Again, many thought they would turn it around in Week 2, or at least stabilize enough to stay at second in the group. Then, the once unbeatable monsters of the LPL had the arguably worst performance in Worlds history during their second round-robin, losing all three games in Week 2 and then getting smashed in the tiebreaker game against Rogue. The previous year, Gen. At the very least, with the tournament held in their home country of South Korea, a place in the knockout rounds all but assured.
In , that defensive, counterattacking style led them to ultimate glory. In , their late-game focused tactics became obsolete, Team Vitality lighting the fuse of a faster, wilder way of playing League of Legends that punished the way Gen. G saw the game. G became relics of a bygone era.
They imploded instead of adapting, ending the group with an overall record and the first South Korean team to fail to make it out of the modern group stage format implemented in Worst of all, their collapse occurred in front of a hometown crowd in Busan. Their LPL final victory sent them to Worlds as the first seed for the region, but they only put together two wins in their group. EDG almost made the run in the second round robin but failed to find their last game against SKT, ending their Worlds run at You see, this was a North American team receiving credit from analysts heading into Worlds as a team that could potentially make the final.
The thing is, TSM was actually able to go toe-to-toe with them at the tournament. The rest is history. After winning the LPL summer split playoffs and placing fifth in the regular season, LGD Esports came into the World Championships as a decent favorite to make the knockout stage and contend for a title.
With the spirit of both Samsung teams from the previous years, many slotted the team in as a decent contender. But those expectations fell flat as the team only managed two wins and bombed out of the tournament. The scrappy LGD that seemed to turn it on for high-stress games like the LPL playoffs absolutely crumbled on the world stage, as many of its carry players looked lost on the rift.
Unfortunately, LGD continued to embarrass themselves as the individual players kept falling apart in lane and team coordination went out the window as their tournament hopes faded away. Six years have passed from this meltdown, and only one player from their starting squad is still actively competing.
The first round robin ended with them at , with a close game against NaJin White Shield. You're like 'Dave knows what he's doing, it's going to be fine'. The team was saying for a long, long time that there were things that were not quite right with the game … It was never the case that the design was fundamentally broken, but in the execution of a lot of the features there are things that didn't quite come together, that weren't polished to the level that people expected.
As our source says, "The middle management — and there was a LOT of middle management at this company — they were on that game for years and they continued to run it as though they were managing an architecture project or something. Fun never seemed to be a criterion for what they were doing; managers with little clipboards would go around and tick off things, saying 'OK that's done' and moving on.
There was never any consideration for whether or not what had been done was any fun. Another part of the problem, it seems, was the money. There was simply too much of it, and no one had come up with a plan on how to spend it effectively. This idea of a rudderless development schedule tallies with other reports coming out of the company.
When PC gaming site Rock, Paper Shotgun ran a story on the earlier RTW redundancies, someone claiming to be an ex-staff member wrote in the comments section : "Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he's a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. Not an unreasonable demand after five years in development.
Last Tuesday, the administrators arrived at Realtime Worlds and from the reports Gamesblog has heard, the APB team was rounded up into the cafeteria and informed of the situation. Over the next 24 hours, staff were told whether they would be kept on or not. Most weren't. I feel like our exec team got out of their depth — I don't mean that in a cheeky way, because we were all out of our depth, but it kind of felt like it was a train that was out of control — and had been out of control for a long time.
Since then, anger and resentment have spilled onto the internet's many outlets. On his personal blog, under the headline, 'Goodbye Realtime Worlds' , ex-RTW staffer Luke Halliwell posted a measured and thoughtful summation of the situation:. It felt like we were being let go decently, and then BOOM — not getting paid anything, owed last month's wages, our notice periods, redundancy pay and unused holidays.
A substantial amount of money, all told. He later updated the article: "Turns out we got 2 days' pay!! Not much but better than the previously-expected nothing. Moreover these very people have enough personal wealth to pay the money owed to the individuals and families whose lives they have left shattered, heck Dave could probably pay them all just by selling one of his beloved cars.
It has to be said, though, that the animosity toward Jones is certainly not universal within the company. He's clearly liked and respected, and our APB source said that he spent Wednesday afternoon touring the building, apologising to staff: "One thing I've learned is, you shouldn't confused creative genius with shrewd business sense.
But Dave was very visible and very upset. He feels bad about the effect this will have on people's lives. There are many question marks over the demise of this massive company.
Why wasn't there a strict development structure in place? Why weren't the problems within APB spotted earlier and dealt with properly? How could the whole issue of latency, especially with an action game running predominantly on the server rather than client side, not have been adequately predicted?
Well, it has happened before. The ambitious science fiction MMOG Tabula Rasa, created by another talismanic designer Richard Garriott, was delayed before its release in November , having been in development since Barely a year later, the development team announced that the game would be shut down due to a lower than expected user base.
There are obvious parallels. Surely, there were lessons to be taken? In the end, it would appear to be a story of hubris and mismanagement, of artistic vision clashing with the realities of staff members working on a game that had no proven antecedents and no clear direction. What it had was confidence. But this is , and smaller companies with greater agility are doing more interesting, coherent things in the massively connected gaming sector.
Realtime Worlds was the dinosaur being eaten alive by insects. A few days ago one ex-employee tweeted about passing the office on the bus. The building looked weird, near empty, no one visible at their keyboards.
Perhaps someone else will come in for APB. It has those , players, and there's apparently a 1. And really, , isn't a disastrous start for an MMO. They usually take a while to grow — even World of Warcraft took almost six months to get to 1. For a lot of the staff, however, it's too late. They will drift away, hopefully to other industry jobs, possibly abroad. Despite what some opportunistic politicians tried to claim in the aftermath of Tuesday's announcement, this one couldn't be put down to the lack of tax credits for the UK games business — Realtime Worlds had millions and millions of dollars in investment.
But ironically, foreign developers may well benefit anyway, through quick-witted recruitment. However, these staff will be leaving behind a company they cared for and a game some of them worked on for six years; a game that may now disappear within months of its release.
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