Jumpgate: A Betatester's Postmortem
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Title: Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative
Developer: NetDevil
Original Publisher: 3d0
Release Date: September, 2001
Original Team Size: 3
About Me.
This is a bit of a different sort of postmortem, I do believe. It’s a postmortem by a player. A beta tester, a 3 year veteran, and perhaps one of the most rabid space simulator fanatics you’ve ever met. Since we have that out of the way... I decided to tear into the vitals one of the most compelling games I’ve ever played.
I’m such a nice guy. Onward to those juicy internals!
The Developers
Jumpgate was developed by a small group of guys from Colorado, who founded their company, NetDevil, in 1997. As I remember their story, they started work on Jumpgate in Scott Brown’s garage. From there, they slowly, but surely, built Jumpgate from a small, combat-only space sim into a multi-sector MMORPG space sim - the first of it’s kind. During testing, the game evolved significantly, into something approximating it’s current state - with close to 200 sectors, 16 flyable, customizable ships within 3 playable factions, 17 “faction stations”, player-owned/built stations, AI enemies with almost 30 different “varieties”, fully functional player-friendly economy, twitch combat, all in a near-newtonian flight model.
Often hailed as a successor to the Elite series, Jumpgate takes you to that realm, as a space simmer, you never thought you’d see, after playing Elite, Wing Commander, and their brethren. “I love this game... but what if all of these ships had HUMAN pilots...”. Let me tell you - Jumpgate does it, and it does it well. It’s the next best thing to Elite Online. How? All right, I’ll tell you.
Beta Testing, and General Game Design.
Jumpgate, from the first time I saw it, hooked me so deeply that I do believe I lost half of my lower lip, as a result. I had read about the ongoing beta-testing, the exploits and stories the beta-testers were involved in - and it fascinated me.
Here’s why. Jumpgate, in it’s most elemental form, is in some truly stellar company. Elite, Wing Commander, Freespace. Those are names to be reckoned with, in the space simulator genre. Jumpgate, however, was taking a shot at becoming the heir apparent to these series - and fulfilling the dream of every hardcore space simulator fanatic - making Elite online. They came so, so very close.
Finally, after much debate, I decided to sign up for the beta test. If I recall correctly, I got into the testing shortly before the major “stress test” phase began. A LOT of new content had been added recently, and many, many things had changed since the start of testing. NetDevil’s publisher, 3d0, was heavily involved in beta testing, and their input, if I remember correctly, led them to incorporate the infamous “registries”. See, in the original version, ANY sort of combat resulted in a “bounty”, which could be collected by another player, upon shooting the bountied player down. As I also recall, the “escape pod” was added around that time, to explain the space sim equivalent of a “respawn”. The escape pod took you back to your base of origin.
I remember, during stress test, being in quite possibly, the largest online, First-person space battle I’ve ever seen. There were something like 400+ pilots, all trying to blow each other up, in one place, to *really* test the server architecture. Well, they got the test they wanted. Oh, and I won a t-shirt. I still have it. Cool stuff.
Anyway, back to the game. Jumpgate has 3 playable factions, or, multi-planetary governments, with 3 “home planets” each. Each planet has a station orbiting it. There are also 3 non-playable factions - two are for story purposes only, and one is for the AI enemy aliens - the conflux. (Who, by the way, are spacefaring creatures who mysteriously look like seafood. A tip: If you look at NetDevil’s homepage, and you see that the “originals” are all scuba divers, and they named their company after an undersea creature... you get a better picture :D)
Each faction has it’s own particular strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies. To grossly simplify things, Octavius is a warrior culture, Solrain are traders, and Quantar are zealots. There is also a huge space in the center of the map, containing 3 “unregulated” stations, and a LOT of sectors. No rules, no penalties, and even “civilian” registered vessels are fair game there. Interesting idea, I thought.
Basically, like the recruitment portion of the site says, “there’s nothing you can’t do”. Well, almost nothing. I’ll explain more about that later. That should give you a basic overview of the game though. It’s not like this is a review.
The Community
During the formative stages of the game, NetDevil was helped *tremendously* by word-of-mouth advertising, and by a dedicated core of *seriously* committed fans, and fansite developers. The chief of these was a guy who called himself Gossip. He ran a place known as “Planet Jumpgate”. This place was the unofficial Jumpgate headquarters, and just about everyone who played during it’s reign can tell you about it. It rocked. There were the usual 3rd party programs, tools, and helpers created, as well as FAQ’s, fanfic, and just general.. Stuff. From all sorts of people, to all sorts of degrees.
The community was really a jewel, in some ways. A nicer group of helpful people, you’ve never met. On the other hand, it also had elements of the very worst of the FPS “I pwn j00 hahahahaha” crowd. You know who I’m talking about. It comes with the First-person combat territory, I believe. I’ve seen them in every space sim I’ve ever played. It was manageable.
Release!
Eventually, the time came to “go gold”. I remember the hype about the box numbers, the shipping dates, and the like. I preordered one, but the shipper fell through, so I had to cancel, re-order.. Bleh. Then... the servers went live, and we were OFF TO THE RACES. Everyone’s who’s started a MMORPG, on it’s first day of release, knows what I’m talking about. I took two days off of work, and by the time I had to go back, I was in the top ten in several categories on the leader boards... Man, that was fun.
More time passed, the game matured, bugs were fixed, storylines started moving, and everyone was having fun. Then, catastrophe struck. Since this is GameDev, I’m sure you remember when 3d0 crashed, and took everything it had it’s name on, along with it. Well, Jumpgate was one of those titles. By stint of what had to be superhuman effort, NetDevil kept the rights to the their game, kept the servers alive, and kept their heads above water.
I think that’s a good segue into “What went wrong” - don’t you?
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