for another one Me either. I'm excited. It's coming along good At least, you know, I will say this like Project stamina at least like we can look at gigantic objectively now and be like, okay Like they have so many amazing ideas Like how do we take that and skip the part where we're like trying to figure out what this game is like Like over a long span of time. So At least for us like that's really helpful Although I really really would have loved to see gigantic as the game raid so bad Yeah I think it would have been cool. I mean, you know, you got your giant monster. You're fighting it. That's fun I like giant monsters back in raid. It was a believe it was a totally pve game, right? Or was it so? Yeah So I think because like they were the idea that was that they were trying to make like mmo raids into like a whole game Just that Okay kind of like Monster hunter Yeah, it was kind of like monster hunter if the monster was less of a Less of like an npc like a creature you were fighting and more of like an entire set piece Kind of like dauntless actually now thinking about it which came in later. I wonder if they were inspired I think it was it's closer to like the siege fights in monster hunter probably where Uh, you were fighting though you were fighting the monster But a lot of it wasn't just like a lot of it wasn't attacking Uh, it wasn't just like okay the monster's in the middle of the arena and you fight it It was like the monster's moving around and you have to like dodge as huge attacks Uh, so it was closer to like fighting the dalamadur Uh in monster hunter which honestly they probably got a lot of uh, A lot of inspiration for like, uh, gren the naga guardian from that Well, well speaking of other games Um, that's that's one that's part of our list here is the launch of gigantic was kind of overshadowed by not I wouldn't even say similar titles, but they from the outside looking in looked a bit similar, which was um Overwatch battle born and paladins and that could have led to a lot of people never checking out gigantic Especially with blizzard dropping such a huge game as overwatch and you know overwatch's first person It didn't have nearly the depth that gigantic did However, you know, it's still a hero shooter sort of and and a lot of people would have looked at both of them Saw that, you know, you get to choose different heroes that have different abilities And they would have you know, just went with overwatch because it's blizzard and blizzard has tons of money to to spend on advertising and such Yeah, I know that I actually When both of the games back in like 2015 when both of the game like right after packs 2015 Uh, which was when like was that no That was overwatch was or overwatch was like in its like it had been announced But it was like in beta and it was like in closed beta I remember I applied to I applied for the gigantic closed beta and I applied for the overwatch closed beta And I was really I was probably equally excited for both. Uh Unfortunately, I well fortunately probably because I I didn't get into the Overwatch closed beta but I did get into the gigantic closed beta So that might have honestly been a deciding factor for me whether or not I played gigantic luckily I got pushed towards gigantic. Uh, but I definitely think uh that overwatch Was similar enough in its general Goal of pick a character like pick a main like smash bros Learned your character like other mobas but more fat like other mobas like league But more fast paced and it like you said the fact that it was made by blizzard And they just have like like blizzard could launch Anything and people would play it which is unfortunate from an indie game perspective but uh, that's just kind of how large game companies are these days and so Definitely, I think that paladins probably a little less because I think that paladins Uh, piggybacked off the success of overall I feel like paladins would have been might have been less successful if overwatch hadn't Been a thing right. Yeah, it was like a free to play like a free. Yeah, exactly That's what that was like where paladins got a lot of it's a lot of its player base was like people who like Overwatch looks cool, but I don't want to pay full price for a multiplayer game You know one of the the real edge of overwatch was just so it was very easy to just pick up You could really just be dropped in Play any character and like you pretty much know what to do where to go in gigantic the learning curve There's a lot more factors to learn it was a lot harder for Players just to like get into I remember telling my friends like hey, you should play gigantic with me And then they're like nah, I've you know, I've been playing overwatch a lot And it's just like you could not get them to switch It was heartbreaking just because that game, you know, it looked good. It's functioned correctly Gigantic had a lot of bugs We had a lot of bugs although some of them were beneficial Like all the woo animation cancels which were hilarious. Let's not talk about that character. No Woo needs to be brought back Well, um, I actually got into the overwatch closed beta. Um And I had never even heard of gigantic I think I would have preferred gigantic to tell you the truth because I like a game that has a little bit more depth to it and Overwatch I played all through the beta. Um, it released. I bought the game and I have not touched it since I remember I know my friends played overwatch a lot and I went through the same thing as you with failco Where I was trying desperately to just come please play this game. It's so good. It's free Just download it. I got them to play like three games with me and they just never played it again Uh, and I think it Like there's just a mentality of like you play this one multiplayer game and you're like, I'm a league player I'm An overwatch player and you don't want to play other games that are in that similar vein for whatever reason Uh, and so it makes it it made it really hard to try and show the game to people because they're like Oh, that just looks