How do some developers not notice when they are making a bad game
Angry Hillbilly 2
Join Date: 2012-03-31 Member: 149741Members
Join Date: 2012-03-31 Member: 149741Members
<div class="IPBDescription">NOT pointed towards UWE devs</div>Everywhere you go theres good quality and bad quality stuff. Good films. Bad films. Tasty food. Crap food. So on and so forth. But usually (although definatly not always. Transformers 2 being a perfect example) the quality can come down to budget, time and experiance. And then other times which is the thing ive noticed with games more recently with the big title makers it just seems out of damn right lazyness (such as with astonishingly poor consle ports).
After watching the review of Res Evil Operation Racoon City i just couldnt help thinking do developers even notice if they game they are making is bad? How come a developer can have all the tools, money and manpower in the world at its disposal (such as EA, Relic, Nintendo..etc) and yet produce such poor quality merchandise at the cost of millions of pounds. Does no one ever say during the process "this idea is rubbish" or "why are we doing this when it clearly breaks the game".
And yet (with more recently showing full force) indie developers with the smallest budget, team and everything in the world against them are able to groudbreaking material (such as Amnesia Dark Decent, Lone Surviour, Machinarium and hell might as well boost the devs egos a bit NS2 :P haha)
So i thought I might as well get answers the way Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World, straight from the horse's mouth. Do you notice when you are making a bad product (thinking the sense of any experiance from other studios). Does it in the end come down to bad management and politics where people just whack down the code and not care (which could end up with Poor AI, game breaking bugs) or is it something more subtle in the development process that causes everything to go up in the air and down the river without a paddle?
edit: took the liberty of editing the thread title/description
After watching the review of Res Evil Operation Racoon City i just couldnt help thinking do developers even notice if they game they are making is bad? How come a developer can have all the tools, money and manpower in the world at its disposal (such as EA, Relic, Nintendo..etc) and yet produce such poor quality merchandise at the cost of millions of pounds. Does no one ever say during the process "this idea is rubbish" or "why are we doing this when it clearly breaks the game".
And yet (with more recently showing full force) indie developers with the smallest budget, team and everything in the world against them are able to groudbreaking material (such as Amnesia Dark Decent, Lone Surviour, Machinarium and hell might as well boost the devs egos a bit NS2 :P haha)
So i thought I might as well get answers the way Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World, straight from the horse's mouth. Do you notice when you are making a bad product (thinking the sense of any experiance from other studios). Does it in the end come down to bad management and politics where people just whack down the code and not care (which could end up with Poor AI, game breaking bugs) or is it something more subtle in the development process that causes everything to go up in the air and down the river without a paddle?
edit: took the liberty of editing the thread title/description
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
With games like Amnesia they really have to focus on the unique selling point. People don't play the game and think it sucks you cant do acrobatics or use lasers or whatever.
It's also tempting to think 'we want to appeal to a wide audience - therefore we can't be too unique'. If something has its own character and identity people will be drawn to it and want to share it.
One project I worked on a while ago, the first version was the simplest and I thought it should have more action, special effects and be flashier. Now years later I enjoy the first one more than the sequals; the core experience was stronger because it wasn't lost among all the new features.
If I was advising someone making a sequel, I would get them to list everything that made their first project special, and then see if what they want to do in the sequel adds or detracts from those special points of the original.
1) Large studios. The larger a group of professionals gets, strict management layouts need to be created to compensate for the diverse skill and knowledge sets. These traditional management hierarchies tend to stifle creativity, reduces importance of low-level grunt work being done to a high standard (preferring to reach deadlines as part of product lifecycle) and low-level staff having no input in how poorly a product is shaping.
Small studios, and studios with very fluid structures (like Valve) do not have this.
2) Super-publishers owning the developer. Publishers exist to make money, producing a quality product is just a by-product of their attempt to generate income. EA, Ubisoft and Activision are large examples of this. The studios they take over are given strict deadlines, until the goodwill of past titles wears away as fans realise that priorities have changed.
