Armored Warfare: SS offers insight into Obsidian exit!

Reading the forums I came across a thread, yet again about  how the game is dead.  I  always think these are funny because so many people claim so many games are dead yet they keeping going for years.  Any way what really caught my eye was SS posting very insightful post about the exit of Obsidian , and very professional done.  SS does are great job in my opionion of being honest withoug really saying it was anyone fault per say.  Any way you can read for yourself below. -armedbushido

It really depends on what you expect. Potential is nice to talk about, true, but I also think that the 0.21 version of the game (that I happened to test for quite a bit) is simply a good game as it is despite feelings of some players. It's obviously not the next 10/10 Skyrim, nor is it a WoT killer or any such nonsense (realistically, it never was and as far as I remember, we never claimed it to be), but I think that realistic rating would be around 7,5/10.
As for the developers, well... like you, and many other players, I came to the project a bit starstruck with the Obsidian name. I mean, holy crap, KOTOR2, New Vegas, those were some awesome games, right? Even the current Obsidian RPG production isn't bad, they love making RPGs and they are good at it. However, as I became more involved in, let's say, game's development a bit - not as a developer obviously, apart from some very limited cases, just someone with some access to the files and processes - well... let me put it like this. There were some great people working for Obsidian, Richard Taylor was and is an amazing person, he was always helpful for example. Spunky - Obsidian's CM - also worked really hard on making the game better and while I didn't always share his views, ultimately we both did our best.

But, of course, there were some pretty bad decision made when working on the project as well, on all three sides. There are two people who I blame most for the current state of the game, but none are currently working on the project anymore and even then, some of the decisions they took were good - the world is not black or white and none of us are cartoon villains. Let's just say that the way things ended with Obsidian... it couldn't have happened any other way and to blame "evil Russians" or any such crap is simply wrong. This story has no good guys or villains and I am quite frankly amazed that so many fell for the fairy tale on Reddit that one of the Obsidian devs wrote and used dupes to spread. Even without knowing internal information, surely anyone with common sense must suspect the truth is never that one sided.

But that's the past.

The "new" team that came after them is neither inexperienced, nor small. Dmitry Tabakov was with the product since the beginning and has a vision of what we should do and no, it's not copying WoT (the person responsible for this strategy is not on the team anymore). He is a good developer, I trust him completely, his decisions make a lot of sense (it's a shame we can't always explain exactly how things work because some of the stuff is very internal). He's actually a really great guy to work with, always ready to explain stuff. His colleagues are pretty great as well (shout outs go to Evgeny, Peter, Karolis, Marina, Alexei and all the others who put up with my occasional bullshit ).

Not only Dmitry, but the team as a whole was there since the beginning and supported Obsidian. In fact, some of the most annoying problems were fixed by the RU team even during Obsidian time. These include:

- the disappearing premium big (remember that one?)
- optimization fixes (especially early on)
- partially the shot delay issue

And so on. In short, I am happy with the change.

On My.com side, we genuinely hate the sort of fuckups that happen, like today. Quite frankly, I can't really explain it, nor can I promise it won't happen again with complex events such as this one (you might have noticed that simple events now work well, we've established a process to keep the issues that caused them in check). Naturally, as the game population declined during the long one-year Balance 2.0 wait, some things got deprioritized - for example, you might remember the awesome video from 2015 where a T-72B shoots at pumpkins, such expensive things aren't really made until the launch. But the core didn't changed, I am here, the GM that was around since the launch is here, the old CM and production team still works for the company (except for Kevin and Josh, I miss them ). So yeah, we'll go on for as long as we have players.

As for the future, we have a plan regarding what to do. I can't put here any details obviously, it's mostly marketing and PR. Steam is obviously considered but I can't really share anything more, such steps have to be carefully prepared.

But the expectations must be realistic. We will never have as many players as WoT, or even close to that. Just like no MMORPG came close to World of Warcraft - some games are simply unique and, despite all the criticism and occasional fuckups, what the original Wargaming guys built was something amazing, the first game of its kind that single handedly revived the interest in tanks and all the stuff connected, especially in the CIS region.

Our goals are more modest - we want a stable community for the game to function as intended that would make all three modes viable on both servers. There will always be players who dislike it, forums will always draw more criticism and so on. But most of all, we want to have a game that's really liked by its fans. We still have some way to go, but the game will be here until the situation improves and, quite honestly, if you want the game to succeed this way the way we do, you have a chance to help us by not being toxic, being constructive and by trying to look at the game from an unbiased angle. I know it's hard after two years, but we've made a lot of improvements and I think we're heading in the right direction.

That's all.
SOURCE

Comments