kind of like overwatch but uh with melee characters And that should be really cool But but for some it might be a bit sunk cost fallacy people are like I put all this time in overwatch I don't want to move to a whole new game playing a multiplayer game in my opinion takes a lot of like time commitment to get To to play a multiplayer game consistently is like I remember uh at its peak I was playing gigantic like three hours a day every day. I would just like that that was my free time That's what I do. I would get home and I would go. Okay, cool launch gigantic turn on the stream Let's play. Uh, and that was like the the the best days Uh, like I'm not gonna lie like there were days when gigantic was out like My work from home. I was just playing that game all night Don't tell anybody that but Well, you just told Something interesting that like overwatch did Was they had the ability to switch out people who were leaving matches, which I think was Huge it it turned it into more of like a casual experience But it was easy if you weren't having fun you leave it's okay. The team will probably be okay. Somebody's filling their spot gigantic didn't have that so people would leave the game and Your team would literally be screwed You know, if you're down a player and you're trying to learn the game Um, you're probably not gonna have a lot of fun if your team, you know, two people leave on your team It's now 3v5, you know, it it gets a little hard So I think like for people who kind of like I'm not having fun. I'm leaving like gigantic wasn't for those people Yeah, it hurt it a lot. Yeah, definitely and that uh goes into more of like a core design of gigantic is like you look at gigantic, uh, because we're comparing it to overwatch right now overwatch games are like Seven to ten minutes. That's your match in gigantic They can go anywhere from five to 35 minutes and so a lot of people like if they're uh losing or if they're in a stalemate or like They just have to leave because they've been playing for so long and their mom is yelling at them or something like that They'll have to they'll have to leave and it had no system in place to prevent that from happening it had like there were there were Like penalties for deserting the game But they usually were less time than the what would have if you hadn't stayed in the game Uh, which is like if like they were usually like it was like One minute and five minutes and then 20 minutes But like if you left one game that was going to go on for another 20 minutes And you only have to wait five minutes to play again and that game was like a slog That's like that was just a better deal for a lot of people And that made it really like leave people leaving the match was really frequent and it might have been partially because of like, uh Just people not taking the game seriously. I know I see that a lot in like, uh, when I play like I just played The beta for bleeding edge and I know that was a terrible problem where people would just leave Uh, and then just because they didn't care because oh, it's a beta. Whatever. I don't care So like that might have contributed to people leaving. It also could have been M&R stuff, which I know we have on the list to talk about later So but there was no Safety net for that when someone left they left and the way gigantic was structured as a game It was very hard to win a 4v5 game, which is another issue Um, well, let's move on here to one of the other problems When the game launched on steam you had to download arc As well as the game in order to play it um I don't like having to download anything other than the game whenever I'm I know it's kind of dumb but Like if if I go to download a game on steam and it's telling me you need to download This or that this other thing just to play this game. I'm like not done. I'm going to move on to a different game So I think yeah, we played a little bit of a part in it Yeah, definitely. Uh, I know I hate downloading things in general. So Uh, if if I hadn't already been invested in the game, I probably wouldn't have downloaded it because of that Yeah, I remember the arc launcher. No one liked it. I remember like And at the time I think the game still didn't have like in-game voice So you not only had, you know Your extra launcher step you had to go into discord and find a way to talk to your teammates Yeah, so now I think it I think it did have it before yeah, I think I think it had in-game voice at that point, uh, although it wasn't great Sorry, all the timelines are blending together in my brain Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of a lot of builds a lot of versions But yeah, like the arc launcher I wish it didn't have to exist but Hey, it's not on my computer anymore It's on my computer for a long time after gigantic closed just didn't want to get rid of it So, um, the next one here Uh, what we were talking about earlier where they had the spaghetti code and they were never able to go back and fix it It led to a bug. I guess, um, you guys confirmed this one for me Where you you couldn't play on pc unless you had eight gigs of free ram It was six gigs of free ram, but because it needed to be free ram you basically needed eight gigs ram to run the game Uh, because most most computers go from four to eight to sixteen Right, and you also need ram to just have your computer on like some small amount of ram is always used So you mostly needed like eight gigs Uh, which was yeah, definitely a problem Yeah, and I know for me sometimes I would have problems where like the game would have like a memory leak and Lead to memory leaks were definitely So that you know, those are kind of problems that you you don't really want to have They're kind of like blockers. They should be blockers to a game like being out, but they They had a problem kind of like getting Big problems like that fixed quickly enough and they became really annoying for a lot of people. Yeah I mean from what I saw there's workarounds for it. However Why the hell would you do a workaround to play the game whenever you