Magna Mundi - Better grab your popcorn folks, this one will go into the DRAMA history books

[Kashmir Slippers]

I know that I am posting this after a lot of the discussion has already passed, but I just don't understand why MMtG wanted to reinvent the wheel so much.

I look at For the Glory as an example of a mod-turned-game that Paradox has released. I don't think that FtG and MMtG are quite the same beast, but, from what I can tell, FtG took EU2's basics (map, sprites, mechanics) added a lot of events and a few pins and whistles and released a pretty enjoyable and moderately successful game. With MMtG, I couldn't help but wonder why they had to make everything different. I used to keep updated on the Dev. Diaries and always wondered why they felt the need to change the maps, menus, and buttons just enough that it looked different (and shittier) than EU3. I cannot help but think that all the new artwork and menus were just a waste of time that they could have spent on, I don't know, making the game work.

I'll admit. I don't know the second thing about modding or programming, and I might be horribly underestimating what the Devs had to do or what Paradox was expecting out of them, but I don't see why they didn't take a page from FtG and take the mod that they had already made and understood, take the general EU3 design, and develop a safe pseudo-new game that was basically EU3+/Hardcore mode, because that was all MMtG was ever going to be anyway. Now Paradox, the Devs, and the consumers have nothing to show but tears and hate.

Don't get me wrong. I love the mod. In fact, I can almost not make myself play vanilla EU3 because of the map-painting-ness and the incredibly stupid AI. The more I read about the (not) up-and-coming game, however, I lost a lot of faith and interest in it.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Napoleon complex.

 

[Trash]

Probably. Though the thirst for moar DRAMA shit like this seems to awaken on the internet needs a complex named after itself as well.

 

[Malakal]

I know that I am posting this after a lot of the discussion has already passed, but I just don't understand why MMtG wanted to reinvent the wheel so much.

I look at For the Glory as an example of a mod-turned-game that Paradox has released. I don't think that FtG and MMtG are quite the same beast, but, from what I can tell, FtG took EU2's basics (map, sprites, mechanics) added a lot of events and a few pins and whistles and released a pretty enjoyable and moderately successful game. With MMtG, I couldn't help but wonder why they had to make everything different. I used to keep updated on the Dev. Diaries and always wondered why they felt the need to change the maps, menus, and buttons just enough that it looked different (and shittier) than EU3. I cannot help but think that all the new artwork and menus were just a waste of time that they could have spent on, I don't know, making the game work.

I'll admit. I don't know the second thing about modding or programming, and I might be horribly underestimating what the Devs had to do or what Paradox was expecting out of them, but I don't see why they didn't take a page from FtG and take the mod that they had already made and understood, take the general EU3 design, and develop a safe pseudo-new game that was basically EU3+/Hardcore mode, because that was all MMtG was ever going to be anyway. Now Paradox, the Devs, and the consumers have nothing to show but tears and hate.

Don't get me wrong. I love the mod. In fact, I can almost not make myself play vanilla EU3 because of the map-painting-ness and the incredibly stupid AI. The more I read about the (not) up-and-coming game, however, I lost a lot of faith and interest in it.

Only that FTG was a massive financial failure and sold peanuts.

But I think that comes from the overestimation of the mod playerbase. They always count number of players by number of DOWNLOADS. Not a good idea when mods get dozens releases...

 

[Kashmir Slippers]

I know that I am posting this after a lot of the discussion has already passed, but I just don't understand why MMtG wanted to reinvent the wheel so much.

I look at For the Glory as an example of a mod-turned-game that Paradox has released. I don't think that FtG and MMtG are quite the same beast, but, from what I can tell, FtG took EU2's basics (map, sprites, mechanics) added a lot of events and a few pins and whistles and released a pretty enjoyable and moderately successful game. With MMtG, I couldn't help but wonder why they had to make everything different. I used to keep updated on the Dev. Diaries and always wondered why they felt the need to change the maps, menus, and buttons just enough that it looked different (and shittier) than EU3. I cannot help but think that all the new artwork and menus were just a waste of time that they could have spent on, I don't know, making the game work.

