For Game Devs: What’s it like inside a studio after your title has been critically slammed?

Not every product is going to be a smash hit. You're only as good as your next game. Fallout 76 will make them money, and just because it's popular to dislike it right now, who knows how the general public will feel about the game in six months, or a year, or two years.

I'm not a dev, but there seems a common thread of having to be able to keep your head above water in a sea of internet-fueled hyperbole and vitriol while accepting some of the more informative bits of criticism.

Only been around lukewarm receptions, but besides the gossip and slight atmosphere of worry about the stability of the studio, everyone kept to their jobs and proceeded with all the post launch support. It's a job at the end of the day, you don't take it to personally.

Alright, I'll post the Robot Chicken Pluto Nash bit.



On a more serious note, It would be interesting to hear, but I imagine most of the time the team did everything they could to make the best game they could, and they more got screwed over by higher-ups making ludicrious decisions that the team can't make.

I imagine the recent Telltale Employee stories are the closest you are going to get for your answer.

Not in the game industry but I've worked on huge IT refresh projects. New phones, new circuits, WiFi, standardized dialing across multiple states, it was a massive undertaking and even brought some older sites up to new levels of technology, convenience and faster network speeds.

It took over three years from start to finish with a lot of travel. Got nothing but complaints the whole way even though the project went really smooth in the implementation phase. Afterwards, more complaining and no thank you for all the traveling during the holidays and hard work from management just complaining.

I know it isn't the same thing but it was so demoralizing at first then feeling resentment. I was pissed for awhile.

I can imagine the developers emotions after years of working on a project only for you to read tons of negative feedback and whatever threats you may receive. Especially if you are just artist #34 doing your job and not having any real direct impact on how the game produced or marketed.

(I probably got a bit self indulgent)

Either it's business as usual, as you're onto the next project (or DLC), or you are looking for a new job becuase you got layed off because the big publisher cuts funding to your studio... (only happened to me twice ha ha... )

But either way, you're hitting F5 all day long hoping that some good reviews start flowing and bring up your metacritic score (it never happens, it only ever goes down....)

But truth be told, developers aren't dumb, they know ahead of time where abouts they will land, and even if they didn't personally, the publishers will often have the early code "reviewed" by private review firms to get a sense of the estimated meta critic score, which ultimately gets passed down to you and affects you before release by way of budgets (icluding marketing) and scheduling for the completion of the game. Yay videogames!

Would love to hear from someone who worked on Lawbreakers. That had to be a really shitty time.

Depends if you sell enough to get your bonus or not. If not, then that can cause some major issues...

Also really depends on your role.
Big studios everything is so compartmentalized, there's sometimes a strong diffusion of responsibility. So it's not like itts any one persons "fault" especially if you spent a year making armor, and a reviewer says "the game is great armor" - you're alright.

A producer may get fired

While I've not worked in the game industry, I've seen and been a part of projects and productions in both work and theater that I/we knew were bad and were gonna get slammed. You accept the criticism, learn from the mistakes along the way, and try to do better next time. Obviously my experiences weren't fueled by fanboy/gamer outrage so I dunno how that could have negatively impacted my response.

Pagusas said:

Only been around lukewarm receptions, but besides the gossip and slight atmosphere of worry about the stability of the studio, everyone kept to their jobs and proceeded with all the post launch support. It's a job at the end of the day, you don't take it to personally.

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This.

x

I've seen folks on reddit trash talking something specific that I put in our game. Feels bad. Even though I am personally pretty anonymous, it's strange having your professional successes and failures on full display to millions of people who consume what you make. Thankfully, we were able to patch it and improve.

Not a game developer but a former software developer and currently a project manager... When something you ship doesn't fly, naturally you feel disappointed but some of those failures are goldmines for going back to the drawing board and addressing things that you may have skipped. It's always revelatory when you are humbled. For me and my team, the priority was improvement over personal embarrassment. Hated for a few weeks but heroes for years if the hate is handled correctly.

I briefly worked at Bartlet Jones, a couple months after Drawn to Death shipped. From what I recall, most folks by that point were pretty accepting of the game's critical reception. It definitely informed some of the decision making for the next game.

It's like any failure in any line of work. You use it as a learning tool to improve what you do next and avoid the same mistakes.

Companies which fall aren't those which make mistakes, but those which do not learn from their mistakes.

I feel for the folks at Bethesda who have to slog through a bunch of Fallout 76 updates.

