And, much like it is always shown, that is a problem of management at the publisher level. Visceral Games is generally one of the most well documented but every major studio with a similar “uh derr, how they not have game after five years. They deserve to die” story is a similar tale:
The studio heads and the publisher could never agree. Often there are mandates for specific technology (Visceral was forced to use Frostbite which even the Battlefield devs hate) and publisher level management can never be bothered to actually look at anything other than a full pitch level vertical slice… which they then say is not good enough or “Continue but make massive non-specific changes”.
The end result is that game dev, which already takes years, gets stretched out because so much work gets thrown out and completely redone whenever the managers actually communicate. And then the studio is gutted, jackasses online talk about how it was obviously the answer, and said managers get to move on to hopefully work with devs who can deliver products in spite of them.
So… maybe don’t just parrot the bullshit for the companies mismanaging the industry and destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the games we claim to like?
It shouldn’t take 6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop. If you don’t have a demonstrable gameplay loop after 6 years, yes, that’s a management problem, but it’s also a dev problem.
All we got to saw of Everwild was pretty, but it was never clear what the game actually was and the developer wasn’t clear either.
It doesn’t take “6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop”. They are pushing vertical slices, proofs of concepts, etc internally near constantly. The issue is when you get told “no, not like that. We want it to be more… you know?” and so much of that work gets scrapped. ESPECIALLY as time moves on and those vertical slices are also being done alongside levels, weapons, cutscenes, etc all while never knowing what the gameplay even will be.
Is there an issue at multiple levels of management? Yeah. But when you have a single “boss” you tend to actually have something. It might not be great but you have a vision you can work towards and release. Rather than five new visions every time you get a new contact at HQ.
But hey, keep on leaping to defend the mega corporations.
Another “great” example is the bad CGI in most modern Marvel-Disney movies. And that is because the VFX studios don’t even get the actual full scene until VERY late in the cycle. And they might not even get the final costumes until literally days before it is due (because “leaks”). When you are completely redoing the entire scene because now Cap shoulder tackles the helicopter instead of dodges around it AND don’t even know what colors he is wearing it is REALLY hard to get the lighting and dust to look right. And your team is completely over-stretched because you are not just doing one scene: You are doing five. Even though you agreed to four.
And you can bet countless clowns are out there talking about how the VFX studios suck and blah blah blah/
I get it, it LOOKED great, but as a potential player I need to know what the actual fuck I’m doing. What’s the goal? What am I supposed to do? What are the tools I have to do that?
Everwild Devs: 🤷♂️
If the suits were screwing around and changing things, we STILL should have seen what the actual game was before and after the changes. We never did. Never will.
That’s not a corporate problem, it’s a development problem.
Compare that to a teaser for a game that actually released:
You DO realize that you aren’t their bosses, right? That was Microsoft. Microsoft almost assuredly saw a LOT of internal content. It just didn’t get packaged up into sizzle reels to be shown at the keighleys for 50k for a few seconds in between kojima appearances.
At the end of the day, game development is a business. You only see what is deemed worth publishing. Take Night Dive for example. They have a ridiculously solid portfolio and, outside of System Shock (which was kickstarted?), don’t talk about ANYTHING until it is ready to release. Does that mean they are in a constant state of doing nothing and deserving to get fired up until that brief window where we all see Hexen and Heretic being pulled from store shelves a few hours before a (funny enough) Microsoft press conference?
… Actually I could very much see Microsoft take that route if they owned Night Dive. “They haven’t uploaded anything to youtube. Let’s fire their asses. Oh, shit. Danny O’Dwyer just skeeted that he is driving up to Washington again. Okay, give them a week and we’ll probably get a few million bucks out of them”
Hello fellow kids, remember the BioShock game series? Now you can buy more, now with added Circus of Value™ boosts! $4.99 to unlock a new exclusive ability!
Just let a series be, not everything needs endless sequels. Come up with something new.