could just move on and play something else? You know Yeah, it kind of it kind of like makes the case for itself. You know, it's like Hey, I'm gonna make this like really annoying to download and play and That kind of like yeah Yeah, the other the other problem with it was that it just everybody Took that and they just Crushed the game in reviews Like there was a lot of there was just a lot of negative reviews I don't think I can actually find the page Anymore to see all the reviews now I don't think we can search for it because it's off steam Uh, but there was a lot it had like the game ended up with like mixed like the mixed reviews thing When you look at on steam, which is basically a death sentence on steam Especially when you're like an indie game that no one knows what it is And it's uh, you're basically the only advertising gigantic had was going to PAX a couple years But they only they only did that a couple times and that only gets they only hit so many people You get you can you can show a lot of people your game at PAX, but only so many And that's on our list too the the poor reviews. That's it's kind of a mob mentality when it comes to different games We were talking about this like with no man's guy At a certain point it becomes cool to shit on a game and when that happens You're done You are done for because everybody's not people Aren't even going to try the game to see if they like it. They're going to see everybody else Just given a you know terrible reviews and they're just going to review it terribly themselves just to be fun And people like being right in that situation They like to say this game is dying this game is is dead and then they want to be proven correct on that So, I mean that's just a weird sort of internet thing that we have Now and it's kind of a mob mentality and I think that In light like if I if I look at a game on steam and I see mixed reviews. I'm moving along Yeah, it's it's really unfortunate because There would be times where you're watching a streamer play gigantic They're in queue for a while and then they like they're they look at the camera and they say dead game Like you're saying that to everybody watching like you're Declaring how you feel about the game. Of course, everybody's going to feel that way and Yeah, why would people pick it up after you say that like people would come back Because they're obsessed with it because they were you know, they thought they were good at it or whatever or just because the game was Pretty fun. It was fun. But it's like Everybody soon had that negative kind of energy and like the discord in the community and it kind of It kind of snowballed its way along Yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy Yeah, it was definitely it was definitely palpable in like the discord was just like the mentality like for the veterans It was a joke Uh, but for a lot of people it wasn't uh, and I know I tried my hardest never to like Uh joke about ha ha dead game, uh, because I uh was one of the people who are like guys stop That's what's making people not play because we're calling it a dead game I know for me a lot of the reason I'll play a game is for its future like I I'm not a hyper competitive person But I like playing a game to get better at it to then be able to Play it for a long time. I like treating it as like a new relationship almost with this game And so like just like with relationships with people if I don't see it going anywhere I'm just gonna cut it off. I'm not gonna continue that relationship. And so I don't know how many other people a few games like that like me, but it's gotta be some and so That's another reason is just like you look at it and you're like, oh, here's this community of people saying the game is dead Why why should I put time to invest into playing this game? When it's not going anywhere, right? So we kind of jumped ahead there, but let's let's head back to the the gameplay issues and this is the one where you guys can really educate me on this and uh So doc you were saying the main game mode was laid out in such a way that it was very easy to feed which led to frustration Yeah, this one, uh, might be a bit contested This was just my opinion from playing the game for a long time I know a lot of a lot of veterans and a lot of different people Uh, who played the game had Varying opinions on how the main game mode worked whether or not it worked whether or not it was good Whether or not some parts of it were good or the whole thing needed to be changed uh for me the I really liked the game and I think that overall Holistically, it was a really good game mode But there were pieces of it mainly the fact that The whole game mode was based around power And so power was the entire thing because you couldn't win the game if you didn't have power And that was like the whole point of the game and that's a really cool like avenue that they explored But what it led to is like Dying like going back to comparing it to overwatch dying in overwatch loses you a bit of pressure on the objective Which may which has the potential to be Utilized by the enemy team to further their winning of the game in gigantic dying directly and Revocably push the enemy team towards victory like because auto wounds were a thing because guardians dealt damage to each other on attack Getting power was always a hundred percent of the time Guaranteed to push you further to victory Whereas uh, so dying in the game Always helped your team and they didn't need to capitalize off of it at all Uh, if they did capitalize off of it It was even better for them, but they didn't they weren't uh, there wasn't that chance that they didn't unlike a lot of other games where dying just kind of like Is you're not there to defend anymore. So now they can keep pushing forward Uh in gigantic it directly added numbers Uh in a very countable sense to the enemy score almost Uh, which is kind of like team team deathmatch is that but in gigantic since it was so much longer Uh than like a normal team deathmatch and it had so many other things that