L:O' failings-and-future

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Defender

Member
I think one of the the biggest failings early on, was not encouraging more player made content like maps, and featuring the top winning ones on the main webpage, or making them easier to install for new players.
 
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Armageddon

Teapot
The game was doomed from the start, the community took over a game that lost a large company a lot of money. They worked on it for free for years and did the best they could with what they had, knowing they'd never see a dime because of the agreement.
The game has had mod/map support for a pretty long time, before at IA we would have never had any of that but the devs here gave it to us in OD when they didn't have to.
Granted the process for OD has been slow but they gave us back a game we all wanted and for nothing, they never saw 1$ from their time coding this game.

We've had community maps added in recent updates but none of them will garner any attention, classic small maps are all that are played anymore and even that pool of maps is small. which reflects the player base... small. We all want a good game of FB over a huge canyon map, it holds our attention, it's quick and usually fun.
Another update was in the works for OD with timeslam.. or whatever stupid *dancing* thing it was.. hopefully it won't come, we have enough useless *chocolate cookies* as it is.
With project Z coming around i hope 0 time is spent on OD, i want pZ to give us all that addictive feeling again, bring all those MIA player back and make me want to use my pc for more then cat pictures.
 

Royalty

The Aussie
jiffm-jpg.3340
 

BugsPray

Legions Developer
I think one of the the biggest failings early on, was not encouraging more player made content like maps, and featuring the top winning ones on the main webpage, or making them easier to install for new players.

Two things:
  1. IAC shutdown IA before they officially announced our project (Legions: Overdrive) was live. We lost a TON of players because of that.
  2. --
  3. License Agreement said:
    Licensees may not charge end users for playing the Game, advertise on the Website [ed: legionsoverdrive.com], or otherwise monetize the Game or the Software.
Two biggest influencers IMO.
 

Royalty

The Aussie
Exactly what Arma and Buggsy said.

Lack of advertisement was the main issue. This was out of our control.

Hopefully Project Z can revive things.
 

Fixious

Test Lead
I'd be surprised of Z had any kind of OD aspect, since Mabel (and probably others) weren't fans of it.

Anyways, Legions ultimately failed after development was halted in 2009 while IA did their whole makeover, and advertising never came back after the launch of Legions: Overdrive since it then became a community project. The fact that the entire IA website was shutdown without even a link to this one didn't help, either. We could've had 20 community maps with the same fun qualities of Frostbyte but they'd be pointless without advertising the game. We've been able to host our own servers and create mods since 2011 and literally NOTHING came of it. No one created a mod worthy of hosting a separate server for like Annihilation, Renegades, LT, etc. Tweaking sever info is child's play, and it's incredibly easy to create something like an Ultra Renegades or LT mod by changing a few weapons variable or bans. But people still played and preferred base Legions, with Team Rabbit getting a brief spike of popularity before dying out.

Part of that was because, again, it was a community project with no real funding for...anything. The other part was due to the licensing issues with IA that prevented the developers from at least spreading out to other websites like Steam, but even something like that would require even more engine work and time. And I'm sure there are a plethora of other things that prevented new players from joining, such as immediately going up against veterans, or the movement system actually taking some time to learn. The game currently consists of the lowest common denominator, if you will. CTF isn't even a thing anymore. People just duel.

It's unfortunate because there are people who still care about the game and want to see it come back, even if it only means a few good games of Legions throughout the week. Poponfu just won't let it go, and is currently reviving Engineer on his own to make it a bit simpler than it was in the past (no leveling, faster deploy times, dumbed-down turrets, etc). I could be partially to blame for that though, since I was really the only one vocal about seeing it return. I remember saying this a while ago, but you'd be better off looking into something Project Z. Legions is somewhat rapidly going the way of Legends, and I'd rather shift my attention elsewhere than watch Legions rot away.
 

Defender

Member
I don't know how you can guarantee 'Z' will deliver, when at-least two teams of paid developers, tried to make successful tribes or tribes2, successors and they failed. Project Z, has a much worse chance of succeeding in my book, no real financial backing, no paid developers.
They also have no plans to allow modding, and maybe mapping will be supported, to me that kills it right from the get go.
Its funny how so early in the processes they are talking about ways to maybe charge people for the initial game and then maybe charge extra for more stuff, when most likely it will end up as freeware, or worse.
 
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Royalty

The Aussie
You seem to forget why Tribes died.

Tribes died because their F2P model was broken, and because the developers weren't passionate about Tribes.

A whiff of money in the general direction of SMITE, and Ascend was abandoned.
 

Fixious

Test Lead
Well, on the other hand if the community had an SDK to work with towards the end (like Hi-Rez said they'd provide...) *Tribes: Ass-End* may have had a somewhat healthier life. There were a number of issues that plagued the last few attempts at *Tribes: Ass-End* comp, most of which could have been fixed if Hi-Rez gave a damn and fixed a few ini variables (only focusing on the newer ones, like flash and hitbox ini). Modding doesn't just mean 'hey we're going to make our own new gamemode.' It means the community can actually fix *chocolate cookies* the developers can't or refuse to. That's pretty much Tribes in nutshell, up until Ascend of course.

