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Wired News: 2002's Greatest Vaporware
Quill writes "Wired News has once again compiled a list of last year's greatest (worst?) pieces of vaporware. The winner (I won't spoil the surprise) has been on the list three times now! The nomination process was mentioned a few weeks ago on Slashdot."
Metroid Prime : exceptional gameplay
Super Mario Sunshine : exceptional gameplay
There are still fun games being released. Good gameplay isn't gone, it's just being drowned out by all the crap out there.
Of course they're the minority, like in anything. How many movies came out this year that were focused on viewer enjoyment rather than glitz and flash?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I started helping on an open source project called Project Armageddon in 1996. It became a massive thing, with about 50 guys working, artists, programmers, the works. It was due for release in 1998. It still hasn't been released..
Why? Because technology moves too quickly and your game looks old fast. If you write a game with a target for release in two years, you write for the highest end kit, make sure your engine scales, and hope for the best. But what if when two years have passed, you need another year to finish the title? Your title immediately looks old!
What if Red Alert 2 ran a year late? It'd look like an old clunky piece of crap. Okay, it's still an excellent game, but it was more cutting edge in 2000 than it possibly could be in 2001.
So, when titles run even just a year late, the developers have to rush and scramble to make their graphics engine look up to date.. but that introduces new bugs, so they become even more delayed.. then they need to upgrade the engine AGAIN, and repeat ad nauseum.
mogorific carpentry experiments
A late game is only late until it's released. A bad game will be bad forever. How many people remember when Super Mario 64 was supposed to be released vs when it actually shipped?
In any case if you're going to put "Forever" in your game's title you have to expect a certain amount of jokes about it.
Graham
The OSX/Quark problem affects much more than "graphics enthusiasts" as they put it. Working at a prepress company as I do, it's a very real problem. I don't know why a "graphics enthusiast" would get Quark anyway, when I think of that I think of people like the Digital Blasphemy guy, not assembling postscript documents in Quark.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Actually, the engine, although definitely one of the most technically complex parts, is no longer the "hardest" part. The core engine can still be designed by a small team ( 5, easily, 3 or less if they're really good, a la Carmack), and even in that, the core graphics is pretty much done by one person even on today's game. All the tools for the artist, level designers, and such, take up significantly more programmer time than the engine. And that is dwarfed by the content creation that artists and designers go through. I'd say the hardest part is actually making a fun, interesting game, while still maintaining a shiny patina of graphical goodness.
;)
Go create a single, high-poly, production-level model, including a bunch of animations, and then multiply by about 10,000 and you'll get a feel for the effort involved.
And while I'm sure he was in on the design process, its not like Carmack sat around doing everything himself, surrounded by a chorus of yes-men-and-women, cheering him on. I'm pretty sure most everything outside of the graphics is done by others, please correct me if I'm wrong. Take a look at Armadillo Aerospace, and you'll see where he's been spending his time (and money, yikes!).
And as for needing to sell a copy to every computer user, at an inflated price - do the math and you'll see that's a bit off. Say, $100, and 100 million computers in the country, which makes for a nice cool $10 billion if my maths (as the brits say) are correct. Its a moot point anyway, I'm sure the Duke Nukem' group have made so much cash off the old franchise, that its pretty much a rich-person's hobby at this point.
Hell, I'll be incredibly impressed if they do get a good-quality game out the door any time in the next decade. Give me $50 million or so, and I don't think I'd ever get anything done again, especially not something as demanding and intense as game development.
I'd just get stuck at the stripper motion capture sessions the press has mentioned
If true, that's a huge relief since any game coming out now using the original Unreal (or UT) engine will look _very_ dated.
*GWOE (Games With Older Engines) is not dying
Pac-Man is dated. Pac-Man is still fun. Therefore, in some cases, dated is still fun. Namco still sells copies of Pac-Man on Game Boy Advance. Therefore, in some cases, dated sells. This correlates with the fact that games that remain fun continue to sell.
However, notice that in auto racing, "DNF" stands for "Did Not Finish".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let me quote from the article:
That pretty much says it all: they had no plan, they're making all of the classic mistakes of software development, and they are burning through the cash as if it were marshmallows at a boy scout outing.The least they can do is hire a competent project manager to slap those ho's back on track.
Way I figure it, if they had 3 developers and one manager working full time for five years, they've already burned through close to two million dollars and have nothing to show for it. Hope they figure they can sell enough copies to *cough* at least break even. Do'o!
Yeah, right.
My understanding was always that vaporware was specifically supposed to refer to products that are claimed to exist, and perhaps even exist in some basic stage of development, but are essentially non-existent in any practical term, despite the company's claims it is coming. The reason I ask is that it seems unusual to list products like the GeForce FX as "vaporware", just as it seems odd to list other products that are merely delayed but clearly do exist realistically. So, has the definition of vaporware changed to refer to anything that gets delayed, whether or not it exists....or has my understanding of what constitutes vaporware always been incorrect? -Tom
...if you can't walk into a store and pick it off a shelf, or otherwise acquire it, it is vaporware.
Companies can demo it and say it's 'almost ready' all they want, but until you can get product in exchange for payment, it's vaporware.
