Gaming and industries, does great success ruin everything?

[Ghogiel]

@Ghogiel

 

That makes sense to a degree (in that it makes complete sense from a cynical business standpoint while making no sense from a work-ethic standpoint), but the "buck" has to stop somewhere when it comes to such breaches of quality. If it really is the designers and the management team condoning all the corner-cutting (spurred on, no doubt, by the executive team and their desire to satisfy shareholders), common sense would seem to indicate that these individuals be replaced and the philosophy of the studio reevaluated. Or at least it would if consumers didn't reward such bad developer behavior (obviously guilty myself of this...) with unprecedented levels of sales. One potential silver lining perhaps with the mainstreaming of gaming (and the general decline in quality that this trend has ushered in) might be the mushrooming of studios, creating more genuine competition within a given gaming genre. That's why I am really excited to see, for example, what CD Projekt will do in their open-world Witcher 3--hoping that it will build upon Skyrim's flaws and force Beth to "up their game" if they desire to remain the kings (sitting all slouchy on the thrown like a Skyrim Jarl...) of open-world RPGs.

I am saying that I would not allow my team to run rampant and make s#*! that they themselves know is waaaay beyond the hardware specifications of the console hardware. Modders can do things developers simply cannot do. So using that particular mod as an example just doesn't fly in reality. The reality is there are still memory concerns and budgets must be roughly adhereed too

Edited February 19, 2013 by Ghogiel

[Vagrant0]

@Vagrant

 

That makes an enormity of sense, TBH. I suppose that it answers affirmatively the OP's original question, that once a studio gets to be a certain size and their quest for Septims begins to outstrip their desire to make the best game that they can, you get the management situation that you mention. Makes one pine for the old Blizzard approach of "it's ready when it's ready" rather than aiming for artificial marketing type launch dates of 11/11/11 and such. And if your studio doesn't have the manpower to accommodate working on a game of that size while not sacking polish... why not hire more employees. I read somewhere that Skyrim grossed one billion in sales--somehow I think Beth could have afforded to hire a couple more writing/art/quest design guys and foregone ~150k in profits. Or just use interns to identify and squash the zillions of quick-fix CK bugs mwaha.

 

Actually, I was kinda kicking the old EA strawman in regards to setting impossible deadlines and slave labor. I've ran into enough people who actually worked for EA to get an idea of how poorly setup most of that company is. One of them mentioned to me that the actual production timeline for games isn't set by the game's designer or anyone who actually knows what would go into the game, but rather the producer and a board of marketing members who decide on a date based on projected sales in relation to other EA products and known titles. The ones developing the game then have to just make it work within that time frame, in any way they can. Which is why most of their games feel so incomplete and rushed.

 

Skyrim really wasn't as rushed as you suggest. Compared to Oblivion, there weren't nearly as many things literally gutted from the game because it wasn't going to get done on time, or wasn't something they had disk space for. Most of it was just Quality Control issues, and problems that arose from the vast array of potential hardware that the game might run on or other system problems. About the only issue I ran into personally (from using the launch day patch) were a few quests that wouldn't properly advance. I never got the backwards dragon problem, nor most of the other ones that were reported. But we did end up getting mounted combat and spell finishers out of the deal, so was fine in my book. But Bethsoft has had consistent QC problems since before Shivering Isles, so at this point I mostly come into their games expecting things to occasionally go wonky. Partly why I didn't buy Dragonborn, and why I probably won't for a few months.

[sukeban]

@Ghogiel

I get what you're saying (that you can't have employees going all Game Jam-style rather than sticking to what they're supposed to do) but some things, such as this, are like basic QA. And even if we leave the realm of graphics (which, for sure, can't all be high-res due to console memory constraints) there are still things like obviously broken quests (Barenziah) and zillions of CK errors (many items not being temperable, for example) that really should just have been apparent if testers had just put more hours into the game.

So who is that the fault of: the overworked/understaffed game developers, the managers setting their deadlines/headcount, or the higher-up powers that be plotting out the overall strategy of the company? Or is it by dint of receiving loads of outside funding and having those shareholders breathing down your neck for their dividend (random fact: apparently Donald Trump's brother sits on the Zenimax board!)?

