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America's Army 3 Has Rough Launch, Development Team Canned
incognito84 writes "The development team responsible for the creation of the freeware game America's Army 3 has been canned, days after the launch of the highly flawed game, which was distributed mostly via Steam. 'The anonymous America's Army 3 developers in touch with Kotaku unsurprisingly didn't sound too pleased with the current situation, venting that "a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.' The game's launch was plagued by massive server authentication issues which inhibited most players from playing it even two days afterward. One of the developers made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy. A patch has been released to address some of the game's issues."
Like much of America itself, America's army is "broke", and lots of people involved are unemployed...life is it's own parody.
"...much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy."
I've noticed a pattern in a lot of talent-based industries. On a small scale, or with an upstart CEO you can have talent-driven companies. But, as soon as they hit a critical mass, the bureaucracy becomes the dominate force and turns the talent into powerless labor. Every company I ever interacted with in the corporate world was like this. And, once you've got suits in charge, they make sure that they're well compensated.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Played it for 3-4 hours, and have crashed at least 4 times.
A couple of ways to deal with their firings a)Take their skills and go elsewhere. If they're actually any decent, they can make an impressive game to knock the socks off AA3 b)Complain.. c)(and only if it's true ) realize they suck at programming and find a new career. I make no defense of the Army, I'm sure it's a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, even more then normal(yay for government!), but c'mon. Basic things like not being able to handle auth servers? Something that is at the VERY CORE of the game, that without *the best* you can do is a plain m16 is crap. There was a pretty massive user base for AA2.x and they did a fair amount of hyping for it(hell, I heard about it and I don't even check gaming news websites.) That's one of the more *important* things to handle. Now, if it was crappy funding issues(god knows I don't know what happened), that's another story. If it was programming/design related....that's something *important* to get working right. Who knows? Maybe they are staying truth to the authenticate Army lifestyle, bullshit and all?
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
I didn't know there was a two. The one I played several years ago sucked dog shit with corn through a straw.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
"Obama would never offend his oil-buddies from the House of Sa'ud."
Considering the criticism other games with similar premises get. I find it quite reasonable that this project would be in need of, at the very least an overhaul.
Other things wrong with it include the idea that a government would provide free games to further recruitment or it's agenda.
I think if Obama has anything to do with the end of the game as it is, it would be over the social implications of the game rather than angry Saudi Arabians.
As a member of the beta team , I can tell you everyone was pretty damn concerned about the state of the game so close to its release.
It was obvious SOMETHING was wrong given the alpha state of the builds they were giving us.
As it is, you load, hit a button and crash, repeat. I tried to withhold my judgement until they released into open beta, but its just horrible.
If the government can't even manage to make a computer game well...
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Strangely, I rarely hear talk of it. For reference, see something called the Dunbar Number.
Any organization that grows over 150 (or so) people either fails or forms a personality-stomping bureaucracy to survive. It doesn't happen right away, but it always seems to happen. And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
I used to avidly play the game but stopped when they stopped updating the Mac client. A lot of honest (the cheats didn't work on the Mac anyway) and fun players left then, too. Despite having a tiny market share it did seem to have a disproportionate effect on the game.
So... maybe.
E pluribus unum
The American army has a long history of killing their own allies.
I spent four years in the Army myself. I was a "Network Swtiching System Operator/Maintainer." Sounds a lot cooler than it is, trust me. I've got two deployments to Iraq under my belt. Really, I have to tell you, every other iteration of the America's Army "game" I played blew ass. I had more fun going to work. Seriously, they gave you "Task, Condition and Standard" in a video game?!?! Jeeze, I'd rather shine my boots and clean my weapon. Not to mention that they just happened to leave out the whole screaming-in-horrendous-agony part of war. People usually don't just fall down and play dead when shot or hit with shrapnel from one source or another, you can trust me on that too. So, I'm kind of glad this game ate shit. The only "realistic" part of it was how outrageously boring training in the Army can be. Other than that, the only purpose it served was to give children a false impression of war, and how god-forsaken horrible it is. Usually that wouldn't matter in a video game, but it certainly does matter when that video game is really a recruitment tool for the US Army. -Reed
unfortunately the patch can't be said to have really helped. All the auth servers are still down, meaning no official servers currently work. the game still freezes for several people. I'm optimistic however that eventually the game servers will be functional and people will forget about the horrible launch.
