Thank you very much.
I particularly liked this exchange about Bungie co-founder Jason Jones:
Jones looms large over the entire piece, and yet doesn’t contribute his own voice. I assume he declined to be interviewed. What is especially striking to me is the fact that the journalist managed to include so many developers who played a key role in the creation and development of the Halo franchise, and yet not a single person interviewed currently works at Bungie.
Jaime Griesemer and Marty O’Donnell are currently working together at their independent studio Highwire Games, developing the PSVR exclusive Golem.
PC Gamer interviews a guy that spent 10 years working on one RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 map.
The original Reddit post:
Cleve? Is that you?
I’m not even through part 1 yet. This is long and riveting. Thanks for posting this!
Now that I finished that long Halo article, I’m struck by a few things. I’m amazed, first of all, at how much Marty was involved in all the Halo games. I thought he was just the guy that did the music and sound, but it turns out he has the best insights out of all the interviewees on what worked in Halo’s stories and what didn’t work. His criticisms of the stories of Halo 2 and 3 and Reach were spot on. And he had a lot to do with why ODST was the best one, beyond just the music. He had a lot of story input and feedback that he gave the team, and some of his ideas were implemented and some not, and I think he was spot on about all the story failings in the various Halos.
Another thing that surprised me is just how long a shadow Halo 2 cast. That’s the game that had the most problems and it burnt out many people at the studio. Even when they get to Halo 4 and 5, some of the things from Halo 2 kept getting mentioned. Like Halo 5’s Warzone was initially the concept behind Halo 2’s multiplayer, but that was completely scrapped. Certain Affinity, a studio setup by former Bungie employees, was the one that did the Halo 2 anniversary game that was part of the Halo anniversary edition.
There was also some great bits in there with the project lead for Halo 4 whose previous game experience was working in Japan at Konami on Metal Gear Solid 4. He came in and wanted to do something radically different for Halo 4, but couldn’t make it happen. He was pretty humble in his answers about being demoted and then leaving. He said in retrospect, he would have made the team work on recreating the first Halo with this new engine, get them confident since it was their first game, and THEN had them work on his big idea for Halo 4. Frustratingly, no parties in the interviews mention what his scrapped big idea for Halo 4 was, since one person mentions that they might still use that idea in future editions of the Halo franchise.
Ironically, I had forgotten why I disliked Halo 2 this much until they brought up the talk about the Dervish/Arbiter. Now I recalled!
Reading this, it almost feels like from the 2nd game on, fanboys of the first game took over and decided to put all their “that’d be so cool” fantasies in, with no regards to what made the first game unique and brilliant. Leaving stuff unexplained is so underrated.
Anyway it was very interesting: I always like those talks of how almost amateurish (should I say “human”) the process of setting up big productions is, despite the best effort of companies to try to make us thing such titles are just generated, and not built by hand.
I am atrociusly bad at fighting games (despite liking them) so it was really enjoyable reading about this player placing in the top ranks during hardcore fighting tournaments.
https://esports.yahoo.com/killer-instinct-player-wheels-overcoming-disability-pro-204002264.html
Thanks :)
But… No billboards with ads on the rooftops, must be fake.
To be honest, i’m not really interested in whether or not the developer of Nier believes in god. I am interested to discover he apparently wears a giant smiling helmet/mask in public.
Not always Frank.
Long form article on what happened with Mass Effect Andromeda.
Reading that story made me really happy I preordered Jason’s book.
So the team at Montreal wasted their pre-production phase creating No Man’s Sky (a case of convergent evolution), and instead of extending pre-production once that vision was scrapped, they just went into full-scale production despite having a different direction. There was really no concerted polish phase at the end of development either, because core systems were being reworked until the last minute.
The segment on animation pinpoints EA forcing them to use Frostbite (Inquisition was the first to use Frostbite, but Andromeda’s pre-production actually started around the same time), an understaffed animation team, and outsourcing to second and third world countries which was not efficient because the story was still in flux.
It will be interesting to see if Bioware’s next projects (Dragon Age 4 and Project Dylan) recover in terms of animation now that they’ve had time to modify Frostbite to suit their needs.
facepalm
Wow, I have to admit, that does look quite different. It still looks like a pixelated relic of a by-gone era, and they preserved that look, and I would have never noticed how different it was without side by side screenshots like that.
I was thinking of getting a new computer, while all I needed was a new monitor.
One is how the game looked, The other how you remember it (or how it looked for you due to mods)