Studios that remain independent of their publishers are less affected by this. Or ones that have no publisher at all (see CCP, Valve and CDProjeckt).
3) Lack of persistence in vision. This can happen a few ways. Sometimes too many writers/designers, sometimes listening too closely to fan desires (after all, fans are generally writing with emotion - they know something is wrong, just not what). However if a product has been written with many writers and shifts to one, the product can also take a nosedive in complexity and depth. No one has perfect scope or vision, and having a few people looking and contributing finds alot of the faults and builds ideas.
Whats the point of this topic btw?
A neutral game is one that breaks even.
You get varying degrees of good as the profit made increases.
There is no other measure.
A neutral game is one that breaks even.
You get varying degrees of good as the profit made increases.
There is no other measure.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So that means that Duke Nukem Forever was actually a good game then?
It's becoming less and less appealing to point out a hole in someone else's argument online
Obviously if a game is free <i>(no profit)</i> it has a chance to be still be good in the minds of some users, but to someone trying to actually make a profit they still won't see it this way no matter what you do
What makes me laugh though is thinking about someone with that mind set looking at a quality free game and saying to themselves "This could of been good"
<i>When it obviously already is. . .</i>
-
What people are willing to pay for, on the other hand, says far more.
What people are willing to pay for, on the other hand, says far more.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sooooo... how does NS1 fit into your scale then? :)
What people are willing to pay for, on the other hand, says far more.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So XXXX/Victoria Bitter/Whateveryourcountriesstandardisforcheapmainstreambeer is <i>better</i> than non mass produced cheap crap because it sells more?
It often comes down to brand awareness from ridiculously expensive ongoing marketing efforts rather than the subjective quality of the product itself.
Edit: By your metric, the following games are all <i>bad</i>: Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, E.T.
It often comes down to brand awareness from ridiculously expensive ongoing marketing efforts rather than the subjective quality of the product itself.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
High marketability is just another word for good.
I agree its not a nice way to rate games, but there is no better way.
High marketability!= More money was spent marketing this game than developing it(See- most AAA games now).
After watching the review of Res Evil Operation Racoon City i just couldnt help thinking do developers even notice if they game they are making is bad? How come a developer can have all the tools, money and manpower in the world at its disposal (such as EA, Relic, Nintendo..etc) and yet produce such poor quality merchandise at the cost of millions of pounds. Does no one ever say during the process "this idea is rubbish" or "why are we doing this when it clearly breaks the game".
And yet (with more recently showing full force) indie developers with the smallest budget, team and everything in the world against them are able to groudbreaking material (such as Amnesia Dark Decent, Lone Surviour, Machinarium and hell might as well boost the devs egos a bit NS2 :P haha)
So i thought I might as well get answers the way Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World, straight from the horse's mouth. Do you notice when you are making a bad product (thinking the sense of any experiance from other studios). Does it in the end come down to bad management and politics where people just whack down the code and not care (which could end up with Poor AI, game breaking bugs) or is it something more subtle in the development process that causes everything to go up in the air and down the river without a paddle?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think the answer is more obvious than some posts here suggest...
To make a large profit today you need to make an <i>accessible</i> *caugh*dumbed-down game.
Why?
Because the large masses are too dumb to care about something complex. It takes too much time. It's beyond attention span. IT'S HARD!
So today all games basically hold your hand through the whole ordeal, and if you hurt yourself anyway, then "hide behind a rock and suck on your thumb" (-yahtzee) and you're magically good to go in a few secs.
-It's basically arcade nowadays!
UWE have mentioned several times they have plans on bringing NS2 to XBOX - durrr! Although they said it like it's a very far out "maybe-plan". I think, unofficially it's more important than the PC platform for them, they just need the PC audience to get started...
