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

Filmed the day Commodore went out of business

Ninjadom said:

"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

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Yu Suzuki infamously does not play video games outside of the ones he makes. He doesn't like to play video games much at all, actually.

"The reason I started making games is I joined a game company," Suzuki says, his bluntness softened by a smile that lights the room. "That's it! It's not like I wanted to be a game designer. I just entered the game company. I usually don't play video games. For example, with driving games - I've got much more interest in real cars. That's the reason I went for that style.

"As a student I was looking for a good company, and looking at which company has a good future - and the software companies, that looked good. Games, they don't matter so much to me. I saw a challenge at Sega, Fujitsu - a computer systems company, not a game company - I visited them all. Sega's people, though, were the most interesting people."

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Unfortunately it's only in German but there was an interesting report about the developers of "Past Cure" which was absolutely demolished in reviews. All the more tragic that the feedback the devs had received until then had been positive and they even had a little launch celebration.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/game...n-kritikern-verrissen-wird-a-1197405-amp.html

The mood of course dropped once the first reviews hit but they seemingly went on pretty quickly to find out where they went wrong and asked for more feedback through Twitter in the hope that patches might fix some stuff.

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!

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

This is extremely accurate to my experience.

Praglik said:

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.

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.


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 :)

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Fascinating!! Thanks for sharing. Although, be careful, shaddy sites can make a entire article from this post alone.

Man, cryengine produce amazing results, but is also extremely resources hungry.

I don't know if we have any Bethesda people here but we do have some DICE people. Don't get me wrong I think BF5 is an amazing game but I don't think the moral of the studio can be very good when 1 week after launch the game can be found for 50% off. Also in this case it's mostly on EA, but I can't imagine the studio is happy at all.

Ninjadom said:

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.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

I will say that last generation had alot of "clout chasing" across the board, so in that I agree. I do think it's changed for the better this one. Even "copycat" titles seem to take a different spin on a successful formula, rather than copy it wholesale.

I can't begin to imagine how hard it must be to put in so much effort and then have the audience pan it. In some cases it seems like a bit of a snowball effect where people will pile and pile despite the game being fine. Overblown expectations perhaps.

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. :)

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Oh wow, Sleeping Dogs is among my all-time favorite open world action-adventure games. The team did an absolutely stellar job! A crying shame that United Front closed down :/

JamboGT said:

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.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Is 1 day of QA a long time?

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.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Yeah, it's such a shame. I hated that ending but it put a wrench in everything surrounding the reception to see how quickly it escalated into cyberbullying, death threats and like you mention, things that are directly dangerous. I understand a little bit why BioWare hasn't been completely open to the public about it in the long run. A shame it turned out that way.

Wouldn't devs have a sense of the quality well before reviews hit, or are they so close to the game they lose sight of public perception?

Sectorseven said:

Wouldn't devs have a sense of the quality well before reviews hit, or are they so close to the game they lose sight of public perception?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

It varies a lot I would say; sometimes you can develop a massive tunnel vision that clouds you from reality or that just because you love the game, doesn't mean enough people love it. On the otherhand (and I would actually say a more common perspective) is that developers feel that the game could still use a ton of polish, for example famously The Last of Us developers felt for a long time that game wasn't going to turn out well and would ruin the studio's reputation (the case wasn't necessarily during the very last moments leading to ship, but that does happen quite often).

But often, yes developers are aware of thousands of issues and things they would like to improve when shipping a game, as you never get to finish a game, you only get to ship one.

From my experience, you usually have a range in which you think the game you've been working on will hit. 90+, 70s-80s, 60s, or a total turd.

But the difference between a 70 and an 89 metacritic is big, so there's always room for surprise even if criticism lands in the range you expected.

Also, as a dev you know what kinds of constraints the project was made under, and there are always was to justify the outcomes. "Well, our 65 metacritic game had an awful director, or we had half the budget that the comparable 85 metacritic game did, or we hit 60fps on this aging engine but reviewers don't care about that, or it's a miracle we shipped at all!"

And you do have to develop thick skin and try to remove your personal feelings from the feedback. There were a lot of negative posts about the one 90+ mc game I worked on, and I had to admit when they had a point about the problems with systems and scenes I worked on, but take solace in the fact that many many people loved the game in general.

You balance the good with the bad - for instance, the episode of Tales from the Borderlands where I was lead designer was the worst reviewed of the season, but it also featured two scenes that I'm very proud of that are brought up as highlights of the series. So I take joy in that

Sectorseven said:

Wouldn't devs have a sense of the quality well before reviews hit, or are they so close to the game they lose sight of public perception?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

As machinaea said, tunnel vision is definitely a thing. You work on the same thing, under the same assumptions, it's actually hard to see it from a perspective of fresh eyes. But also, finalling a game can have a lot of overtime, and being overworked, it's tiring. With pressure to get it done, the final bits can sometimes feel shoe horned in, as there is always more you wanted to do, more fixes you'd have liked to get done, but ran out of time.

Most of the bugs or features that didn't make it the end users/reviewers never find, or don't care, but sometimes the things that you as a team or individual felt were minor, get massive traction in reviews or in the community.

