Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand the hate. Look at what exactly DreamWorld is claiming on their Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playdreamworld/dreamwor...

* The infinite open world MMO

* Sculpt the world and create with a massive catalog of objects

* One single world, millions of players

* Explore thousands of unique biomes

* Fight and tame DreamWorld's incredible creatures

Those claims just don't seem very outlandish to me! They aren't even very unique among videogames. There is no standard for what constitutes a "biome" so it seems quite plausible that you could procedurally generate different biomes. The most questionable part is whether millions of players would really be in "one single world", but it seems quite reasonable than an actual limitation would be something like "they are all in the same world, but different areas of the same world require a loading screen", and on the backend it's just implemented with multiple servers, nothing fancy.

Everyone who's familiar with "early access" video games or Kickstarter video games should know, one cool demo video doesn't guarantee a fun game, at all. That's just how video game development works. This one is no different. They aren't a "scam", they are just trying to make a video game.

> The infinite open world MMO

That bullet point alone is essentially enough to make me extremely skeptical that a 2-3 person team could deliver this.

To give me any hope, I would expect that team to have a significant amount of mmo (or at least significant netcode experience).

I'm not saying a 2-3 person team could never deliver a simple MMO, but it makes me very skeptical right off the bat.

Though, I tend to be quicker to jump to "naive" than "scam" as an explanation of why someone might try to tackle more than they can deliver.

MMOs are hard, and there's a reason you are very few tiny indie MMOs out there. They are a significant up front development cost to build out.

It feels like someone is promising to build a multi-story apartment complex, but quoting a budget more in line with building a single family home. And the developer hasn't ever built an apartment complex before.

This was literally the topic of my PhD thesis and it is absolutely not trivial. It's one of those things where it's easy to think it's simple from the outside, so I'm thinking naive over scam too (I was there a decade ago)

I once thought about how to make Minecraft multithreaded. There is no way its going to happen without a from scratch redesign and a massive increase in code complexity.

> > The infinite open world MMO

yea, the last time a game claimed this, they flopped super hard - and it wasn't even an inexperienced developer! See "No Man's Sky" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Controversy

they've fixed a lot of flaws now apparently, but i would be very skeptical of somebody claiming to deliver a skyhigh goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ&vl=en

And it’s not even an MMO.

But it's also a startup. Don't those usually gather up investment and hire more people?

Just looking at it casually I would have guessed that there's a small founding team, and they are trying to snowball the investment to a point where they can actually do it, with a much larger team.

That's how they all work, isn't it? There's not a whole lot you can do with just two people, it's a matter of attracting investment.

> But it's also a startup. Don't those usually gather up investment and hire more people?

In the kickstarter they describe their team as: "2 full time devs, 1 part time dev". That's where I got 2-3 person team.

They also say: "If we raise enough, we'll be able to hire an additional full-time engineer to bring you Alpha features even faster!"

So, by their own terms raising an additional team member would seem to be some kind of a stretch goal, and such hiring isn't in their plan for delivering the features they've promised in the timeline they promised.

Yes, if their promise was: "We need to raise a large amount of funding, so that we can hire a medium sized team to build out all of these features" I would be a lot less skeptical. But, from reading their Kickstarter page, that doesn't seem to be what's being promised or proposed.

I would be mildy skeptical of those claims from a AAA studio with MMO experience and a multimillion dollar budget. Making an MMO with a persistent, procedurally generated, infinite, and player-modifiable world is an extreme challenge and I am unaware of any major success at it.

When you add the fact this is a team of 2 with little to no game dev experience asking for only $10k I conclude this is just impossible unless they have discovered a secret everyone else making MMOs hasn't.

It is literally impossible to deliver on even half of their promises with their budget and team. Even 10x that budget and team size is not enough. It is a scam that works because most people don't have an understanding of the challenges and costs involved in game development, much like how most people don't understand the challenges involved in operating an online service like Facebook or even Hacker News.

Companies with ~100m worth of funding and 100+ member teams have tried and failed to do less than these con artists are promising on a shoestring budget.

How about how they say that the game will also include every genre, and all of this work will be done by two people? This is an absolute scam.

I would hesitate to call it a scam, but it definitely seems like they're inspired by Ready Player One at least a little bit, and may well be overzealous.

It sounds like they want to compete with VRChat since VRChat can do almost all of their stated goals with the added bonus of users being able to create and upload content, and despite the name, you don't need VR hardware to play it. The only thing listed that VRChat doesn't have or can't do is a single, giant world.

Also they state worldbuilding will have a "catalog of objects," but VRChat worlds are just Unity levels, so you can put whatever you want in there. You're not limited to a "catalog."

I'm pretty convinced they wanna compete with VRChat.

It depends where you put a limit on genre. Minecraft for example covers a surprising number of genres using just the basic mechanics + user mods for goals/limitations. Same with Roblox. If you can modify the world, you get them "for free".

Minecraft wasn't marketed as having "every genre", while showing exactly none in their demo videos.

When you design a game you come up with a core game play loop, Minecraft had this, and notch was competent and humble enough to make his game from scratch, and release a MVP people could play.

This game doesn't have a core game play loop so it hides behind nothing burger statements like this.

Whenever someone makes claims that are both grandiose and vague you should take it with a grain of salt.

But do you know what it does have? it doesn't describe in ambiguities? kickstarter rewards, you get pets, and you get to put your name on a billboard, and the more you donate the bigger your name.

I'm not saying they're right, but given we know games can lose the core game play loop and succeed, maybe starting without it isn't a terrible idea. Secondlife is still around without one. Roblox doesn't really have one. Kids can spend hours in Scratch creating their own.

In the video they say that this game can encompass all genres of game. Clearly total bs.

It's not that the promises are impossible, it's that the promises are completely inadequate for their proposed team size and budget. Many components of what they would be building are well known, nothing fancy, they simply need time and work - but much more manpower and budget than they expect; so their promises to do it with an unreasonable budget indicate they don't even expect to fulfil these promises - ergo, a scam.

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