I'll admit. I don't know the second thing about modding or programming, and I might be horribly underestimating what the Devs had to do or what Paradox was expecting out of them, but I don't see why they didn't take a page from FtG and take the mod that they had already made and understood, take the general EU3 design, and develop a safe pseudo-new game that was basically EU3+/Hardcore mode, because that was all MMtG was ever going to be anyway. Now Paradox, the Devs, and the consumers have nothing to show but tears and hate.

Don't get me wrong. I love the mod. In fact, I can almost not make myself play vanilla EU3 because of the map-painting-ness and the incredibly stupid AI. The more I read about the (not) up-and-coming game, however, I lost a lot of faith and interest in it.

Only that FTG was a massive financial failure and sold peanuts.

But I think that comes from the overestimation of the mod playerbase. They always count number of players by number of DOWNLOADS. Not a good idea when mods get dozens releases...

Well, damn, don't I look the fool.

What I mostly meant by the comparison was that FtG was a working game. The MM mod is still pretty imbalanced and buggy even now , so I didn't understand why the Devs didn't at least try to fix it first and maybe work forward with that model or understanding than to start from scratch with a less-than-perfect basis.

It almost makes you wonder why Paradox was willing to make the gamble in the first place.

 

[Malakal]

Mainly because, while FtG didn't sell and was disappointing for both Paradox and its creators, Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy did well enough to be considered successful. Now, we don't know exact numbers, but EU3 is popular enough to warrant a comparison to HoI2 thus popular enough to try and make a mod to stand alone game.

 

[Destroid]

What kind of faggot takes out the framed! event chain? It is one of my favorites chains because it fucked math-fag players who dodged badboy wars though calculus.

What kind of pussy does that?

 

[Malakal]

What kind of faggot takes out the framed! event chain? It is one of my favorites chains because it fucked math-fag players who dodged badboy wars though calculus.

Yes, in THEORY it sounds good. But in practice it makes conquering even 3 provinces risky. Why? You get lowered infamy limits in the mod - to around 20. You conquer 3 provinces without cb or with a weak cb and accrue 8-12 infamy for that. Then you get hit with those additional infamy events for +1 infamy each province (the world doesn't recognize our claim or something like that). Then you get framed and get over the line. Its not only impossible to predict but also not very fair. And unrealistic.

 

[Kosmonaut]

http://forum.universo-virtual.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4314

I arrived early in the Saturday morning at the new offices of the company. Everything is quite new and unsettled but I could see a large meeting table already setup, perhaps five or six desks with computers there, some servers working in the corner with a technic bench for what seemed to be hardware work and the strangest service room I ever saw! Ubik was there alone to receive me but in the course of the morning I noticed he placed a few calls to people who are clearly involved with Universo Virtual.
After talking a bit with ubik, he showed me the game and allowed me to play it in what seems a average laptop (I forgot to ask specs).

I picked Portugal and was able to play it without a single crash for about an hour when I quited the game by myself.
During this time I was able to setup my budget a few times, to check how my religious faction got angry because I refused to declare war on Morocco, I settled Azores and changed the privileges of factions to my liking (merchants and nobles first!). I saw how the religious faction got less and less power given some choices I made in events related with the renaiscence (while also becoming more angry with me).

There were some consequences for that both in the form of events and in the form of religious modifiers. As merchants got happier and more powerful ubik explained to me that it was good that I keep them happy, otherwise I could face a civil war and that merchant faction could get an helping hand from the religious one, turning everything even harder for me. During this time there were events happening that offered me the chance of getting some good things at the expense of the happiness of the merchant faction but only once I was tempted to do it.

