The Tale of a Fraudulent Clusterfuck - Part 3

Part III

I am Zola, a 2D and 3D artist and developer. Please excuse the spelling errors herein as english is not my native language. I've been invited like Myobi to clarify the issues surrounding Greed Monger by clarifying some views and adding technical notes on this terrible project.

I do not wish to give too many details about myself, except some nuggets which users of the Ultima Enhanced Client will have known: polake, schwanz and schwul are bad words in Ultima. Sometimes you receive errors to “notify engineering dept?” in game. From this you would probably have guessed where I used to work at.

I heard about GreedMonger from Hector an artist who worked on the project. He sounded the alarm about Greed Monger. Jason was low-balling the artists - asking for a $5/hour rate, asking for free work in exchange for credits (despite earning $100,000 in KickStarter). Don't expect to be paid. Jason throws insults and flames at any artist who disagree with the low rates, telling them their work is crap and threatening legal action (as happened to Hector).

It comes as no surprise, that Stefan Davis, a well-known scam-artist became part of the credits in the Greed Monger Kickstarter. Aaron Victoria, an artist with no portfolio would often advise them.

I respect other artists and each artist has their individual style and way of doing things. It is foolish to solicit for or work with 2D artists who "claim" to do environment or UI artwork, but have nothing related to this in their portfolio to prove they did so. They work slowly, and poorly - which is unacceptable when doing a paid job.

The entire project is nothing but a chaotic mess, no design plan. One of my other friends, who was there temporarily, said - you are not even needed, all the assets are store bought and attempted to be stitched together into a frankenstein of a showcase MMO, full of way too high poly models that will never work in an actual game. Refitting and re-texturing various mismatched and broken assets!

There are more videos of course, basically showing the same thing. Most are 2 years old.

In the above video you can see the following store-bought assets being used.
Ancient weapons pack:
Medieval Villages from the below link:
Deer from asset-store

2 YEARS after that video the "lead" developer: James Proctor, despite saying he had an art team, showed a mostly empty scene of a "new" character which would appear in the game. Funny enough this was yet another unity store asset, not unique, nothing any of their devs or artists created.

Later screenshots from the same guy show a nude elf walking around with a floating stick. Can you imagine how low Greed Monger has become? Catering to kids now.

For the terrain, they were all store-bought assets to be randomly place all over. When asked, where do you want us to place housing, or NPCs? The answer is - none. Players build it themselves, which is utterly stupid. Who has heard of placing animals, forests, grasslands, various rocks, terrain, haphazardly and then a developer would come around to spawn them for the player? It never came. James, the lead or only developer of GreedMonger, would take so long, years would pass by...

None of it makes sense. How would you harvest "parts" of a grass that is a 2D sprite? How would you cut holes in rocks that are a solid model? That would be a large amount of decals and deformations! How would you place houses on uneven terrain? How would you cut trees that do not have different meshes / models to represent being cut?...

Then using UniStorm (a unity climate generator script) with only the basic stock assets is bought and used. There is no consideration of "the sun following the player", or "stars following the player and maintaining the same relative positions when the player rotates", sun camera lens flares at certain angles would blind the player, no dynamic shadows (notice there are no shadows at all in the above screenshot).

Aside that the terrain is hideously made without any consideration to the graphical quality or player experience. The grass and vegetation are placed so densely that, once the world would be multi-player, it would be have an insanely high poly count, which would fry your CPU/GPU unless you had a machine capable of such densely packed models. The towns would be impossible to move around in due to low FPS (assuming there are ever going to be towns) and high object count. Roads (what roads?) would be very crowded when players start congregating in certain quest areas.

So, imagine this team sat in a room with you:

Out of these people the Lead Designer, has no prior experience leading a team of artists, developers, designers, 3D modellers and/or other people to make a MMO.

To make a MMO, the server has to have the full terrain so that it can "tell" all the other players what the world should look like. A huge mesh. In normal MMOs, the navigation mesh is static, premade by a mapper who inserts the models at fixed locations. I know how to create a clean nav-mesh server-side. In the case of this game, the mesh is not cleaned up to be polycount efficient. It's basically using demonstration materials, designed for a single player game. The polycount is very high, loading is slow, and the player's Frames Per Second (FPS) will thus be very low. The game will be playable simple because the server could not handle all the information, let alone the connected clients.
 As the game is a survival/harvest/crafting, non-player (NPC) inanimate objects needs to be tracked as well. All the crafting/harvesting objects are all store-bought assets. As for whether or not they are on-server-side logics, there has been given no consideration at all at the moment.

The developer, who is mentioned in Part 1 and Part 2. A true developer, should know the language, use the engine proficiently and have years and years of experience. Yet all you can see of the finished design so far are store-bought assets re-fashioned to prove James’ big ego that he can develop a MMO or RPG. Nothing "actual" has been created yet in all the years of "development" that has been done. No engine, no new models,. nothing.

There is no concept art or planning for any new areas, no concept art for any armour, weapons, NPCs, animals, houses. Everything is just store bought and placed randomly on a limited size map. There is nothing unique about Greed Monger, except a animated fan-art illustration.

The game-design is non-existent. There is no lore, except an initial lore from the Greed Monger KickStarter, there is no talent-tree, assuming there is even one planned, there is no trade, or crafting, no skill checks to determine your fighting ability or magic, no NPCs merchants, no buy/sell abilities, no actual housing scripts, as we had in Ultima Online.

There are no particle effects, barely any animations, no magic, no shadows. Until perhaps when they spend more money and buy a new script from the store. Want to earn some money? Go ahead and make it. There's a good chance they will buy it from you.

There are no self-portraits (of NPCs), no chat, there is no 2D UI, no 2D representation of any of the current items, there are no 2D faces for players / npcs -- requiring lots of unique concept art, no UI.

There is no sound system, no sound effects, no audio, or rather - nothing that wasn't store-bought music...

There is no website, no SSL, so if you enter the same password as your Google Email, you probably would get hacked, there is no way to change your password on website, there is no way to purchase items, if any, there is no way to ensure your data you trust with GreedMonger is safe, there is no way to ensure that the developer will not retaliate against you, if you speak up against them.

The list goes on and on,. there is little to be found that is real, actually designed specifically for the project rather than bought with the kickstarter money to keep the few ignorant fans happy. And those few are dwindling fast.

I must warn you about this project: There is no "game" inside this MMO. There is no joy, no fun, nothing to discover or be entertained with. Greed Monger is just sadness. It is solely about taking your money, and the regret that follows afterward.

What's for sure is, there is no game. There never will be.
Only lies to kindle the fire of your heart, to take your money away from you, and freeze the assets.
All promises given by the author are false promises. Lies which in his mind become truths, truths that become bigger lies.

In the end, greed is what destroyed this game before it could be anything more than an idea.

Continue reading in Part 4.


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