Chronicling the inability of gamedevs to make video games

[rusty_shackleford]

Steam's hands-off approach to early access was a mistake. I'm fine with them not curating published content, but they really should be curating early access content. I don't mean in the sense of the quality of the game itself, but the state of the product and its development. No obvious early alphas, require communication from the devs with customers, make it blatantly clear when purchasing the game the last time it received an update, and so forth.

Being able to release a product and not have to feel the full brunt of expectations & feedback should be a privilege. How many other industries let you release an unfinished product to solicit feedback from paying customers? I guess the pharmacy industry, but they don't even solicit feedback.

[somerandomdude]

Opening up early access in very late beta is how it should be done, IMO. Early access alpha should be totally scrapped. Early access should be a game that is mostly complete, that needs some finishing touches. No more 5 year games in early access. Early access should be like 1 year tops.

[rusty_shackleford]

Ark 2 delayed for another 1½ years, devs are however continuing with their plan to shut-off Ark servers and anyone who wishes to continue playing Ark will be forced to pre-order Ark 2 that may or may not be available sometime in 2024 to get access to the Ark "remaster". Yes, it's as ridiculous as it reads.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/ ... -remaster/

BONUS POINTS: They originally stated Ark's remaster would be free. Here's one of the owners(?) of the studio stating it will be free:

[MadPreacher]

Ark 2 delayed for another 1½ years, devs are however continuing with their plan to shut-off Ark servers and anyone who wishes to continue playing Ark will be forced to pre-order Ark 2 that may or may not be available sometime in 2024 to get access to the Ark "remaster". Yes, it's as ridiculous as it reads.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/ ... -remaster/

BONUS POINTS: They originally stated Ark's remaster would be free. Here's one of the owners(?) of the studio stating it will be free:

From what I understand is that private servers won't be affected, but we'll see. Ark has one of the more toxic communities out there.

[Fargus]

Behold Strong ****** Woman!.

Protago is customizable, also in CGI trailer masked guy saved her worthless ***. Just saying. The game probably will be trash, seems like run of the mill low effort action "rpg" (or another souls like?) with ok visuals and bland design.

[Tweed]

Valve really doesn't give two shits about what gets sold on Steam as long as it doesn't put them in legal trouble or you don't threaten fatty Gaben's life. Dead games, unfinished garbage, porn, they make money so what does it matter to them.

[wndrbr]

https://www.pcgamer.com/were-running-at ... dget-rpgs/

During an RPG designer roundtable organized by PC Gamer, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko and other veterans talk about the "staggering" complexity of triple-A games.

"Everyone actually, after reading this article, said: we mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a ******* wall, I think, and we're gonna crash on that wall really soon."

Sasko's comments above kicked off a discussion on the technology behind today's big-budget games and the expectations players have for them. The "wall" Sasko referred to is the ballooning complexity and expense of making games like Cyberpunk 2077.

Am I incompetent?
No, it's the games that are too complex.

[wndrbr]

"Witcher 3 has so many ******* tricks," Sasko said, explaining one in particular—the way it would often cut to black to stage scenes or transition between bits of a quest, letting the developers spawn or despawn objects, and change the weather or time of day. "Sometimes there's a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he's like, submerged waist-up to the terrain because we didn't have animation. So he's just sitting there. But he looks perfectly fine in that scene, and it looks like he actually matches and everything works.

"Then you look at Cyberpunk. No cuts, no black screens, you're 'in' V all the time. Staging is in-person. It got so incredibly more expensive to generate branches. Adding branches to Witcher 3 was so easy in comparison to Cyberpunk. This article really sparked that discussion."

Todd's games allow both first- and third-person perspectives, and they are chock full of goofy trickery.

Basically, those CDPR ******* suffer because they want their games to look like blockbuster movies. Should've just sticked to their original plan of having third-person cutscenes.

[rusty_shackleford]

Reads more like they lost their bioware CDPR magic, and are trying to blame anything except the lack of ability of the people actually making the game.
Pawel Sasko was simply a quest designer on Witcher 3, was a 'quest director' on Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR was hemorrhaging with that turnover.

[KnightoftheWind]

He's not exaggerating the complexity of AAA games, I can't imagine how difficult they must be to develop nowadays. Each console generation's development requirements is probably 10x more complicated than the last, requiring ever-increasing amounts of high detail assets, animations, physics, code, and all of that has to be crafted by hundreds of diversity hire artists and programmers working with equally bloated game engines on a bloated Windows 10/11 operating system. Games aren't even developed by just one studio anymore, now much of the work is farmed out to a dozen other companies just to meet deadlines.

AA games are definitely getting better in terms of visual quality despite all this, but they aren't developing massive open world RPGs with numerous game mechanics working in tandem. You'll never really see an indie or AA version of Cyberpunk 2077. It requires a lot of talent, money, and time to pull off, and unfortunately for CD Projekt they didn't have the talent.

[Segata]

[rusty_shackleford]

The "ship and patch it" mindset has completely rotted their brains. Soyer went berserk on someone pointing out how ridiculous it is, no other medium gets such leeway to fix a broken product. But it's ******* true. You don't see failed TV shows rewriting & replacing bad episodes, they have to live with that ****. Gamedevs ship a bad product and tell their customers "ah, guess I'll fix it maybe later sorry thanks for the money"

Patches have been a disaster for video games.