So THIS is my only explanation to why they from the very ground and up during the making of NS2 take design decisions that deviate from the complex roots of PC-gaming (ns1) and goes TOWARDS the dumbed-down nature of the console audience!
That's one piece of the puzzle.
The second piece, and to answer OP: <u><b>we who are dissatisfied with NS2 currently, are PC-gamers, not retard-console-kiddies!</b></u>
--Scythe--
Same thing happens in the record industry. They offer marketing dollars to help promote the projects to get a piece of the pie. With the internet being a free marketing tool that's why you see a lot of companies stick more towards the indie route. Which typically ends up with them over spending and under delivering because they become two close to the project and any real goals go out the window.
So to try and save face they sell a ridiculous amount of points on their project to a company like EA, who then uses their misfortunes to their advantage. EA invests some money into marketing and packaging but if the game fails than its okay because it's EA and your just an indie company who now owes EA the money you were suppose to make on the sales of your game.
In the industry we call it the vicious circle.
Same thing happens in the record industry. They offer marketing dollars to help promote the projects to get a piece of the pie. With the internet being a free marketing tool that's why you see a lot of companies stick more towards the indie route. Which typically ends up with them over spending and under delivering because they become two close to the project and any real goals go out the window.
So to try and save face they sell a ridiculous amount of points on their project to a company like EA, who then uses their misfortunes to their advantage. EA invests some money into marketing and packaging but if the game fails than its okay because it's EA and your just an indie company who now owes EA the money you were suppose to make on the sales of your game.
In the industry we call it the vicious circle.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
are you kidding? you think EA passively hands out funds and handles the marketing?
they dictate the ###### out of everything according to what they themselves think will make the most money!
any developers under EA are EA's employees.
I think that is the key point to remember.
Bad games happen generally because people have too much invested in the game. Now, this can be Money, where it's "Ship or don't eat", or "XYZ Large corp says we have used our budget, we now must ship". It can also be time and love, which is what DrFuzzy was aiming at, after pouring XYZ number of hours into something, it is very hard to objectively sit back and go "wow, this is crap".
I find this thread kind of amusing as it's basically polarized itself in to "profit == only way of judging 'good'" and "If it isn't a classic wonderful game, it's bad". Obviously neither of these can be correct, as we can pull up examples that clearly break both molds.
I find the idea that quality can only be measured in profitability to be foolish. Simply redefining quality to profitability is short sighted and inherently flawed. You have free products that are wonderful (Cave Story, NS 1, Dorf Forts, etc), and objectively bad games that make large amounts of profit (That dino game that just came out and was broken, DNF, etc). Now, obviously a company like EA, Activision, etc DO define a good game to be a profitable one, however they also fully understand the non-monetary values of success. If they move a million units of a terrible game, they can't turn around and move a million more of it's sequel, people will learn "well, that franchise sucks, I'm done with it". So even there, simply renaming profitable to good obviously doesn't work.
The flip side is that just because WE don't like a game doesn't mean it's bad, an example:
Farmville.
It's objectively a bad game. There are no goals, at best it's a sandbox game, however the strict limitations it puts on it's users severely limits the creativity they can express in any reasonable amount of time.
However, there is a very large crowd of people that play it. Why? Well, it's easy to bush it off as "Their sheeple and will just play whatever you tell them to, they don't know what a good game is", and that is just as ignorant and foolish as some one saying "Well, it makes millions of dollars for zynga, it HAS to be good!". If you step back and view it a bit more objectively you can see how it qualifies as a good game:
1) It has a target audience, bored non-gamers with a lot of spare time on their hands.
2) It appeals to said audience, they enjoy the sense of accomplishment they get from keeping their farm healthy, racking up coins, and slowly expanding their farm. Each step is a milestone for them with quasi tangible rewards (their coin counter goes up, their farm is bigger, the lay out is 'nicer', etc).
Now, this doesn't make it a great game (I already listed it's obvious failings), it defiantly makes it a successful game (Zynga rakes in the money), so, it falls some where on the scale of a good game though, right?