It's complicated lol

I definitely wouldn't make it as someone working in game development. I don't have thick enough skin to weather extreme hate over something I made, when I'd already be questioning if what I've made is any good. So kudos to you people who regularly have your asses handed to you by comments sections on a regular basis but still stay in the industry.

I'd like to thank all the devs who have chimed in on this thread! Been a very informative thread for me.

Depends on the studio's culture I guess. I've worked on most teams where people are really understanding and share some of the same criticisms, but I've also had the displeasure of working on a team that wanted to insolate itself from criticism and lashback against its own fanbase and franchise fans.. not fun if you're not drinking the kool-aid.

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?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

ahh, I've dealt with this too and for a long time just wondered if it was only my local scene. Good to know I'm not crazy! Some people even boast how little they play or keep up with games, it's insane. Sometimes leads! It can be infuriating to work with these people because they don't have any semblance of what a game is and can get completely lost in inane details or semantics. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO CALL THE SLUDGE?!

The worst can be working with ultra-contrarian designers who just cannot see redeeming qualities in successful titles they don't like. Like I get it you would never personally touch a GTA game, but maybe you should take a look at some of their world systems to see what a top industry standard would be?

All the games I helped ship were all mediocre, I knew they were mediocre, co-workers knew they were mediocre, CEO designed them to be mediocre (you know, for kids! attitude). So, I am never surprised the games get mediocre reviews and a general lack of sales as a result.

I would like to turn this ship around and actually attempt a good game, made with using a game development 2.0 standard we learn in game development courses nowadays, but of course, the CEO is against this unless I bring him solid proof that my ideas would provide additional sales.

aiswyda said:

Is 1 day of QA a long time?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Noooooooooo lol, I wasn't on the project at all, was full time on another game. I came in one saturday to help out.

I also want to add, the people that made the game were good at their jobs, there were a lot of decisions coming from the publisher that made the game from merely bad into terrible.

I'm not a game dev but I have worked as a dev and there's something I learnt very soon after I started working: don't take you job too personally and never let other's ignorant opinions affect your self worth. I know when my work is good and I also listen to expert colleagues because they provide an educated opinion. I don't listen to barely technological literate bosses or users because they don't know enough to judge the quality of my work.

Since many of those decisions are made by publishers, sometimes it's just frustrating in a "no shit, ffs..." manner, but many companies are already way into the next title by the time the one before it releases, so it sucks but you just try to make the next one better.

I wasn't there when the project was greenlit but I recently helped ship a game that was fairly panned by both gamers and reviews. It wasn't a huge surprise by any means but it did bring down morale since the patches since haven't really made any drastic changes so working on it has felt a bit pointless in a way.

I can't speak for other companies but online reviews and feedback are being shared internally on discord etc, we all know the game has its numerous faults and we want to fix them; hell, they should obviously never have shipped in the first place. But from what I've gathered from more senior staff, the problem doesn't lie with the devs, but in an inherent lack of interest in listening to feedback.

Now gamers, even on era, want our heads on a plate when they don't even know a fraction of what's going on. The company might crumble over this and hundreds of people will have a tough time in life. Meanwhile the concensus sounds like it's well-deserved almost.

Nothing I've worked on has yet been on the receiving end of a critical panning, but I honestly doubt I would feel much if I had. When you're a cog in a machine it's important not to take any sort of backlash personally... It's an attitude you have to learn quickly I think.
Back when I was working on my first project, that feeling of being let in on a big secret before watching it get revealed to the public was so fucking surreal... But it was ridiculously exciting, and I became totally obsessed with following all the coverage about it, I got such a buzz off of it. I was reading all the articles, watching all the videos, scouring all the comments (positive and negative)... Because the whole phenomenon was new to me, and I was super invested in how the game was received; I ended up desperate to see what kinds of reactions my work would get (if anybody would even notice it).
Very soon I realised that this is probably the worst possible thing to do, especially if you have low self-esteem to begin with :P It's way healthier to detach yourself to a certain degree, otherwise it'll drive you mad and you'll never get anything done.

scottbeowulf said:

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.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Can't really go into specifics but around the time the game came out and the online complaints started reaching alarming levels we had people try to sneak into the office by tagging along with those who had access, or approach some of the employees going out for smoke breaks and being unpleasant. We got a couple of email warnings to be careful, report suspicious activities and not respond to hate mail. The mood in the office soured with each incident, but thankfully there was nothing major that happened in the end.

Kinthey said:

Unfortunately it's only in German but there was an interesting report about the developers of "Past Cure" which was absolutely demolished in reviews. All the more tragic that the feedback the devs had received until know had been positopo and they even had a little launch celebration.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/game...n-kritikern-verrissen-wird-a-1197405-amp.html

The mood of course dropped once the first reviews hit but they seemingly went on pretty quickly to find out where they went wrong and asked for more feedback through Twitter in the hope that patches might fix some stuff.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

In July, they released a rather significant overhaul of the game. https://steamcommunity.com/games/646050/announcements/detail/1675785220239530073 But there are zero reviews of the game from after that update released. Which seems like a shame. Low profile indie games basically disappear off the face of the earth if they have a negative initial reception. They don't have the money to throw at a "Hey, it's fixed now!" marketing campaign or anything like that. I haven't played the game so I can't speak for its quality but it seems like a situation where reappraisal might be interesting.