In any event, somebody said before that making games is a business rather than an art. Increasingly, that definitely seems to be the case... or at least in the case of the bigger houses. It's not exactly a controversial statement to say that the highest quality, most creative, and innovative games seem to come from smaller developers, those that Vagrant0 mentioned as being more likely to be working for themselves rather than for the enrichment of some anonymous, disinterested-in-games, Wall Street speculator looking to make a quick buck off a growth industry. Not saying that developers shouldn't get paid (they should, and handsomely... if the game is amazing), but perhaps that they should think twice before inviting in some well-heeled outsider to start calling the financial shots in their organization.

Probably fodder for a different thread (that I'm sure has been debated before), but perhaps it is true that art and commerce cannot really coexist if art must depend upon commerce to survive. Fundamentally, their interests are not the same and only one set of interests may end up carrying the day. Ideally, consumers would want the most creative, original art available, but--witness the success of Thomas Kincaid, comic book movies, and 2Chainz--it's pretty clear that's not really the case. Obviously the judgment of art is entirely an opinion, but I would advance that the ideal of art is to showcase the creativity of the artist and to demonstrate their mastery over a chosen medium (to be fair, Thomas Kincaid was pretty good at what he did...). Transposed to the game industry, you have the big houses buying up and watering down other people's IPs or else resting on their past creative laurels and hoping that nobody notices.

EDIT: Whoops, Vagrant0, just now saw your post above.

Edited February 19, 2013 by sukeban

[imperistan]

Its a big mixed bag of things thats causing the decline in media. Economics, widespread apathy in the general public, a good wholesome lack of cajones, etc etc.

 

Thing is with the gaming industry is that the gaming industry doesn't have the saving niche that the other media types do. Movies have gotten severely dumber over the years, but there are still devastatingly fantastic movies coming out that are just as successful. Books too, but great books still exist, are still bought, and indeed are still being written.

 

But with gaming, the equivalent niche is supposed to be indie gaming, but indie gaming is nowhere near the level of success its brother and sister niches are at. Where an indie game can be very well made, it will almost never reach the success of any mainstream game. This doesn't happen with movies or books or whatever else.

 

There's plenty of investors in the mainstream in gaming, but virtually none of those investors understands what a truly quality game is. Investors that know what a quality game is and will invest to bring that quality game to market are what are needed to bring indie gaming out of its indie status and more into that high-quality niche.

[Ghogiel]

@Ghogiel

 

I get what you're saying (that you can't have employees going all Game Jam-style rather than sticking to what they're supposed to do) but some things, such as this, are like basic QA. And even if we leave the realm of graphics (which, for sure, can't all be high-res due to console memory constraints) there are still things like obviously broken quests (Barenziah) and zillions of CK errors (many items not being temperable, for example) that really should just have been apparent if testers had just put more hours into the game.

 

So who is that the fault of: the overworked/understaffed game developers, the managers setting their deadlines/headcount, or the higher-up powers that be plotting out the overall strategy of the company? Or is it by dint of receiving loads of outside funding and having those shareholders breathing down your neck for their dividend (random fact: apparently Donald Trump's brother sits on the Zenimax board!)?

No one is at fault. It's like 'when is a painting finished?'

 

The testers likely had filed tickets for a lot of that. Who ever is in charge of the queque probably gave it a low rating and then it never came to the top of the queue, so was never assigned to a dev, as more important things would always be found and always be moved to the top of the queue. You don't want to dump a zillion tickets on a dev at a time, and then keep piling more, often higher priority ones on their head on a constant basis, and there WILL be constant flow of tickets to be assigned in all the departments every week.

 

Eventually you have to mearge to stable from the testing environement and you build an RC, or next milestone build number, and you cannot ever make the guy who is doing the build wait, the leads of those teams have to cut you off and just say 'well that feature/fix/update doesn't make it'. If it isn't the final build perhaps next build it makes it. If it is, it's out.

 

As for that image, yeah it's a bodge job there, I can think of several senarios how that could have come to be. And the most likely one is that the amount of changes to the town and the way it was whiteboxed and then finalised over time allowed things like that to happen, and then the ticket was so low priority or no one complained because they were all playing it on the xbox in 720 lol