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Area 51's Lead Designer Admits Project Was 'F'd Up'
Wired has up an interview with Blacksite: Area 51's lead designer Harvey Smith. Smith is well known for his work on great games like Deus Ex and System Shock, but his latest title is getting a lot of negative press. In the interview, Smith as much as admits the team failed in their quest to make a great game. "'We got hammered so hard [by reviewers], and we deserved it ... Everyone was forced to share tech. It took eight months to get one thing working.' He wouldn't specify what that one thing was, but did note that technical problems set the team back, time and time again. Another of Smith's complaints was 'the fact that we had four days to Orange Box something,' meaning to fix and polish a level. Smith called this 'completely reprehensible.'" Kind of shocking to see this kind of honesty from the games industry.
He was lead on Deus Ex 2, if memory serves. Even during development Warren Spector was distancing himself from the lead role, giving Harvey Smith all the 'credit' - or so we assumed at the time. Then the game came out, and well, you know the rest...
I thought we were talking about the actual facility in Nevada...
It's cool that he's accepting responsibility for some of the ugliness... but you have to wonder about the whole politics in games thing. People are playing games for entertainment, for fun. They don't necessarily want to get a lesson from you about politics. I understand that there's a fine line between making your game an interactive version of something like "An Inconvenient Truth" and making a game with political undertones. But you can't produce something meant specifically for entertainment and then balk when people don't "get it". I'm not sure if I'd want to play a game full of any kind of message - whether I agreed with it or not. That's just not why I'm playing. Do any of you guys play games looking for secret moral / political messages?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I hope this serves as a lesson to any other company working on a first person shooter (it really won't) the market's so bloody diluted with FPS's now if they can't knock it out of the park, there's no point in trying.
I have nothing compelling to say
So now Orange Box is industry slang for obsessively polishing a game? Go valve.
Kind of shocking to see this kind of honesty from the games industry.
Really, Zonk? Nothing in this article surprises me at all. I think any project, in any industry, can suffer from the problems described... Complaining about it afterwards doesn't help though.
The Project Lead needs to stand up sometimes and say 'No, this isn't working, we need to stop and re-assess the situation'. It is entirely possible to deal with these problems - a decent Project Lead would do exactly that imho.
It's all well and good to say "I believe in personal accountability." but if you'll note, other than that one phrase there isn't a single quote in the entire article where he actually takes responsibility. Each and every one of them is phrased in such a way as to imply that these events were forced upon the team, and by someone other than him. Only the government does a better job at this special brand of "personal accountability."
Namaste
The quote above strikes me as greatly amusing. Ham fisted satire is not exactly what I'd call subversive. This kind of statement seems like something an attention seeking high school student would come up with. It seems like something more subtle would also be more effective.
Dude! I swear I thought this article was about the actual "Area 51". I guess I'm not enough of a geek...
If you can't sell it, open it up! Release it under the GNU GPLv3 and perhaps the content under CC by-sa-nc. There's great stuff coming from the modding community, some mods are even completely new games like Bid For Power, True Combat Elite and Urban Terror (the more recent versions of it are quite well done).
Enemy Territory was canceled and then put up for download, it became very popular and True Combat Elite is based on it. Heck, it's probably being shared on news groups and through bit torrent already, uploading your own torrent to a torrent site costs nothing!
I first thought we were talking about the government facility where we might or might not have extraterrestrials. Then I figured you meant a game designer, so I thought we were talking about the arcade game from a few years back (get off my lawn...) where you blasted extraterrestrials in the government facility where we may or many not have extraterrestrials.
But as for this product, I for one have never even heard of it. I have no idea why its delays would be at all important.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
For those of us that aren't in the game dev industry, what does it mean when he says "everybody was forced to share tech"?
Cue all the Nintendo and Blizzard references ("the game won't ship until it's ready to ship").
See also: Starcraft II, Metroid Prime 3.
So Orange Box here doesn't refer to Valve; who knows? Maybe that's why Valve called it the "Orange Box" (along with the "Black Box"): it reifies their next phase of data mining; every "Orange Box" continuously records gameplay data for analysis back at HQ. In a software engineering sense, every "Orange Box" is an orange box.
There are a few developers that I support whole-heartedly and will buy anything from them sight unseen. Carmack. Miyamoto. Spector. Wright. Meier. Even though they have the occasional flub, they more than make up for it in the quality of their work.
Then there are some developers, who once made a name for themselves but have completely destroyed any credibility they once had and I will NEVER buy another of their games again. Harvey Smith, demonstrating his complete and utter incompetence in developing DX:IW. Peter Molyneux and the enormously bland Fable series. John Romero, for being John Romero.
These guys are complete and utter wastes of my time and money. It's not hard to see that they have no business being in this business. What was good ideas twenty years ago does not translate into quality today. These guys are masters of only one thing: Hype. I don't support it, and I won't support them or any game that involves them.
