Blastfrog on 25/8/2014 at 01:58
Why does it seem that some of the greatest games of all time have had horrible development cycles and often end up far from their originally conceived concept?
An example many on places like Doomworld and ZDoom know is Doom 1. Tom Hall, the original designer, wanted something more akin to System Shock, wasn't even all that into the project to begin with, and was going against the grain of the rest of the team. As the game was shaping up only partly conforming to the original design document (probably because the rest of the team didn't really want to make that version of Doom anyhow), Tom is let go mid-way through development. The corpse of the empty, grey and slow-paced compromise is salvaged and quickly reworked into much more straight-forward action game. Despite this turmoil, the end product turns out great and is regarded as the golden standard of what the core of an FPS should be (some may disagree).
Thief: The Dark Project started as an action combat game than a pure stealth game, with much of its development being somewhat inbetween the two. Warren Spector was originally on the team but voluntarily left out of frustration as he wanted combat to be a viable option to the player while the rest of the team was starting to shy away from it. The game is converted to a pure stealth title at the last minute, retaining most of the level design and assets geared toward the more action oriented mechanics.The game is met with critical acclaim, but the legacy of its original combat design is still clearly felt and this diminishes the game for some. Thief 2 is highly regarded as it built levels and scenarios with the final stealth mechanics from the very start.
Deus Ex was a far more ambitious title than its final product. After Warren Spector left the Thief team, he began work on this game instead. It's said that the team was split into three factions: hardcore western RPG guys, hardcore shooter fans, and hardcore stealth fans. They eventually reached a compromise and tried including all three elements, but this initial schism obviously wasn't good. The original design consisted of entire portions of the game that never made the final cut in any form and many useless characters that served little purpose and only served to cloud the focus of the story, often disappearing without a trace later in the game.
The game was already being built to this plan until Harvey Smith became disillusioned with its flaws and pulled Spector aside to discuss a rescue plan. It was decided that they would cut everything not already physically started on from the design doc and heavily rework the story and decoration of the now severely out-of-place remainder levels. The portion that suffered the most was the middle of the game that took place in war-torn Texas. This was done, and thus came the game we all know.
Despite all games being considered some of the best of all time, Doom is probably the only one that doesn't have any obvious legacies of its troubled development during gameplay, though this could be attributed to the simplistic design and the rest of the team heavily leaning in this direction from the start and generally disregarding the design doc even when Tom was still around.
There's probably more examples and I only covered western first person games. If you have more examples, I'd love to hear them.
nicked on 25/8/2014 at 06:12
I think the answer is that there is a strong correlation between brilliant creative types and lack of focus and organisation skills. Certainly back then when teams were smaller and games easier to make, you'd end up with these melting pots of explosively creative ideas spewing out all over the place, and the ones that actually managed to get finished were hailed as visionary classics.
Compare to now, when games are harder to make, require hundreds more people and cost millions more, so the trend is more towards safe, workmanlike games that don't take risks but are polished to a sheen.
It's probably why a lot of the more interesting games of recent note are those from smaller indie studios (No Man's Sky being a good example, yes I know it's not out yet, but come on, it looks incredible) or those driven by an "auteur" director in some form or another (see Dark Souls, which, possibly due to coming from Japanese development culture, is generally discussed in terms of what the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was going for).
demagogue on 25/8/2014 at 08:10
This is an old debate that happens for cinema too. Casablanca was famously done by a rambling unorganized "development by committee" and is one of the classics. Of course so did Charlie's Angels which was a steaming pile of roach feces for just that reason.
But I think "troubled" can mean different things. I think what matters most is that a game stay focused & true to a good concept. "Trouble" in development can either put the development on track to that concept (like Doom) or pull it off... A peaceful development can also lead to a bad game if their concept was bad from the start.
"Troubled" could also mean a straight up technical problem that would make any game suffer whatever the concept, like Deus Ex IW and Thief DS getting stuck with a bad engine, making all the levels suffer from its limitations. Other troubles just delay the game but the concept is still there when it comes out eventually, like Duke Nukem Forever which (while never going to be a classic anyway) at least did what it said on the tin. Or you get a situation like Halflife 3 where it doesn't matter how good its concept is if the troubled development means it never gets made.
So my general answer is it's a mixed bag. Sometimes troubled development makes a difference to the quality of a game for the better, sometimes for the worse, or sometimes not at all. You could probably cherry pick examples to make any argument you like for that matter. Not sure you can say much more unless somebody does an actual statistical study correlating difficulty of development with game quality or score.
WingedKagouti on 25/8/2014 at 09:29
The counter-example to the tread title would be Duke Nukem Forever. By the metric of the title alone, this game should be the #1 game ever for anyone who has ever played a game.
demagogue has a much more useful look at how it's worked out.
faetal on 25/8/2014 at 09:40
The whole premise is a Texas sharp-shooter fallacy. You'd need to look at all development as a whole and then determine if there is a causative link between development cycle issues and final game quality. Picking out a few games and extrapolating from those isn't going to tell you anything. The extreme of such an extrapolation might be that the best games never get made.
N'Al on 25/8/2014 at 10:12
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
The counter-example to the tread title would be Duke Nukem Forever.
Daikatana,
Too Human,
The Bureau,
etc.
Shadowcat on 25/8/2014 at 12:09
Software development is hard to begin with, and the more complex the software the harder it gets. As software goes, most games are pretty complex to begin with, and a lot of those examples would be considered "complex for a game". I strongly suspect that the number of such projects which actually run smoothly from start to finish are few and far between.
ZylonBane on 25/8/2014 at 15:22
I cast Betteridge's Law on this thread's title.
demagogue on 26/8/2014 at 05:28
Watching the development of Dark Mod, there were some very heated exchanges and people got very emotional. You have a group where everybody cares about the game and has strong, sometimes opposing, opinions about what direction to take it. How could it not get acrimonious at times? And I'd consider our group very much on the amicable side.
(Interestingly almost every complaint a fan ever made was already made by a dev and hashed out over dozens of pages in 100 times more depth than the fan ever thought about, with strong words on both sides to exhaustion before some compromise was found. Something many fans probably don't appreciate.)
So I agree probably every project has its share of friction. I can only imagine if you add a profit/risk element, people's career ambitions, and management breathing down your neck, it'd be even more intense and acrimonious for most commercial games. Then add the chemistry of certain people working together and it's a powderkeg, the more people involved the more likely to go off sooner or later.
Gryzemuis on 26/8/2014 at 23:54
My view on this:
- Good games are made by people who love games. Who love to make a good game. Who have an idea about what a good game should be like. People who play games themselves. People who take pride in the product they make.
- Management doesn't care about games. They care about profit. They care about number of sales. They care about cutting development cost. They care about marketing. They care about deadlines and release dates. They don't play games. They take pride in the amount of money they make. The amount of money their company or department makes. They care absolutely not about the product.
The result of making a game depends for a large part on who was in charge. If management was in charge, the product will probably be profitable. It will be ok-ish, but probably not good. It might be worse. It will almost certainly not be better than ok-ish. Because better means there had to be more budget involved than necessary. If a game ships that is great, it could probably been shipped 6 months earlier, when it was just ok-ish.
That doesn't mean that letting the people from group 1 in charge will always result in good games. On the contrary. Usually if there is no "real" management involved, then development budget will rise beyond imagination. Deadlines are not made. Release date will be missed. Maybe the product will be cancelled. But a few times, when the "game guys" are in charge, the product will be a beauty. Not often, but sometimes. Maybe not often enough to be profitable. So management rather doesn't run risks. They don't care about brilliant games anyway.