Ultimately, my point is that if we want to judge the worth of anything we have to either step back and attempt to objectively view it from a more neutral stand point, or qualify our arguments a bit better.
You can't simply say "NS1 was a terrible game, it made no money", though you could say "NS1 was not fiscally a good game", however, even there some one else can say "I disagree, NS1 WAS a good game fiscally. Flayra invested a good portion of his savings, allowing him to retain total creative control over NS1, creating a very solid product. Because of the success of NS1 UWE was able to secure angel investors as well as preorders for NS2, trading on the brand name of NS and UWE to alow them to create a more advanced game, that required more resources than were initially available to Flayra".
meh
</rant>
The people who decide what product to make do not care a crap about what the consumers really enjoy. Investors actually probably don't even enjoy art at all. When Resident Evil 1 was successfull, the chances are high that consumers will pay for Resident Evil 2. When they paid, it is not important if they enjoyed it. Then RE 3 comes, consumers still say 'Ok, RE 1 was so cool, maybe the programmers will go back to the roots'. No they won't, because they probably don't even think it is senseful to make RE 4, so they aren't that creative anymore. Then RE 5 comes, the programmers and artist, who are probably not the same as for RE1, look onto the game market and steal everything that may be liked by customers from other games.
Investors only want to sell games at christmas to children who beg their parents to buy it, because there are zombies in the game.
Remember when you were 12-14? Did you really buy games because they were classics or did you play any game? Well I played any game back then. And I paid for it.
The problem with innovative games is, that most consumers are too lazy to use their brain, in any art you can think of. 10 Years ago I thought 'Dammit, the Bands I listen to are so creative and innovative, why are they so poor and this crap in the radio sells'. The years after that I learned that out of 50 people maybe 3 know what I mean. The rest just doesn't care. The rest maybe sais 'wow, his shirt sucks' or 'haha, his car has only 60 HP' or whatever they are experts in.
TL:DR: It is not important if devs recognize the quality of their games. No one cares, because their company hates them and they hate their company.
To make a large profit today you need to make an <i>accessible</i> *caugh*dumbed-down game.
Why?
Because the large masses are too dumb to care about something complex. It takes too much time. It's beyond attention span. IT'S HARD!
So today all games basically hold your hand through the whole ordeal, and if you hurt yourself anyway, then "hide behind a rock and suck on your thumb" (-yahtzee) and you're magically good to go in a few secs.
-It's basically arcade nowadays!
UWE have mentioned several times they have plans on bringing NS2 to XBOX - durrr! Although they said it like it's a very far out "maybe-plan". I think, unofficially it's more important than the PC platform for them, they just need the PC audience to get started...
So THIS is my only explanation to why they from the very ground and up during the making of NS2 take design decisions that deviate from the complex roots of PC-gaming (ns1) and goes TOWARDS the dumbed-down nature of the console audience!
That's one piece of the puzzle.
The second piece, and to answer OP: <u><b>we who are dissatisfied with NS2 currently, are PC-gamers, not retard-console-kiddies!</b></u><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I hear ya =) it is sad but this is what is happening.
1. This is a PC game, not an XBOX game. We are not writing it, or designing it, with consoles in mind at all. However, no matter how much you 'PC Master Race' it up, there are millions of people out there who will never experience NS because it is PC only. One day, in our dreams, we would love to bring the NS experience to XBOX, so more people can share the thrills and spills that are unique to it. On that day, a PC game will be shoehorned into a console <i>after</i> being written for PC. Not the other way round.
2. Some developers may have issues with investors. UWE is not one of them. This game is being designed totally in house, with no outside influence whatsoever except for the community.
3. Developers will not always love their product. Sometimes, they aren't happy with it and all. But they work on it because it is their job. Luckily, we here at UWE do not have that problem. Everyone is here because we want to be here. Because we love NS, we love Spark, we love pushing boundaries. We lunch together every day, we play the game together every day, we discuss A-Z of the game together every day.
