The human toll of Fallout 76’s launch
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.
Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.
And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.
They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.
Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
If there's no food at the office I'd start worrying about the company not being able to secure funding.
That's not all of it, though. It's also one of those meals that are logistically east, because most people are OK with pizza. "[S]omething more tasty, healthy, and costly" is also the kind of thing that will likely require separate individualized orders for each person.
...and the movie industry
...and the music industry
...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.
most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money
then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself.
Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)
* $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums.
* $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible.
* $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm
* $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA.
I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value
This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
Someone's therapist is getting a new boat soon.
But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers.
Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.
The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about.
I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was.
From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me.
I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.
Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall.
I find thinking out of the box very challenging.
That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.
I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting.
Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever.
Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc.
So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money?
I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev.
I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.
I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.
You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.
Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.
When it comes to a game like 76, which was clearly mandated by some greedy executives who don't play games, the lack of passion permeates the whole game. From what the article describes it seems like nobody wanted to work on this thing - not the QA, not the devs, not the managers. The end result is no surprise. Nobody cared.
If I was a games exec, I would do everything to empower the great minds that produce great games to pursue the projects they are passionate about. Unfortunately there are a lot of very successful companies out there that do the exact opposite of that, but the tide seems to be turning.
EDIT: I want to clarify that part and parcel with being a talented passionate game director is the ability to build a great team and keep the team motivated. Obviously passion isn't the only ingredient to make a great game. As with any other massive undertaking, teams of humans are what get the job done. I simply observe that these singular figures have the two-part gift of understanding what makes a great game, and also being able to attract others who can help execute that vision.
I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever.
Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.
I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start.
If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument.
It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments.
I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean.
Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.
There's nothing wrong with being "a reskinned Elder Scrolls". Elder Scrolls is a great game (series). It is up there in the hall of masterpieces along with GTA and CS.
If you don't believe my word, look at Steam stats: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Like many here I also believed F3 and NV had better storytelling. But many hours of playing later, I see that I actually prefer F4.
Yes, they do. But it is absolutely not the case here, sorry. F4 is just a worse game.
It's not the worst game in the series or the genre, but it is utterly mediocre and not at all an example of a resounding success in Bethesda's history as a game company. Metacritic's 5.6/10 User score agrees with me.
Doesn't mean you have to stop liking the game. There are plenty of bad games we all play as guilty pleasures.
Also, just FYI, I think Fallout 1, the first game in the series is a pretty awful game. It's extremely short, the side quests are all boring fetch/kill quests, the open world is mostly dead. F2 was a huge improvement upon it.
I thought Fallout 1 was incredible. I remember getting the trailer literally on VHS tape and being so hyped for it, and it totally lived up to it. It was unlike anything else at the time.
Fallout 2 felt kind of watered down by comparison. The whole idea to move the series back by 80 or so years was terrible. The enclave was a terrible idea. The first Fallout made sense 80 years after the war. Everything looks basically the same. People still live in bombed out buildings. Nothing makes sense. The second and later Fallouts were all set way too late.
But playing Morrowind made me realize just how crap Fallout 4 is as an RPG. Fallout 4 has almost no choices to make and all the characters worship you as a messiah five minutes after meeting you. Morrowind is very rough around the edges, the roll-based combat system was a very hard swallow. But despite the rough/exploitable mechanics and the bad graphics, Morrowind still manages to be a much more immersive world because the people in it actually make sense. They have their own agendas and biases and they don't care about you until you give them a reason to care. In Morrowind you join a faction and are given orders by some regional flunky, or worse, that regional flunky tells you to buzz off and do shitty odd jobs for another apprentice in the faction. In Fallout 4 you approach a faction and immediately meet the faction leader who tells you that you're Howard's own gift to humanity.
The main story was weak, and the side content varies, but the game is sprawling and full of ‘hidden’ gems. In what other game could you eavesdrop on raiders discussing Henry David Thoreau in their lair at a former gift shop at Walden Pond? A gift shop at Walden Pond is itself ironically and darkly humorous.
There are also many great results that are a team effort.
And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example:
"[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."
Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work.
Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions.
But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way.
Software hasn't.
Films are an exercise in getting everything you need in your 70 or so days of filming. The days you've rented the exorbitantly expensive cameras, trailers, lights, etc.
Games are similar, except over a few years.
