Excited to see what's next.
[1] https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062651235/blood-sweat-and-...
Is that just the industry? Or are we just hearing about the worst cases?
Game development is generally complex and has some special challenges but given those constraints isn't always worse than many typical software projects.
(Hi, Matt!)
I spent 17 years at EA among a number of teams and found the most challenging parts were the BigCo related issues; things like cultural mismatches between groups that have been ordered together, or politics. The working hours were standard for the most part, occasionally there would be a fire to put out but all the management I had was fair about compensating for any extra hours.
Coworkers I had from other parts(Nascar, NFS/EA Seattle, etc) all had similar stories and of course there's the infamous easpouse.
The publishers have a weaker hand to play today, since it's easy to go to market with minimal marketing and distribution spend, but that has the side effect of making it more common to see tiny studios that run a sweatshop churning out bad products.
Yep, it was the big company stuff that led me to leave EA on both occasions but I worked with many smart, competent people there (Max included) and learned a lot. I heard some horror stories and don't doubt that there was truth to them but I never personally experienced any of the really toxic games industry stuff that you hear about. To be honest I think I'd have just left if I had, there was never a time where finding another job was a major concern.
Why do you think you weren’t part of those other groups of people who did have to work unpaid overtime every week? Were you in an area with lots of people for whom finding another job wasn’t a major concern?
As I said in my original comment, a lot depends on your manager and your team. It probably also depends on your location (my experience was at the Vancouver studio) and when you were at the company.
While it does seem that some companies and industries might be worse than others depending on the culture, in general it looks to me like you're better off with the best manager / team in a 'bad' company than with the worst manager or team in a 'good' company and not everyone is going to have the same experience in the same company.
Being on a central technology team at EA I think meant less crunch than being on a game team with hard ship deadlines. Friends I know who worked on game teams at the same studio had more crunch periods but they also typically got more 'comp time' (an EA term for extra vacation time given after ship) and might also get bigger bonuses. I think they sometimes got more pressure to work overtime.
I can see crunch situations (ship deadline approaching, much work to be done) demanding a lot of communication skills between managers and developers for everyone to feel good.
If someone on either side drops the ball (being overly aggressive / under appreciating, failing to clearly communicate work-life limits and expectations), it ends very ugly.
I was responsible for rewriting the UI more or less from scratch for the most recent major version, and at the height of “crunch time” leading up to the release, I worked maybe 50 hours a week... and most of that was voluntary, because, though I had the option to cut features to make the deadline, I really wanted to get stuff in.
So you get a bit less pay for your trouble too :D
Unless you make your OWN game and it is a big hit, but that is VERY hard right now.
And when you have compensation terms without being empowered to influence them... burnout.
Capricious bonus terms with a large public company always felt slimy to me. It seems a pretty large conflict of interest. In contrast to: 'We agree on what my work is worth, if I don't do the work as expected then you fire me.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8
Disregard the clickbait title. Cofounder Glen Schofield talks about how they resolved all bad bugs 2 weeks ahead of schedule and came out with one of the most innovative titles in the past 20 years.
I know we work for the same company and I generally agree that our company is one of the better ones. Which is not to say that there's no shit being flung around.
But our company is not known for being loved by gamers. I wonder if terrible working conditions is somehow related to creating better games. Horrible thought though.
I know what you mean....on one hand, it's great that the conditions here are pretty good(I pretty much never work more than 40 hours/week, overtime is extremely rare, at least for us programmers), but on the other hand.....I don't know. I don't want to say that working more would lead to better games - I honestly don't believe that the problems with our games could be solved if we suddenly started doing 80 hour weeks and work all weekends. I think at least some of them stem from how we approach building games in terms of design and production planning(at least for the AAA titles) instead of the fact that people here generally have good work-life balance.
And yes, of course there is some shit being flung around like you said, but (at least for me) nothing approaching the horror stories I hear from other places. Maybe we're just lucky - our company has loads of studios all over the globe, after all.
Which is unfortunate, given so much of the team gets staffed after those decisions are made (as I understand it).
Every story was about something interesting, but they were all pretty shallow. At the end, regardless of the actual outcome, they pretended it was a massive victory where the devs pulled off the impossible. In some cases it was accurate, in other cases the companies were financially successful, but didn't quite capture the magic of previous games.
Destiny actually has a rich backstory comparable to or greater than their previous titles like Marathon. I’ve got the first volume of printed lore they’ve done here and there’s lots more available through online sources.
As for what’s next - more Destiny. There’s a reason they’re holding onto the IP rather than selling it to Activision. The studio is hugely passionate about the game and about continuing it to the finish as far as I can tell.
That said, the backstory is a lot of fun although they've done a consistently horrible job of presenting it.