I think deep down you always know if and why your game will be poorly received. We're all gamers too... and if we have no pleasure in playing our games during the late QA debug stages, we know our players won't enjoy it either. It happened a few times in my career, as a Level Artist on Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 for example. We knew the direction the game was taking, but we were just artists or programmers with no power to influence the game's direction. Lots of us left before completion, even more were fired at launch. It's always the same pattern:

• The mood at work is terrible, layoffs are frequent, direction is angry and managers are on the edge.
• Directors and leads are always on the hunt for "quick wins" that never deliver or cause more issues immediately after implementation.
• Sometimes it's like a trainwreck where nothing ever worked in the first place, sometimes it's a house of cards where the last few elements ruin the entire design.
• Some other times it's a lingering feeling during the whole production: some elements are pushed before others, you feel like the project is an upside-down pyramid where the core is not solid at all and you keep building upon it.

But you know, most of the time the game is actually cancelled before release because there's a reputation on the line for everybody involved... I feel like for all the terrible games out there we have been saved of many others.
If you have specific questions I'd be happy to answer!

JaeCryo said:

I'm not a dev, but there seems a common thread of having to be able to keep your head above water in a sea of internet-fueled hyperbole and vitriol while accepting some of the more informative bits of criticism.

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Yeah. I remember feeling really bad for the devs after watching Jim Sterling hit hyperbole after hyperbole in his 'We Happy Few' review.

I think sometimes the internet goes overboard in the savagery of their criticism. Especially when it comes to the smaller devs.

For something to be absolutely panned you are going to know it is coming. I once worked in a studio as QA that released a really bad game which I worked on for a whole day and the reaction to it was exactly what I expected.

I'm not a developer, but I do imagine that developers know long before we do that the game isn't shaping up very well. I mean, they're the ones spending hundreds (thousands?) of hours in QA in the months leading up to launch. They'd know if something's about to get a critical mauling. It's probably almost never a surprise. Must be a pretty shitty atmosphere to have to come in to every morning.

joesiv said:

Either it's business as usual, as you're onto the next project (or DLC), or you are looking for a new job becuase you got layed off because the big publisher cuts funding to your studio... (only happened to me twice ha ha... )

But either way, you're hitting F5 all day long hoping that some good reviews start flowing and bring up your metacritic score (it never happens, it only ever goes down....)

But truth be told, developers aren't dumb, they know ahead of time where abouts they will land, and even if they didn't personally, the publishers will often have the early code "reviewed" by private review firms to get a sense of the estimated meta critic score, which ultimately gets passed down to you and affects you before release by way of budgets (icluding marketing) and scheduling for the completion of the game. Yay videogames!

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I would hope that management takes a lump of the responsibility for the decision making process and what they set-out to make the development team go through and end-up with.

First rule of the internet: don't read the comments section.

But honestly, it mostly depends on what it gets slammed for and by who. There's subjective and objective critiques, for the latter it's most likely expected. For the former, what can you do. And there are definitely some opinions that matter more than others when they come.

I worked in game dev for 6 years. We turned out a few turds. As a play tester, we knew they were turds. And there was only so much in which you could polish them up.

The thing with devs is that we had some designers who never grew up playing the greatest games. If you don't know what a 10/10 game is, then how can you hope to make or design one?

Praglik said:

I think deep down you always know if and why your game will be poorly received. We're all gamers too... and if we have no pleasure in playing our games during the late QA debug stages, we know our players won't enjoy it either. It happened a few times in my career, as a Level Artist on Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 for example. We knew the direction the game was taking, but we were just artists or programmers with no power to influence the game's direction. Lots of us left before completion, even more were fired at launch. It's always the same pattern:

• The mood at work is terrible, layoffs are frequent, direction is angry and managers are on the edge.
• Directors and leads are always on the hunt for "quick wins" that never deliver or cause more issues immediately after implementation.
• Sometimes it's like a trainwreck where nothing ever worked in the first place, sometimes it's a house of cards where the last few elements ruin the entire design.
• Some other times it's a lingering feeling during the whole production: some elements are pushed before others, you feel like the project is an upside-down pyramid where the core is not solid at all and you keep building upon it.

But you know, most of the time the game is actually cancelled before release because there's a reputation on the line for everybody involved... I feel like for all the terrible games out there we have been saved of many others.
If you have specific questions I'd be happy to answer!

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This part is interesting to me. As a level designer, I would think you would know your craft. Are you able to tell when you're making a "bad" game? Like you know that the metacritic score isn't going to be very good?

And the thing is that you don't have any control over the type of game you make sometimes. I would imagine that higher up execs would want you to add x mechanic, and you know that particular thing doesn't fit the game but you do it anyway because you have to.