Only the auteur leadership model is able to make those project management tradeoffs quickly, under a lot of stress, and well, to deliver high quality output.
The Civ games have been around for a while, then it became "Sid Meier's Civilization". Not because he went back in time and did more work on Civ, but because he built his rep and wanted to use it to sell a couple of more copies.
It's that making ambitious games is hard, and if your organization doesn't have good engineering practices, good project management, a clear achievable vision, a realistic timeline, and capable team members, you will have difficulty succeeding.
And even with less ambitious games, studios fail all the time for the same reasons. It's not just the AAA games.
Clearly a smaller team with a smaller scope has an easier time because as you increase headcount, communication overhead increases exponentially, and bigger teams are usually trying more technically difficult things than a smaller team would try to tackle.
Fallout 76 seems to be a classic case of unrealistic development and testing deadlines.
Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game.
The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.
Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.
Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary.
Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".
Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap.
Hideo Kojima, I'm looking at you.
He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.
All this BS about siloing QA off is ridiculous. The celebrity worship of project managers/game designers/executives at game companies is way out of context. The whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game and then selling each copy for $50-60 and having to rely on millions of fickle gamers to buy it is hugely problematic and inferior to other types of businesses. The whole adjacency to the entertainment industry is problematic. The vast # of creatives/artists & non-technical employees doing "toil" is problematic.
I have been working 22 years.. if you asked me when I was 13 or 18 I would have said I wanted to build games. By the time I was 21 I already knew it was a bad industry. All my friends who did go into the games industry left within a few years. Everyone is vastly more happy now that they went to work on commercial/enterprise stuff.
I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland.
Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.
Not looking too good. Especially since the interest rate hike (the free money faucet was tightened), but the timing might be coincidence.
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
Turns out that no advertising, rent land, sell memberships works.
For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.
Personally I see it as a reason why the current metaverse schemes are a scam, since there are numbers right there that profit is from selling what are essentially indirect server rentals (that becomes more profitable as time goes on as server prices drop). Rather than a one time 'crypto' purchase silliness, that scammers have essentially set their sites on.
This is a pretty good deal for the users, but it's not going to pay for a Meta quantity of developers.
Yet if they put in all the mobile money extraction mechanisms into it, why would people choose Meta's product over VRChat?
Seems a bit much.
Own what, exactly? Is "metaverse" just a new word for "cyberspace"?
Rinse and repeat for everything else done online.
(I'm not surprised they tried; but surely they should have failed.)
The metaverse will succeed if it breaks free of the walled gardens; a federated distributed internet - controlled by the users.
Otherwise the users will continue to be the product, eating an illusion of freedom that only ever tells them what they want to hear and think they already know.
All we can really do is warn the younger generation to steer clear of the video games industry even if video games are a passion. You’d think with such a terrible reputation they’d be struggling for hires, but there’s always fresh blood to grind into the ground.
Jobs are generally; Demanding, Requiring Skill, Well Compensated… pick 2
Demanding is hauling 50lb concreate blocks or stocking store shelves all day, or something maybe less physically strenuous, but..distasteful, like working with sewage or garbage)
> Bethesda officially became a part of Xbox Game Studios on March 9, 2021, which placed Fallout 76 under Microsoft’s stewardship. When asked whether or not the acquisition had improved the internal work culture within Bethesda, several sources offered lukewarm responses.
> One source suggested that Microsoft’s emphasis on a “hands-off” culture toward its studios meant that the new owners trusted Bethesda to take care of its own problems. Sources at Undead Labs also mentioned that Microsoft had a “hands-off” policy, which they claimed had “allowed dysfunction to fester” at their studio.
No quality of game could justify the senseless anti-human mentality and processes described. But the fact that Fallout 76 was just such an abysmal and hated release just increases my contempt for Bethesda. Not seeing the moral value in treating their employees ethically is bad enough; not even having the cold business sense to see how it obviously affects their bottom line is just pathetic:
> Some sources noted that the project drove an exodus of senior developers who had worked on some of Bethesda’s most prolific titles. Many developers developed physical health issues, such as tinnitus and back pain. One source said it “wasn’t uncommon” for artists to have wrist braces. Senior staff who’d remained loyal to the company for 20 years finally found their reason to quit. Some had been around since Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 76 was their final breaking point.
You-must-do-overtime is a management fail and a strong indicator for bad leading.
The games industry is it's own weird universe of madness at quite another level.