Idk, I suppose you can argue that the binary morality system of the first BioShock was integral to the franchise identity, considering the time it came out and all, but I don’t hate that Infinite has one definitive ending to the story it wanted to tell. In fact, given the game’s emphasis on tropes and meta commentary, I’d imagine that setting a story in a universe with infinite possibilities and then removing the “choice” from the player to influence the ending was done deliberately. However, it’s been a decade since I played it, so I could certainly be misremembering some details.
The game’s narrative was identified as an area that was particularly in need of improvement and will be revamped in the coming months
I really don’t trust executives to be the arbiters of what is considered good narrative. I hope they didn’t just kneecap the writing because it wouldn’t appeal to as many people as possible.
To be fair, they are largely anti-american and woke, but in a good way. Woke is good, and America has some fucking issues. If you’re choosing to be not woke or actively pro-america, then you might be doing something wrong.
It’s TakeTwo - you know they did. Bioshock was a complete arc and died with Irrational. Whatever this zombie project is, I expect it won’t live up to the name, but they’ll slap it on anyway because goshdarnit executives just can’t help milking a franchise dry instead of innovating.
Not saying you're wrong but I do feel like there's still so much of the universe to explore, even if the main arc is complete. I would love to learn more about Rapture
I’ve been addicted to Bioshock for so many years now. I do a yearly-ish replay of them (Infinite is my fav, which some consider sacrilege) and always hoped for more. They’re perfect Steam Deck games.
For now, I think the upcoming Judas will be a more dependable game to look forward to:
A disintegrating starship. A desperate escape plan.
You are the mysterious and troubled Judas. Your only hope for survival is to make or break alliances with your worst enemies. Will you work together to fix what you broke – or will you leave it to burn?
Judas is a narrative FPS developed by Ghost Story Games, a studio led by Ken Levine, Creative Director of System Shock 2, BioShock, and BioShock Infinite.
Throw the System Shock remakes into your replay. They’re Bioshock in all but name, except you get more freedom (that decreases steadily over time with each game in this “series”).
In my dreams, regulators would require UP and NS to divest older or redundant ROW so that publicly-owned transit systems can repurpose them for passenger rail services. Even so much as a single-track minor branch line could be reinvigorated with high-floor DMUs while maintaining freight access in the off-hours, such as with SMART in San Francisco area. And in the long run, electrification without UP’s typical objections to overhead wires could enable performant EMUs like with CalTrain.
Fully agree. In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails (because, I mean obviously it would) and operators would put out timetables and requests for trains - all managed by the government. Just like the UK and most other countries, the government is in charge of maintaining the rails, keeping them safe, and expansion, while the operators do what they do best - they manage their schedules and try to squeeze the most profit out of it.
It’s a win-win, private industry doesn’t have to worry about safety or maintenance beyond their own vehicles, they work with the government on scheduling, and passenger rail would get a resurgence because adding new train lines and stops would just be a matter of starting a new operator.
If you thought of a new commuter line that you think would benefit a region, it wouldn’t be trying to convince Amtrak to do it - you could literally raise the money and start your own operator, lease some vehicles, and then literally just start running your train line operated on government tracks. Just as the semis do on the interstate system, just like airlines do.
In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails
I agree with the sentiment, but also have to mention some implementation quirks that should be addressed along the way.
Just like the UK
I personally find the UK to be something of mixed bag. Yes, they do have Network Rail managing the fixed infrastructure for the national rail system, but they’ve bungled the working model with a half-hearted attempt at semi-privati(s)ation with franchise operators for different rail segments. And while that problem has flared and simmered since the 80s, attempts to fully open the network for any operator (aka open access) runs into the age-old problem of too much demand.
Open access – which should absolutely be a starting point of any regulated monopoly, government owned or not – comes with the challenge where if every train operator wants to run their own London to Edinburgh service, then very quickly, the East Coast Main Line and West Coast Main Line are going to be booked up, leaving scant capacity for local service. Obviously, a high-speed corridor between Scotland and England would solve that particular issue, but the central challenge remains one of finding balance: local vs long-distance express, minimum train speeds, freight capacity, first-class vs economy vs sleepers. Open-access is open like a door, but even the widest doors enter to a limited space.