Praglik said:

I think deep down you always know if and why your game will be poorly received. We're all gamers too... and if we have no pleasure in playing our games during the late QA debug stages, we know our players won't enjoy it either. It happened a few times in my career, as a Level Artist on Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 for example. We knew the direction the game was taking, but we were just artists or programmers with no power to influence the game's direction. Lots of us left before completion, even more were fired at launch. It's always the same pattern:

• The mood at work is terrible, layoffs are frequent, direction is angry and managers are on the edge.
• Directors and leads are always on the hunt for "quick wins" that never deliver or cause more issues immediately after implementation.
• Sometimes it's like a trainwreck where nothing ever worked in the first place, sometimes it's a house of cards where the last few elements ruin the entire design.
• Some other times it's a lingering feeling during the whole production: some elements are pushed before others, you feel like the project is an upside-down pyramid where the core is not solid at all and you keep building upon it.

But you know, most of the time the game is actually cancelled before release because there's a reputation on the line for everybody involved... I feel like for all the terrible games out there we have been saved of many others.
If you have specific questions I'd be happy to answer!

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Firstly, I wanna say that I think you and the other SGW3 developers were truly talented people who suffered under poor management, and so much of your hard work and creativity regardless shows through in the final game. You and the other level designers crafted some incredibly clever points of interest and some very beautiful and memorable scenery. I was very saddened when I heard so many people were laid off several months ago.

Anyway, I am a modder who has spent the last year or so working on a mod called the SGW3 Improvement Project. I'm preparing for a new release as I write this. I've tried to fix every bug I possibly could and also I have a version of the mod that overhauls the gameplay. I really love the game despite its shortcomings, and I have great respect for the developers who worked so hard on it. I dunno how you feel about the game personally, but thank you for working on it and I'm sorry it wasn't able to be the game you wanted it to be.

In this light, I have a few questions. I understand if you can't answer them all.

1. SGW3's main story is pretty bad. Random dialogue from NPCs? Pretty good. The actual plot? Terrible. What happened to SGW3's plot? Was it always this bad? The game had different, vastly superior voice actors a year or so before it released. Did SGW3 at any point have a plot that didn't revolve around the ludicrous twist involving Robert and Armazi that the average player sees coming from about 20 hours away?
2. Could you give me some examples of bad ideas you were forced to put into the game, design-wise? Good ideas you were forced to cut?
3. What was the internal discussion around SGW3's severely problematic NPC draw distance? Eurogamer released a video in disbelief that a sniping game had NPCs that disappeared when you tied to snipe them. The complaints were widespread. Surely you guys knew it was a problem. What were the politics preventing it being fixed?
4. SGW3's day/night system was broken. Despite huge outcry on the Steam forums along with all the other complaints, it was never fixed. The game resets to midnight every time you die, and it sucks. Speaking as a modder, it it could have been fixed within a day or so if someone at the studio had been given a green light. What was going on behind the scenes?
5. Why were NPC-driven vehicles removed from SGW3 in between the beta and the final version? A common complaint about the game is that outside of towns and outposts, the world feels a bit dead. Removing those vehicles made it even deader.
6. Could you explain the scope of the project in any detail? I noticed that it looks like an entire region was cut from the game at some point? (A city region.) How late in development were Mining Town, Dam, Village built? Suppose we go back in time to 2016. What existed at that point? Did Mining Town exist? Or were you guys forced to crunch to make stitch together SOMETHING relatively late?
7. Where did the project lose the plot overall? Assuming you were working on the game from the early stages, at what point between 2013 and 2017 did the game begin to lose direction and go kinda pear shaped? Was the CEO responsible for derailing the the project? I've heard negative things about him from other sources.
8. Why don't more developers actively encourage modding? For example, STALKER was a buggy, buggy game. But GSC went out of their way to encourage mods by releasing the SDK and lots of files. As a result the games were massively cleaned up. The only reason I was able to mod SGW3 is because there were no signature checks on the pak files. But my hands were tied in so many ways because I lacked the source code. Some devs have a history of buggy or half-baked releases. Why has the company always refused to release source code for their titles? With source code access, SGW3 could be transformed into a genuinely polished game -- even a spiritual successor to something like STALKER -- given enough time and effort. Is there some kind of legal complexity there because they license CryEngine? Or is it just stubborness or trying to control their IP or whatever?

Everyone I have talked too about this knew their game was gonna blow well before it shipped. It's only a matter of how bad it does at some point.


I would be more interested to hear someone who was genuinely surprised when their game got a reception they didn't expect.

It's very different from game to game. It's especially hard if you know you're working on you know will be bad or needs way more time than you have but the higher ups won't listen or are being naive about how much work is left. Then they will act shocked and try to lash out against the employees or press in some ways. Usually you have a pretty good idea of how the game will be received while working on it. If anything I'm more pessimistic with what score I'll think we'll get compared to the score we end up with. The worst was a morning meeting after we got a 2.5/10 review and people had been crying and where very upset.