I faced three rebellions in north africa from rebels that demanded the return of ceuta to Morocco. The first and second times the garrison was able to stop the rebellion, the last rebellion was bigger and I sent there an army. The text of the battles is very interesting to read but everything happens so fast that one will probably not pay attention to it, only taking care of the numbers, morale and modifiers involved. Meanwhile I was also colonizing Azores and an African province Portugal starts with. Azores was piece of cake and then I started developing it. The African province was a different matter. When the session ended it was not still matured into a colony and when one sees the budget, one can see how costly it is to have a settlement growing at full pace.
I avoided minting because that's not my play style but I took advantage to borrow money from the Merchants in order to improve my trade capabilities faster.
I also decided to discover the way to india and when the game ended I was near the cape of good hope. By then I also had a foothold in Brazil. There were lots of diplomatic proposals going on and they seemed to make sense. The world seemed to be alive around me. Piracy works great this time as it is a modifier that you can influence thanks to your province directives or country directives.
Beware that a lot of things seem to have an impact on how factions align with you and worse, there are some big events or decisions that can change completely the alignment of the factions in one go.
I also placed merchants in Lisbon, in Spain and in Algiers. I could not get a proper feeling if they were being a big or a small profit or not, except for the case of Spain where they weren't. The trade system makes center of trades very important because those provinces act as goods receivers from all the provinces that negotiate there, increasing their value immensely.
Over the hour I played I had the sense of building the country slowly. Towards the end of the play ubik asked me to declare war on Morocco. After transporting there 9000 troops I did so and was able to set my war aims. It's a big list of stuff where you can ask for lots of different things. I don't know if everything is balanced or if the only way to go is to demand territory, but that was exactly what I demanded. I invaded and it was not very difficult to occupy a province. I ended that battle with about 7000 men and 3000 more were on their way to Ceuta. Morocco then attacked my armies and the result was a kind of a draw with myself keeping both Ceuta and Tangiers but with about 4000 troops in all. It was at this time that ubik told me he needed to go and so it ended, but I got the feeling that fighting in a foreign land places a big penalty on the invaders resources.

I saw bugs during the time I played. A few messages had no text, twice an option gave the opposite result to what should be expected, I saw some strange values of tons of goods on the trade system and many details seem to not be very balanced.

Regarding the graphics, the game looks good. I like the interface and the map. The I saw only three types of 3D models. The European and the African one are very good but the muslim one looks ugly. On the other hand it's clear the game was made with the idea of playing most of the time with counters, they are informative and very well done and they scale with the map.
There are lots and lots of details in the game that I tried. For instance, the color of the counter changes with the maximum allowed size of army which depends on the national ideas picked. National ideas are very interesting to pick and research is also done in a very interesting way.

The game has bugs, you find one of them with relative ease but I didn't saw anything game breaking happening. At least for me the game was very fun to play and it was also fun to see ubik being caught offguard by some of the events happening. The potential of the game is big. Universo Virtual did much more than Paradox ever did in terms of caring about the moddability of a game.

I don't understand how this game can get cancelled. Ubik only smiled and said he was ready for everything only increasing my confusion. I can only give him my support. I was a Magna Mundi fan before and after playing the game I continue to be a Magna Mundi fan.

Como Português tenho todo o orgulho em ti. És o primeiro a criar um jogo ao nivel de qualquer outro internacional. Muito obrigado pela oportunidade Carlos e boa sorte!

Ubik couldn't be more obvious. Sock puppets gonna sock puppet.

 

[Berekän]

Too obvious, Ubik.

Welcome to the UV forums!

What is too obvious?

It's so cute when they try to play dumb.

 

[kris]

http://forum.universo-virtual.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4314

The game has bugs, you find one of them with relative ease but I didn't saw anything game breaking happening. At least for me the game was very fun to play and it was also fun to see ubik being caught offguard by some of the events happening. The potential of the game is big. Universo Virtual did much more than Paradox ever did in terms of caring about the moddability of a game.