~Philly
I'm sorry, but no. The game is fun, and the control scheme is serviceable, but it's also quite bad, and could've been much better. I own the game, and have played a number of hours in it, and I still dislike the controls. I know about the lock on trigger, and the freelook trigger, and I think they're a solution to a problem that never should've existed.
And I know what type of game Metroids are, I don't expect the game to be a Halo killer or a fast-paced Quake. But that's still no excuse for a poor control scheme.
If you want to applaud the efforts of a game development crew, then pick a team like id or Epic. These guys set internal release dates but tell the world that their games will be out "when they're done". They always seem to deliver a game in a timely manner, they always make good on the hype, and they both leave legacies for their products by crafting engines that other games are built upon. How those guys stay focused year after year and still manage to be on top is definitely book material. I would love to see a project management book by John Carmack and Tim Sweeney hit the shelves some day. These guys know how to get it done.
3D Realms, IMO, is living on their legacy created by Duke 3D. Granted they've spent some time helping other games get out the door (Max Payne, Duke titles for consoles, etc.), but I think someone above summed it up best : their outfit comes across more like a rich man's hobby. Were it not for the reputation of 3D Realms, I think you'd see Duke Forever getting the same treatment as Daikatana, Ion Storm and John Romero got a while back. If you think about it, there isn't much difference between the two except that Romero had a track record with a different company. Let's all hope that Duke 4 doesn't come out as flawed as Daikatana.
So now that I've said my piece, yeah, I think it's cool that 3DR can laugh about the progress made on their latest game. But I would prefer that they quit laughing and joking and actually ship something that even halfway meets the hype they've built. At least the hype has died down in the last year or two, giving them a much lower hype-target to hit!
Project management is a complete waste of time when you don't know how you're going to create the finished product. When you're doing a whole heap of things for the first time you really can't know how long it's going to take.
I think you have no idea what a real project manager does.
A project manager is not some idiot drone who does fancy graphics to tell everyone what the schedule is. A project manager is there to keep the team focused throughout the entire development cycle, including the research and specifications phase. I've had the privilege of working with a top-flight project manager. Every project he was involved in had clear specifications, came in under-schedule, under budget, with few or no mid-project changes, and had happy programmers. And most amazing of all, the end result worked, and required no post-implementation fixes.
The problems are: #1, most managers think just like you do. They think project managers are just fluff. #2, good project managers are hard to find, especially in IT, since project-management is so under-valued. The project manager I worked with spent most of his career in the aerospace industry, designing jet engines.
(Hint, aerospace corps don't always know how they're going to build something when the project starts either. But, every single project has a project manager.)
I couldn't help it. Dammit, I'm already accruing coal in my stocking for 2003...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Mod parent up. Unless your requirements change you shouldn't have to do a redesign. They should have stuck with the quake II engine and invested more into quality design and artwork.
If they really wanted to do a game with the unreal engine, I'd say put it off until Duke Nukem Forever and Ever.
Technology does not a good game make.
Quality artwork is better.
Quality AI is better than artwork.
Quality game play is supreme.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
The Max Payne dev team had about 20 people over 2 years, so if they were payed well that's a production cost under $5 million. There are 200 million computer users in the US alone, and the company makes $20+ from each $25 copy sold. So, they only need to sell 500,000 copies to get $10 mil, which is a 100% return on the investment in only 3 years. IIRC, they sold millions of copies.
Repeal the DMCA!
don't forget a little thing called "Internet Explorer" that came with every single new computer sold in the world for the last four years. as much as netscape slit it's own throat by taking 4+ years to release mozilla, microsoft killed them too.
I say, then, don't worry about it looking old. Look at Blizzard, who has huge PC game sales by title and is very respected in the industry. They always delay games and their games always look dated by the time they come out. It doesn't matter though... 1. The gameplay is still good enough to sell it, despite it looking years old. 2. A dated game just means lower system requirements, which opens up a broader audience. Quake 3 is dying now for Doom 3, but Half-Life still gets more play. Even though it is an old engine, everyone can use it so it remains popular based on gameplay.
All the funny lines from Duke Nukem 3D were stolen.
"It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
-Duke Nukem 3D
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
-They Live (a John Carpenter movie starring Roddy Piper and that black guy from Platoon), release in 1988
A great many also came from the Evil Dead movies, and sounded much cooler when spoken by Bruce Campbell. I guess that's what happens when you get a radio DJ to do the lines for your game.
What's worse, George Broussard said in a magazine interview that all the sayings and such in Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever were original. In the same article, there were screenshots from DNF where Duke Nukem loses his hand and puts a chainsaw in its place (a la the Evil Dead movies). Message for Mr. Broussard: open mouth wider and insert other foot...
> "Apple should buy out Quark simply to get this app out," opined
> Stuart Long. "It's the one app holding back the adoption of an
> amazing Unix OS."
First off, the only thing holding back adoption of OS X is time; as
people replace their old Macs with new ones, and as new apps and
versions of apps are released that do not support Classic, adoption
of OS X is a foregone conclusion. No one app matters, really. It
can make the difference of a couple of years for some people, but
in the long run it doesn't fundamentally change anything.
My other comment about this is that for Apple to buy out Quark in
order to get XPress out would probably disgruntle Adobe, which is
probably not something Apple particularly wants to do.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.