38 Studios - Rise and Fall

TechRaptor's Robert Grosso talks about the rise and fall of 38 Studios:

Project Copernicus and the Rise and Fall of 38 Studios

In 2006, baseball pitcher Curt Schilling announced he would continue working in a new field: video games. After speaking with several friends and family members, he would found Green Monster Gaming with one goal in mind: create a new MMO.

Schilling himself was an avid fan of MMORPGs, playing the likes of World of Warcraft in the off-seasons and wanted to add to the market a passion project of his own design. Schilling was not alone in this passion. Two of his biggest backers to Green Monster Gaming, famous fantasy author R.A Salvatore and conceptual artists Todd McFarlane, were also gung-ho on the potential of any projects the studio could create.

Unfortunately, Schilling’s dreams, which saw him invest nearly $50 million of his own funds to finance his studio and his ambitions, would ultimately unravel in one of the most infamous studio closures in gaming history.

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The funny thing is that Kingdoms Of Amalur feels like an MMO without players every second you play.
Vast empty (but beautiful, if you dig the style) world with fetch-quests.

When a site needs traffic, you can always count on a good retelling of the 38 Studios story #38645 to get some page clicks.

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
The funny thing is that Kingdoms Of Amalur feels like an MMO without players every second you play.
Vast empty (but beautiful, if you dig the style) world with fetch-quests.

This.
It was a single-player MMO and ultimately failed because of it. Endless grind and boring, too easy combat even on the highest difficulty. The story had potential, but it was not enough to keep me interested. Sad.

I believe it was suppose to be an MMO but failed in that area; so they went ahead and released it as a single player game as they continued to use the tech towards the intended MMO that eventually was shelves when they went bankrupt.

Schilling had good intention but poor management and they burned cash senselessly (part of bad management). To be honest at the very end what RI did was criminal though I'm not sure they would have remained solvent if RI gov kept his mouth shut. While RI made a horrible investment that was not 38's fault it was the stupidity of the gov; and he only made things worse by trying to defend himself (and quickly killing 38) in the end.

Originally Posted by TheSHEEEP
The funny thing is that Kingdoms Of Amalur feels like an MMO without players every second you play.
Vast empty (but beautiful, if you dig the style) world with fetch-quests.

Originally Posted by Caddy
When a site needs traffic, you can always count on a good retelling of the 38 Studios story #38645 to get some page clicks.

And you can always count on the comments having the same repeating stuff, like how Reckoning was going to be an MMO (this is incorrect, it was always a single-player RPG. The MMO "Project Copernicus" was being developed alongside it and took place in the same Amalur universe that RA Salvatore wrote 10,000 years of lore for.) Then of course you'll have the people who say Reckoning itself feels like an MMO, which I feel is sort of like some weird psychological issue caused by the constant talking about MMOs in articles about 38 Studios and the misinformation slash confusion that Reckoning was supposed to be an MMO. This causes some weird reaction in the brains of its victims.

Half-joking, but to me, Reckoning was basically an Elder Scrolls-style game more than anything. Tons of quests, huge "guided open-world", bunch of dialogue and NPCs, several guilds and factions (Mage/Fighters/Thieves/2 Elven factions and an arena), new high fantasy RPG lore, tons of exploration, etc. Obviously there are many differences as well, such as the overall amount of dungeons in Reckoning being much less than an Elder Scrolls game, and so on, but I think if you play the game with an open mind you will find that it's pretty good in these categories. Amalur was supposed to be a rival/competitor/whatever to Elder Scrolls but we know what went down. Sad indeed.

Such potential, really good people involved, but what a nasty ending to it all. I played this thing, but I'll tell ya, I have never felt the need to ever replay it, and I seriously doubt I ever will.

Originally Posted by Fluent
And you can always count on the comments having the same repeating stuff, like how Reckoning was going to be an MMO (this is incorrect, it was always a single-player RPG. The MMO "Project Copernicus" was being developed alongside it and took place in the same Amalur universe that RA Salvatore wrote 10,000 years of lore for.)