Long hours unpaid, shortage of personnel, impossible deadlines, sounds like my time in the real US Army.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
I managed to get in a few servers and get a half hour of combat in. It's very intense and really a good tactical shooter. If the auth server had any stability or capacity there would be no story here aside from a few bugs that can be eliminated quickly. (Such as having two main menus up at the same time in-game, a few minor animation bugs, etc.)
Ha ha ha ha!
Their trouble is that they didn't give this job to the pure propagandists, (you know, guys like Westwood and. . , well Hollywood).
Heck, I'd only be half surprised if this wasn't a failure-by-design to make the military look useless and all "Beatle Bailey" in the eyes of the public while the real recruitment officers, (the News, for instance), do the dirty work.
Of course, it could also simply be the result of endless wishful thinking; you know. . . Imperial Rot and Decay before the Mongol Hoards come to raze the Empire.
-FL
The chance that the entire team was incompetent is very small. When a project fails, look to its management, not to every single engineer on the team. Also keep in mind that half of software projects in general fail; it's a very immature industry.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What about Valve? They have roughly 200 employees and they seem to be very much "talent based". Their methodology for making games has worked pretty damn well for them IMO.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I can name a lot of companies that by your definition have been bureaucracy driven for decades and have put out cutting-edge products for a long, long time, like IBM, Apple, Raytheon, Dell, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, GM (even if they recently failed), General Electric, Intel, Honeywell, 3M, AT&T/Bell, Xerox, Lockheed-Martin, Medtronic, Cisco, United Defense, Texaco, etc etc etc etc etc etc
I wouldn't call any of the above 'powerless labor'.... There are large, bureaucracy-driven companies that also have a lot of talent and they know how to use it... Proper management is a good and necessary thing....
WHERE'S MY GODDAMN EPISODE THREE.
also releasing left 4 dead 2 and not updating the first one all within the span of a year.
gotta love it when unemployed army people complain about being 'stabbed in the back' by 'outside sources'.
Well, if you're not happy about it then don't buy the second one. The first was updated, just not significantly. You can try to call the addition of the 2nd half of versus maps an update - it's really just finishing something left undone from release.
The situation is not quite that bad, though the summary makes it seem so. From what I gather, it wasn't a major part of the development team that was released, but rather 3-4 people in a small satellite team. Of course, there would definitely be bitterness about this, especially in this economic climate, but the job cut definitely wasn't extensive.
As for AA3 being flawed, the only major issue it's had is that the authentication servers have been overloaded by the hoards of new players trying to log in and play the game all at once. Obviously something like this can't be predicted, so no one is to blame. (I'm sure many of us recall Quake Live being hammered when it was released in open beta for similar reasons. And Demigod as well.)
The game itself is a LOT smoother and cleaner than any of its previous iterations. There are some occasional bugs and glitches that need ironing out, but thus far I haven't seen anything drastic.
(Yes, I am an AA player, and I have enjoyed for quite a long time. No, I'm not at all interested in joining the US Army. I realize it's a recruitment tool, but that doesn't mean there's any reason for me to shun it as a game.)
200 employees? Really? What's Valve actually released in the last eleven fucking years?
Half-Life
Half-Life 2 + episode 1 and 2 "expansions".
Portal
Left 4 Dead
Yep. 4 games and 2 expansions, all of the games except for one are on the same engine. All the mods were 3rd party and then assimilated by Valve. L4D was purchased too.
So what the hell are the other 150 employees doing? Steam DRM?
So what the hell are the other 150 employees doing? Steam DRM?
Counting the huge piles of money I suspect.
This doesn't come as a surprise to me... sometime around the version 1.6/1.7 release, a bunch of the DEVs were let go/fired/left (I don't remember specifics) and the game hasn't been the same since. I participated in the beta testing process at one point, and there were a bunch of great guys doing the testing and lots of reports of issues were being relayed to the developers. But it seemed that there were always issues slipping through the cracks because the Army was more interested in phasing in the overall "experience" or storyline of the game, rather than gameplay. I haven't been following the development of the game since a few years ago when the gameplay went south, and I imagine they've been losing lots of veteran players since then. Being the army, it should be easy to assume the DEV team was pressured with unrealistic goals and an unrealistic deadline for launch. Since the game is (obviously) targeted at young adults and they failed big-time on first impressions for many new players coming on board with this release, it's easy to see why someone's head was required on a platter even though the blame really lies with the Army officials. Typical bureaucracy at its finest. I hope the fired DEVs find good paying jobs with companies who don't require treading manure on a daily basis.
