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You know what's really funny about video games? When an AAA executive is like 'we can't go story first, we need to find the fun, all our games are about finding the fun,' and then they make a game with systems and controls virtually identical to other games.
Like I'm sorry, did your story really have to suffer because you spent a great deal of time creating a perfect copy paste of Arkham City's combat system? Did the plot need to get boring because you decided you had to have loot using the same colors as diablo and borderlands?
I see people supposedly spend years prototyping new ways of doing things and then the systems are the safest, most "like other games I have played" shit out there and it makes me feel like the idea of "find the fun" is inherently flawed.
Maybe you need to get better at prepro and figure out what you want to make first?
Because every time I read about a studio going "we wanted to find the [iconic studio magic] so we crunched for the last 18 months of development" I kind of get skeptical about management.
Because every time I read about a studio going "we wanted to find the [iconic studio magic] so we crunched for the last 18 months of development" I kind of get skeptical about management.
Every postmortem I see there's a lot of time wasted experimenting on obvious bad ideas (portal competitive multiplayer! because a game about the joy of movement flow would definitely benefit from getting your flow interrupted by competitors, right?) or... just copying other shit.
idk about u but i think maybe if ur management team was REALLY GOOD and your producers were ON POINT and you actually figured out what you wanted before you started and weren't prototyping systems 12 months before launch on a six year dev cycle... maybe you could do better?
The studios that all seem to do extremely well with interesting and EXCELLENT gameplay do this thing where they let their team go wild experimenting and prototyping in between projects and they put some of those ideas into their next game.
idk it might just be me but I think we should spend a lot more time in pre pro and sticking to that instead of crunching or team to literal death and underpaying QA because we were wasting time not sure what we wanted our game to be.
And I have literally had to sit there and explain to a studio head on an almost finished game what "fetch quests" were once. I have had people ask me if I thought their complete pivot in genre was a good idea after MILLIONS were spent making a completely different game.
In Hollywood, when people do this kind of extensive rework, these movies are huge fucking boondoggles but in AAA game dev this shit seems par for the course.
I'm just saying that you can make a big open world AAA action adventure game where you press Y when the Y pops up above the guy's head as a counter and were you have a white/green/blue/purple/orange loot system for a lot less money.
I don't think you should do much R&D in production personally, but I mean, I come from an background where our movies got a lot worse once people stopped storyboarding everything and planning all their shots in advance and just said "it'll come together in post."
believe it or not dump truck editing doesn't win you oscars and only makes you billions at the box office when the studio has an in-house team assembly line for making all their movies On Brand and can churn out two of them every year with interchangeable employees.
anyways I'm EXTREMELY sus of anyone who says "we don't have producers" or says "we like to find the fun" like remember when blizzard didn't release any new games for AGES and then diablo 3 was so bad they had to completely rebuild it from scratch in an expansion?
and like, diablo 3 as it is now. better than diablo 2? good story? new game design innovations? did they really need to work on it for like 700 years if all they were gonna do was make... a direct sequel to diablo 2 that kinda sucked until loot 2.0?
