Almost a year

[hanstin]

It has been almost 1 year since we got something from kaos war.
Any plans to give us some screenshots or well something anytime soon?

[Darthorious]

Originally Posted by hanstin

It has been almost 1 year since we got something from kaos war.
Any plans to give us some screenshots or well something anytime soon?

That would be kind of nice if it was possible.

Sense the reality series I've gone to Oklahoma met up with an old friend who changed so much she drove me up a wall, tag teamed between 3 different MMO's, bought a PS3, dated 2 friends, watched the economy go down the drain, invested when it did, took a trip to Maui, started a retirement plan around the investments, assuming I don't get married I could retire shortly but that could change shortly lol, all in all the only constant in my life has been coming back and checking the board to see where Kaos is at lol.

[amz181]

I kinda agree. To be honest i expected there to have been atleast a CB or Alpha by now.

[Cavaliere123]

Makes me consider playing Aion... I don't like aion and would much rather play kaos war. However, Aion is the best mmo out so far so I have no other choice unless something happens with kaos war in the next year... Some updates and perhaps a "Hi guys we arent dead and are still working on the game" would be nice. Otherwise I doubt anyone will continue to wait for something that currently seems like it will never happen.

[Mister Matt]

Guess we can just get more addicted to WoW in the meantime.

[invadererik]

Hi guys ... I probably shouldn't be doing this, since its really Damon that should be talking to you guys directly but here it goes anyway...

Currently as it stands Kaos War / SRI / Legends of Kaos... is all on hold. Why?

Well its a long story, but let me try to clarify.

not so short story of SRI:

What you saw in the internet series is mostly true. Watch that if you haven't already, before reading the next parts.

After the internet series, I think what was not shown was that the team went to a couple of big studios to pitch the game. However the result of those meetings was I believe ( since I wasn't there at the time ) negative. The pitches did not go well due to mainly 3 things:

1) the technology did not impress (not to say it wasn't a nice indie attempt)
2) the game design / story / concept were not fleshed out enough
3) the team did not want to consider creating a smaller game than a full
blown MMO

After this the main team that you guys saw on the series tried to survive and pitch for a 1-2 months, but they were already starving and a bunch of tension and arguments flared up between team members. Most of the original team left.

Damon however managed to hold on for about another month, pitching to whoever would hear him. In a miraculous moment ( in my opinion ), somebody did invest in SRI. They didnt invest a lot, certainly not enough for a full blown MMO and they slowly dripped the money.

In the following months, Damon would have to look to re-create a new team and a new engine, since the members of the team that made the engine left and took all the code with them. In this time, the few team members that stayed, tried to come up with a plan to create a new prototype, to go back to the studios and pitch for a 2nd time. They decided to focus on this "Cryogate" area that you've heard/seen. However, the team members that were left were all artists and they really needed an engine. They started working on the art, while scouring for an opportunity on the engine.

At that point Damon made contact with an ex-Farcry engine programmer, who after some negotiation, made an agreement to work on a brand new MMO engine. So for a couple of months, one team worked on art while another worked on the new engine. At first it seemed like things were going well, the art was looking good and videos of the builds of the engine looked promising. However, as the investors of SRI starting asking for a playable build, Damon asked the programming team to supply the art team with one. The programmers sent a pretty buggy build and it was a bit technical to the artists in the team. At that moment the art team decided to hire someone technical for their art team to be a in between party between the artists and programmers. ( thats me ) . So when I came in there was a good amount of art done, but not integrated into any engine, a very buggy build of the engine and an incredibly short deadline for a playable internet capable demo.

By short I mean like 2 months. For the majority of the first month I spent bugging the hell out of the programming team to send me code, to give me access to let me see docs and builds, but it became apparent really quickly that they were not very happy to share. So Damon called them up to find out that they wanted money up front, before they would give us any of the code.

So started a long bitter string of, breach of agreement arguments. (which ended up in them getting paid and then not delivering anything anyway)

Meanwhile, we still had to give the investors a working prototype. So I tried to think of something we could achieve in 1 month. I had been following the development of Crysis and Cry Engine, and I was very psyched about it. So I put it out as an option, if we could get an early build, we could potentially finish our prototype in 1 month.

So we called Crytek and (2nd miracle in my opinion happened). The team over there very graciously, along with a few other Mod teams, gave us early access to their tools. Now let me be straight, these are the tools that shipped with the game, same as everybody gets to mod on. Clearly not the best tools to create a real game on, but the people at Crytek offered to give us a very deep discount on the developer toolsets if we managed to get real funding.

So with not many options left on the table we set off to finish out prototype in record time, as a MOD in CryEngine 2.

