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Starcraft Ghost Update
GamesIndustry.biz has an interview up with Blizzard creative director Chris Metzen and VP of business operations Paul Sams, where they discuss the status of the Starcraft Ghost title. From the article: "Basically the status of that is that we've kind of gone back and reassessed certain of the elements of the game that we felt needed to be refined. I think E3 was a big influence to us - we looked at other products that were in that genre, and felt as if we were quite competitive in many ways, but maybe there were some other things that we weren't getting to where we needed to go."
That is a false comparison. Movies are an established form of entertainment, and have a fairly well laid out production arc. Hardware considerations are a non issue, and neither are alpha and beta testing (and yes, I know about test screenings, and they just don't compare for difficulty). When was the last time you saw a "bugged" movie? Design in a movie is what's done before production; you don't write the script after you've started filming. Conversly, game design is what take up much of the production time, meaning that the number of variables you need to take into account is greater.
Finally, I would rather _not_ see the game industry become the next hollywood. Games are already too formulaic for my taste, and speeding up production in order to give a predictable product faster, *cough* EA *cough*, does not sound like an improvement.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I think anybody who's ever coded anything of even a moderate size, much less a giant project of the scale of what Blizzard would be taking on, knows that the unexpected just happens sometimes and it can set you back weeks, or more. Predictions of how long software projects will take are usually more accurately called "guesses". And trying to get a project out by a deadline no matter what usually means "Ship it with the bugs, we'll patch it later." I don't think Blizzard should be criticized for *not* taking this approach.
Of course, it's not like Blizzard products have never shipped with a bug in them. But I think the entire idea of polishing a product until they're sure it's worth putting out is a good one. Lots of good games have been ruined by being pushed out too early. And while Blizzard's development cycle is quite long, they don't seem to have a vaporware problem, either.
Course, Blizzard seems to have almost nothing to do with this game, so we'll see if they hold it up to the same standards since their name's gonna be on it.
hot foreign sheep.
Because I had no problem with Blizzard controlling their own fucking product in the first place, particularly given that the sole purpose of Bnetd beyond letting people use pirated copies of the game. War3 and WoW are brilliant games, the fact that Blizzard wanted to control a previous property (in order to prevent piracy, no less) is no reason to not play them.