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Why not a PROPER Majesty Game?

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Tarantian

Tarantian

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Aug 19, 2013
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  • Warlock 2: The Exiled
You know what would be great?

A PROPER Majesty 2.

You know, a Majesty 2 that has randomly acting autonomous heroes, random maps, a variety of mobs that do things besides rush straight for the town center...
 
Tarantian said:
You know what would be great?

A PROPER Majesty 2.

You know, a Majesty 2 that has randomly acting autonomous heroes, random maps, a variety of mobs that do things besides rush straight for the town center...
Click to expand...

In short - I don't think it's possible to do in a profitable fashion. This is due to A: The cost of a proper M3 game would be high and B: I think that the audience for a PROPER majesty game is too small for A to be viable.

We'd love to - we love Majesty to death and we've looked at this in twenty different ways but can't make the math the work. Even if just was a break even affair we might consider it.

I hope someone comes to us and convinces us they can make a great Majesty game with a smart budget.

Regards,

Shams
 
Metro. said:
Oh man, that's disappointing. But I appreciate the honesty so we know not to expect a Majesty 3 anytime soon.
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Never say never :)
 
Majesty market is really so small ?

Anyway, the main default of M2 was the IA. And it could be solved easily.... with a proper :)cool:) scripting engine. Majesty is all about IA of heroes and monsters. If modders/players could write script (per example during the beta and after release), the problem is solved and the game will have lot and lot of different personnality for heroes and monsters. Add more complex economic strategy for the kingdoms and you got a cheap and fun majesty game.

On the other side, TheEngine used by Ino-co for M2 and warlock would not be a good choice.
 
saroumana said:
Majesty market is really so small ?

Anyway, the main default of M2 was the IA. And it could be solved easily.... with a proper :)cool:) scripting engine. Majesty is all about IA of heroes and monsters.
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Solved easily? On the contrary.

Being small is not the only issue to consider.
Players play games for various reasons and quite often, those reasons are conflictual with some orientations taken by the game design.
By this, I mean that not all players accept the game as it is and would prefer it to be modify in order to fit their tastes. This divergence between the players' expectations and what a game can be can lead for example players to reject managerial mechanics in a management game. Game X is a management game but players simply refus to take managerial decisions when playing that game.

Players play to command and conquer. They want to be big in the gameworld and they want to dominate. From this point of view, any game must allow them to do and any feature that put itself between players and command or domination is likely to be a problem.

Majesty in this regard in no different. Players playing Majest does not mean that players accept that Majesty is essential a game featuring semi-independent agents acting out of personality and that are not to control directly but influenced.

Players who accept Majesty as it is try to make the most of the game mechanics of heroes acting out of personality.

But players who want to command and conquer, semi independent agents acting out of personality are nightmarish. They absolutely do not want that in their game. It is a roadblock.

The AI is the biggest problem to be solved and the most difficult to solve as players do not accept it.
Remembering the threads on Majesty 2, certain players revealed they thought that Majesty was a great game apart from heroes acting on their own. Like telling that you love participating to a marathon, except that part when you've got to run.

The mistake is to consider that players who play games are willing to play the game according to the game mechanics. Wrong. Players want one thing in their game: command and conquer.
You could think that players coming to management games would accept that the game revolves around taking management decisions and that the discussion on the game would hinge around the quality of implementation of the management mechanics. Nope. It doesnt as soon as the feature puts itself between players and their thirst for domination and control.

Developping a management game for players who reject the idea of taking management decisions is not easy.

Developping a game that features a certain type of AI players reject is not easy either.
 
I think saying that players reject the basic game play paradigm of autonomous heroes in Majesty is overly simplistic.

*SOME* players reject it. In an ideal world, those players would not play the game at all, just as players who hate first person shooters don't play them. Attracting players who are not fundamentally opposed to the core game play of your game and keeping away players who are is the job of marketing.

That just leaves the question of whether there is enough of an audience for a fantasy kingdom management game featuring autonomous heroes to justify the expense of creating another Majesty game. Don't look at me, I don't have the answer, but it looks like at the moment the answer appears to be, "No."
 
Thracian said:
you can try this marketing thingy for a wider audience
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That's the kind of reasoning the bigger publishers go by.

More marketing spend ≠ bigger audience. Besides that's not how we operate - we try to go for the smart opportunities.

/shams
 
To me it sounds like that would be a reason to try croudfunding. But that has it's risks and downsides too. But if you could bring it across without having people cry out about you just cutting the risk, it might be a good way to test if there is interest enough in it.

Just my 2ct after stumbling over this thread. :)
 
Shams said:
In short - I don't think it's possible to do in a profitable fashion. This is due to A: The cost of a proper M3 game would be high and B: I think that the audience for a PROPER majesty game is too small for A to be viable.

We'd love to - we love Majesty to death and we've looked at this in twenty different ways but can't make the math the work. Even if just was a break even affair we might consider it.

I hope someone comes to us and convinces us they can make a great Majesty game with a smart budget.