As for financial backing, a Kickstarter will likely happen for Z. Whether or not it'll take off...who knows. If I had to guess I'd say they're going to wait until the game is well into alpha and maybe even closed beta before doing the Kickstarter though. That way they'll have something to actually show off other than concept art and design documents.
 

GReaper

Grumpy
Defender - it's hard to take threads like these seriously when you're generally negative over what we've done over the past few years, yet you still linger around complaining about it on a regular basis in various threads.

It's also hard to take your opinion seriously when you've called *Tribes: Ass-End* a outright failure (I'll allow Vengeance to be called a failure without questioning it!), and you're instantly negative towards Project Z as modding as been announced as a most likely a no, even though map making is most likely a yes. You're bitter when you create custom mods/maps, and people don't necessarily don't want to consume that content.


Anyway, from my point of view:

Should've released the scripts at launch. It took 4 months to release the script source, during which the development was a nightmare because we were dealing with binary blobs in the repository - some of which contained code which we were uncertain about.

No authentication at launch. We had it, then we removed it, and people were pissed off because we removed it - even though removing it meant you could host servers and do more custom content. Development was hindered again because developing the game was a bit of a nightmare which required access to the auth server to do stuff. The community would've been better off if it wasn't around from the start.


Those are the main two things which we as developers had control over and could've done something about.
 

KrO

Member
hi,

sorry for my english language but i would like in the first time to say thank to the developers and all people who have contributed.
L/O is a good game maybe the best FPS but firstly L/O doesn't benefit advertise and mainly it is not easy to take a position* (fr : prendre en main). it takes time to play correctly. Now with the new games the players want a few minutes to control. it s not possible with L/O.
 
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Defender

Member
To start, I think it would be fun and maybe keep new players around if we had some new simple one weapon death-match game modes.
This could be fun on vary small maps, maybe make a few simple new maps, for these game modes.

Unlimited ammo..
1# laser, light armor.
2# grenade, light armor.
3# rocket, light armor.
Could do more, ideas?
 

Defender

Member
Just don't bang your head, Unreal Tournament had options for game modes like this, called mutators or something.
 

stefygraff

Private Tester
Legions had its time, get over it, I play 1-2 games per month and get bored very fast. Just face the facts and move on.
No new content will get players back to this game on a daily basis, not even the engie core/mod.

Im sorry for all the custom content you made for the game man, but the reality is that the majority doesn't give a damn L:O anymore.
It was fun, its over.

Also the title of this thread dose injustice to Legions because this game did not fail, it just finished its progress, coming to an end, just like all the games ever made.
 

Jordahan

World Leader of The 21st Century
Defender - it's hard to take threads like these seriously when you're generally negative over what we've done over the past few years, yet you still linger around complaining about it on a regular basis in various threads.
This is seriously a thread you made just to be negative about L:O and Project Z. Legions has had a rocky life but I think the team that salvaged it from the wreckage of IA has done a pretty awesome job giving us something to hold onto for a few more years. If it weren't for people like Crash who managed to help get the game out of IA limbo and the initial dev team of Bugs, Mabel, GReaper and just about everyone else who dedicated time to this, it would have been dead back when the IA Arcade shut down. Our team was heavily limited on what we could do for the game but I know that all of the people who were Staff here tried their hardest to make the game the best it could be. I'm sure we made some wrong decisions along the way, but that's just human error. Your dissection and negativity over it is not helping anyone and is seriously just bringing down the morale of everyone who put time into this game. In summation, if all you want to do is pick apart Legions and try to tear down the development team, please either keep it yourself or politely *dance* off out of what's left of this community and go join TW, I'm sure they'd love your negativity and bitterness over anything that's not T1 or T2.

I don't know how you can guarantee 'Z' will deliver, when at-least two teams of paid developers, tried to make successful tribes or tribes2, successors and they failed. Project Z, has a much worse chance of succeeding in my book, no real financial backing, no paid developers.
They also have no plans to allow modding, and maybe mapping will be supported, to me that kills it right from the get go.
Its funny how so early in the processes they are talking about ways to maybe charge people for the initial game and then maybe charge extra for more stuff, when most likely it will end up as freeware, or worse.
If you don't think we're going to succeed, that's fine, that's your right to believe that but please for the love of god, keep it to yourself. Not a single person here is asking for what in your inexperienced and uninformed opinion we are doing wrong. We are going to work our asses off to make Z awesome, everyone on the team has been disappointed in the past by games that could have been so awesome, being so bad. Z might not be a success, but nearly everyone except for you is positive about it and trying to give us support. We had 40+ people show up to our event in Seattle and it was pretty unanimous that they thought the game was impressive and had serious potential. All of us at Archetype are dedicating serious time and effort to make a great game. So if you have constructive criticism, feedback or support, we welcome it wholeheartedly but if you're going to sit there, be negative and try to pick us apart, nobody is going to care or listen.
 
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