Yes, this seems to happen a lot - like on the insistence that Shroud of the Avatar was meant to be a single player first when it wasn't and the strange surprise that garners about someone who popularized the MMOG in the first place (among his many other grand achievements).

Originally Posted by Caddy
When a site needs traffic, you can always count on a good retelling of the 38 Studios story #38645 to get some page clicks.

I actually find this entire matter interesting. Thanks to RPGWatch for posting the article.

Originally Posted by Darkheart
This.
It was a single-player MMO and ultimately failed because of it. Endless grind and boring, too easy combat even on the highest difficulty. The story had potential, but it was not enough to keep me interested. Sad.

For me it was the field of view. I couldn't stand how close the camera was to your character. Played about 15 hours and stopped. Might have stopped before finishing anyway becase even at 15 hours the world seemed too big for the content it offered.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
Yes, this seems to happen a lot - like on the insistence that Shroud of the Avatar was meant to be a single player first when it wasn't…

Actually, it was. The first pitch about the game on Kickstarter was that SotA was going to be a spiritual successor to U7. I don't care anymore that it has evolved into UO 2.0 because I don't care about this game anymore and if that's what the playerbase wants so be it. But in actual fact, the first chatterings for this game was BIG on conveying the idea it was to be a spiritual successor to U7, a single player game.

There were issues with the game that could be fixed with mods, and while 38 Studios was in the middle of adding new things and patching the game, they went under. The issues include the game is a bit too easy even on Hard difficulty, you can hit level cap at about 80% or so into the game if you do everything and the camera was indeed a bit close for some people's tastes. All those things have been addressed with mods, so check those out if interested.

I strongly disagree about the content comment, though. The game has hundreds of hours of content like an Elder Scrolls game, and while not all of it is the most memorable extremely amazing content ever, most of it is very good. The House of Ballads is a simple example of some of the best RPG faction content you can find, and The Legend of Dead Kel DLC (expansion, really) is fantastic, and also among the best DLC you can buy for an RPG. The game has plenty of interesting locations, fun exploration in very large and diverse areas, beautiful graphics (if you're in that sort of thing ) and some pretty good story and lore bits throughout. It essentially accomplishes the same things as a TES game, so if that is your thing then it is worth playing. I played for roughly 250 hours in a single playthrough and didn't even see the last 2 zones. The game is *huge*.

Will do another run sometime with the mods I mentioned. I would suggest adding the difficulty tweak mods, reducing the rate of experience gain and also limiting the Fate meter by a bit. The camera can also be tweaked based on your preferences.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Half-joking, but to me, Reckoning was basically an Elder Scrolls-style game more than anything. Tons of quests, huge "guided open-world", bunch of dialogue and NPCs, several guilds and factions (Mage/Fighters/Thieves/2 Elven factions and an arena), new high fantasy RPG lore, tons of exploration, etc.

I hope you are half-joking. This would give Amalur too much credit. It's a 3rd-person ARPG, that had some nice ideas lore-wise, but fell flat on all the rest. Especially the quests most often had the quality of your average MMO.

Thanks for the tip on the mods Fluent, I was unaware of them. I will eventually give this game another run.

While I agree it has a ton of content like an elder scrolls game don't make the mistake I did and play it like one. The game is broken in to zones and those zones all have a level range to them that will lock at the level you are when you enter. So, if you're like me and run off to explore you can inadvertently lock all theses zones at their lowest level effective ruining the difficulty of the game. Not sure if the mods Fluent mentioned addresses this issue though.

That is what happened to me and it ruined my play through. I was enjoying my time with the game though before i severely outleveled everything in the first half of the game. I thought the combat at first (when a bit challenging was fun, more so than elder scrolls).

Ya, sad saga. Re Reckoning, have sad it before…

Cons - Yes it's a bit MMO-ish and RPG lite. It has all the elements but it's more console action rpg than PC rpg if you get what I mean. Combat does get easy by the end. Relatively small stable of critters to battle. Managing loot gets a bit tedious. Studio went under before they finished tweaking it.