were kind of like The tendrils stretched out all over the place and just meet it a problem Yeah, like to that point it was kind of like you would get in a game and you would immediately be able to tell who was new to the game and It would almost be like you would have to start babysitting them and making sure that they Weren't just going off on their own and getting killed or you know The game didn't really lend itself to teaching you in a lot of ways It was like here's a bunch of points on the on the map Maybe go put something there people would summon a thing leave it and leave and that thing would obviously get killed and so it would be kind of like this race between You trying to like corral your team to do the right thing with using only one ping that you had available to you and It became kind of like frustrating Even if you knew the game to watch your team either run into the enemy monster, you know like and get annihilated or Put things down leave them and then just like kind of give the enemy team like free kills free power Yeah, frustrating for like both sides, and I'm sure the new players were like They just wanted to know what was going on Yeah, and because the power was so Because you basically you basically needed 10 kills for a rampage like that's how many max you needed But but really since over the course of a rampage you'd almost always get at least two power orbs Just because of the way the gamer was set up So really you only needed like six kills and so now if you have somebody that dies 20 times in a match They've given the enemy Like three rampages just that one person dying and so One person Was able to shift one person feeding a lot was able to shift the balance of the game Substantially, which is kind of where I think the main problem with this point lies Is that one just that one person feeding was enough to basically throw the game Hmm I mean there need to be repercussions for for for deaths, but it does sound like Yeah, you always want a little bit too much Yeah And I mean like most games, you know, obviously the person who's the weakest link is going to determine the game Right, but in this game there just wasn't enough to teach people what to do And I think you know in the game wasn't around long enough for them to learn either So it just became like if you wanted to play and you knew how to play You either had to direct the shit out of your team Or you have a good chance of losing And then uh next up as far as gameplay issues, um Apparently the MMR system Was, you know, so long at high at high ranks that it encouraged smurfing Which is a problem in quite a few games. So I mean Falco, I'm sure you were you were pretty high ranking there. Did was smurfing an issue? I mean, I did it too I mean honestly like It The frustrating thing was Was that you know, you would start learning the game and then the game was released, right? And the MMR system was put into place and if you were part of the beta or the alpha you had a lot of knowledge Like over everybody else you would easily like kind of breaking through the ranks And there there became times where you wanted to play with your friends and you were both somewhat higher on you know, the top 100 You would wait for half an hour even more Um just to get a match because the discrepancies in MMR were that different and that really sucks Because you want to play um But so it definitely encouraged smurfing and encouraged like making a new account and In a way. Yeah, you're like, oh I can try a new character do this, but you know You went back to your characters you liked and won a few games, right? You get pissed off and then you just switch to your main and you're like, I want to show these guys how it's done Yeah, right and I mean I'm not saying it's a good thing. You know, it's not it's not like the right thing But there was kind of like a trend of people doing it And so you would run into other smurfs. You were like, oh, I wonder who that guy is It it wasn't great, but in a way like even if you did smurf you would still have the Totally new people on your team and literally having to carry a team by yourself. That was kind of fun but At the same time, it's like am I ruining the game right now? Like is this a bad thing? That's gonna be a terrible experience for those newer players Like I mean if you're fighting smurfs against smurfs, that's all well and good for you. You're still having a fun time They're just getting their shit kicked in Yeah, and I remember I got I was like on a smurf. I just wanted to record goddamn gameplay video for trip and uh one person on my team left is a 4v5 and I Freaking worked my ass off in that game and my team won and at the end of that game the enemy team One of them sent me a message and said try hard much and I'm just like Bitch, please Xbox messages. Yeah, I was but you know, um, yeah Smurfing is never like a good thing. I think it definitely led to new players getting frustrated. Uh, Which really really sucks. I have no excuses. I was just following the trend Yeah, although who can I don't think anyone really blames you honestly It definitely wasn't a good thing to do But when you Have this game you love and you're sitting in queue for 30 plus minutes. Like that's just ridiculous It was terrible I could not use my main account because it would be like 40 minutes and motiga broke my account They unlocked all the skins and they were like, don't show this So I was like, okay never using this again Oh Now I just remember that one clip of so fed she's like, uh, the command to unlock infinite money is like dollar sign Get money one thousand It wasn't but she said it on stream one time and it was just a meme. Oh no Uh, well, let's move on to the next problem here. Um So the workflow system led to each build requiring 30 days to approve So like trying to fix bugs and do patches and stuff took 30 days I believe I believe so, uh, again that one is a little A little less confirmed, but I'm fairly confident in that it's just like that's what the xbox approval time is Like it needs to go you need