This real question should be: Can they salvage it after launch?

Ninjadom said:

The thing with devs is that we had some designers who never grew up playing the greatest games. If you don't know what a 10/10 game is, then how can you hope to make or design one?

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Buzzman said:

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"Enter the slacker art school kid who was only ever hired as a favor to his family. Shigeru Miyamoto was told to recoup losses by designing another game for the returned Radar Scope hardware, preferably aimed at US audiences.

Inspired by Pac-Man, Miyamoto took pretty much all of Iwatani's new ideas of scenario, character, empathy, and play narrative, and pretty much built a whole game on them without the traditional clutter."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...rio_Bros__The_Inexorable_Rise_Of_Miyamoto.php

Problem is, whilst most game devs presumably don't mind some construction criticism, the internet and the majority of people playing games are incapable of constructive criticism. The reactions to how bad or good games are is usually completely over the top in both directions.

I did a lot of internal compliance work on Thief (2014), and we all knew pretty well that the game wasn't as good as anyone wanted it to be, but there was definitely a shared sense of happiness that it managed to ship out as well as it did considering where it had been a short time before launch and how much it had been through in the previous years. It's a rough game, but it has its moments and a tight set of core game mechanics. No amount of vitriol could really take away that feeling of overcoming the odds.

EDIT: It definitely wasn't a shared sentiment or even common knowledge around the office but Lords of Shadow 2 dropped at just about the same time as Thief and it sure made me feel a bit better that we weren't the only ones shipping a disappointing title, haha.

KillstealWolf said:

Alright, I'll post the Robot Chicken Pluto Nash bit.



On a more serious note, It would be interesting to hear, but I imagine most of the time the team did everything they could to make the best game they could, and they more got screwed over by higher-ups making ludicrious decisions that the team can't make.

I imagine the recent Telltale Employee stories are the closest you are going to get for your answer.

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Wow didn't know that movie did so bad, I liked it. I was a teen though.

Mexen said:

Not a game developer but a former software developer and currently a project manager... When something you ship doesn't fly, naturally you feel disappointed but some of those failures are goldmines for going back to the drawing board and addressing things that you may have skipped. It's always revelatory when you are humbled. For me and my team, the priority was improvement over personal embarrassment. Hated for a few weeks but heroes for years if the hate is handled correctly.

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Congratulations on having a mature, healthy outlook like this. It's always hard to receive criticism but you just have to remember that a complaint is an opportunity to improve even if it can be demoralizing, you just have to extract the opportunity from the potential filth before you digest it.

cooldawn said:

I would hope that management takes a lump of the responsibility for the decision making process and what they set-out to make the development team go through and end-up with.

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Managing a studio in the Videogame industry is a hard thing. Typically when a studio gets funding cuts, it's up to the powers at be decide on how to reshuffle funds, I've never been in those meetings, but the pattern seems to be leaving a core group that can keep the studio running as best it could. Layoffs would go through all departments, including management, if that's what you mean by "taking lumps".

If you're trying to blame management for not being able to schedule something as complicated as a videogame with a limited schedule, I'd say, it's not easy. Videogames are both art and technical, mixed with the fact that it's very easy for scope creep, or "risk" that often comes to fuitition in terms of bugs or things requiring rework, makes scheduling very difficult.

In my tenure in videogames, either you have a formulaic project, like a sports game for example, the features and risks are fairly known, often swappable from the last years game (AI/Rendering/etc), the only big question mark is on generation changes, as you are reliant on external factors (hardware/API's/Tools/Documentation/etc...)... and even so you have massive failures. For example, there were years at EA where NHL was terrible due to features not working out, or NBA trying to implement new stuff that just sucked.

The other side is a studio trying to either do something new, or trying to prove their studio is awesome (which garners work and more freedom with publishers). This situation sucks, becuase the powers at be in your studio is trying their best to convince the people with the money that the game they are pitching, or in development is going to be awesome, so keep sending money (or let us work on it a bit longer than we origional estimated). This is where vertical slices come in, throw everything cool into a short demo, estimating gameplay, and also the graphical fidelity that we expect to hit. Eventually you have to make an actual game, but 1 virtual slice + 6 more do not make a complete game, and the coming together of everything is incredibly difficult to do, ontime, and on budget. So much unknown, risk, and estimating work, QA, regressions, polish, more bugs, etc... is hard.

A bit more on topic with regards to projects I worked on.