The proper balance is a matter of policy, rather than technical merit, so I’m not entirely sold on the notion that it should be the infrastructure manager (eg Network Rail) making those decisions. Such decisions would have major consequences, and so I think properly belong to public policy makers (eg lawmakers or regulatory agencies). But for technical decisions like loading gauge or max axle loads, those are almost exclusively for the infra manager to adopt, but with public consultation with operators and the public. After all, we wouldn’t want adoption of obsolete or unusable standards on the national system.
they work with the government on scheduling
I think this is implied, but I’ll state it for clarity: operators should have to make a showing to the regulator that their services operate “in the public’s interest” before being granted access to the national rails. And even when granted access, operators must conform to the infra manager’s technical requirements for uniform operation.
In the USA, this is almost identical to the process of setting up a television broadcast: radio spectrum is a limited commodity, and so it must be used in furtherance of public interest. In practice, this isn’t a very high standard, but it does prevent waste such as having one’s own private TV channel. So too would it be wasteful to schedule a “corporate train” service for the exclusive use of select personnel while still physically occupying the rails despite carrying zero passengers.
Basically, there’s much to be fixed in the USA, but the UK model could also use some work too, towards a principled model that maximizes the public investment.
Completely get all of your points, and respect them. I think on the spectrum of bad to perfect systems, I see the UK as “good” - but a long ways from perfect too. The US however is just obviously bad, and I think moving towards the UK’s system would be a massive step in the right direction. Personally, I think the first step is that the private companies should not own the rails themselves, they have proven that they are not the proper stewards of those systems and should not own that.
That’s step one. After step one though, I completely see your points and that there would be a lot of details worth looking into.
And, as someone how has ridden the Azuma service from London to Edinburgh 4 times - I have seen it cancelled twice. Ridiculous that in my very very infrequent trips to the UK I have seen my train trips cancelled just as many times as I’ve ridden them.
There is exactly one nice thing I can say about the USA rail system, and it kinda underscores essentially every issue we have with the rails today: the privately-owned railroads are absurdly good at moving freight.
If we were to ignore the entire notion of using trains to move passengers, then suddenly the American railroads are remarkable in how much tonnage they can move over across the continent, even with their horrifically skeletal network, and still achieve the highest energy efficiency for land transport. They really shouldn’t be as successful as they are, given that they have unionized labor, are not exempt from federal emissions regulations, and serve huge tracts of the country using only single-track lines dating back to the 19th Century.
To say that they’ve devoted all of their efforts to making freight work is an understatement. And it is from this foundation that all other uses of the rails are incompatible. And it shows.
The national passenger operator, when seeking to (re)start a line somewhere, must negotiate with host railroads – except when Amtrak owns the tracks, such as in New England – and that’s primarily a matter of paying for time on the track, plus the “inconvenience” of regular schedule services when most freight doesn’t really need to follow a schedule at all.
Unlike any other product or service, there is no eminent domain at the state-level for access to a railroad, so if a small public transit operator is rebuffed by the host railroad in their area, then that’s basically it. Only Amtrak has a right to use eminent domain for railroads, and that’s only ever been used once, resulting in a 20 year lawsuit to settle the matter at great cost.
Query whether a wealthy state like California or Texas can make a market-rate offer to outright buy the rail network within their state. I imagine the answer is yes, though this would have been much more useful if the idea came up when Southern Pacific was having their difficulties in the 1990s. Further query whether a state-owned railroad located in multiple states can unilaterally deny access to all other states – like what the private railroads can do. Who knows.
In all fairness, we do have a few objectively nicer things, like level-boarding for wheelchairs and strollers into LRT carriages, and pantographs rather than trolley poles.
But we did lose 100+ MPH operation in the 30s, when the 79 MPH track limits came into being for most railroads.
So in total, if that’s all we’ve progressed after a century, then yeah, we haven’t gone very far.
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Aktywne