to submit a build and then that build needs to be approved Through xbox so that it can then be put on the xbox store And that approval process takes about a month and that's why they did monthly updates and those were the only updates we got were every month they had an update and while that's fine for some games For a game like gigantic where there were a lot of bugs and the meta shifted wildly and like some characters were broken Then some characters were useless and then they needed. I mean, they weren't really that bad A gigantic balancing overall was really good. Uh, but there were there were a lot of bugs That just couldn't be fixed because they needed they couldn't fix it until the next build was out And on top of that what would happen is they needed to They needed to put things into the because I was talking I believe it was to so fetch about this they needed to put Builds like to the approval process Like months in advance. So like when we got like a February build that February build was put into the approval process in like November so like They there would be bugs in it that they'd had already fixed but couldn't talk about because like They because it was already they couldn't they couldn't uh because everyone was complaining about build bugs that were already fixed But weren't in the build yet because the builds were so Uh so far away from they were they released so far away from when they were actually like put into the approval system And there was that led to like confusion between the devs and the players and people complaining about bugs that were might or may not have been there Uh, and just if people found a bug in a new build Then they'd have to wait Other mother bug fix and that definitely led to like there was definitely a couple times were like, oh, whoops I guess ashling's just broken because they accidentally had to put a bug in that gives her two cat ores Now I don't want to play that now. I don't want to play the game anymore because Cat or or everyone's playing ashling and there's no way to fight against her Uh, so I definitely think a lot of people probably left due to things like that Or like when ramsey was broken back when he could just how he could just take you for 300 poison Oh, yeah, there are definitely a few things that I mean like all new characters, right? They're always overtuned But yeah getting rid of that it it took a long time and that character That character was really nasty And if there was a ramsey on the other team didn't matter if they were good or bad at that character He could slice through you like and then there was vadas Luckily most people didn't know how to abuse her like the cut like samurai toast or like the couple other people That were absurd vadasi players. You just see them on the other team. You're like, well Let's waste 15 minutes. I guess Yeah, the vadasi had the laser beam while she was healing people. It's just Yeah, there are a lot of things characters could do in that game that found abuses for Definitely and then Because of the approval rating being so or approval time being so long I think that a huge piece of multiplayer games being able to thrive especially in specifically in the multiplayer games because like AAA multiplayer games Because they're AAA multiplayer games and that's just kind of uh Symptom of the industry we're in right now is like people will always play Uh triple play games kind of goes back to my point earlier about game longevity People will always play triple play games because they always know people will play AAA games And so they always know this game will be here. That's why smash bros is so popular and rivals of aether isn't even though They're basically the same game Everybody knows there will always be people playing smash bros because it's nintendo But like who the heck knows what rivals of aether is so i'm not gonna put any time into it exactly It's just a platform. It's another platform fighter similar smash bros. Uh but I've lost my train of thought It went too off the tracks You get the point though was people uh wanted No, I definitely lost my train Let's move on to the next one then which is uh the one that you'll see the most when you search If you were to search on this topic, which is uh, they secured 20 million dollars from uh, perfect world entertainment and then they just kind of blew it all on conferences and I'm setting up massive Rooms at different conferences like like packs and stuff like that. Um So that all that that 20 million dollars was completely gone by the time that the game launched Um, what do you guys know about this velko? I know we were talking about this a little bit earlier yeah, um Our perfect world was really interested in Trying really hard to keep the team to make the game but The team I think wanted to finally do some marketing. They finally wanted to you know, bring the game to conferences they would As much as I loved it like they would fly people out From the community to coach at packs me being one of those people And they would put them up in a hotel, which is like amazing but I felt like that was the wrong move like it was like too early to do something like that when their games still had a Lot of problems and you know, they didn't have a lot of like post launch content They didn't even have a lot of tutorial stuff in place at that point Um, so what you're saying is that you're the reason that gigantic failed like I killed gigantic. Sorry Shit All killed gigantic. I mean like um It was rezzo having the top like three five out of the top ten spots on the leaderboard There Oh, yeah, they they also tried really hard to get like pay top streamers to play the game and advertise the game We had people like lyric who actually played the game and I remember them telling us do not Fight these guys. We want them to like our like our game Yeah, did they did they pay lyric some of two some amount of money for him to play the game You have to pay big streamers to play your game. That's you know, that's their business Like it was absurd how much they paid for him