Do you think you end up with a more realistic development timeline by remaking things you’ve already made? Your comment can end up downvoted for calling one of the most common industry practices, for very practical reasons, “cutting corners”.
Because while it’s a tool in one’s tool belt to work smarter, it is obviously not the start and end of where crunch comes from. Nor is it cutting corners.
Apologies for the delay, my instance is having problems with communities so i can’t reply with that account.
To answer the question, not anymore.
The crunch culture was a big part of me leaving.
Honestly it’s not that different in type from non-game dev houses, the difference is in the magnitude.
I understand why these things happen, the reasons just aren’t good enough for me.
Poor planning compounds with ridiculous timeframes to create an almost immutable deadline to deliver unrealistic goals.
The problem is, they’ll jump right back in to the next project and make exactly the same mistakes. At what point does it stop being mistakes and starts being “just how things are done”.
One of the main reasons this works at all is that they take young idealistic programmers who want to work in their dream industry and throw them into a cult of crunch where everyone is doing it so it must be ok or this is the price of having my dream job.
it’s certainly not all studios and it seems to have gotten marginally better at the indie to small-medium houses but it’s prevalent enough that it’s still being talked about.
When you worked in games, how did your team deal with the unplanned scenarios where a feature, or even the core game, wasn’t fun and you needed to go back to the drawing board?
On paper what you’re “supposed” to do is iterate through gameplay mechanisms and scenarios by building up the bare minimum needed to get a feel for it, then once you have something viable you proceed further along the development process.
In reality it really depends heavily on context, sometimes you find a particular scenario works fine standalone but not as a part of the whole, or some needed balancing change elsewhere breaks the fun of something established, late additions can also cause this.
but again that depends heavily on the type of game, rpg’s are more sensitive to balancing changes than racing sims for example.
Specifically we’d usually evaluate the tradeoff between how much it doesn’t work and how much work it is to “fix” it, sometimes it’d get cut completely, sometimes it’d get scaled back, sometimes we’d re-evaluate the feature/scenario for viability and make a decision after that re-evaluation and sometimes we’d just bite the bullet and work through it.
Over time you get a bit more cautious about committing to things without thinking through the potential consequences, but sometimes it just isn’t possible to see the future.
I understand the realities of managing a project like that, at the same time these kinds of things are known upfront to a degree and yet people always seem surprised that the cone of uncertainty on a project like that is huge.
As i said, i have no problem with re-use, i have a problem with saying re-use is “essential” to stopping crunch, like the management of a project like that isn’t the core of the problem.
This seems really dumb. Yes, reuse your assets in the next game, but also make new ones. Then I get more variety, plus I get some of the nostalgia from the last game
I made a tool that migrates from one DB format to another. Then another format was introduced. Of course I reused the assets from the tool to expand the tool to migrate to the new DB format. But then I know more of what can go wrong with the tool, so even then testing took longer, but the tool ran cleaner.
So only games that are made from scratch can charge full price? What about reusing code? Engine? Animations? Textures? Lighting system? Rendering backend?.. Games are made of everything that came before, being angry about a game using assets that were originally developed for an older game is like being angry about a movie reusing props made for an older movie, should they burn all of the Christmas decorations between one movie and the next? Or can the studio hang the same glass ball on two different movies? Does that detract from the movie? Will you really only consider it’s worth the full price if all props were made exclusively for that movie?..
Agreed. Idk how they reuse specifically, but it is fine for sure - to a point. As long as your game doesn’t have 3 enemy types that are recollored across it or all environments are the same everywhere (hello, Dragon Age 2)… use what you have effectively.
For a game like Fortnite for example reuse of assets is vital to make the constant updates possible - without that steady flow of changes the user base pretty sure would dwindle fast (as already regularly is the case at the end of their “chapters” and “seasons”). They have to balance old and new parameters a lot to not alienate any/or bore their customers - not the easiest thing to do according to their fan forums… :D
The saving grace now is that you can burn through DA2 in a couple of days if you’re really dedicated to move into inquisition. It’s too bad with the gameplay since there are some hugely key plot points revealed in it
The criticism in this case is completely bonkers. They reuse assets from previous games, even adding more while developing.
