Chronicling the inability of gamedevs to make video games

[J1M]

https://archive.is/kWOlD
https://insider-gaming.com/eidos-montre ... cellation/

Excerpts:

According to sources, the game had been struggling for years, with 4 different game engines used throughout development, narrative direction conflicts, and a budget that had exploded to several hundred million. The game’s spiralling budget resulted in several projects at the studio being cancelled, including a new Deus Ex game in January 2024.
(...)
Footage of the game (...) shows that Wildlands was an open-world third-person action-adventure game in which players would take control of a character named River. River was part of a group of teenagers called Spiritbounds, who could ward off bad spirits with their magical staffs and ride mythical creatures.

We lost a Deus Ex game so they could burn money on a project that had a target audience of 14 people.

[WhiteShark]

I just want to know what was going through their heads when they changed engines for the third time.

[rusty_shackleford]

What’s bizarre about Wildlands’ cancellation is that, according to sources, the game was almost complete. It has recently passed key milestones and was in the debugging phase, with a tentative release date planned for later this year.
However, for whatever reason, Embracer probably went cold on the project and felt like any future investment wouldn’t be recouped. As to why it took Embracer this long, though, remains to be seen.

tax writeoffs because they expected it to be a commercial failure

[logincrash]

Meanwhile, RARE's list of things not to say during the development of Donkey Kong Country:

My handwriting looks very close to this. How ******* weird.

[Tangerine]

https://archive.is/kWOlD
https://insider-gaming.com/eidos-montre ... cellation/

Excerpts:

According to sources, the game had been struggling for years, with 4 different game engines used throughout development, narrative direction conflicts, and a budget that had exploded to several hundred million. The game’s spiralling budget resulted in several projects at the studio being cancelled, including a new Deus Ex game in January 2024.
(...)
Footage of the game (...) shows that Wildlands was an open-world third-person action-adventure game in which players would take control of a character named River. River was part of a group of teenagers called Spiritbounds, who could ward off bad spirits with their magical staffs and ride mythical creatures.

We lost a Deus Ex game so they could burn money on a project that had a target audience of 14 people.

We didn't lose a Deus Ex sequel. We dodged a bullet.

[J1M]

https://archive.is/kWOlD
https://insider-gaming.com/eidos-montre ... cellation/

Excerpts:

We lost a Deus Ex game so they could burn money on a project that had a target audience of 14 people.

We didn't lose a Deus Ex sequel. We dodged a bullet.

Both things can be true.

[wndrbr]

Publishers allegedly "stifling the creative freedoms of the innocent devs" are vindicated once again.

Gamedevs are subhumans who are unable to produce anything of worth without some angry dude breathing down their necks.

[rusty_shackleford]

vindicated

wrong word?

[Tweed]

Publishers allegedly "stifling the creative freedoms of the innocent devs" are vindicated once again.

Gamedevs are subhumans who are unable to produce anything of worth without some angry dude breathing down their necks.

Publishers are as much are allies as they are our enemies.

[wndrbr]

Funny how back in the day people were laughing at Square Enix' unreasonable sales expectations for Deus Ex and Tomb Raider games, and were happy about Square letting Eidos and Crystal Dynamics free.

Turns out the Square execs were right to be disappointed.

[J1M]

Funny how back in the day people were laughing at Square Enix' unreasonable sales expectations for Deus Ex and Tomb Raider games, and were happy about Square letting Eidos and Crystal Dynamics free.

Turns out the Square execs were right to be disappointed.

Both groups of execs can be wrong for different reasons. Regardless of what happens in the future, the square execs messed up.

[Oyster Sauce]

Even normies are starting to notice gamedevs can't make games anymore
Golden age of Xbox 360 timeline

I think about this video a lot. It was just one console out of the big 3. What would the world be like if this pace had been kept until today? There might be peace and love between all races.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493

A month late, but I have finally finished going through the five hour long Jeff Kaplan interview. Main issue is that Kaplan avoids talking about the elephant in the room, which was the cultural change happening within Blizzard during the late 2000s/early 2010s. There was a reason why there was a massive brain drain and hollowing out happening during that time period. The studio went from releasing great games every year to being unable to ship games. Overall feels like Kaplan didn't want to rock the boat.

It's the same problem with Schrier's book on Blizzard in that "muh capitalism" does not sufficiently explain why all of these OGs would leave the ostensibly rockstar company for greener pastures. What happened is that Mike Morhaime threw wide the hiring gates, which caused people to come in who shouldn't have been there. But Kaplan's new game The Legend of California is being published by Dreamhaven, which is owned by Kaplan's former boss Mike Morhaime. So Kaplan isn't going to bring that up.

