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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...
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.
And yet, he really should be taking full responsibility for this mess. Read http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1552/the_subversion_game_an_interview_.php for an eye opener into how this guy thinks. It was also published in Game Developer mag a few months before. Especially pay attention to the things he starts saying about game development around page 3, and the fact that he mentions Deus Ex every other sentence or so in an article about his new game, and tries to railroad around actually talking about his new game. Never have I seen a game designer with his head stuck so far up his own ass.
I worked on Blacksite. We had plenty of hardware.
The problem was that we had to share code (tech) with the other Midway teams developing in Unreal3 (we also had to wait for quite a few code drops from Epic). Systems such as AI would be developed by one team on a completely different timeline than us, and then we were forced to adapt it into our project for political reasons even though the integration took more effort than it was worth or there were better systems available that were already working. I guess it made management happy though to be reusing code...
Perhaps it will pay off in the long run, but the forced sharing in this game amounted to a whole lot of overhead.
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.