This might come off as being a old gamer, but I feel like they’ve been saying this about AAA games since 2000s.
Sure, 90% of them will play it super safe. But there’s always 1 AAA game that breaks the mold and suddenly, the AAA games will follow that. Or imitate whatever indie game is doing with a higher budget.
Sam Lake is still out there fighting the good fight. Kojima too - whether you think he’s a genius or think he produces incomprehensible nonsense you can’t deny he is at least flying the flag for the weird.
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.
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”.
That’s not to say they didn’t expect backlash, they fully expected some, they simply didn’t do a field study to see how bad it was going to be. Actually pretty common in the industry. Thow shit against the wall, see how bad the outcome is, discount that against profit. :)
“One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith told us. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn’t know!”
Fancy cutscenes and “lore” to cover up boring gameplay.
It’s just another base building + gather resources game.
The quests are go to A, go to B, collect stuff.
The gunplay is like shooting plastic straws, the enemy ai is braindead, the climbing mechanics are the worst I’ve ever seen. Ice glitched INTO walls and got soft locked so many times I stopped counting. There is a “unstuck” button. Doesn’t work. Want to report a Bug? Button doesn’t work.
Good I got it gifted, wouldn’t spend a dime on this. It’s not finished at all and just another clone game…
All ambitious games have problems on launch. If the studio is any good, these usually get cleaned up over the following six months or so. I’ve played over 100 hours. Game is fun.
bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn’t good, then the modders won’t bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.
because of that i don’t think there’s any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn’t getting forced to work without pay - they’re passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too
Defending amateurism in amateur fields is reasonable. Especially when amateurism is a legal defense of the practice such as modding. Professional mods without official license are copyright violations.
This is similar to fanfic communities. The amateurism of the field gives it part of its charm and community, and it also makes it easier for people to come in, develop these skills, and move into creating and selling original works if they’d like to move in that direction.
Copyleft “fanfics” are what we call the entire SCP universe. CC-BY-SA is just like the GPL. Notice it’s not CC-BY-SA-NC (NonCommercial). Labor, even if it’s “mods” or “fanfics” is still labor. What, suddenly your work grew in value because it was based off of a different license agreement? The hard work didn’t change, yet it suddenly legitimately grew in value?
If i ever made a game, im making sure everything is released cc by sa and a FLOSS software license for the source code. Because fuck the mentality that says your work isn’t valuable simply because I didn’t give you a license to “my stuff”
Labor is labor, and copyleft is great. Hell copyright has massive issues. But also if youre going to participate in amateur labor where it would be illegal to profit, something wonderful and fulfilling for many people, then you don’t get mad when you don’t get paid. If you decide you’d like to make it something you get compensated for you can file the serial numbers off as has become a common practice for fanfic writers who achieve a certain level of popularity.
But also, the exchange of money changes the nature of labor. Labor done out of love and a desire to create and act and give to one’s community is deeply human and quite satisfying and it’s why amateur communities develop culture of amateurism. And it’s why many people who don’t want to do these things for a living choose to do them for a hobby
I don’t either. But if they’re joining an intramural league, I oppose it. Because its a league defined by amateurism in which nobody’s really seeking to profit.
When we talk NCAA or Olympics then I think that as people are starting to profit off of it the athletes should profit. Though I ask why we’re endorsing the everyone profit model rather than the “college sports teams should more resemble high school ones and we create a minor league instead” model.
Lets go to a form of labor I’ve done: open mic nights. Comedians should be able to make money off their craft, but open mic nights shouldn’t pay because that creates conditions that ruin the point. It’s a space where anyone can go up, try their hand, and with minimal judgment perform. You being good is a nice surprise to the audience, unlike when you’re being paid where they have reason to expect it. It’s a different environment, one more focused on the human desire to create and perform and share it and on the development of skills to a level that they can be sold.
That’s what amateurism is about. It’s about keeping it low key, keeping the expectations reasonable, and keeping the vibe of “people are selling their stuff here” out. It’s the same reason that as a former nudes poster who has dated nudes sellers I’ve wanted to keep those communities separated.
So yeah, it kills the vibes and for us supporters of amateurism we know we’re losing out on highly skilled people’s contributions to our communities when we say we’d rather them not engage in commercial works in those realms. Thats OK.
And I’d like to add that I do purchase art from former amateurs when they move into professional realms. Tamsyn Muir is my favorite author and her writing drips of her fanfic history. But her fanfic is for her and under a name idk if shes even released, and I wouldn’t buy it if she were to sell it wholecloth, because that kills the vibes.
Its not the graphics that need a rework, its their quest syatem.
The side quests were tied to your overall level, meaning if you were overleveled, you could unlock quests to battles that were only explained way later in the main quest line. Also the Frozen Wilds expansion made more sense if you did them BEFORE the final quarter of the main story line, but the missions themselves were of a higher level than the endgame boss.
Regarding the main quest line, while its quality is noticibly much higher in Zero Dawn than the later game Forbidden West, the way they were structured meant that f you unlocked the extra dialogue (from talking to certain NPCs) out of order, the whole script felt a little jarring.
Tldr: the quest system of Zero Fawn needs a fuckton of polish, not the graphics
Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.
I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.
Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.
The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon
I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.
If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.
Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.
The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.
Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”
Hard agree on the weqpon upgrades. Getting the perfect one, upgrading it to the nines and FEEL like it was worth it was one of the fun parts in HZD. Not so much here (Wildmaws shudders)
Regarding Strike, if they had slowed down the pace of the game, like death of the world in a few years instead of months (with hard timeskips you could gree to), and set the Strike tables in out-of-the-way corners you never have to go to without good reason, I MIGHT have felt like playing it. Deff interesting, just not part of the overall tone of the game.
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
The pressure applied by the need for video games to act as investments is not aligned with artistic expressiveness, innovation or quality.
This is why games from smaller Companies or indie developers continue to be the huge, genre-changing breakout hits. They’re still being made with the intention of making a game that’s fun, weird, or interesting as a primary concern, rather than just being a vehicle for profit.
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