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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.
I thought we were talking about the actual facility in Nevada...
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
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."
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.
The success or failure of a game can not be attributed to one person. Studios like to play up known names to sell their games, but the reality is, large productions are pulled in many different directions due to the differing interests of the developers, publishers and distributors. Sometimes the product development team can balance those needs and sometimes it can't, but there is no one person to blame. Regardless, it's a team effort. Also, I believe Harvey said "we," which is appropriate.
Good point. I think people, regardless of their views on the current situation, are sick of having their entertainment littered with anti-Iraq war propaganda at every turn. (note the terrible box office receipts for Lions for Lambs, Rendition, The Kingdom, etc.) We get enough of it on the news; we don't need it in our entertainment media, and particularly not video games. Most people see video games, movies, etc. as a means of escape - not an excuse to get preached at by individuals whose opinions we couldn't care less about.
Don't get me wrong - there's a time and place for trying to raise one's consciousness about social issues via entertainment, but is there *anyone* that doesn't already have their opinion firmly in place about the Iraq War? At this point it's just more noisy static in an already ear-splitting cacophony.
I wouldn't be a fan of a game that's trying to give a *secret* moral/political message (as in some kind of brainwashing technique/subliminal message).
However, like a good novel, a video game sometimes has something important to say. If they've woven it artfully into the plotline (i.e. not hammered it into place or constructed a poor plotline around the idea), I find the game to be even more entertaining than when it's purely "for fun".
For instance, in the book world I loved the message from "Speaker of the Dead". It was a good message about cultural tolerance and humanity's inherently distrustful nature. It was also a damn entertaining book.
In games, I'd have to point to Deus Ex (the first one). It was a game that had a strong political/historical message, and that only made the game *more* entertaining.
So in other words, it depends on how well its done.
-Vendal Thornheart
On a related note, game websites really need to stop grading on an "out of 10" or 100 scale. It seems to remind reviewers of standard grading scales, where everything below 60% is failing, and so every review site and magazine seems to live within the 6 to 10 range of the scale. If you really thought a game sucked, was derivative, had bugs, etc., slap that sucker with a 2. Movie reviewers and their 5 or 4-star system don't seem to have a problem with throwing out zeroes and ones when appropriate.
The impetus for this complaint is that the linked Metacritic site to illustrate how the game's been getting "hammered by reviewers" shows a 65, or "Mixed or average reviews." This only seems to fly as "getting hammered" in a world where the scale is hoplessly skewed. It's like the media-stereotype "Asian parent" grading scale: anything below an A is an abject failure.
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").
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"