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.
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.
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.
I did. Luckily there were points where it was shit enough to be able to leave without looking back.
I beat The Black Heart, Atheon, Crota, Oryx, Siva, Xol, Ghaul, Calus, Riven, Nezerac, Savathun, and The Witness, plus AlakHul, Atraks, Sepiks, Taniks, the Forsaken Baron, a bunch of Vex Gatelords and Overminds… I rediscovered 3 Dark Subclasses plus a fourth Light one and then merged them, I became an Iron Lord, a Dregden and went to Osiris’ Lighthouse in D1 and D2, healed the Traveller (twice), I witnessed my own funeral in the Corridors of Time, bringing back Saint 14, I saved and killed Rasputin and Prince/Crow, became Taken and beat Sword Logic, Vex Simulations, and Nightmares themselves: including the real world that’s four entire realities I conquered and I communed with The Long Boi In The Soup. I saw the whole story through. Anything that happens now is of lesser concern, so I can leave.
For me the big mistake started with the Dreaming City: when the world first raid changed the game for other players- I wasn’t the main character any more and canonically all the raids and boss fights after that were done by other players, and mine (canonically even!) just fantasized about it pretending I was there. Even in the very last fight against the Witness, canonically, I was just one of hundreds of thousands in a faceless army that defeated it together.
And then they made Myth II, which they had to recall (that almost bankrupted their company) because trying to uninstall it could delete your system folder and brick your PC.
At least with Myth II, Bungie actually made the right call and did the right thing.
Although judging by this news and the first sentence on their Steam page being “…Bungie’s team-based extraction shooter.”, maybe it’s a good thing I can’t play their games.
It did at one point, but I think they were forced to change it to Prey at some point in development. It had a “Shock” title to put it in line with System Shock and Bioshock.
I watched people play the game and was wondering what the hype was all about. The game looked so dull and boring. The outside of the map looled like a game made by a single dev for his indie game. Only yesterday i watched the short film and was loke: oooooooh, i get it, because they lie.
Im so tried of all these multiplayer games, make a goddamn single player campaign, fuck it add in splitscreen or the ability to play the campaign with friends if you have too
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.
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.
It’s such a damn shame, too. Destiny 2 was some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming over the last decade. Absolutely jaw-dropping environments at times, clever encounter designs, the gunplay, so many things to love. And I have no doubt Marathon will be a hell of a thing from what I’ve seen. These people can design a game.
But GODDAMN stop stealing art from people. Upper management has got to be atrocious with all the bullshit they’ve pulled over the years. And you know that bullshit starts at C-suite and rolls downhill.
It’s surprising how few people at the top you need to change in order to change a company culture. One of the companies that I regularly work with has gone from being a nightmare because we could never get information out of them, to a nightmare because of how whiny and demanding they’ve become. That was the result of the CEO changing, that’s it one person and it results in a totally different corporate personality.
Is it only the management though? You mean to tell me absolutely none of the artists knew about this, or that literally ONLY ONE “ex-employee” artist knew this was going on among the art team? Do Bungie only have one artist making art assets for textures across various objects, as well as assets they use on their website and in their trailers?
“Ex-employee” is a scapegoat, but I guarantee you there was more than one artist, entirely unrelated to management, that knew this was going on and will happily blame the scapegoat to absolve themselves of their involvement.
Is it far fetched to say their art team could be large, but also underpaid and ignored it so the work was done? Not right but sums up my work experience in an entirely unrelated and uncreative field.
Really just devil’s advocate, im curious for any corporate artist opinion
NGL, it seems really practical that it was intended to be placeholder concept art that someone forgot to go in and replace.
That said, this artist they took so much inspiration from definitely deserves a place in the game’s credits at this point. Whether they actually use his art in game or not.
Placeholder doesn’t need to be anything more than basic featureless textures on cubes, and you should own them completely. If you made your placeholder to look like it fits, you’re asking for it to be forgotten and left in place. Which might not be too bad if it’s finally not too out of place and it’s yours.
Especially in a professional studio, they should know better than using stuff they just “found” as placeholder. To me it’s either terrible incompetence… or worse, they thought nobody would care anyway.
Didn’t they get caught doing this with destiny as well? It makes me wonder if it’s a studio culture thing. You’re 200% right in what they should be doing, but I still am inclined to think this is more likely an incompetence thing than malice.
I will say, placeholder SHOULD be more than basic featureless textures on cubes so it can’t make it to a playtest without knowing about it. You know, like this. Placeholder kittens are always distinct, in my book. Plus if something subtly gets through, players will think it’s a hilarious easter egg
I’ve been in and out of games for my entire career. Every place I’ve been has had strict policies on outside art assets. I’ve even seen every new art asset to require a monthly license review to prevent any chance of outside art having slipped in somehow, including any usage of Blender’s example model Suzanne.
But I really wonder about the stuff at bungie being “just” incompetence, because their defence is “weren’t aware of this, just used assets left by a former Bungie employee that’s not here anymore”… And yet the art director had been following the plagiarized artist on twitter this whole time.
And they have an history of “just taking” when they think they can get away with it, as they’ve done with fanart. So, shitty studio culture sounds a definite possibility at that point.
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.
They just don’t make memes like they used to, and none of us can just run in without fearing the wrath of strangers. The folks who take games too seriously won.
Maybe not everywhere, but multiplayer games for sure have more serious elements to them than I ever thought.
In a way, this is what I wanted back in the 90s when so few people understood the potential of video games as a serious art form.
In a way, this is what I wanted back in the 90s when so few people understood the potential of video games as a serious art form.
Same, but definitely not for competitive multiplayer games. That’s the antithesis of the direction gaming should go in.
Instead, we should’ve moved more towards co-op. Gamers would be happier and healthier, which is why it was decided they should not appreciate it.
I genuinely feel bad for all the people getting suckered into wasting hundreds of hours in a game like fortshit just because it’s free and their loser friends got suckered into playing it, too. They have no idea what’s happening around them. If they ever realize it, it will likely be too late.
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