Uh? He explains nothing about how they cared about the moddability of the game. While this project itself would never have seen the light had not Paradox cared so much about moddability. Makes no sense.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Even if it isn't ubik's sockpuppet, the sort of bugs that Pdox cares about are the stuff that you cannot find with one player in an hour. HoI3 had some nasty bugs that weren't discovered in the QA/Beta period, only revealed after launched. Similar issues arose with Vicky2 and EU3 - and almost all of their expansions.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Right now the two scripters and three coders of the team are only concerned with the new project. Of course, we can allocate these people to fix any remaining bugs on Magna Mundi when the project gets started again. Also any of the distributed team members that resigned will be very welcome back, if that is their will.
Bottom line is that we have the local resources to deal with Magna Mundi but at this point its not sensible to do it as we don't know if we are going to court or an agreement is made.

Cheerio ubik, I'm sure you'll win that fight.

 

[Kosmonaut]

I have never seen someone so delusional on the net since Cleve stopped posting here. Seriously, it amaze me that Ubik still posts that kind of silly stupidity.

 

[Jarpie]

I was reading the paradox forum thread about cancellation, and came across couple interesting posts from betatesters:

The amount I got to play as a beta tested showed me that the game had promise but was in no way ready to be released. The diplomacy just did not work whenever I played and the bug reports that were submitted never seemed to be fixed in the next version. I had some problems in life that made me quit the process of testing midway through but the game needed a lot more time than just a few weeks. At least another 6 months were needed on just squashing bugs.

Also the saved game issue was big. At one point I saved the game as Castille and when I reloaded it loaded up England and 20 years before I saved. I never could replicate the bug. Also autosaves would not work half the time. The game was just not ready at all and I saw that it needed more time, but it did have promise. If the things that were broken were fixed the game would've been great.

At one point during the process they were talking about shipping the game and we argued that it was in no way ready. We had voiced our concerns in the private forum about the game not being ready and it seemed we were ignored by Ubik. They claimed that the versions they had were ready and more advanced than ours. Finally back in March/April the betas stopped coming in and the testing was done by Ubik and the developers without us. (At least I never saw any more versions) From what I saw on the forum we were only given 5 versions of the game. Now some testers may have had other experiences but this was what I had seen/experienced. If only the promise of the game was completed and that everything worked, then game could have been amazing.

And from the same poster:

While I did have some criticism as to the bugginess to the game there were some areas that worked that did impress me. One thing was the faction system in place. The game felt dynamic as I had to juggle the demands of individual factions or else a civil war might break out in my nation. But with diplomacy not working it really hurt the game. The economic system too was good, while buggy and not fully balanced it seemed well thought out.

Like I said though, it was the bugs that killed the game. Bug hunting is tough and trying to fix bugs is really hard to do for small development studios and it just needed more time. The game concepts when they worked showed how great the game could be. The concepts that did not work still showed promise if they worked. I think the downfall to the game was its complexity. With the complexity it created a lot of bugs and the developers just could not complete it in the time frame.

As in my previous post the game has a lot of promise if all the bugs are quashed. If they fix the bugs then it truly can be great. But I also believe the game needs a lot more time so that we can enjoy it functioning like it was envisioned.

And another betatester:

I also concur with everything that another beta tester, Phystarstk, has reported earlier about the PI MM beta test (see his earlier posts).

In my case, the third and fourth beta releases ended my involvement with the beta test. Beta releases 3 & 4 weren't just unplayable; they were unusable, as in: the game was impossibly, glacially slow. The controls (mouse, sliders, map scrolling, etc.) were so unresponsive (even with the game paused) that I literally could do next to nothing with the game. (By contrast, beta releases 1 & 2 ran okay. And CK2 and EU3/DW run perfectly well on my system.) I reported this (as did at least one other beta tester), but -- as with so many other issues raised -- received no direct acknowledgement from the devs. Hello, anybody home? ...

Sad to say, PI made the right call in cancelling the game.

But having said that, I can also say: I hope PI -- perhaps involving members of the MM dev team -- can still salvage something from this fiasco.

Sounds like a completely mismanaged project.