4. Putting in tutorials, tooltips, banner hints and training modes is not dumbing a game down. It is making it more accessible. The two are not symbiotic. If you don't like the idea of more people being able to share the experience you are having, then you are trying to be the king of the sandpit. You are welcome to your sandpit. This game wants to touch hundreds of thousands of people, not become a clique for a knowledgeable few.
5. NS is not about money. If everyone on this team had coldly calculated 'how can we make the most money in our lives?' this office would be empty. It is a labour of love, that slips under the radar of critics, that excites those that come across it, that builds bit by bit every day, against all odds.
Now this may be a futile request, but there is no shame in asking. Developers read these forums, and we have feelings. Posting frivolous opinions that run completely counter to fact is hurtful. If you want us to stay here, in these forums, and continue to talk to you as fellow Frontiersman and Kharaa, you need to be welcoming. You need to think before you post.
Love,
Strayan
<b>Putting in tutorials, tooltips, banner hints and training modes</b> is not dumbing a game down. It is making it more accessible. The two are not symbiotic.
...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hugh, if you're referring to my post here, I have no idea what you got this from.
Not trying to be disrespectful here, but you stated you didn't know NS1 - play it, familiarize with it, learn it, and you'll see how I couldn't possibly meant that. And you're going to understand my, and many other community members' disappointment with NS2 much better!
Do casts about it too! :D some oldschool input into the community!)
I don't think there's any point arguing about anything further until you know NS1...
With NS2, UWE have the opportunity to make the learning curve less and give helpful hints to new players. As long as they don't interfere with gameplay, that should be encouraged. We dont want tto play with the same people we've been playing with for 10 years. We want new skilled players to take up the game.
1. This is a PC game, not an XBOX game. We are not writing it, or designing it, with consoles in mind at all. However, no matter how much you 'PC Master Race' it up, there are millions of people out there who will never experience NS because it is PC only. One day, in our dreams, we would love to bring the NS experience to XBOX, so more people can share the thrills and spills that are unique to it. On that day, a PC game will be shoehorned into a console <i>after</i> being written for PC. Not the other way round.
2. Some developers may have issues with investors. UWE is not one of them. This game is being designed totally in house, with no outside influence whatsoever except for the community.
3. Developers will not always love their product. Sometimes, they aren't happy with it and all. But they work on it because it is their job. Luckily, we here at UWE do not have that problem. Everyone is here because we want to be here. Because we love NS, we love Spark, we love pushing boundaries. We lunch together every day, we play the game together every day, we discuss A-Z of the game together every day.
4. Putting in tutorials, tooltips, banner hints and training modes is not dumbing a game down. It is making it more accessible. The two are not symbiotic. If you don't like the idea of more people being able to share the experience you are having, then you are trying to be the king of the sandpit. You are welcome to your sandpit. This game wants to touch hundreds of thousands of people, not become a clique for a knowledgeable few.
5. NS is not about money. If everyone on this team had coldly calculated 'how can we make the most money in our lives?' this office would be empty. It is a labour of love, that slips under the radar of critics, that excites those that come across it, that builds bit by bit every day, against all odds.
Now this may be a futile request, but there is no shame in asking. Developers read these forums, and we have feelings. Posting frivolous opinions that run completely counter to fact is hurtful. If you want us to stay here, in these forums, and continue to talk to you as fellow Frontiersman and Kharaa, you need to be welcoming. You need to think before you post.
Love,
Strayan<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sry man (and the other devs at UWE) for the thread turning into a insane rant... my original reason was just was just a plain question about games in general not a rant at NS2 or UWE (hence the tag... ¬¬)
The NS2 developers/community relationship is intense!
Keep up the good work folks, your game is good, bound to be excellent.
As for this thread, I'm closing it.