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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.
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.