I briefly mentioned before that based on datamining the latest PTS build, that there wasn’t much of anything new that Bluehole Ginno has been specifically designing or testing.
One can argue that this is because all of that is being kept in an internal build. While that might be true for the way some companies compile their builds, that doesn’t apply to Ginno. Plus there is a point (even with companies like Blizzard), where production lead time/logistics means traces begin showing up in the client because there is a need to begin qualifying that code (or to have that in place to prevent blocking other parts of the production process where those teams need to get their part of the work done; and they can only do their work if certain pieces of code or assets are already in place). And those pieces also need to work with existing production frameworks and content.
Ginno has always left telltale signs of what they have been trying out in their production builds. And like many developers, they don’t bother cleaning out a lot of outdated stuff (Devilian has a large amount of assets for designs which they ended up tossing out).
I never bothered mentioning this before except to only a few folks (who also never publicly brought this up else there would have been more chatter about it) but I will now to prove the point of this post.
First of all, anyone can look at their game directories existing logical folder structure. The following is from my old computer for the EU client since that one has been updated since late March 2017.
There is something in there from that earlier production client that has been present from builds during Trion Worlds CBT’s (so October 2015 and onwards). What I am talking about are those files called players_shaman. That contains the assets for the 6th class; one of the two new classes that Ginno began to work on after they completed work on the Kairan (Kyran for the unpublished China version, Death Scythe for the Thai version, Tempest for Trion). The Death Scythe was released on July 29, 2015
No movement has happened with that which makes sense considering the timing of events that I covered before when the game service was taken down in Korea + when the financial issues that hit parent studio Bluehole happened (when development of the PC version was curtailed once the CEO nixed the decision to relaunch in Korea and instead move resources over to Devilian Mobile).
The graphical assets and animation for the class (normal form) are done (partial file listing).
The sm_m files are of a male model that was going to be used to unveil the class to troll the players since it is of an old and unattractive bearded character. The so_f model assets are of the actual completed female (so yes, it would have been gender locked). The .NIF files (for visualizing the models in 3D) and keyframe (.KF) files are the pose and attack animations that can be imported into something like Blender or Maya.
I am not going to release images or videos of that completed 3D model because this is still Bluehole Ginno’s unpublished intellectual property which they should be allowed to reveal for themselves first if they ever chose to do so (highly unlikely for this game).
And to prove this isn’t just some renamed hoax, the following are the recognizable (from the game) faces for the cannoneer taken from its unpacked asset container.
The following are the “shaman” (just a reference name for the class) faces.
The weapons and armor assets for each slot are also completed. But that is it. Devilian form is non-existent as well as the most important part, the class skills (and thus all the balancing and tuning involved with that part of the design).
To put this into the proper context, the Kairan (reference name is amazon) was first noted officially by Ginno Games (before they were fully acquired by Bluehole) in February 2015 when they released the following image teasing a preview. That image happens to contain a small screenshot of individual image files (3rd one down) showing the assets with dates on them; from February 2014.
The point is to illustrate the amount of production time it takes them to design a class with a team of modelers, animators, designers, and coders. The key things here are time + resources = money. This game is OFFLINE/DEAD in the country where it is being developed. I would like to hear a current day example of a Korean MMO that has been able remain successful and relevant elsewhere when it was no longer being published domestically in Korea. ** crickets **
The killing blow though is a publisher that does not care about much except to make whatever money they can, quality be damned. The majority of employee Glassdoor reviews for Trion is pretty damning in this area where the people in the trenches/frontline want to do the right thing, but have to deal with incompetent layers of middle management (and at times, higher level ones who are there because of the usual who you know, and not what you know). And this is a recipe for a poor reputation when you throw in 3rd party publishing such is the case with both ArcheAge and Devilian (the former still has decent CCU’s even though it too is losing players due to both Trion and XLGAME).
As I mentioned before, had the timing been right (where the acquisition of Ginno Games by Bluehole had been finalized before talks with Trion Worlds had begun), they could have been published by En Masse Entertainment; the same as TERA since EME is a subsidiary of Bluehole. So there would have been greater incentive to dealing with the above issue with possibly never coming to the decision to not republish in Korea to begin with.
What exists now “is what it is” unfortunately and the PC MMO version does not generate enough revenues to fund that sorely needed newly designed content. They can’t even get the person who is left dealing with it to cut/paste things properly and there is generally no QA on the Ginno side to properly qualify and test things. This is why I refuse to be an enabler of such poor business practices by giving Trion large sums of money since none of it is going to improve this game. And from a player perspective, it is not going to do anything good when it comes to an important metric; retention rates.There was a time when this game had potential but it is now being wasted by inattention to the finer details when it comes to having a game that has enough issue free content with a smooth gearing progression so that it can at least attract and maintain a sizable population. New players are constantly faced with progression issues where they eventually become frustrated and stop playing. The lack of newly designed content eventually drives end game players away.
The following is a preview of what this game will look like in the future (maybe slightly more than 20 players logging in during the week since more geographic regions but definitely lower concurrency than what exists now). The last guild tournament result shown was from earlier in 2016 before the player population dropped off into an abyss.