The first [Prototype], the studio was pushing Activition hard for more budget, we knew we had something that could be incredibly fun. Early on, the uppers indicated that activation was going to give us X million in funding, we were all like YAY! Throughout the process, activition sent our game code to some reviewer company, and initial indications were that we would hit high 80's I believe, activition was pretty ok with that, now they started commiting on marketing, and we had sales predictions. Marketing started doing their thing, and it was incredibly exciting to see fan feedback, and excitement to trailers and such. But in all honesty myself, and likely others knew that high 80's was probably too high, as we were completing the game, I knew there were some aspects that were awesome, but other aspects that sucked (like two boss battles in particular, also the technology wasn't quite up to some other games coming to market, even in our genre, remember the prototype vs Infamous?). This is around the time where Activition really started pushing for "few games" that "sell a LOT", and metacritic seemed to be their indicator (getting a new IP green lit from a publisher is incredibly hard to begin with). I recall finalling that game to be quite stressful, because Activition started pulling back, as they started seeing the more final code. When it finally came out, intial reviews were fantastic (not sure if something shady happened there,) but eventually it leveled off lower than original estimates.

When I worked on Mod Nation Racers, we knew we had something revolutionary going on, I mean kart racing on the playstation where you could build your own tracks?! Sony is an incredible publisher, very patient, and let us do our thing, we didn't quite meet all our deadlines, but we were still incredibly excited. However, some things we knew were going to hinder the reviews, things like load times, framerate, weapon balance mostly. It was pretty dishartening to see the sales be so poor. For me in particular I was disappointed that some parts that I really enjoyed and helped polish didn't get as much love (seemingly) from the community. I really enjoyed time trail mode, certain tracks really are awesome for shaving off miliseconds, and with competitive ghosts, it was a lot of fun getting the drifts just right to just edge out your friends ghost) Anyways, reviews were ok, sales were bad, little big planet on the other hand was very well received... guess what the studio was kind of forced to make next? In the end, it was disheartening seeing the community not give it a chance due to poor reviews that focused on some of the annoyances. Yes load times sucked, but online was actually awesome, the track editor was awesome, and the racing/drifting/physics model was quite good once you got used to it.

Sleeping Dogs, or True Crime Hong Kong :) We knew we didn't have the budget as GTA, so we focused on what we felt we could do better. Again, Activision, the demos were good, tug development was starting to go a bit long as we were trying to finish off some bits and pieces (like the story missions lol, though we were close!). Eventually the whole project got canned, to later be scouped up by Square Enix. I think we all expected to be in the 80's. but for that game, since it was back from the dead, I think the most positive thing was the positive community reaction. :)

Yinyangfooey said:

This part is interesting to me. As a level designer, I would think you would know your craft. Are you able to tell when you're making a "bad" game? Like you know that the metacritic score isn't going to be very good?

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There's several possibilities:

1. You don't know that you are actually bad. It implies bad leadership, nobody actually playing your stuff and perhaps a company culture of shutting down criticism.
2. Tools are broken, non-existent or not developed with users in mind.
3. Sometimes the direction wants something unachievable with current tech.
4. The game design doesn't fit the world design, or changed last minute and doesn't fit anymore.
5. All other pieces (game design, tech, art direction) came at the last minute and level design had to be rushed in. That personally happened to me a few times.

Dr. Caroll said:

Firstly, I wanna say that I think you and the other SGW3 developers were truly talented people who suffered under poor management, and so much of your hard work and creativity regardless shows through in the final game. You and the other level designers crafted some incredibly clever points of interest and some very beautiful and memorable scenery. I was very saddened when I heard so many people were laid off several months ago.

Anyway, I am a modder who has spent the last year or so working on a mod called the SGW3 Improvement Project. I'm preparing for a new release as I write this. I've tried to fix every bug I possibly could and also I have a version of the mod that overhauls the gameplay. I really love the game despite its shortcomings, and I have great respect for the developers who worked so hard on it. I dunno how you feel about the game personally, but thank you for working on it and I'm sorry it wasn't able to be the game you wanted it to be.

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Thanks a lot!! I tried to distance myself with this company some time ago, but you are absolutely right. I learned a ton with artists and designers on this project, most of them were incredibly talented people, whom talent was barely used. And kudos for modding this game, I'm sure it's not an easy task. Even with the tools available to us it could be a nightmare to implement some stuff in their version of CryEngine.

Dr. Caroll said:

In this light, I have a few questions. I understand if you can't answer them all.

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I will try my best! I'm answering underneath each of them for clarity.

