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."

Comments

Unfortunately, this sounds typical

[GodfatherofSoul]

"...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.

Abysmal builds

[Stray1]

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.

Re:Unfortunately, this...typical...extrapolating

[JohnBlueMO]

Yep. In fact, its a social phenomena that is not limited to talent-based industries. It effects governments, non-profit organizations, religious groups, clubs...you name it.

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 :).

From the standpoint of a soldier.

[sealfoss]

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

Re:From the standpoint of a soldier.

[sealfoss]

The recruitment tool that worked for me.... hmm... being bored to tears in college... and planes flying into buildings (that happened in September, I signed up in December). I wanted some adventure. I was young and still stupid enough to think that America's foreign policy might actually do the world some good. Not going to get too political now, but rest assured I don't feel the same way now. Of course they didn't spend time "drilling the horror of war" while recruiting me. That was my point, recruiters are *supposed* to blind potential recruits with "glory" and "action" and shit like that. A joke is that another name for Army recruiters is "liar." Nothing really wrong with all of this I think, it is how you get people to join the Army after all. Now, normally I would apply the same thought process to Americas Army, the video game. But I run into a moral conundrum when doing so, because Americas Army is just that, A VIDEO GAME. And who plays video games? Children play video games. If you, as a legal adult and the Army thinking that war would be anything like what you see in Americas Army (or any other video game for that matter), you are a dumb ass, and you deserve what you get. Either that, or mentally retarded in some way, shape or form. Darwinism at its finest. On the other hand, children do not have the same cognitive ability as an adult, and therefore should not be held to the same standard. The act of killing people being a fun and relaxing experience in any situation, or being able to reset a match when you get shot in the face, are just bold-faced lies when told to children. This is because children will look at the game as being official, released by the Army itself (and who knows more about war than the Army?) AND THEY WILL BELIEVE IT. My recruiter told me a story once about how he had been driving down the road in a particular Eastern-European, war-torn nation. The Humvee in front of his (they were of course driving in formation at the time) was unlucky enough to hit a landmine. "Scared the shit out of me" is the way I believe he put it. Other than that, he didn't go into too much detail as to how well (or not) the passengers of that ill-fated Humvee turned out. Now, in this situation, it wasn't really how much he did tell me about what happened as much as it was the expression on his face and the way in which he skirted around my questions that gave me a pretty good understanding of what it was like. For myself, I don't think I realized what the hell had happened until a year or two AFTER I was out of the Army. There is no thinking about what is going on while you're actually there. No time to stop and say "what in the name of FUCK am I doing here?" Because doing things such as that are counter-productive in the long run, as there really isn't much you can do to get out of the situation anyway (until your time is up). I hope this answered your questions, asshole. -Reed

Sounds Familiar

[DesertBlade]

Long hours unpaid, shortage of personnel, impossible deadlines, sounds like my time in the real US Army.

It's not quite that bad . . .

[apharmdq]

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.)

Re:you say it like it's a bad thing

[bennomatic]

I've heard that 3M corporation does this to an even greater degree. Each time a division is successful enough that it grows past 200, they break up that division's product lines into two subsets, so that they can break up the division into two sub-150 groups. The idea is that for the great majority of human evolution, we've lived in groups smaller than 150, so our brains are pretty well equipped to know and trust and work with that volume of people.

Get much larger than that and you'll start getting weird political BS. Not because people are bad, but because they need short cuts to help them deal with the overwhelming number of personalities they have to interact with to get their jobs done.

Re:Unfortunately, this...typical...extrapolating

[sco08y]

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.