The closest he gets is when he admits that Titan began development in 2007, but by mid 2009 he knew that the game would never ship, but they still had 140 employees and would continue to burn up to $83,000,000 by the time the plug was pulled by 2014. ??? how do you keep going for five more years knowing it would be a waste? He says he tried telling the higher ups about it, but this makes no sense. They were also apparently getting visas to fly in foreign environment artists to make maps for a game that didn't exist yet... and apparently they were producing assets in 10 different artstyles and there was no cohesive look for the game. What were you doing? Was there no art supervisor checking work?

It is absurd that Kaplan could have been blindsided by Armin Zerza telling him Overwatch had to make a ridiculous amount of money or 1,400 people would be fired. In this very same interview, Kaplan says that when they were tasked to come up with 3 pitches for a game in 6 weeks, the requirement was that it had to have the potential to make WoW levels of money. And Kaplan had to present the Overwatch pitch up through several layers of management, all the way to Activision. He knew what environment he was in and who he was dealing with.

Also, Kaplan is leaving out a part of the story. In Schrier's book, Kotick at a board meeting congratulated Kaplan for Overwatch's amazing launch, and then asked him to create an additional team to produce a sequel quickly and capitalize on Overwatch's brand name. It was Kaplan who refused, saying that he wanted to maintain control over the Overwatch brand. Kaplan in this interview seems defensive over the choice to put the sequel on the backburner, blaming a "coalition" on the dev team who wanted to make the PvE campaign, saying it was crazy, etc.

The first pitch in 2014 was for a World of Starcraft MMO. Kaplan's main criticisms were that 1. "it would take 5 years and 200 devs to produce", and 2. "well it wouldn't feel good if you travelled between planets in a cutscene, so you would need space gameplay, which would add another 3 years". ??? goodness gracious, you were not making WoW in 1999. You were in 2014 after there had been significant advancement in tools, modelling programs, discovery and refinement of techniques and production processes, blueprints laid out for you with the success and failures of all of these other games, etc. How would a world of Starcraft take you 5 to 8 years to make?

[DecadeRiptide]

My name jeff

[sheet]

https://nichegamer.com/sony-reports-765 ... rformance/

Dawg.
-20% ROI
$3.7 billion USD.
Tanking this hard...

All because you thought Microsoft was a threat.

[methoxetamine]

https://nichegamer.com/sony-reports-765 ... rformance/

Dawg.
-20% ROI
$3.7 billion USD.
Tanking this hard...

All because you thought Microsoft was a threat.

The funniest ******* part is they still think Bungie is worth 3 billion

[anonusername]

https://nichegamer.com/sony-reports-765 ... rformance/

Dawg.
-20% ROI
$3.7 billion USD.
Tanking this hard...

All because you thought Microsoft was a threat.

The funniest ******* part is they still *want their investors to* think Bungie is worth 3 billion

Fixed that for you. Can't admit they wasted 3+ billion and all that's left is whatever they can salvage from Destiny.

[Xenich]

I can show you exactly what happened. Might not be worth 58 minutes of your time, but here you go.

Before:
One guy decides a dungeon with evil druids would be cool. Makes the entrance a rock that looks like a skull because he likes pirate stories. Creates 4 thematic areas with different monsters. Added some jumping challenges because he wanted to. Adds some group quests to direct players to the area.

Now:
Blizzcon 2017 - World of Warcraft Boss Design Workshop

Project management in game dev was a mistake.

The problem is design by committee. There are 5 people trying to push their own ****** ideas to be accepted by the group while simultaneously seeking acceptance from the girl and trying not to point out how bad her ideas are. They don't have the skills to use the editor, and then the one guy who is going to implement this stuff ends up working on ideas that he doesn't think are as cool as what he wanted to do from the start.

The video shows them "collaborating" for an hour and they have almost nothing to show for it but back at the office this would be considered a successful meeting and they'd book another one for the same time next week to make more "progress".

Sounds like how Amazon management works, but a lot more women.

[DecadeRiptide]

CD Projekt Red decides to kill The Witcher 3 by announcing a new DLC alongside new hardware requirements:

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/wit ... -wild-hunt

Basically, if you don't like frame gen, raytracing, and FSR/DLSS, then tough luck because they will be forcing it down your throat. You'll be forced to play DX12 which runs at 30fps compared to DX11 which runs over 60.

They'll also be dropping support for HDDs. They will make the game stop running on HDDs. No, there's nothing wrong with your HDD, and you've been able to play the game on a HDD for 11 years, but now they will prevent the game from running on HDDs.

Also rip my modlist of 150+ mods which ran FINE on DX11, over 60fps. I guess I won't get to enjoy that anymore. OR MAYBE I'll disable auto updates for the game in Steam and never update it? Will that work? I don't care for the new DLC.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

CD Projekt Red decides to kill The Witcher 3 by announcing a new DLC alongside new hardware requirements:

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/wit ... -wild-hunt

Basically, if you don't like frame gen, raytracing, and FSR/DLSS, then tough luck because they will be forcing it down your throat. You'll be forced to play DX12 which runs at 30fps compared to DX11 which runs over 60.