1. SGW3's main story is pretty bad. Random dialogue from NPCs? Pretty good. The actual plot? Terrible. What happened to SGW3's plot? Was it always this bad? The game had different, vastly superior voice actors a year or so before it released. Did SGW3 at any point have a plot that didn't revolve around the ludicrous twist involving Robert and Armazi that the average player sees coming from about 20 hours away?
   • The story was completely different for most of production. It was designed by a huge name in the industry, Paul Robinson, who was let go when creative differences arose between him and the CEO. They butchered his idea which involved an homosexual ex-US military villain in love with the hero's brother. I know it sounds corny but being himself a gay vet, the story was very deep, tough and real. He said many time he was "making the game of his life". We all loved the guy, his plot and its boldness. We often stayed longer at work just to hear his old stories... He sadly passed away from cancer a few months ago, and everybody who knew him or worked with him was devastated.
2. Could you give me some examples of bad ideas you were forced to put into the game, design-wise? Good ideas you were forced to cut?
   • Tough to say, there was constant changes from the game direction. I think everything was kept but lots were modified and implemented in a different way than originally intended.
3. What was the internal discussion around SGW3's severely problematic NPC draw distance? Eurogamer released a video in disbelief that a sniping game had NPCs that disappeared when you tied to snipe them. The complaints were widespread. Surely you guys knew it was a problem. What were the politics preventing it being fixed?
   • Oh despite was the CEO was saying at the time, we had QA departments. Everybody was aware of performance issues. The last minute fixes like the NPC draw distance were an aftermath of trying to keep the game running on consoles and mid-tier PCs. Generally speaking, performances were horrendous during most of production.
4. SGW3's day/night system was broken. Despite huge outcry on the Steam forums along with all the other complaints, it was never fixed. The game resets to midnight every time you die, and it sucks. Speaking as a modder, it it could have been fixed within a day or so if someone at the studio had been given a green light. What was going on behind the scenes?
   • That's a good question! Maybe again performance issues? I wasn't there at the end of production so I couldn't tell, but during my time there the day/night system was really beautiful, the artist working on it was extremely talented and dedicated. Honestly it seems more like a terrible design choice.
5. Why were NPC-driven vehicles removed from SGW3 in between the beta and the final version? A common complaint about the game is that outside of towns and outposts, the world feels a bit dead. Removing those vehicles made it even deader.
   • We just couldn't get the AI to work with vehicles, despite involving top AI programmers from abroad on the project it always was janky as fuck. We always had massive traffic jams, randomly stuck & colliding exploding vehicles. A good chunk of the game was inspired by FarCry's convoys, and that's what we were supposed to have.
6. Could you explain the scope of the project in any detail? I noticed that it looks like an entire region was cut from the game at some point? (A city region.) How late in development were Mining Town, Dam, Village built? Suppose we go back in time to 2016. What existed at that point? Did Mining Town exist? Or were you guys forced to crunch to make stitch together SOMETHING relatively late?
   • The game had a MASSIVE scope, the CEO expected big sales and a big team, something the likes of Witcher 3.
   • So during my time there we had, in order and one after the other: one 32km² map, two 16km² maps, four 16km² maps, then two small maps. You have to imagine, I was working there close to a year and none of my work made it to the final game. Almost everything was placed by hand. We restarted everything on 5 or 6 different worlds. We always had some sorts of Dam, Mining Town and village. Everything was rushed toward the end, crunch was semi-permanent for some people. The city was cut early on as we couldn't make it run on consoles and it was a huge undertaking to develop that much content with the small team we had.
7. Where did the project lose the plot overall? Assuming you were working on the game from the early stages, at what point between 2013 and 2017 did the game begin to lose direction and go kinda pear shaped? Was the CEO responsible for derailing the the project? I've heard negative things about him from other sources.
   • I kind of answered above, but for a timeline it happened somewhere in the end of 2015/early 2016. The CEO was definitely getting his hands directly on any project this company ever had. Everything you heard is true, and it's probably even worse. Go to any Game Dev Conference in Poland and talk with anybody there, they probably worked at some point for CI Games.
8. Why don't more developers like them actively encourage modding? For example, STALKER was a buggy, buggy game. But GSC went out of their way to encourage mods by releasing the SDK and lots of files. As a result the games were massively cleaned up. The only reason I was able to mod SGW3 is because there were no signature checks on the pak files. But my hands were tied in so many ways because I lacked the source code. They have a history of buggy or half-baked releases. Why has the company always refused to release source code for their titles? With source code access, SGW3 could be transformed into a genuinely polished game -- even a spiritual successor to something like STALKER -- given enough time and effort. Is there some kind of legal complexity there because they license CryEngine? Or is it just stubborness or trying to control their IP or whatever?
   • It's a very complicated topic and I think you're getting there with the CryEngine license. There's also tons of libraries and third party software that couldn't possibly be open sourced or distributed - stuff like Simplygon for generating LODs for example can't be shared freely.
   • Additionally, the way the game engine is distributed on specific dev platforms with specific network paths and restrictions would require a tremendous amount of work to deploy on other, random machines. If the game engine and development pipeline is not thought from the ground up to be moddable, it's close to impossible to adapt it later on.