and then nobody came from that. Yeah It was really frustrating. Yeah Or people came to project stamina from you models that people came to gigantic from lyric And there were like 40k people watching that stream. Yeah, it's true And it was disheartening, you know, like uh, you go to a convention you teach people about the game They wait in line for half an hour 40 minutes. Then they never play again Yeah, it's just like it had no way to kind of keep people playing I guess because there was only one mode, you know the entire time and they're Like I'm really curious like where some of that money went other than just conventions because it seems like Maybe they didn't hire all the people they needed Uh To really get that code done Uh, but I mean, hey, you know, I can't complain. I got to Stay at a hotel and get some sway I always wanted to do that And the game wasn't around long enough for me to get good enough to do that Yeah, well try being a girl streaming the one game, you know, I mean that I think um I was talking about this earlier. This is really one of those hindsight 2020 sort of things if the game would have been Like like they they blew their 20 million dollars not on the game, but on Marketing the game if the game would have been massively successful, they would have looked like fucking geniuses Like people would look back and be like, wow, they really they they they took a gamble by spending all their money on marketing But look how it paid off But instead the game failed and it's like everybody looks at that like what what an idiot like Like why did they do this? Why didn't they just Spend money on fixing the code and making the bank game better That's how everything works, isn't it the history is written by the winner and all that jazz It sucks because like I don't want to call their team down at all Like they they were a bunch of amazing artists and they had very creative ideas It's just I feel like this game is just too ambitious for the timeline Like maybe if they Had more done before the microsoft deal or maybe if they didn't have to rewrite the game This would be a completely different conversation But it seems like there were so many things in their way by the time they got to this point I wonder what the energy of the team was at this point. It must have been really low Yeah, there was also Oh, sorry. I was gonna say um There was one point when I remember talking to so much monsters. He was the character I think the lead character or figure mother and he was saying that they made like character mastery skins For no money. They just did it because they wanted us to have them That's like where they were at the end of that cycle. Like people couldn't get paid Yeah, well, I mean perfect world came in. I mean there. Yeah, there was that whole like, uh, Whole super inspirational. I mean less inspirational now that the game's dead but went at the time it was super inspirational where, uh At the at the end when they ran out of microsoft funding There was I think it was a whole month, right? Uh, it was some ludicrous amount of time for what happened where everyone just came to like like they had they Uh, I don't know who exactly made the announcement But somebody came out onto the studio floor and they were like we're out of money. We can't pay you uh, they obviously didn't say it like that, but that was the message that happened and Everyone still showed up to work mix the next day And they did it for a month or some amount of time close closest to that Where they just showed up to the game with no pay because they were that passionate about it and Luckily within that time they were able to secure the funding from perfect world. Unluckily it didn't go anywhere but People were really passionate about the project, uh, which is Just unfortunate that it ended up not panning out. Yeah, it's the kind of the same way with paragon the team itself behind paragon amazing the, um People in charge over there at epic not not so much Yeah, and it it's hard when you have to you know, work for a publisher Like there's timelines you got to hit and if you're not going to hit them It either the approval process is going to take even longer or I mean they're going to lose confidence in you and possibly Stop funding you so People invest money and they expect a return and if they're not getting a return they have every right To pull the money Yeah, you know, that's why project stamina is in a good spot right now because it's working On no timeline basically so you guys have free marine to just Make it as good as possible For as long as possible Other people might disagree with you Why the fuck is the game not out yet? Yeah, phelco. Why don't we have 17 playable characters? Hold on, let me code right now Where's all of my concepts? I sent you all my concepts Why am I not a character model yet? I'm sorry. I'm so bad Let's move on now to uh Said it was very large heart very large very large to herd the game Very hard to learn in the game and uh, there was no tutorial system That's a that's another problem that paragon shared and uh There was it had a confusing ui. So can you guys explain that a bit? I don't know which one of you wrote that one Uh, I wrote that one. Um, phelco Yeah, like when the game first launched there wasn't a tutorial at all for it. It was like Really and you know, it's a hard game to learn. There's two monsters It's kind of like a base, but it's not there's points to control kills also factor in there's something called wounds You got to move forward and attack the enemy garden with your garden There's a lot going on here. Um, and there's also your ultimates and the fact that all of your abilities upgrade Not just once but twice and you can make different builds You know with each character There's a lot of stuff and it was very difficult to find all this information unless you were actually playing the game Uh, because you were like people would sit there. I I would see this all the time They would be like trying to upgrade the character trying to read it in the middle of battle And