That said, I do hope that moving development into the military sector instead of the private sector ends up saving taxpayer money in the long run, IMHO the game as a whole isn't really an effective recruiting tool anyway. The only thing that's really useful is the virtual-reality training for our soldiers, and that should be the main focus of the development.
200 employees? Really? What's Valve actually released in the last eleven fucking years?
Half-Life
Half-Life 2 + episode 1 and 2 "expansions".
Wikipedia currently lists 20 games, though several of them are ports
List of games developed by Valve
Not counting ports, I see 17 games:
Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Deathmatch Classic, Day of Defeat, Ricochet, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead.
Three games are listed under "in development"
Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2
The company is also still working on additional content for Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead (1).
Valve also has staff providing ongoing assistance to Source Engine licensees working on commercial games based on the Source Engine (eg: Postal 3, Sting: The Secret Operations, The Crossing, Mabinogi Heroes, Zeno Clash, Salvation)
Licensed Source games
There's also the Steam Store, which has a fairly large team assigned to it for marketing, development, and support. This is all the "official" projects anyways, there's been several "unofficial" projects rumored about as well such as a whole new game engine for Ep3, a possible linux based version of the Source Engine, and CS:S2, though there's been no official confirmation on any of them.
Anyways, the point I was trying to make is there's no single project that all ~200 employees work on, the staff is instead split into "cabals" (groups of 5~10 or more employees) that are assigned to all these individual projects. This isn't Valve specific either, most major game studios work this way to maximize productivity.
I know how to fix this: Put KBR on the job.
This is woolly psychology, not hard computer science. 150 is one approximate estimate; other people have made estimates of 231 or 290.
(Source: Wikipedia. Take with appropriate dumper-truck full of salt).
If these guy's had use the Imperial handbook, they wouldn't be in this situation.
"The Emperor is most displeased with your apparent lack of effort" - Vader
"He asks the impossible, we need more men, we need more time" - Commander
"Then perhaps you can tell him yourself when he arrives" - Vader
"The Emperor is coming here?" - Commander
"That is correct Commander" - Vader
"We shall redouble our efforts" - Commander
"I hope so Commander for your sake, the Emperor is not as forgiving as I am" - Vader
But, as soon as they hit a critical mass, the bureaucracy becomes the dominate force and turns the talent into powerless labor.
When companies *have* to be large, I believe keeping small, relatively autonomous groups of talented employees is the cure. Once a group becomes too large or the group is stripped of its autonomy to enforce mono-culture, innovation takes a back seat to sweeping, generic, stuffy rules that attempt to keep things 'safe' and 'organized'.
Just about every company wants complete control from the top -- The problem is it's dangerous to assume people from the 'top' have enough insight and knowledge to make good decisions for the 'bottom'. Letting groups of people do their own thing is chaotic, but it's probably good for incubating fresh material and novel ideas.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Two Words. Socialized Healthcare.
Yes, I much prefer the warm, caring bureaucracy of a private insurance agency over the cold, sterile bureaucracy of a government agency...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
The Wikipedia article you cite says no such thing.
200 employees does not necessarily mean 200 programming dudes. Remember that there's legal, marketing, and P.R. to consider.
Keep in mind that Valve doesn't just make games - they also work with Steam.
There's probably at least half a dozen guys dedicated solely towards bringing new games onto Steam. Not getting the licensing, but setting them up so they work with Steam and its interface (like the in-game stuff.)
There's also likely a dedicated team for updating content for certain games, like TF2. I'm sure that they have a few guys who job it is to do just that.
The Source Engine is a beast unto itself, and one of the reasons the Episodes come out so many years in-between is because Valve elects to improve the engine every time. If they did not go with the engine upgrades (HDR, particle physics, L4D engine's improvements, and who knows what is coming with EP3), they probably could have cranked out games a lot faster. The thing is, they make them so damn good that they have enough staying power where they don't have to worry about cranking out a shit-ton of games every year.