Hopefully that answers a few questions :)

Liam Allen-Miller said:

I did a lot of internal compliance work on Thief (2014), and we all knew pretty well that the game wasn't as good as anyone wanted it to be, but there was definitely a shared sense of happiness that it managed to ship out as well as it did considering where it had been a short time before launch and how much it had been through in the previous years. It's a rough game, but it has its moments and a tight set of core game mechanics. No amount of vitriol could really take away that feeling of overcoming the odds.

EDIT: It definitely wasn't a shared sentiment or even common knowledge around the office but Lords of Shadow 2 dropped at just about the same time as Thief and it sure made me feel a bit better that we weren't the only ones shipping a disappointing title, haha.

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I loved Thief 2014 :)

Ninjadom said:

I worked in game dev for 6 years. We turned out a few turds. As a play tester, we knew they were turds. And there was only so much in which you could polish them up.

The thing with devs is that we had some designers who never grew up playing the greatest games. If you don't know what a 10/10 game is, then how can you hope to make or design one?

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Isn't that a bit unfair? Just because you haven't played the best of the genre doesn't mean you cannot create a game of that calibur just like any form of art.

Liam Allen-Miller said:

I did a lot of internal compliance work on Thief (2014), and we all knew pretty well that the game wasn't as good as anyone wanted it to be, but there was definitely a shared sense of happiness that it managed to ship out as well as it did considering where it had been a short time before launch and how much it had been through in the previous years.

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I always felt sorry for the Thief 4 team. Is it is good as Thief 2? Or Thief 3 with the Gold mod? No. But if you step back and look at the game, it's clear that passionate people worked really hard and arguably succeeded more than they failed. It's rickety, but it's a pretty damn solid stealth game in places. Stuff like the plot being really dumb and having some bizarre irregularities right at the end speak of a game where the devs tried to massage and stitch what they had into the best game they could make considering the circumstances. A lot of older Thief fans were convinced that Eidos Montreal didn't care about Thief and screwed up a beloved series out of callousness. But that's just paranoia and spite, IMO. I think the rollercoaster nature of game development is often lost on angry fans. I wish more people could appreciate what flawed games do well instead of being mad that they're not as good as they could or should have been.

Praglik said:

The story was completely different for most of production. It was designed by a huge name in the industry, Paul Robinson, who was let go when creative differences arose between him and the CEO. They butchered his idea which involved an homosexual ex-US military villain in love with the hero's brother. I know it sounds corny but being himself a gay vet, the story was very deep, tough and real. He said many time he was "making the game of his life". We all loved the guy, his plot and its boldness. We often stayed longer at work just to hear his old stories... He sadly passed away from cancer a few months ago, and everybody who knew him or worked with him was devastated.

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Thank you so much for sharing. That explains a lot. Wasn't the original lead designer of Enemy Front also fired because of "creative differences" with the CEO? Terrible, terrible behavior. As you say, the pitched plot sounds corny on the surface but I'm sure it would have been bold and thought provoking and there is absolutely no way it could have been worse than what we got. (And as you see below I did some digging and it's more depressing than I initially thought.)

Something occured to me, and I wayback machined to find this image. The map and that sheet of paper are legible zoomed in, and have a bunch of missions and story beats that are completely missing from the final game.

Your remarks about the man behind the game's story being fired got me thinking. Paul Robinson was pushed to Special Thanks. He's not listed under story. That's a bad sign obviously. But there was another chap who did interviews back in 2015. Narrative Designer Jess Lebow. He's not credited under story in the final game. He's credited under Special Thanks, too. I sat down just now and watched an interview with him from 2015.

Literally nothing the man talks about in this video in is in the final game. The game he's talking about is a game where you're undercover in Georgia working for the American government but also working for various factions, and sometimes you'll be in a position where your country asks you to kill people you've been working alongside. It gives you deep moral conundrums about war, and blindly following orders, and what a killer behind enemy lines looking for his lost brother might do to protect his cover. He talks about a game that deeply explores the Georgian/Russian conflict, and where characters passionately try to persuade the players to the justice of their cause.