As for the lore, I had the legendary edition and the lore was incredible. I loved how the lore was delivered in bite sized chunks and little details all over the place and not thrown out to you in a digestible way like basically any other FPS game. To me it all went downhill after the first DLC, turning it into a quite generic, palatable game. Over the top cosmetic items and armor design felt out of place and broke suspension of disbelief for me, as I was not here to play some WoW-like game.
Destiny 1 sans DLC has a very special place in my heart.
Sorry. Flashbacks. Visit http://marathon.bungie.org/story/ for an unbelievable rabbit hole
I recall being so disappointed when Halo turned from a Mac-first game to an XBox exclusive...
I hope a more-independent Bungie can recapture some of their magic from those early days.
* The shooting is still as good as it was in the Halo days, but the need to constantly grind for gear to progress really kills the way you would acquire new weapons in Halo and learn how to use them in concert. There's so many more weapons in Destiny, but it doesn't feel like you have the same sort of choices you had in Halo.
This, coupled with the really engaging and welcoming community, are a few of the elements that have me excited about this announcement. Bungie is still responsible for getting involved in the initial mess of Destiny’s initial launch, but hopefully they have learned from their prior experiences.
I don't understand the logic here. Surely they could create smaller, self-contained units to work on projects like this? Even stick them in separate buildings for that "small company" feel.
But then Microsoft bought them, and they had to port the whole thing to XBox, and when it eventually came out for Mac years later, it was a port of a port.
Imagine if Halo had been a Mac-exclusive when it launched. True, it wouldn't have had the full force of Microsoft's marketing machine behind it, but it still could have made a world of difference for Mac gaming, for those of us who did care about such.
And then they were bought, and Mac gaming lost its chance to become remotely relevant for another decade or more.
Getting bought by Microsoft was the best thing that could have happened to bungie at the time.
But the Mac itself still seemed under threat at that time. Having such a cool-looking game that was going to be Mac-first, if not Mac-only was a PR/morale booster. And its then being absorbed by MS, who was very much The Enemy in those days, was an equally large bummer.
And not just the game: Bungie was really a darling of the Mac community. They had created and published a string of awesome games over the course of the 90s, all Mac-first. Pathways, three Marathons, Myth I and II, Oni... "Losing" them was a blow.
Award winning, real time tactical multi and single player game with a map maker and a mod system. So diffeeent from their other titles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_(series)
Fond memories of the “recon” WW2 mod that transformed the game of 1 on 1 managing an army of dwarves and warlocks to team vs team each individual controlling 1 army man.
(Edit) If you want to play it, the game is still supported (with a release in Nov 2018!) here http://projectmagma.net
Many games since (including Destiny) have tried to recreate that feeling of an oppressive enemy that you can't defeat, only push back or cut a temporary swathe through. But no one comes close to Halo.
That's why it was the perfect MLG game. Every shooter these days is more and more complex.
OTOH there is Counter-Strike which turns 20 this year and is the third most popular game on Steam right now. Most of the changes to the core game since ~2001 have been about balance as opposed to adding new mechanics.
Someone who played the game over a decade ago could pick it up today and still play on mostly the same game on mostly the same maps:
de_cache 2011
de_dust2: 2001
de_inferno: 1999
de_mirage: 2004
de_nuke: 1999
de_overpass: 2013
de_train: 1999
for some reason valve doesn't release new versions of the game but instead chooses to radically change all aspects of the game and call it counterstrike(increment code+1)
i like the model, much better than call of duty randomly naming things differently even though the games are fundamentally the same with a fresh coat of graphics on top
I know you probably don't care about things like movement accel curves or hitbox sizes (which have changed drastically over the years) but just look at the deagle, possibly the most iconic weapon of the franchise. the weapon went largely unchanged between 1.6 and source, but is almost unrecognizable in csgo. you simply can't use it the same way you could in the older games; it has a completely different role.
The fight for asymmetry is what makes the game fun.
Graphics were arguably better on the PC; higher resolution and better frame rate, but it was not well optimized.
So the PC version was definetly a port of a console FPS and it showed. Mouse aiming was awful (too slow without acceleration, and inaccurate with it). Weapon switching was very akward as well (tab? and only 2 guns?!?).
If you had just played Half-Life shooting headcrabs off the poor scientists, or let alone something like Deus Ex, it just felt very dumbed down
what do you mean by this? do they not let you adjust the mouse sensitivity or are you talking about input lag?
However there seems to be a third party hack that fixes the issue: https://github.com/AWilliams17/Halo-CE-Mouse-Tool/releases
I believe Rare's decline happened after an acquisition (Microsoft?) but I may be misremembering.
I’m not aware of a game that pivoted so much during development.