This only means that they have an ever increasing repertoire of assets from all their games, from which the designers can freely choose. And then of course they match the asset to the new game (adding a grunge pass for a zombie game is the example given)
This is the optimal way of doing it. They save time and money and have lots of different assets to choose from.
This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part
Do asset flips even happen anymore? I feel like they were a problem that Stephanie Sterling brought to light a decade ago when Steam opened its floodgates to anyone who wanted to sell a game, but it seems to me as though standard market forces made them nonviable in just a few years’ time.
Right. I feel like they were a self correcting problem all along. They get buried in Sturgeon’s Law and that’s the end of it.
Except for that one guy who tried to copyright claim Steph’s channel. That guy needs something more. Like any kind of consequences at all for false copyright claims.
I remember it being a big deal, well, some deal for a brief while, that God of War Ragnarok had reused boat animations from the previous game. Similarly for Horizon Forbidden West I think.
Anyway, sports games come annually and literally feel like the same game with some adjustments here and there and they’re usually the best sellers lol, so this issue feels like a very “online thing”, or perhaps the title makes it seem like there’s a big inexcusable issue that needs a “defence”.
Yeah, Capcom figured that out ages ago with Monster Hunter.
They tweak some movesets on the skeletons, they improve the ai a bit. They create new textures, and spend their time making endgame bosses a more unique.
My favorite example is Kushala Daora. I don’t exactly know how many times his skeleton has been reused, but I know Monster Hunter World had at least three reuses of it.
But they always have unique fights for final bosses, even if the Elder Dragon reused assets.
Programming is all about reuse in general. Reuse is part of good applications.
Imma need at least 6 new testicle types to explode! Listen to your playerbase! Every damn nazi has the same balls?! Get your heads in the game Rebellion.
That kinda reminds of something. Earlier this summer I had to go out of town and stay in a hotel for work. The hotel lobby had this decorative box with lights in it, but it also had these fake river stones or whatever to look like pieces of colored glass. But they all had the same shape, which was unique enough that at first glance every piece looked totally different.
That’s standard procedure. Elden Ring’s animations and enemy moves are mostly reused assets from previous games and it shows when the models morph here and there because the rig is recycled. Don’t remember anyone complaining about it even though it actually is noticeable.
Online games are different because you control the hosting and the service has much higher upkeep. Don’t try to apply the same shenanigans to single player games. Also pissed me / pisses me off that they started doing this Borderlands 2+
But then they say,
Despite the massive backlash and more than a decade of memes, Horse Armour DLC’s popularity was proven by the wallets of gamers. While Bethesda was being flamed for releasing the paid content, the numbers don’t lie, and gamers were actually very interested in paying for the DLC
Their main market focus is on whales now. They make it very clear, they see the Horse Armor DLC as a success story.
I don’t know how people there are like me, but I have forked over a lot on TES:O that I will no longer ever fork over again, and I regret having fueled their foray into single player. I will not preorder TES6, and I will have to wait for discounts to begin applying to their new franchises. As someone who was deep into TES lore, I will no longer care about TES6’s monetization or their attempts to tie into and guide players into TES:O.
“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”
And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.
I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.
It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.
And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.
I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.
BG3 received a lot of possitivity for releasing a massive game for half the price of starfield. But it seems apparent that negative reactions are stronger than possitive ones for most of us.
BG3 has been 70 dollars since release, unless i missed a sale. meanwhile starfield was on game pass on release which is like 20 bucks a month, so if you play starfield for 1 month then cancel you had essentially paid just 20 dollars for it. im on xbox though, not steam, so that may be why ours are so different
If people had just chilled the fuck out… we might be in a better place now.
Gamers aren’t a bloc, and each person has their own individual game tastes, opinions, and willingness to spend money on trivial junk.
Most gamers are tween Fortnight players or ones who play exclusively mobile games full of ads. They are not people like us. This was inevitable, and nothing would have or will ever change it. Most people just want a pleasant distraction from the horrors of life and don’t have any particular principles when it comes to how they spend their money on games.
I will admit to being one of the people who bought this DLC when it came out. I was very engrossed in the game at that time and felt like $2.50 was trivial enough that I just went for it.
Now, I was uninformed about what the armor did and was disappointed that it was only cosmetic. But I don’t remember regretting buying it.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t bought it. And it’s something I wouldn’t buy now.
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Aktywne