The CEO took a game that had the potential to be Far Cry 2 meets Spec Ops: The Line and turned it into something out of a Steven Seagal movie. Freaking hell. That is so unbelievably depressing.

joesiv said:

Sleeping Dogs, or True Crime Hong Kong :) We knew we didn't have the budget as GTA, so we focused on what we felt we could do better. Again, Activision, the demos were good, tug development was starting to go a bit long as we were trying to finish off some bits and pieces (like the story missions lol, though we were close!). Eventually the whole project got canned, to later be scouped up by Square Enix. I think we all expected to be in the 80's. but for that game, since it was back from the dead, I think the most positive thing was the positive community reaction. :)

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You made one of my favorite games of all time! Thank you so much for all your work. Sleeping Dogs has brought me more joy than every other open world game combined.

Brikky Freeman said:

Isn't that a bit unfair? Just because you haven't played the best of the genre doesn't mean you cannot create a game of that calibur just like any form of art.

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Yeah, a little bit unfair. The industry has matured so much now over the decades. In the 2000's it was so frustrating working with designers that didn't even really play games in their spare time. Designers looked at what was popular, and what sells, and based their gameplay around that. It's sure possible to create a good 3D platformer without having ever played Mario, but I'm sure it would help you even more if you had played it.

I had a small involvement in a mid-sized game, not as a dev. When it was officially announced, I read a story about it on a Nintendo news site. The comments were all totally derisive, mocking the publisher and the concept, and predicting it would be terrible. I'd been working with the publisher and knew how much they put into making the game as good as possible. The actual dev is a very good studio. I'd also played it, and it was decent. Seeing the comments didn't hurt me personally, but it made me sad that gamers are so quick to be negative about something people have worked really hard on. Even before anyone had played it.

Edit - I should say some gamers, not all obviously

Praglik said:

He sadly passed away from cancer a few months ago, and everybody who knew him or worked with him was devastated.

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Whoa, I worked alongside him at Kuju, many years before S:GW3 and I'm so saddened to hear this. He was an amazing, talented guy whose path in life made him stand out from other Designers & it's a shame that his chance to bring some of his world to the surface of S:GW3 was stopped :(

In an industry where diversity is still an ongoing issue, it's tragic his uniqueness as an African-American Gay Vet Game Director wasn't given the chance to shine through and now been lost for good :(

ASleepingMonkey said:

What a mess. It must be a bit demoralizing knowing the outcome of something like that ahead of time but still seeing the excitement of many who have yet to see the final product may not be up to snuff.

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i dont know. if its ahead of release you still have time to delay and do it better. its something the publisher needs to invest in for sure but if you look at games like mass effect or fallout that really have been stellar games which had two not so great games in a row you gotta wonder if it wouldnt have been wiser to delay the game and try to go all the way...

Working at EA when the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle happened wasn't fun, we had security concerns from people sneaking into the office or accusting us outside the office.

joesiv said:

A bit more on topic with regards to projects I worked on.

The first [Prototype], the studio was pushing Activition hard for more budget, we knew we had something that could be incredibly fun. Early on, the uppers indicated that activation was going to give us X million in funding, we were all like YAY! Throughout the process, activition sent our game code to some reviewer company, and initial indications were that we would hit high 80's I believe, activition was pretty ok with that, now they started commiting on marketing, and we had sales predictions. Marketing started doing their thing, and it was incredibly exciting to see fan feedback, and excitement to trailers and such. But in all honesty myself, and likely others knew that high 80's was probably too high, as we were completing the game, I knew there were some aspects that were awesome, but other aspects that sucked (like two boss battles in particular, also the technology wasn't quite up to some other games coming to market, even in our genre, remember the prototype vs Infamous?). This is around the time where Activition really started pushing for "few games" that "sell a LOT", and metacritic seemed to be their indicator (getting a new IP green lit from a publisher is incredibly hard to begin with). I recall finalling that game to be quite stressful, because Activition started pulling back, as they started seeing the more final code. When it finally came out, intial reviews were fantastic (not sure if something shady happened there,) but eventually it leveled off lower than original estimates.

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Damn, almost forgot Prototype. You could feel there was something real special hidden in there but it never quite arrived there. It was the only game where I ever felt like a being with really powerful superpowers that could really fuck shit up. Too bad the second game toned down the scope of the powers while improving almost everything else.

It's a shame that making a great game is dependant on so many external factors and not actually on those who work on the game like it should be.

Fawz said:

Working at EA when the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle happened wasn't fun, we had security concerns from people sneaking into the office or accusting us outside the office.

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Whoa, some elaboration here would be great if you've got the time. I'm one of those people that didn't really have problems with the ending, but I remember the freakout at the time was pretty crazy.