I still occasionally play through the entire Half Life 2 series up to this point because the gameplay and story is so damn good. I think that I'm getting to the point, though, where I want to drop in SMOD and have some real fun. :3
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Any organization that grows over 150 (or so) people either fails or forms a personality-stomping bureaucracy to survive. It doesn't happen right away, but it always seems to happen. And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
The question then becomes whether a larger organization must necessarily stomp your soul more than a smaller one. Anecdotally, the federal government is the U.S.' largest employer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
However... the typical company (or troop or battery) has approximately 100 people. You can spend as much as 10 years working at the company level before you reach Sergeant Major or Major. Some jobs, e.g. Adjutant General (which is essentially HR) are tied more closely to Big Army, but others, e.g. combat arms, are more insulated. Even now the traditional terms "troop" and "battery" are retained, even though there's some OCD bureaucrat who is waiting for the chance to wipe them out and call everything a "company."
I was a Cavalry Scout and we were aware that they were trying to wipe out personality and make us all fit neatly in to their org charts. All the (arguably stupid looking) emblems the units had painted on their HQs were painted over, they banned profanity, and of course our various alcohol sodden rituals were always causing problems for our CO, but for the most part we just ignored them and did whatever we wanted. The flip side of "don't be an individual" is that the Army also demands that you take pride in your unit.
That's true for schedule and budget overruns, but not true for the massive amount of failures. It's extremely rare that say a construction firm says "Man, this house is bad. In fact, it ended up so poor we can't even sell it. We'll just have to demolish it and start over." Then, again few try to redesign the house while they're building it...
That's an unfair comparison. Houses contain windows, but they don't have to run on Windows. Imagine how many houses would crumble if the floors were made of windows?
The same organization in charge of AA, is now in charge of GM. I look forward to more successful product launches!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.
I kills me to see this pattern repeated over and over in the technology industry. Smart managers/leads/companies know that pushing too hard will always hurt you in the long run. Of course there are times where you push hard as a team. But when 12 hour days become the rule not the exception you are establishing an unsustainable habit and company/team culture. Attrition rates will increase (draining you of talent), word will spread into the industry about the negative work atmosphere (making it hard to hire/replace lost or new talent), those still working will lose their passion and the quality of work will fall (killing your competitive edge).
I've been lucky/blessed that so far in my career I haven't been in a situation where I had to constantly choose between my life/family and my work. Part of it is setting expectations/boundaries both personally and as a team. When I was interviewed for the former company I worked for (which no longer exists since we were acquired by a big one recently), I expressed excitement and passion for my work and the technologies they were developing, but I flat-out told them that when push comes to shove when it comes to work and family that I will always chose time with my family. When I go home for the weekend, unless I've agreed otherwise or we're really down to the wire, I do not work. No email checking, no extra hours, nothing. Setting this boundary, people make sure things are squared away BEFORE the weekend comes. And if it is an emergency they know they have to call me on my personal phone (which causes people to make sure it really is an emergency before contacting me).
Again, I consider myself lucky/blessed because I know of companies or situations where setting this kind of boundary will get you fired. Honestly, I think that getting fired for standing up for your rights (and I use that word deliberately) isn't the worst thing that can happen in life. The way to handle this type of situation is to talk to HR. Confidentially show HR a well documented pattern of abusing employees by management demanding/coersing salaried (and even hourly) workers continually work extra hours and ask for their help to change the company culture. If nothing happens, then you can look for another job. If you get fired, you can sue the company since HR broke their confidentiality.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
I guess I have been around long enough to understand when it is release time get the resume ready. The budget
is gone everything switches to maintenance mode and the team size dwindles end of the road. As for the game
problem freezing or crashing by the client now that is a solid programing issue. The authentication servers now
that is a problem that can be fixed and fixed extremely fast. If the authentication servers are still down it is
a good indication that the project is completely out of cash and no one is willing to spend anything to fix it. The other
possibility is that the game was not developed with scale in mind from the start(every byte counts).
Got Code?
The game itself had a few glitches and flaws, but the real problems lied with the server infrastructure and poor planning. With the launch of a FREE first person shooter on a huge platform like Steam, no one bothered to improve the server infrastructure the game uses for online play, which resulted in most of the issues players see.
