Is Empires dead, dying, or just on hold...

For some extremely strange reason. Mods that go commercial usually get a bigger playerbase then when it is free.

 

It's called advertisement

 

Oh god, look what I started D:

 

You've started the revolution of Empires!

 

so if empires goes commercial you can demand money for giving them the idea XD

 

no you started a bunch of worry based on unfounded ideas

 

Hey guys lets all make completely baseless speculation then raise a bitch-fest afterward

 

This thread is stupid...

 

Its limited to people who look for mods - most don't. Most just buy a game and play it, then buy a new one.

 

I agree. Moderator should delete the whole thread.

 

Nah empires aint dead it just has fewer players. I would be playing now but my game keeps crashing because of my low specs =[. I think that its better with only a few players like 7 or 8 aside. Anyway the players on the servers now arent noobs so you'd always get a good game, I assume =P

 

this thread isn't totaly out-of-the-blue. When was the last time we got a like status update? Or some concept art for BE aircraft. A post in the developers blog telling us what yous are up to (even if it something like "too bust atm, will start working in 2 weeks time" so we know where we stand).

 

what's your source for this info?

I think you are forgetting the mods that did get popular enough to go commercial. Lets take for example, Counter Strike.

Once it was polished enough to become a match for the rest of the commercial games in the market then they could start making money off it - But it took a very long time to get to this stage. All the time while they were updating the game, the player base grew and grew because it was a great free mod - the only reason it survived going commercial was simply the massive number of players it had behind it.

Another example is the "team fortress" franchise. Until TF2, the team fortress games were free to play and in its "popular period" TFC was very highly ranked in terms of player time & popularity - but alas, due to lack of updates and "stagnant development" the players began drifting away.

I believe its not that people "dont look for free mods" - mods simply are not high enough quality to draw players away from their shiny polished games which have had studios spending thousands of hours on making it "look and play good".

Insurgency got high up on the "quality" scale visually and game-play wise and for this reason alone the free to play mod did pull players and did come very close to becoming "popular" - but they killed themselfs with lack of updates to fix the bugs.
When the bugs became annoying - people stopped playing - when the servers became empty - the servers were shut down.

This is kind of where I feel EMP is now...
The lack of "known direction" of the mod is what's driving people away. Nobody knows if there will ever be an update again to fix the problems or add the new content. And now there are rumours the mod is being dropped for a commercial one... damaging.. but people believe it simply because there is no other source of information.

My opinion is EMP would never be able to go commercial on the source engine due to valve licensing costs - but if someone has a massive amount of cash sitting around - then the game quality would have to be much higher to sell and currently its not at that level of quality.

 

DUDE!

HAVE YOU EVER followed a mod's development? It may take 6 months to get a new update up and if you post it too early on the forum to show it to people then everyone goes crazy and gives an opinion of it, says it's shit/cool and gives numerous idiotic ways to "improve" it. This is THEIR mod, not ours. THEY decide when they give a new update. We just follow their wills and maybe give them small suggestions what they could do differently.

Empires isn't fucking dead idiot. They are working on it all the time, the process is just slow because they aren't eating, breathing and living FOR Empires. JESUS!!!

Even making a MAP can take months to get it released. Why? Because people don't work on it 24/7. Even getting something new to show for people may take weeks.

Holy fuck the whole idea of this thread is the most utter shit I have ever heard. Empires isn't dead, dying or "just on hold." People are all the time working on it they just make progress very slowly. Jesus...

 

if you dont believe weedy there was LOADS of drama on the sourceforts forums when they decided to release a preview of the models that they were working on (which werent complete) which resulted in the sf team pretty much completely changing and further led to pretty much no development (do you guys want that to happen here?)

 

If we want more players, we need more attention.

Fortunately, empires is the perfect game to record awesome looking scenes from.
Unfortunately, apart from broc no one here seems to be that good with making video's, trailers and stuff.

If a few people who knew what to do, would make a quality video every one or two months, we could keep empires in the news.

The footage won't be a problem. Join KM or any other server with 40 decent players and NORMAL settings, and record a few games.

Or: it takes only a few games untill you get one that's been awesome the entire time, and that can be turned into a video from start untill victory/defeat. Summarized that is. Show the strategic decissions, show the comm view (!!!!!!), record the voice chat when people are requesting attack orders or when the comm is telling everyone what he is researching and asks for feedback, show huge tank battles and artillery taking out turret farms, scouts sabotaging builings while hiding, a gren blowing up an apc with mines killing lot's of passengers, missiles and shells flying around someone's ears and engies dropping ammo boxes and reviving people.

Empires is awesome for making very interesting and high quality video's. But we need people who can put it all together in a professional way, and put it into a nice format. If someone knows someone (even outside the empires community) that knows how to do it and wants to do it, i'm sure the empires players can provide him with lots of good footage.

Why don't we record a few clanwars, and turn the best one into a video? A narrator can explain what's happening. Also since you have to go from about 60 minutes to 5-10 minutes, someone has to say what happened in between the more interesting parts that are shown in the video.

I'm pretty sure having a high quality video every 2 months on as many sites as possible, will put empires and the empires gameplay into the spotlights again and possible keep it there.
And all it takes are a few experienced video editors.

 

Well, I'm taking a lot of media courses at school. We've done a few mini-movies in class, all of them were quite good. I could give trailers a crack. I have the knowledge of camera angles, movement, etc, as well as the editing experience to pull it all together.

 

This thread is going overkill.

Actually, most people download their games...

 

That's a good start.
Most problematic is recording the comm view though, since it has to be recorded in real time. Source demo's do not work for the comm view. We'd need some commander with a very good pc, able to play in high settings and run some software recording everything in high quality straight away.

 

I've got a HD3870X2, newest card out :p

I got 120 fps on 1152x864 with everything maxed out but unfortunately my ISP (Guess wut, Telenet) thinks it's fun to give me the shittiest upload speeds imaginable and random timeouts whenever I'm uploading for a long time.

Maybe I should just snailmail you the footage, that'll probably be faster than uploading it