I once had business with a large AAA house in Cambridge England, in a big glass corporate headquarters. When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. A senior person turned up and there was a really weird dynamic. She was obviously not supposed to have met me. The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. This was at least 5 or 10 years before the gamergate and metoo stuff.
> The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance.
That's probably someone who based her whole self-worth around impressing people making the games she loved.
They don't understand the franchise's message or the lore, they can't write very well, and they also really struggle with technology apparently.
What actual ingredients are missing?
* incredible passion making the workforce exploitable and more tolerant of abuse
* explosive revenue growth bringing in scammers, hucksters, and MBAs
* incredible passion from consumers who will buy the same game over and over
* the advent of gambling in the form of microtransactions
* the consolidation of the industry to a handful of big publishers
* incredible technical complexity
* exclusive rights on media like star wars or sports like basketball giving some publishers a complete monopoly in some cases
Unions work.
If bethesda/microsoft announced Fallout New Vegas 2, everyone would lose their shit and preorder instantly.
Also it disgusts me how happy everyone seems when a company announces that they won't do microtransactions. If the company has a history of keeping promises and releasing games without mtx, sure, it's warranted. But otherwise? Are you an idiot? They'll update the game half a year after you and the other fools bought the game and introduce microtransactions then. I wish there were laws that clearly defined what monetization in a game means and forbade developers from changing monetization schemes during the lifetime of a game, I just can't trust cloud-enabled games nowadays that promise a non-mtx non-p2w experience. It's worthless promises if you can change your mind down the line after I invested time and maybe money in your game. First get the money from the gamers who think they're really smart for "supporting games with fair monetization schemes", then when they're exhausted introduce mtx and go after the whales for the big bucks.
Fuck this industry, you don't even know what kind of product you're buying anymore. People waiting for "a full review of Diablo Immor(t)al to figure out how much money you need to spend to get a good build" - what's the point? By the time the review is out blizzard probably already changed the sliders and everything's different. Although from what I hear about the game, the only way they could change them at this point would make the game better, so there's that. $100k (that's one.hundred.thousand.dollars.) to get a fully equipped build. Jesus christ. Go back in time to when Diablo 2 is released and tell the gamers that soon they'll have to pay one hundred. thousand. dollars. to get a fully equipped build in the latest Diablo. They'll just cry and jump out the window. An even sadder thing is if you told them the latest Diablo will be a mobile game, they'd think "what? you can play Diablo anywhere like with a Gameboy? That's freaking amazing dude!" ugh. But you need to tell them this before telling them about having to choose between a nice house and a cool armor for their barbarian, burst that bubble properly.
I hate this. My comment here is the incredible passion from consumers, you can see it live now, you're welcome.
The incredible passion from developers is also me still being interested and working on gamedev crap even though I wish I could just turn back time instead.
You can not care if you want, I think it’s just a lame thing in general to do so.
Until you can't. A good case study is Dice Stockholm, perhaps best known for their stewardship of the Battlefield franchise. They butchered the launch of two titles in a row and lost much of their senior staff.
FWIW BFV became a good game. But the churn BFV (+Firestorm Battle Royale mode) caused has taken BF 2042 to a new low.
It's also the reason why you don't see major new IPs, the risk is huge, it can lead to mass layoff / studio closure.
Making AAA game is risky and expensive.
This sounds interesting, but I don’t really understand what it means. Why would they time encounters in a multi-player game? Wouldn't those have to be run in a separate instance if they are timing sensitive, especially if you don't want other players to interrupt the event?
But I have 0 knowledge in game design and I'm pretty sure they are probably talking about something completely different! :')
I loved Fallout and Elder Scrolls but absolutely hated ES:O and FO:76. I loved those games for having my own little world that was my own. Lack of multiplayer was a feature itself, not something I wanted to be implemented.
As with most MMO's I feel like I wanted to play an MMO I'd just mainline WoW, not some crappy imitation reusing IP.
An the job isn't that good even.
Can somebody explain all the kids that scripting an off the shelf 3d engine is not really fun?
more expensive maybe, but that's not the same as difficult.
hard to replace is when there are no interviews a week.
I realize capitalism rewards scarcity here, but imo this is a piece explicitly about the tolls that tends to bring
I don't trust this source. It sounds like something close to accurate based on previous game industry insights, but again, I don't trust Kotaku for telling me if it is currently raining while we're standing outside.