Pros - The story and the law are well fleshed out. Everything is voice acted. I really liked the aesthetics. The combat up until the last 20% was perfectly fine action RPG fare. It has the usual rpg mod cons like crafting, respec-ing, appearance changing. It's big and the zones vary quite a bit. There's a lot of content.

I enjoyed it a great deal and recommend it to people if they are looking for an action RPG in the same vein as Divinity II.


-kaos

Reckoning is about 50 times the size of Divinity II, if not more. I would not compare them myself, but they both do have a high fantasy almost storybook-esque vibe to them.

Reckoning is just a huge, Elder Scrolls-esque RPG, IMO. Huge open-world that is broken into 5 zones with interconnected "bubbles" within the zones (no loading screens between bubbles but there are between the 5 huge zones.) Same style of faction design (6 join-able factions, I believe, each with long questlines, perks for joining, rising to Grandmaster of them, etc.), same type of lore intertwined with the world, just with a heavier focus on story bits, with some cutscenes spread out and this sort of thing. It definitely has action RPG combat, and it's not all that difficult, either (use mods as I said). Bunch of crafting options, 10 overall skills to invest in, 3 combat skill trees that you can mix and match from and unlock many different "classes" based on your choices (the class "cards" give you bonuses based on your choices.)

And the MMO thing just follows it unfortunately. It has nothing to do with MMOs nor does it feel like one, unless you consider Elder Scrolls an MMO or something. Maybe it's the art style or something, or the exclamation points above questgiver's heads (that you can turn off in the options), don't know, but it's definitely a story-based RPG, it's just also enormous with hundreds of hours of content. IMO.

@saki, Yes, it has a different scaling style than TES, designed to make it more "old-school"-esque. It is not recommended to run to the end of the map as it is a "guided open-world". If you run across to the later zones you are going to lock the zones into a certain level, so that's obviously not good. I didn't have this problem when I played the game because it seemed to me that you should explore each bubble and zone before you move on, since the way the world is built gives that cue, IMO. That might be addressed in mods, too, don't know.

@Kaos, The studio finished the game completely, but went under when designing and creating a "patch" designed to add new features to the PC version based on feedback, such as a harder difficulty level and other options I don't recall right now. Unfortunately they went under, but modders basically tweaked all that stuff and more. Check out my guy Ill Don's video on how to mod Amalur. It's kind of a pain but this is another thing they didn't get to add, "proper" mod support. Still works, though.



He gave very good impressions and reviews of the harder difficulty mod options as well. Makes the game way harder if you choose, thus making combat more deadly and interesting.

All things aside, I am a life long Redsox fan and Curt Schilling will always be a max level god like character in my opinion!

He was a hell of a pitcher. Was nice to see him paired with another great, Randy Johnson, in Arizona.

One of the gaming collectibles that I have is a few tarot cards for Kingdoms of Amalur in an envelope with a wax seal and signed by Curt Shilling. They had a contest before Kingdoms came out and the first 500 people who signed up were mailed these. I grew up watching Curt pitch and have a few of his baseball cards from my youth. It's just a weird crossover collectible of my interests in video games and baseball.

Originally Posted by Darkheart
This.
It was a single-player MMO and ultimately failed because of it. Endless grind and boring, too easy combat even on the highest difficulty. The story had potential, but it was not enough to keep me interested. Sad.

That's how I would describe Skyrim too, endless boring grind, easy combat, nice but empty world. Only story was nowhere near as decent as the KoA one, and the combat was even more boring. Yet it's one of the best selling titles ever… never ceases to amaze me.

I played the game end to end. Yes it had a lot of content but 90% of it was horribly boring. It also has some significant clipping bugs (esp near the end and boss battles) which make it a pia to finish (yes rumour is they had a patch to fix these issues and it is a pity EA couldn't apply the patch even fit he studio went BK). However, I stll feel the game was MMO'ish and that added to the boredom since it was a signle player game with an MMO design - way too much pointless and extremely boring grind. I would rate the game a 5 for boredom and 7 for pretty graphics and a few nice ideas. Obviously fluent likes it more than myself and i know there are other folks who thought it was fantastic but then again I've always found real MMO grind incredibly boring - and only played them for the community not the gaming aspec which was mostly lame.