they're like, I don't know what i'm doing and you're like, I wish I could help you like when the game was in Was it alphar or beta? There used to be actual coaches that they would have to Like training sessions. Yeah, but like a group of people that have been playing the game Just community members for a while would sit in discord and you could ask them Hey, i'm interested in learning margrave. Like what would you suggest that was back when that was back in mumble, wasn't it? I don't know. I remember discord. Maybe question mark. Maybe oh, oh, maybe it was the arc I think that was that was either mumble. No because game fox would just record Oh, you're right. It's not it's obviously not arc. I can't remember anyway um Like something like that was so cool like being able to talk to people who were good and they actually gave really good advice and It was easier to learn the game. I just wish something like that carried You know through to the to the end and maybe in a way like that's on us as community for not like doing that more and helping people But it's like at the same time your game really should have that in place because There's a ton of things to learn about each character Yeah, tutorial is definitely the the company's responsibility not the players. Yeah, so To that point the game did have a tutorial it I believe it came out later on so so uh a big thing with the game is that it kind of soft released quote-unquote like a year or so Before like the actual official release when it released on steam But it was in basically open beta for a long time and when it transitioned to release that didn't there wasn't really a change much But at some point they did in they did put some point before the actual like release date The official release date. They did put in a tutorial Uh, it wasn't a great tutorial. It did Go through some things and they did require you I believe to do it before you were allowed to play any matches Uh, that might have been a turnoff for some people Having to do a tutorial before you are allowed to do anything But they did have it, uh, I think personally and I'm probably biased because I played the game for so long So I I know it I don't think that a lot of the systems were super complex, but they definitely weren't portrayed. They weren't Shown to the player in a very Intuitive way like the only way to see upgrades was in-game You could not see upgrades out of the out of the match. So you had to sit At some point in the match or in the practice arena you had to sit and read through everyone's abilities You couldn't do that on their hero page Uh, you could only see their like base abilities in the descriptions. And so that was one issue I there was There was not a ton There was definitely ui in place to tell you when you had a level up points They weren't it wasn't super like in your face Which I like in some regards because it's not super in your face in other regards It probably led to people being a bit more confused. There was also the whole talent system Which had a ui element In the bottom right that was always there, but you can only click on it after you hit level five And so the only difference between when you couldn't click on it When you could is that it went from having a lock icon over it to having Like a five icon and it like flashed a bit and so There was a lot of there was a lot of like They they tried they really tried you could tell how hard they tried to portray the game And like to give people all the information they need to play it But they just it was just kind of a swing and a miss Yeah, and you had creatures too. So there's like a whole other element to learn Like who where do I summon this like does this actually work here? But that was also like Kind of the fun of like figuring those things out But most people just would run right past the summoning circles and not even do that like so many games I'm like, oh great. Yes. I'm on summon duty again Yeah, and then like you only had you only had a limited amount of creatures So you didn't want to be on summon duty for every point because it's like I can't Summon any more bloomers guys. I only have two bloomers. Someone has to summon a point Uh There was definitely I think creatures were a really great mechanic I don't think they were implemented super well just because of like, uh the way they interacted with power mostly because it was like So there were points where like upgrading a creature was throwing the game because If they kill it they get such a huge power swing that they just can win from there There were points where Summoning a creature at all was was throwing the game because they would kill it And so while yes, that sometimes could be shown as like, hey, this is uh It's an advanced mechanic to decide whether or not to summon or upgrade a creature Uh In reality it just led to a lot of people summoning and upgrading creatures that then died and then through the game and fed power Yeah, and like You know I definitely give them credit for trying a lot of different things I remember how they did power change throughout like the entire game's life cycle How creatures were summoned change they even changed the maps and like positions of the giant monsters Uh at first on one of the big maps Actually, no all of the maps the guardians were very far back Yeah No one could even get to them when the time came it took forever to get across the map They realized that pushing them forward make made the games like take a little shorter time And it was a lot easier for people to be like, oh, there's the giant monster I don't have to go to a death trap to get to it now. I'm going to go to it so In a way like I'm really glad that they did end up refining a lot of the things but It was unfortunately like a little too late at that point. Yep, a little too late Can't and they couldn't like like I do think that if they didn't weren't changed by the one month approval time they probably could have like Uh, I mean I have a philosophy in just anything when I want to approve something It's rapid iteration. It's