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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.
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)
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.
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.