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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.
You should tell them. I hear they have a call center in India you can make suggestions to.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
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.
What?!? You mean all those kids with a degree in 'Game Design' from Devry University really didn't know what they were doing?
"I think this guy should move over this way..."
"Whoa, dude. We should like, totally use that sound effect from the last level..."
"You mean this one?" *bleeerp*
"Yeah, man!" (high fives)
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.
Yeah, that'll happen. The key is to note the word followed by the colon, to the left of the headline. The headline in this case, "Games: Area 51's Lead Designer Admits Project Was 'F'd Up'". The key word here would be "Games". Happy reading.
We willna be fooled again!
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.
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.
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").
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"