just like try something didn't work try something else didn't work Try something else. Cool. That works move on to the next thing And I think like if they could have just been constantly be like, okay Put out this update two weeks later guardians are too close move them back a couple feet Still too close move them back a more and just kind of like Really fine tuned a lot of the pieces of the game. They probably could have They could have gotten into a better point the moving the guardians forward was a double-edged sword because yes It made games take less time But it made guardians a lot more intrusive So like you'd be trying to storm the enemy's uh back point and you just can't because the guardian is shooting you Oh my god, and guardians were really really strong. Let's talk about guardians for a second. Oh, yeah All right. Yeah You would be walking along the guardians are rampaging bam You're freaking dead because you got hit by like a giant aoe that murdered you in a head Or you'd be walking along and the guardian would come out of nowhere and hit you out of the air Like that happened to me so many times Or the guardian would go to pin the other guardian And they would get stuck in a spinning animation and no one could hit it and that would be it You would have to leave the game if that happened. Oh, I think that might have happened to me once that wasn't super common But it wasn't super common Well, I guess we all have to leave who leaves last they win Yeah, yeah Yeah, there was a lot of problems with the guardians Like I still uh same with creatures I think the guardians were such a cool idea conceptually and I could talk For hours about the ideas I have for how to make guardians more, but I won't do that here but I think A lot of issues people had with them is that they did too much And also too little at the same time like they did Too much damage So it was basically if you got close to them You couldn't you couldn't pursue people Close to their guardians because the amount of dps they could put out is insane And that's not necessarily a bad thing because your base should be a safe haven for you to retreat to Uh, but since they were so close to the battle now after they moved them up It would made it really hard to kill people because they could just uh because the ttk and gigantic was high And I I still stand by that's like my favorite part about the game compared to other games besides the like The the movement is the fact that the ttk was more than 16 milliseconds But because it was so high combined with the fact that guardians were so close after the change You could just run back to a guardian and it's like well Yes, I can't get that kill even though I chased them all around the map and I like did all these cool things They still just got back to their guardian And it doesn't matter and it made it was even worse for people Uh like Amani uh like on on ghost reef She could literally sit under her guardian and have Have line of stake to most of the map and you couldn't do anything because she was Underneath the guardian and you could not hit her. Uh, I suggested a lot of things, uh to the devs In uh that they never did it with uh of doing things like making the guardians uh Do less damage but more kind of like displacement So like I suggested instead of when you run up to the guardian They just nuke you and kill you and give enemy to give the enemy power Instead they just shunt. They just like shove you back Uh to like the middle of the map. Basically, they just throw you across the screen Uh, and it would basically keep the functionality of them being safe havens to retreat to but wouldn't also give you the other team power Which goes back to the fact that power was not a great system So there's a lot of things that like there's a lot of things about them about the game that interwoven to cause just this mess of a great game out conceptually but one that just Just missed the mark in so many ways that it just cascaded down to the game failing All right, well, I think that's going to that's going to about wrap it up I think we we've hit all the topics that we were going to and and and more than than we were going to as well Which is which is good. It's a good thing. But before this spirals into just talking about the gameplay issues Actually, let's talk about Let's uh, let's start wrapping it up here. Um Toro duck and failco I'll give you guys an opportunity to to to make your last comments and You can plug any social media you want to if you have a twitch or youtube channel or I don't even you know Whatever whatever you got go go ahead. So I told that duck. Let's start with you Uh, yeah, I mean I have I have a twitch twitch.tv slash the turtle duck man Uh, I don't stream a ton there But I am planning on streaming project stamina basically every day when it comes out. So look forward to that I guess, uh, you can follow me on twitter at the turtle duck math without the end because twitter doesn't let me have All of my characters. It's very annoying Uh But yeah, uh, just look out for me in the project stamina community. I'm always talking love talking with people Thanks so much. All right one and uh failco Hi, um Thanks a lot for allowing me to be on your awesome youtube show And uh, I'm failco punch everywhere. So if you're looking for me on twitter, I'm there And I'm also going to plug project stamina, uh, you know Check our website out project stamina dot com and You'll be hearing a lot more news from us the entire team project stamina On twitter um very soon. So yeah Yay, it's good to hear So that's going to wrap it up. Um Talking about these kind of things is beneficial because it does help teams like project stamina avoid some of the potholes Some of the sand pits and pitfalls whatever you want to call them That that motiga fell into and let's hope that they don't and uh, if you are interested in project stamina, like I said I'll have all their social media linked down in the video description below But for now, this is the man who's signing off you guys. Have a good one Bye Man