 

[Jarpie]

Also this interesting message:

Ehh. It's quite weird to hear Ubik complaining about lack of participation by betas. Beta organised by paradox was largely ignored by Universo Virtual, and initial excitement and willingness to help died out due to lack of feedback from devs. There was very few versions released for testing (four if I recall), and no changelogs. Other thing that discouraged betas was state of the game back then - it was more like Alpha, without functioning AI for example. Plus, latest literation simply didn't run properly on my machine...

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Jeebus wept, and these people think they can go to court over losing their contract?

 

[GarfunkeL]

I wonder if my NDA from HoI2 betatest is still in effect? Do those things ever get old?

 

[curry]

I wonder if my NDA from HoI2 betatest is still in effect? Do those things ever get old?

maybe next time you should read the damn thing before signing it

 

[GarfunkeL]

Maybe I should have saved the email somewhere safe.

 

[Goliath]

ubik has problems..

An Open Letter to Fredrik Wester

Postby ubik » 27 Jun 2012, 22:47
Fredrik Wester,

I am publicly addressing you as I feel it’s my duty to the Magna Mundi fans to do the utmost to save the game and allow them to experience the work of the very special and talented team I have the pleasure to lead.
I also feel I have the duty to the team I lead to try to save Magna Mundi. The involvement of the team on the project and how all worked together towards the single objective of delivering the game was impressive. I was still deciding things minutes before I was warned by a Spanish team member that the game had been cancelled.
After reading that you were the one coming up with the idea of turning Magna Mundi into a commercial project, I feel we stand exactly at the same level of responsibility towards the fans: I created the brand and coordinated both the amateur and the professional projects and you decided to take advantage of it by producing a commercial game and in the process take ownership of the brand.

In the first scenario everybody wins. This scenario demands leadership, charisma and ability to compromise. And those are exactly the qualities I am asking for you to show while trying to summon them myself. It’s a scenario where, to put it simply, a normal release date is set (I have no problem about a release in two or three months time to accommodate your release schedule), the game gets normally released and UV will continue to assume its responsibilities from then on. If for any reason you want UV to stop supporting Magna Mundi after the release thus allowing Paradox to take control of any future development within the scope of Magna Mundi, we can certainly talk about that.

At present the situation is clear. Your decision to cancel the game will lead to a legal battle where Universo Virtual will try its best to beat Paradox, while Paradox will be doing the same to Universo Virtual. All the while I will neither give you the Magna Mundi engine nor return to you a single euro that you spent financing the development of the game.
Courts apart, I am not one who fears the judgement of the public. I invite everyone who can come to Lisbon to check for them the game and make a judgement about it.

In my book, cancelling a game at this stage and in these conditions while demanding back the money used for funding its development for two and a half years, demanding also the engine of the game, continuing to enjoy the ownership of the brand and retaining the possibility of releasing Magna Mundi for you, has a far uglier name than “cancellation”.

Paradox is suing him for all the money? Note that according to Paradox the MMtG budget was comparable to the CK2 budget..
Too bad that the legal process in such cases usually takes years. When this drama finally reaches it's last act nobody will care about Magna Mundi anymore.

 

[Goliath]

Message in ubik's forum

Ubik we are with you

Post by Igor (Posts: 1)

Hello Ubik.
I'm representing a large Russian MM community. We have changed your mod for little more balance in multiplayer and playing your mod for months!!!!
We hope that you will finish the game by any means. We believe in strength to give a birth to your son
I wish you good luck.
We are going to follow the new of your projects!
Best Wishes
Igor

 

[Kosmonaut]

Ha ha ha ha. The drama is getting better and better.

 

[MetalCraze]

A publisher gives us money for 2 years to make a game.
We are just relaxing and doing jack shit.
Now publisher axes the game for some reason. Evil publisher!

Aliens RPG 2

 

[curry]

A publisher gives us money for 2 years to make a game.
We are just relaxing and doing jack shit.
Now publisher axes the game for some reason. Evil publisher!

No, they didn't just axe the game. They want the money back and they want the game which is buggy but nearly finished and they want to be able to release without paying UV. I don't like Ubik at all but goddamn Paradox pulled an all time Jew scheme.