EvaUnit02 on 6/3/2019 at 19:38
And the annual Call of Duty games are each made by different studios with their own day to day management yet there is still a parent company responsible for overall business decisions involved with each game. At the end of the day if Paul Neurath demands that Otherside Texas jumps they will have to oblige.
ZylonBane on 7/3/2019 at 14:33
So your concern is... that they'll be ordered to design a terrible game? That's what your thought process is haphazardly stumbling toward?
Bucky Seifert on 8/3/2019 at 00:09
For once, I agree with ZB. Just because of the way Underworld Ascendant turned out doens't mean SS3 will suffer the same fate since it's two different teams. Hell, in Eidos Montreal, Deus Ex HR and Thief 4 was made by two different teams. Even if you don't care for HR, you can still say it's a better designed game than Thief 4 was.
Plus, the golden rule to remember is no developer goes into a game with the intention to make it bad. Game development is incredibly hard and a lot of things can go wrong along the way. The UA team has been refreshingly transparent about what happened, and believe me, that can happen to even the best developers.
icemann on 8/3/2019 at 03:57
To play devils advocate: By that line of thinking Anthem by Bioware should have been a far superior game to Mass Effect Andromeda considering it was made by a different studio (but still under the overall Bioware umbrella). And yet it's been a complete clusterfuck ever since release. Bug riddled, lacking content. Sound familiar?
Pyrian on 8/3/2019 at 04:26
I'm sure Warren Spector will be able to keep the SS3 team from over-scoping and under-delivering like UA and, um, everything Warren Spector has done since Deus Ex 1.
Starker on 8/3/2019 at 04:29
Hell, even Underworld Ascendant has aspects that are pretty damn great. The sound design, the atmosphere, the spell system, for example. Had they had the money to add factions and NPCs and all the things they had to cut, the whole thing would have turned out very different.
And, btw, Update 3 is still coming and there's talk of an update 4 to fix more things and maybe add a few NPCs, even, resources permitting. The game is in a much different state than it was at launch. The AI is much less braindead, it's less buggy and crash-prone, there's a central staircase now that you can use instead of portals, so the world is a much more cohesive whole, etc.
henke on 8/3/2019 at 10:00
Yeah I think UA mainly suffered from being too ambitious for it's budget, just like tons of immsims* (Stalker, Vtmb, Alpha Protocol). Rather than blame management I think we can thank them for keeping development going for 2 months after the publisher money ran out, and even after release. The management at lots of developers would've cut their losses and ran much earlier.
*using the term very loosely, let's not get into an argument about what constitues an immsim again.
icemann on 8/3/2019 at 12:52
So back when they'd be sending out the KS updates about the games development, I recall reading that they were going to have reactive systems in there. Like X action = this change in how a race / faction behaves etc. Is that in there?
For example, a quick search on their KS page brought up (
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/othersidegames/underworld-ascendant/posts/1132136) this update went into it a bit (under "A Dynamic, changing world").
Starker on 8/3/2019 at 14:51
Not really. You have a standing with the factions and what you do can influence it, but there are no factions in the game, effectively.
D'Arcy on 8/3/2019 at 14:55
Quote Posted by henke
Yeah I think UA mainly suffered from being too ambitious for it's budget, just like tons of immsims* (Stalker, Vtmb, Alpha Protocol).
Stalker turned out to be great nevertheless. I love it even riddled with all those bugs from the vanilla version. And the Stalker mod community is probably one of the greatest I've seen. Stuff like Lost Alpha or OGSE are amazing.