It is one of the reasons. The major reason is that companies aim for maximum profit with low risk, and not best products.
So for them, 10 meh games that gonna sell is better than 10 risky and maybe exceptional games, because they treat games as a dose to junkies. Thats why you have 200 Call of Duty and 500 Assassins Creed, games.
Deadlines, pulling plugs, moving people to different games all the time to reduce costs are the results of gaming becoming an industry. And guess what, they will continue that, even if more BG3 and Expedition 33 come out to hit them.
Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.
And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.
Last three Bioware games had plenty of time to cook. The chefs were just bad. They chose the wrong ingredients multiple times, had to start over and still ended up with something barely edible.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
I dont think his point is ‘These amazing games are what you get if you give devs tine’ but rather ‘you can only get these games from giving devs time’. Its no guaruntee by any means, but you are never going to get greatness from suits focus grouping decisions and crunching out a game.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
Ever since ME Andromeda they’ve been outsourcing a lot of the work, and/or using smaller and inexperienced studios while promoting and launching them as if made by the main studio.
They’ve been trying to “Central Engineering” things.
I worked as a massive chip company, they thought they could fix things by moving a lot of engineering out of the groups and into a single place where different groups and products could borrow and plug and play tech from.
Which was a great idea, except the groups didn’t really understand what they wanted, and central engineering just wanted to make what they thought people wanted, which often fit nobody but looked really cool.
Bioware looks like they’ve been trying to pull all the game engine stuff central, which would be fine but the frostbite engine didn’t work for half of what they wanted, and more importantly the “divisions” ended up just being pushed to make “something” to show off their best new tech, even if there was 0 story or creativity behind it (I’m looking at you Anthem).
To be fair, I’ve read that Sandfall also outsourced a lot of work for Expedition 33, which is how they’ve kept the team small.
I see no issues with outsourcing if done right: not every small developer needs to have a motion capture crew, etc.
If there are companies out there that can provide that for you at a reasonable cost, then you just need to focus on the core gameplay and the artistic aspects of your game.
This way you don’t bloat your headcount with hundreds of people that you’ll have to sack after the project is done, seems like a win for everybody.
If I am going to be completely honest, part of their outsourcing is why I waited until a few days ago to start the game.
Not because I knew, but because the initial screenshots and clips showed a very generic unreal engine level of graphics. With chromatic abberation everywhere, the exact same hair you see in every recent UE game, the same facial style that makes it easier to match mouth movements, and so on. Once I heard it actually had a good story I ended up putting in about ten hours in a day after I started. But they did suffer from outsourcing parts of the game.
It also becomes pretty obvious when you meet certain characters that obviously has weeks(probably months) of work put into just their “hair” moving. Specially when they’re standing next to a model who could have been made by someone who just finished a couple of Blender tutorials.
That‘s the critical one. It‘s not about budget or outsourcing or whatever. It comes down to who makes the decisions and why. In a lot of cases it‘s people with a finance background who couldn‘t care less about the medium they‘re working with and that can be a major issue. Gaming being a bigger industry than music and film combined has attracted a lot of people who only think in dollar bills and it shows. Luckily however, there are still a lot of passionate teams with leaders who have a love for games.
Yeah, and given this is coming from a dragon age writer that’s pretty explicit.
A cancelation is a full stop and needs to be treated as such with any resources from it that can be carried forward needing scrutiny before being brought in, with them understood as a fortuitous situation. None of this 'we’ve spent 10 cumulative years on it" when this round is just one year
honestly though, the game is a complete package AND it doesn’t come with a bunch of fucking microtransactions/live-service/etc. etc. Gaming is the one area where I think we would all like to see our games be made the same way they were 10-15 years ago, instead of the bullshit from today.
You should see unions soon. Gaming industry is going to force every game designer and developer under a union because of the insecurities. A union guarantees they can’t fuck with you like the crunches. Or the absolute worse is when they have to do unpaid overtime which I think is illegal.
True, I didn’t really mean it to that extreme. and yea not saying gaming industry was perfect, there was plenty to gripe about in the past. Just on average, as a whole, the industry seems worse. The one exception I think are Indie games.
The reaction to Clair Obscur has been wild. I had a friend I haven’t talked to since high school - when we were both big Final Fantasy fans - reach out to ask if I’d played it. A bunch of guys at work are talking about it who I didn’t even know were gamers. I hope we see a lot more of these passionate, creative projects and the infrastructure to support them.
I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.
Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.
Seriously, I keep trying to get people to get a taste of it, to the point I’ve even gifted it. It’s been fascinating and beautiful and devastating. Haven’t finished it yet, but getting very close and I only regret it’ll have to end soon.
I originally wasn’t going to get it. I saw the Persona style combat menu and RPG… I have limited time to play games so I have to be picky.
I caught someone playing it… oh yeah, bought the game right away. The writing is amazing, and there’s no “grind” you often find with many of the JRPG-style games
I would be sad for the good artist and developers at bungie to loose their jobs. Hopefully they are more careful and the artist ends up happy with the result of their talks.
Yeah, i do hope it hurts their reputation and game sales. I think we 99% agree. Hopefully this results in better games without ethical lapses in the future.
They just keep doing it. I haven’t played any of their post-halo games and it seems like it’s going to stay that way. Feels like controversy after controversy. Removing content from Destiny 2. Stealing art. Stealing art. Stealing art. Stealing art…
I really wanted to like Destiny 2, but then they started releasing expansion packs faster than I could feasibly buy or play them. Then I learned that most of those expansions had no content anymore anyway because they think removing content is a good idea, so I just gave up.
Sadly it seems like they really would have been better off as a Halo-Making Machine like Microsoft wanted them to be.
This is fourth time a confirmed plagiarism occurred at Bungie in recent years. There is also an ongoing lawsuit over accusation of Red War story theft. This isn’t some lone rogue employee issue. It’s a company culture issue originating from the top. I think Sony needs to step in and clean house to address the systemic problem.
The solution, for anyone else wondering, is derived by simplification. “If theft is bad, why is the alternative, theft again, also bad?” It’s a nonsense statement made by a moron.
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