Regards,

Shams
Click to expand...
Never played Majesty, but this is a fair answer.
 
rakenan said:
I think saying that players reject the basic game play paradigm of autonomous heroes in Majesty is overly simplistic.

*SOME* players reject it. In an ideal world, those players would not play the game at all, just as players who hate first person shooters don't play them. Attracting players who are not fundamentally opposed to the core game play of your game and keeping away players who are is the job of marketing.

That just leaves the question of whether there is enough of an audience for a fantasy kingdom management game featuring autonomous heroes to justify the expense of creating another Majesty game. Don't look at me, I don't have the answer, but it looks like at the moment the answer appears to be, "No."
Click to expand...
That's playing on words.

players reject the basic game play paradigm of autonomous heroes in Majesty( is overly simplistic) and *SOME* players reject it means the same. The only difference is that by stating *some* an emphasis is put on the fact not all players reject it.


Marketing does not have this miracle property to screen out players who would reject the paradigm. Players would buy the game and would come to demand the nullification of the feature related to autonomous heroes.

Additionnally, the thing is that direct control is sumed up to technical values like latency in response etc that are objective values. Putting a personality layer between a player and heroes (or game agents) is subjective. Players are not likely to agree on how much greedy is greedy. Some might find that a greedy hero is too greedy, others might find that greedy is not enough greedy etc
For this reason, the game will be released with tons of room to rework how much heroes act out of personality. Including enough room to nullify enough acting out of personality so much that heroes would no longer act out of personality so to say.
 
Autonomous heroes is the entire point behind Majesty. It's supposed to basically be an RPG from the point of view of the quest giver, who gives, well, quests, but is otherwise not directly involved in the heroes who carry those quests out. (They're even referred to as heroes in game, who form guilds, and even have traditional RPG classes: ranger, warrior, rogue, cleric, etc.) Take that autonomy away, and you have a mediocre-at-best RTS game.
 
Gavinhawk said:
Why Not try a Kickstarter Campaign and see if you can get the funds that way? I know that I for one would be happy to invest in M3
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It's not about the funds - we have those. I'm sure a crowdfunding campaign would raise enough money and perhaps a little more from you, the dedicated crowd, but whenever we make a new game we want it to have the potential to reach a big audience. We just don't think it's there and considering everything else we're doing Majesty drops in priority.

Might change in the future. But for now we're really not pursuing a "proper sequel".

Regards,

Shams
 
Shams said:
It's not about the funds - we have those. I'm sure a crowdfunding campaign would raise enough money and perhaps a little more from you, the dedicated crowd, but whenever we make a new game we want it to have the potential to reach a big audience. We just don't think it's there and considering everything else we're doing Majesty drops in priority.

Might change in the future. But for now we're really not pursuing a "proper sequel".

Regards,

Shams
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Thats a real shame... Majesty 1 & 2 were so different from the usual in control strategy games available. But at least you're giving us a Warlock sequel!
All the best.
 
I know that I and a couple of my buddies would love a Majesty 3 that would draw its inspiration from Majesty 1. Yet as a commercial manager in charge of marketing and heavily involved in strategic planning across the board I completely understand the decision making and ideology of Paradox. I sometimes just wish and dream that gaming companies were all just freelance designers not worrying about the bussiness part of everything.

On the other hand I am grateful (because I am a little surprised) that Warlock 2 is coming :)
 
For those of you who want to play a game more like the original Majesty, I have been working for a while on an open source modification of the Glest Advanced Engine, a branch of a relatively popular, a few years ago anyways, open source Glest RTS. It won't have the great production values of a Paradox produced Majesty since there is no team of artists, UI designers, and such involved. Seeing as open source games tend to be free due to the difficulty of monetizing something that you are legally obligated to provide for free. But the spirit of the game is definitely there.

I understand if this post has to be deleted under some sort of anti advertising guideline, its Paradox's forums and community after all. IIRC there are a couple of other people who are/were attempting similar projects but AFAIK they are making proprietary engines which means they had to start from scratch, so they aren't anywhere close to finished.

I still break out my Impulse(Gamestop) DD version of Majesty: The Northern Expansion a few times a year, sadly I lost my original physical version. I bought M2 and all expansions but I was really disappointed by pretty much all the changes even though I beat every single mission. The game was way too puzzley, the hard caps on guilds and econ buildings were annoying, the lack of freestyle was probably the most major problem, although with so many hard coded limitations on what you could build freestyle would probably be pretty pointless anyways.

Even Tilted Mill had to table their new city builder. These days if you want to do some magical management you are stuck with poorly coded stuff like Towns, or annoying Minecraft ripoffs like Gnomoria or Timber and Stone. At least CE is coming out soon. I'll probably be spending all my time there and buying any expansions or DLC. Although EU4 and CK2 are still good for 3 or 4 hours a week. Once you hit 500 hours of CK2 its hard to justify anymore 8 hour play sessions.
 
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