One of the problems I've heard the most about is the inability to get past the Training missions because the game does not properly save your progress when you've beat a Training mission. Again, this is due to the overloading of the servers, not an issue in the game itself.
Isn't that the gist of it? It's not really "fair" by default. It rewards scheming, obscurity, and shrewdness.
"a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours [on this game] that was butchered by outside sources.' .... One of the [developers] made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy"
wow, if this wasn't talking about a video game, I would almost think they were talking about the real Army!
like a man without arms, you can't hang......
Why did they work long hours? Against whom is the U.S. Army competing? The game, like its previous 2 incarnations, was to be free-as-in-beer.
And why is programmer psychosis so prevalent among game developers? Is it because so many developers (like me) got their start wanting to write games, hence strong competition for jobs as game developers?
Any time long hours are involved, you can be sure it is the result of one or more of at least 3 things:
* market competition forcing businesses to make promises that cannot be kept except by unreasonable behaviors, such as overtime
* lousy project management (is there such thing as competent project management? Even at firms praised by clients for having "great" PMs, I've found PMs to be lousy)
* developers with mental issues of sanity and pushback willpower
Fuck long hours - especially if they are unpaid (as is almost always the case. It is time for developers to fight-back against being taken advantage-of; we need to demonstrate that we are worthy of respect and reasonable lives too!
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
http://jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail408.html#Iron is not just for governments. It applies to any organized group of people above a certain size.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
just a dumper truck? shit, i'd go with a whole state of salt. Wikipedia is so full of personal agendas and bias that it's not even funny. You might as well read the tabloids, at least they know how to entertain people.
Sounds like my last fucking job at this shit startup called LiveOps. Dig this:
This place is a startup that had some pretty decent tech with a talented staff of developers. At some point, this fat fuck named Maynard Webb came along and brought his bullshit e-Bay corporate shenanigans to the company as CEO and immediately started wanting results through the use of attrition -- drive your managers into the ground and MAKE THEM PRODUCE (lotta yelling and complaining) and in turn these chickenshit fucks did the same thing to their underlings. Made for a really, really fucked up place to work.
As soon as this shit happened, the talented group fucking all left. The ones who protested this shit fucking got fired -- me being one of them. Now, what you have is a piece of shit product that HAS NOT GROWN since the talent split two years ago and this fat fuck is still there, chances are, probably skimming shit for his retirement fund.
I hear they are still making the same mistake by hiring fuckers outside of the company and passing over talented, deserving people within the company. Thing is, once these fuckers get the job, they want to make a big play and grind their respective departments down similar to cocksucker Webb. What I've been hearing now is that everyone is working too fucking hard, no pay raises, their fucking stock is shit and no one wants to leave lest they end up in the 11% unemployment lines.
Sorry to see the same shit at America's Army. Too bad...I dug the game. Looks like it's going to go away...
Even today things are still going badly. I was able to get through a lot of the training missions, then the auth server went away again.
Basically, when you do a training mission, it's a crap shoot whether the auth server will register the results which will allow you to advance in the game.
Apparently there was a server side patch done today, and things do seem to work a bit faster when the auth server is up.
There are also still plenty of little bugs in the game itself, and who knows how/when they'll be fixed since they shut down the dev studio.
Apparently, development is moving to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. I'm not sure who's going to be working on it though. They assure us that the game will go on, so I guess they have a team or will hire one.
Even with all the problems, I think it still may have potential. But I'm looking at this as still in beta phase. I'm hoping that by next weekend we'll actually be able to play "normally". :P
both offensive and amusing. well played.
Can be found at http://www.aao30.com/?p=639
Hate to sound rash, but when are people in the game industry going to understand they are contract workers getting paid salary? Meaning: when the project is done, your job is done. There is very little tech re-use between game projects, so there is usually no reason to keep staff. This is different than most major corporations that build upon the same product with new releases, and very rarely re-tool. But really, there isn't job security anywhere. However, for the game industry, and the nature of its projects, it should just be a given you will be let go when your game is done.
Half Life 2: Lost Coast does not count as a full game by any measure ever... not even an expansion pack. It's 20 minutes of game play, tops, with about a half hour-ish of commentary on the graphics system. It is, at best, a glorified tech demo.
Point still stands, but it's more than worth clarifying.