This is something I’ve been thinking of lately, does Amazon have a separate team in NA ( or EU? ) developing it or is it still a Korean team?
I am interested in the structure of that.
Maybe a combination of both ( thinking of the language in particular )?
It’s a combination. KR naturally creates the content and the game, but CM indicated that Amazon can deploy hotfixes as needed. So they should have some supporting dev team in Amazon too.
I really wonder the extent of that team and the extent of what they do.
Same with RU too I am really curious about this.
From what I understand, most of the game’s design work is left up to Smilegate. I’m not sure to what extent Amazon Games Studio controls the game’s development; they act as an intermediary between the Western community and Smilegate. But, @Roxx could explain this with far greater insight since she actually works for AGS as a community manager.
Amazon seems to have quite a bit of control seeing as they were able to dictate changing all the female starting armor (and base default apperance/character underwear) and creating entirely new armor sets to ensure that the original outfits are still in the game. Then they have all the changes to NPC skin color, face preset removal, and other changes that comes across more as something handled by the development side instead of the publishing side.
I do wonder with how much they’re changing if it will create problems in the future content.
Things might seem ‘’ minor ‘’ now but it can still cause problems and bugs in the future.
You can implement or change something in one place and it’ll break it in a totally different place.
With KR/ RU based on what I understand they’re so similar/ the same so it’s easy.
But here they’re just changing so much that things will break easier.
This is one of the biggest reasons I am wondering and just in general too.
At this point it almost feels like Amazon are trying to ‘’ claim ‘’ the game over the Korean devs.
I mean future content is going to have to adapt to it otherwise it’s going to be very strange and feel like the base game and the added content are not connected.
I just do wonder if Amazon basically told them ‘’ this is what we want you to do ‘’ and they just did it for them and that’s why a lot of it feels so random and inconsistent or if it was actually Amazon employees themselves who did it and if they have an actual dev team working on that or if they’re primarily just dedicated to stuff like translation ( which there’s a ton of issues with too… ).
In general tho it’s a topic that interests me too.
There is no need to go conspiracy crazy here.
I used to work in environment with several development teams spread across the globe and when you needed a fast issue fix it often took 2-3 days to do, just because of all the time/goals/vision differences. It was particularly bad during product development, where these back and forth were daunting and robbed a lot of time out of us.
So it will make most sense that Amazon will have a small local dev team, so the very least they could deploy hotfixes without having to wait for KR team. Which is practically what they do + localization.
Main content development still will be there.
Yes, what you’re saying makes sense.
Hotfixes and bug fixes makes total sense and should be simple enough.
But when you start changing things and essentially make it two separate versions wouldn’t that complicate things further?
This is why I am wondering if it’s the Korean devs doing it or Amazon because if it’s Amazon I’d imagine it’d potentially be more problematic in the future.
When the Korean devs create new content or even update old content that can still affect content that was changed and create problems.
It sounds like a communication nightmare to me to be done across two different teams who don’t speak the same language.
Of course KR dev team are the ones who ultimately build the NA/EU version according to the requirements they receive from Amazon.
Does it complicate stuff to have multiple major versions of same product running live? You bet - I currently work as a dev for global fintech corp and we have exact same thing with our major product, even worse. Dozens of versions running live often with customer specific customizations that require separate efforts every quarter to maintain.
But, it’s how it is. When HSBC or many others put $$ on the table, they call many shots including highly customized product. Some things of course stay as they are, because it’s core, but a lot of stuff is changed to suit the customer who pays for these changes.
Then of course for Smilegate - Amazon is like a MAJOR huge god sent partner, Smilegate will do everything they can to please here.
So back to this - what we play will be done by KR devs - they will do it according to Amazon requirements as long as it’s possible. Then Amazon themselves will have ability to push hotfixes for some shit that breaks live and needs fast fix (like that PvP bug that got hotfixed by Amazon devs during beta).
Thanks for your insight.
I really hope and pray and hope and pray and hope and pray that it is NOT the New World devs / coders. They are absolutely new to the industry and have no sense of debugging.
It is absolutely not only on the coders. The engine they are using was NEVER and I mean NEVER meant to be used for a MMO. It is worse then using Unreal for a MMO.
The management is absolutely the crux of the issue, but the coding is spotty at best. A lot of things that shouldn’t be mistakes. IE having to type a 0 before a . because you can’t put a . first in the trading post. This is lazy coding and I actually fixed this exact issue in a game I was making. It took 2 seconds.
There has been numerous times where the patch has implemented new bugs, which is a common occurrence, but some of these bugs absolutely should have been spotted in debugging.
It is a combination of fuckups on every level that has created the catastrophe that is happening over there.
Yea sadly you can recover from one point of difficulty, but having literally every aspect of the development being on fire means it is doomed to fail.
In all reality the game has a good idea and I like a lot of it. It will never flourish with the current engine it is on. Having a MMO have client side interactions will always bring out a ton of hacking / exploits / and bugs.
Smilegate RPG is still developing the game, which includes all things development and coding. We publish the game and provide things like infrastructure, QA support, and localization. When it comes to making decisions about the game and content, we work hand in hand with SGR
Kind of a quick overview, but I might be able to answer some direct questions as well
In our partnership feedback reporting and communication is a task of the publishing team, which is why the best place to leave feedback or talk directly to involved folks is here. The people at SGR who are developing the game focus on development, not collecting feedback or communicating with players, so you are not likely to get answers from them (different folks take on different roles, so everyone can work efficiently).
As far as the Soulfist avatar, that has been updated and is available here.
This is the same image that was posted in July during the Founder’s Pack Content Showcase and in that article Amazon stated that the Soulfist Avatar/Outfit was still in production. What exactly has changed from July to November with the outfit?
Nothing changed about the skin from the original, the model is just in a different pose. This is the same as the in-game skin
It looks like the text you linked in the post from the website is incorrect, I will look into getting that updated
Have you or any other CM delivered any of the feedback at all back to the Korean developers about the actual issue with the starting default?
On the podcast you were on one of the people tried to bring the issue up to you but was interrupted by Sywo who turned it into more mockery…
This is an easy issue to solve and make everyone happy and also build more faith in AGS and how the game is being handled.
And also I think that a lot of people feel as if making this a mandatory permanent thing goes against both the spirit and the actual statement that was given about it.
No one has a problem with more options the problem is when those override the original and become the default permanently and you have no choice.
I gave a solution in the thread that would still even keep the ‘’ front and center ‘’ thing but still hold true to keeping things authentic on a whole.
And there are other issues with it too that feel very strange that I talk about in the thread like Gunner being accurate at first but then suddenly looking like she is wearing a store skin by default.
What makes less sense about it is that even with the argument about ‘’ front and center ‘’ her actual starting gear on top of that store skin look-alike is actually very skimpy.
So there isn’t even any logical consistency about it, and I can’t think of any other game like this that has the issues I mentioned in the thread.
It’s very frustrating when the issue gets derailed constantly like on the podcast and then that’s the only thing you respond to and we get no acknowledgement on anything else.
Not even a content creator on the podcast speaking directly to you could even get it out there without being interrupted and it being derailed…
They’ve said that they’re adding skin color variation to the NPC’s so it’s not a bug.
Edit: Except for that pic I’ve seen I guess where the skin was weirdly glossy.
That was a bug.
Can you please not derail this thread…
Ffs @Roxx is finally responding to questions and you gotta come in and derail it?