[KnightoftheWind]

Every single new AAA release, EVERY SINGLE ONE, has shipped with a boatload of issues. Some of them even game-breaking. And every single time, EVERY SINGLE TIME, the developer or publisher releases an "apology" claiming they'll do their heckin' BEST to fix it.

If they actually cared, they wouldn't release the game at all until it was 100% playable from start-to-finish with all the features and optimizations people expect. The absolute state of gaming right here.

[rusty_shackleford]

If they actually cared, they wouldn't release the game at all until it was 100% playable from start-to-finish with all the features and optimizations people expect.

Then it would never be released.

This is 4 years of work on a game that is essentially just more levels for an existing game, a big expansion pack. They weren't being rushed, the management had to come in and drag the corpse out the door just to finally release the product.

[KnightoftheWind]

If they actually cared, they wouldn't release the game at all until it was 100% playable from start-to-finish with all the features and optimizations people expect.

Then it would never be released.

This is 4 years of work on a game that is essentially just more levels for an existing game, a big expansion pack. They weren't being rushed, the management had to come in and drag the corpse out the door just to finally release the product.

Then it's the job of management to ensure timelines are met, and that the right people are selected for each position. Of course, it's 2023 in clown world so that's a tall order, which is why they deserve to fail. A subpar product should equal a subpar return.

The issue is that gaming is so large nowadays, that a critical mass of 70 IQ Somalian gamers are enough to ensure a crap product is successful for the company. They know enough people will buy their stuff regardless, so they refuse to change. Best thing to do is forget about AAA releases, they aren't worth the Cheetos-stained keyboards they're programmed on.

[rusty_shackleford]

Then it's the job of management to ensure timelines are met,

Best managers in the world can't make fish fly. We all know what the issue is, and you aren't allowed to discipline or fire them without being sued.

[J1M]

If they actually cared, they wouldn't release the game at all until it was 100% playable from start-to-finish with all the features and optimizations people expect.

Then it would never be released.

This is 4 years of work on a game that is essentially just more levels for an existing game, a big expansion pack. They weren't being rushed, the management had to come in and drag the corpse out the door just to finally release the product.

Should have been a slam dunk with only two years of development. Using Unreal they don't even have to train new employees on tooling.

[J1M]

Apparently both the creation of pixel shaders and photoshop filters are now lost technology.

[ds.]

That's more creative than most game devs actually. Sure, theoretically you can get the same result digitally but art often benefits from the limitations of the medium and this is one heck of a self-imposed limitation.

[J1M]

Watch the gameplay video. If you told me the embroidery gimmick was just a marketing angle and they didn't bother doing it for more than one character I would believe it instantly. Nothing interesting or particularly rustic resulted from the process. It looks exactly as it would if you applied a Photoshop filter to sprites and didn't care about consistency between frames.

[rusty_shackleford]

What did they mean by this?

[Fargus]

Just mincing words at this point.

[MadPreacher]

Just mincing words at this point.

It's a word salad of buzz words that emphatically tell you that the entire team are diversity hires (not in a good way) and they lack any creativity.

[Segata]

3 years development time is now "record time"

[KnightoftheWind]

Watch the gameplay video. If you told me the embroidery gimmick was just a marketing angle and they didn't bother doing it for more than one character I would believe it instantly. Nothing interesting or particularly rustic resulted from the process. It looks exactly as it would if you applied a Photoshop filter to sprites and didn't care about consistency between frames.

I couldn't even tell it was embroidered, it just looks like hand drawn animation to me. I can tell they're trying to follow in Cuphead's lead, but with the game it was warranted and the end result speaks for itself. This?, nah.

[rusty_shackleford]

3 years development time is now "record time"

For what is essentially a large expansion pack for an existing game.

[KnightoftheWind]

3 years and the PC port is complete dogshit, what a complete joke. There is no other industry I can think of, besides used cars, that actively profits from selling their customers a broken product. I mean at least Steam has a refund policy so they don't make 'that' much money I guess, but it just goes to show how bad things have gotten. Anti-white diversity hires and blue-haired karens producing barely functioning games for the people they despise, and charging $70+ for it.

[Fargus]

AAA development is a gift that keeps on giving. Soon even 10 years won't be enough to release something that ******* works from the get go. And the price will be like 150-200$ for a live service full of mtx or a 2-5 hour open world game, because "making games is getting too expensive duh". This is funny as ****.

[Tweed]

Let's pray for a new crash.

[J1M]

3 years development time is now "record time"

TLDR: Schrier is trying to save his friend's (congregation member's?) job after they shipped 18 months late.

The position of the article is that no other AAA game was started Fall 2019 or later and came out before Jedi 2. The claim is that working during the pandemic was novel enough to call 42 months a record.

I don't pay enough attention to AAA games to provide counterexamples, but I assume there are multiple. This team had the advantages of a completed engine and tools, a hired and trained team, existing art assets, and the entire star wars expanded universe to pull ideas from. Any other sequel or remake would be a fair comparison.

My opinion? Until it runs at 60 FPS or higher on a 3070, the game isn't really done. The clock is still running.