Amazingly we managed to do a pretty solid job, given the circumstances, of creating a pretty vivid raid scenario in "Cryogate" area. The main problems we faced, were dealing with Crysis's complex animation system, moving all our assets from Maya to 3D Studio , and dealing with co-op networking.

At the end of the month, or 2 months more likely cause, we kept on pushing investor deadline every week, a little bit back, we realized that we really only had a solid 1 player shooter (the networking co-op was too buggy, and required months to get right) . It felt nothing like an MMO, it felt too much like crysis and still had a few crysis assets in there. On the other hand we had done a pretty neat mini Crysis Mod ... haha. Thats what we had to work with. The investors looked at it and they were not very happy but given what had happened with the programming team, they felt we had done a good job recovering as best as we could.

However the money that the investors had alloted had run out. So there was nothing to do at this point, but to try to pitch it. As you can all probably guess the pitching did not go so well, and most of the team felt that it was over. Nonetheless, you have to give Damon props on his insistence. He entered the prototype into TechCrunch 50 and to most of the teams incredulity, they actually accepted it as one of the finalists.

So the investors were pretty happy with this result and there was a lot of business talking. At this point the art team (including me) tried to polish what we had as much as possible for the TC50 show, while some new business people started doing the pony show ( you know power points, money charts, bunch o' lame stuff).

We requested Crytek, for being able to show the demo at TC50 and they graciously said yes. Then TC50 finally arrived and as you all saw, the demo crashed before being showed, and you guys only got to see like 5 seconds of it. After this, Crytek only allowed us to show a handful of screenshots. In my opinion the whole TC50 thing was an utter failure. But the business people (including Damon) felt that there was investment about to land any moment.

However the next 3 months there would be no investment. There would always be a deal about to be made. Most of the team members started starving, working from home, waiting for the deal.

When it finally arrived and the team was called back to work. The news was practically this: We got only enough money to make this web game, that we the business people have designed, take it or leave it. So the team now expanded a bit set out to create Legends of Kaos. The idea was to try to put out there some of the Kaos War ip in some format. They felt that if they could show some traction to the ip, that they could get further funding. Most of the art team were pretty unhappy with the direction but they stuck to it, because after, for some of them years of working on Kaos War, they felt some thing for it.

So we worked for about 3 months to learn Ruby and Away3D and create new low poly assets and art. We created Legends of Kaos in what I feel like is record time, always feeling like it wasn't what we wanted to do.

At about the 3rd month we started noticing that all the management and business people disappeared. Damon would only show up occasionaly and only for a few moments. He told us that there was some exciting buisness deal they were working with another company called LOLAPPS, and that we should finish the game soon. So we worked for 1-2 more months, fixing bugs etc. Knowing that something was not going well.

2 weeks from this month (September) we were given 2 weeks notice. Damon told us that they had offered him an offer he couldn't refuse from LOLAPPS, and that they would try to sell legendsofkaos on their spare time.

So we vacated the office the 31st and all our team members are looking for jobs. Legends of Kaos, we tried to leave in the best state possible before we left.

Thats it. You would have to ask Damon if he has plans. I've seen him since and I can see he is not satisfied with how things went.

I hope that clears things up a lot.

I also hope things change for Kaos War, because truly there were some really interesting, groundbreaking ideas that were put down on paper for the Kaos War MMO.

Maybe we will see some of them make their way into other games as the devs who were part of the team take them with them to other places ! Or maybe someday Kaos War will be back.

Until then !

Later,

Erik ex Technical Art Director @ SRI

[Will]

I'm not sure all of that needed to be said, but for what it's worth, it's true.

[Cavaliere123]

Thank you Erik. That was amazingly detailed and makes me feel much better about things. Majority of it is sad since everyone in the community including myself really love this concept and everyone that is trying or has tried to make it happen. I'm so sick of the games these days, they lack any real gameplay or good concepts. If only I was a good programmer or something lol, I'd make an amazing game. I'd play Aion, but honestly hate monthly fees. If anyone knows of any good MMO's or FPS's that don't have a monthly fee please let me know at toeki6@hotmail.com

I will continue to view this site in hopes that Damon or anyone else decides to continue this project, but until then I'll see everyone later.

[Mister Matt]

Whoa. I'll miss Kaos War and I hope all those that were involved are alright. Hope it will come back in someway in the future.

[fauzool]

Originally Posted by Mister Matt

Guess we can just get more addicted to WoW in the meantime.

nooo not wow, Aion haha ya ive been kinda inactive checking forums once in awhile, hopeing for something new im sure it will come