There's already too many good games I'm missing out on, but at least I know avoiding their titles is safe.
I've been trying to enjoy this game on the PC but it's tough. It's a bad console port. The first thing that hits you is the highly overdone motion blur of the unreal 3 engine. There is no option to disable it or turn it down. When you move your crosshair the whole screen blurs out, worse than I've seen in any game. The last time I played I was given a vehicle to drive and was shocked and dismayed to find that the only way to drive it was mouse control. I don't mind the political messages hidden within (haven't seen any yet) but enjoy games with good story. The only things I don't like (and can't force myself to like) are just the result of sloppy dumbed-down configuration options. A patch that lets you configure things more would fix all the problems I have with the game.
Peter Molyneux Apologizes for Fable
Birds of a feather, yadda yadda.
John Romero, for being John Romero.
But he made you his bitch, doesn't that count for something?
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I have been in the game industry for 15 years. It's a big mess. Four days to polish a product?
:(
On majority of the projects in my career, from Sony to Activision, and many smaller studios in between, four days of polish time was and continues to be about as likely as the company buying every employee a new house for all their hard work.
This is the norm for us, folks. We usually ship our games out around an alpha stage, every single time. The people who have the money in this industry and who make the overall decisions have the sole goal of making money. Polish, Gameplay, and anything else that would result in a quality product are pushed to the back as long as other elements of the equasion, such as marketting and brand recognition, can be used to hide it.
As well as being a developer I am also a gamer, having grown up with the industry since it's infancy, and I hate the situation the medium is currently in. Right now we're most likely witnessing the turning point for interactive media. As it grows and becomes adopted as the new popular media of choice, it also becomes more and more diluted to appeal to the wider audiences, and what were essentially going to be left with in 10 years is television all over again. Hundereds of games (channels) and nothing is on worth watching.
The success or failure of a game can not be attributed to one person.
A good manager alone can't guarantee success, but a bad one alone can guarantee failure.
Not that I'm saying that's what happened in this case. I've watched a game during development and seen all its promise destroyed by a publisher's deadlines (Master of Orion 3), but I won't agree that it isn't ever possible to attribute the failure of a product to one person.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Because boring, oft-repeated, obvious plots are not subversive? Unless you think Universal Soldier was a shining example of subversion? Taking something true (government mistreatment of veterans) and turning it into fantasy garbage (making them monsters) is not subversion. It doesn't highlight the actual real-world mistreatment of veterans. Does he think Resident Evil is subversive because it highlights corporate misuse of medical experiments???? The Constant Gardener might be subversive. Mila Jovovich is not.
No, because even games with awesome stories and plots with really overt political overtones make super shitty sources of brain food. If you really care about games, who cares about the plot?
This is an industry which requires a certain buy in to the concept of, "Our enemies must be killed, but only if you're having fun doing it."
Call me when a game puts you in the shoes of a poor arabic boy who kills the shit out of those Americans. A game possibly critical of western civilization? It won't sell, and not because you can't make a kick ass game with an equally derivative plotline.
But you can't produce something meant specifically for entertainment and then balk when people don't "get it".
Sure you can. Being brainlessly entertained is just accepting the subtext of the setting of the game as a cultural truth. Take any brainless game when you were an American soldier ripping the shit out of nazis, and just flip the narrative to be sympathetic to nazis. The game would be equally fun, from a gameplay perspective, but suddenly, you'd experience massive congitive dissonance based on a plot you would perceive as being political.
Suddenly, the game would be trying to hammer you over the head with the fact that the Nazis were so awesome, and yet, so many games are set in a situation where you already implicitly agree with the political context that you just don't react to it.
Lets be honest here; games are a visualization of some kind of button pushing reflex game. Its dressed up to suit the axioms of its consumers to sell more games. It's no wonder that if you want to sell a videogame in Germany you can't have dialog that says "Nazi". Suddenly, a brainless game would have politically overt overtones to them.
If you wan't to stop thinking, stop thinking. If a videogame pisses you off because you feel its being too 'preachy' then keep playing, and ignore the preaching. Like you imply, its a game. I'd hate to think what you do when you do try and so things that make you think if a videogame plot or dialog pisses you off.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Just an FYI: Ars Technica has done exactly that with all of its reviews. No more numbers. (I believe they got some ridicule for assigning an infamous "7" to most reviews) I think it's definitely a move for the better.
That being said, I've seen several people bitch about the lack of a rating number on the forums. So you can't please everyone...
--LordPixie
There's a place for those proverbial Devry grads:
Entry level grunt coders and junior level designers. Implementers, not lead innovators.
Fresh game design grads should be implementing someone else's innovations until the cream of that junior designer crop rises and their idea actually bears fruit and does not just stink like fertilizer the likes of which cannot be abided(sp?).
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I dunno, OP is more of an obnoxious cunt than a bitch.
Reading the interview is like listening to a character out of Idiocracy.