They'll also be dropping support for HDDs. They will make the game stop running on HDDs. No, there's nothing wrong with your HDD, and you've been able to play the game on a HDD for 11 years, but now they will prevent the game from running on HDDs.

Also rip my modlist of 150+ mods which ran FINE on DX11, over 60fps. I guess I won't get to enjoy that anymore. OR MAYBE I'll disable auto updates for the game in Steam and never update it? Will that work? I don't care for the new DLC.

You could just turn off Steam autoupdate for the Witcher and never patch it.

[DemoGraph]

CD Projekt Red decides to kill The Witcher 3 by announcing a new DLC alongside new hardware requirements:

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/wit ... -wild-hunt

Basically, if you don't like frame gen, raytracing, and FSR/DLSS, then tough luck because they will be forcing it down your throat. You'll be forced to play DX12 which runs at 30fps compared to DX11 which runs over 60.

They'll also be dropping support for HDDs. They will make the game stop running on HDDs. No, there's nothing wrong with your HDD, and you've been able to play the game on a HDD for 11 years, but now they will prevent the game from running on HDDs.

Also rip my modlist of 150+ mods which ran FINE on DX11, over 60fps. I guess I won't get to enjoy that anymore. OR MAYBE I'll disable auto updates for the game in Steam and never update it? Will that work? I don't care for the new DLC.

You could just turn off Steam autoupdate for the Witcher and never patch it.

Or pirate the version you like. It worked with WC3.

[DecadeRiptide]

CD Projekt Red decides to kill The Witcher 3 by announcing a new DLC alongside new hardware requirements:

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/wit ... -wild-hunt

Basically, if you don't like frame gen, raytracing, and FSR/DLSS, then tough luck because they will be forcing it down your throat. You'll be forced to play DX12 which runs at 30fps compared to DX11 which runs over 60.

They'll also be dropping support for HDDs. They will make the game stop running on HDDs. No, there's nothing wrong with your HDD, and you've been able to play the game on a HDD for 11 years, but now they will prevent the game from running on HDDs.

Also rip my modlist of 150+ mods which ran FINE on DX11, over 60fps. I guess I won't get to enjoy that anymore. OR MAYBE I'll disable auto updates for the game in Steam and never update it? Will that work? I don't care for the new DLC.

You could just turn off Steam autoupdate for the Witcher and never patch it.

I don't think Steam lets you turn off auto updates sadly

[stormvermin]

CD Projekt Red decides to kill The Witcher 3 by announcing a new DLC alongside new hardware requirements:

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/wit ... -wild-hunt

Basically, if you don't like frame gen, raytracing, and FSR/DLSS, then tough luck because they will be forcing it down your throat. You'll be forced to play DX12 which runs at 30fps compared to DX11 which runs over 60.

They'll also be dropping support for HDDs. They will make the game stop running on HDDs. No, there's nothing wrong with your HDD, and you've been able to play the game on a HDD for 11 years, but now they will prevent the game from running on HDDs.

Also rip my modlist of 150+ mods which ran FINE on DX11, over 60fps. I guess I won't get to enjoy that anymore. OR MAYBE I'll disable auto updates for the game in Steam and never update it? Will that work? I don't care for the new DLC.

You could just turn off Steam autoupdate for the Witcher and never patch it.

I don't think Steam lets you turn off auto updates sadly

Change the auto update setting from whatever you have to "wait until I launch the game"
Set its respective appmanifest file to read only, in this case I believe it'll be appmanifest_292030.acf

[Stack of Turtles]

They're not going to "make the game stop running on HDDs", that would be impractical. They're most likely just going to stop offering support to anyone running it on an HDD, iow, if you have a problem and you say you're running on an HDD, they get to close your ticket as "sucks to be you".

[SoLong]

And today in "games so hideous they make you question the existence of a benevolent creator": Behold! (Or don't, if you want to sleep well tonight.)



How in the flaming **** did this dumpsterfire survive development in this state? Who could possibly think this was a good idea?

[Tangerine]

And today in "games so hideous they make you question the existence of a benevolent creator": Behold! (Or don't, if you want to sleep well tonight.)



How in the flaming **** did this dumpsterfire survive development in this state? Who could possibly think this was a good idea?

This was a game where you weren't allowed to say anything if you wanted to keep your job.

[Acrux]

Destruction Allstars, two *******. It tracks.

[Niggler]

And today in "games so hideous they make you question the existence of a benevolent creator": Behold! (Or don't, if you want to sleep well tonight.)



How in the flaming **** did this dumpsterfire survive development in this state? Who could possibly think this was a good idea?

Same old song. Gonna be the same old song for a long time, possibly till the end