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The thing that gets me about DF9 isn't that they stopped developing it. It was an EA game, I bought it knowing that it might never be finished (and got my enjoyment out of it). It's that they're still selling it without any warnings attached to it.
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Feb 17, 2015 18:44
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Basic Chunnel posted:PM is such a bad role model because he's the guy every kid wants to be in high school - he got paid to do very little but come up with big ideas for decades, essentially. It's kind of extraordinary that his name had such cache for so long. He's a really dire example of a creative person with astoundingly bad project management skills being treated as a guiding figure. Look up "scope creep" in the dictionary and you'll just see his face. That's not quite true, on a lot of the games that made his name he wasn't just an idea guy but also a programmer and designer. In fact there is a pretty good correlation between him failing to deliver and no longer actively playing a part in s development. I half wonder if the fact that he thought he was a terrible programmer when in fact he was in reality a competent one might contribute to his later overreach.
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Feb 17, 2015 18:49
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Mr Underhill posted:As stated before, never played DF9 - not my genre and don't know much about it. I don't just have this attitude towards DF, I don't really care if I lose 10-20 bucks on a game if the people who've misstepped this time usually deliver the goods. I know you love DF like double hard but can you not see how DF9 was mismanaged and had DF actively lie to customers is a bad thing. How can you be so uncritical?
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Feb 17, 2015 18:50
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The Kins posted:I can't see this myself because the update's only visible to backers, but apparently the dispute between the "Last Year" kickstarter and the holders of the Friday the 13th license has been resolved with only minor aesthetic changes to the game. So, uh, yay and all that. Naw, cant see the updates either. Kickstarter still hasnt lifted the IP blocking thing. They sent out an email, but it was basically a transcript of some back and forth between the devs and the lawyers of Crystal Lake and how both sides are trying to work it out but Crystal Lake are being a bunch of whiney twats over the "similarities".
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Feb 17, 2015 19:03
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BigFatFlyingBloke posted:That's not quite true, on a lot of the games that made his name he wasn't just an idea guy but also a programmer and designer. Eh. I don't know. There are quite a few games he produced that were good, and a bunch he helped program that were bad. My interpretation is rather that it went rapidly downhill once he started Lionhead, so it rather seems like there's something in the team composition that made or broke him. The comparison with George Lucas comes to mind… Either he had the right people to support him at Bullfrog, or the right people to reign him in (or both), and then were left without them when he split off to do his own thing.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:03
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Tim Schafer? You mean John Romero 2.0?
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Feb 17, 2015 19:10
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Compared to Peter Molyneux I actually feel really bad for John Romero. I mean he was all "GONNA MAKE YOU HIS BITCH" back in the 90s, yeah, but he only really released one terrible game and it ruined his career. Plenty of others have dropped repeated bombs and they manage to get by just fine. I guess Daikatana was really, REALLY bad, though.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:12
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Yeah, and it wasn't his idea to run that ad, either. It breaks my heart to see him do social games crap.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:15
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Zaphod42 posted:Compared to Peter Molyneux I actually feel really bad for John Romero. And really, that was more to do with his "rocker" persona than anything else. Daikatana was exceptionally bad, to a degree that it is mindboggling, but everyone always makes at least one bad game. Like Bioshock Infinite for Levine, or Will Wright with Spore and all that, it can have a pretty awful effect though.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:17
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John Romero really loving owns and anyone even remotely interested in the process of making games should be required to read Masters of Doom. The amount of hubris from both Johns was insane and they were young guys caught up in a whirlwind of astronomical success.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:18
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ymgve posted:I created a quck mod for the STRAFE pre-alpha to give inverted mouselook: Thanks dude!
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Feb 17, 2015 19:19
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VodeAndreas posted:If you watch the documentaries then you see that there is ONE business guy trying to keep things on track... I don't think that stands up to Tim's ideas very well though. There are multiple times in the documentary where his facade drops momentarily and he seems utterly bewildered / incredulous at what is going on regarding the decision making / sales expectations.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:25
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Toxxupation posted:Psychonauts is not a bad game, just an unbelievably flawed one with some atrocious platforming and a really, really horrible camera This is pretty heavy hyperbole. Its flaws are minor, the platforming is fun, and the rest is pretty great.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:28
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evilmiera posted:And really, that was more to do with his "rocker" persona than anything else. Daikatana was exceptionally bad, to a degree that it is mindboggling, but everyone always makes at least one bad game. What happened to Ken Levine? As far ask I know, Bioshock Infinite did really well (even if it was somewhat flawed) and he just shut down his studio because he wanted to focus on smaller, more personal projects. Was there something else afoot there?
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Feb 17, 2015 19:29
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:This is pretty heavy hyperbole. Its flaws are minor, the platforming is fun, and the rest is pretty great. This. Except for the Meat Circus. loving Meat Circus.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:30
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Zaphod42 posted:What happened to Ken Levine? I thought the studio was shut down because B:I was in terms of compensating long protracted production costs, a financial failure.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:30
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Mr Underhill posted:Peter Molyneux springs to mind. Yeah, everybody's jumping on the hate bandwagon, and I agree a lot of folks have the right to be upset, but it's like Bullfrog and Dungeon Keeper and Fable II and all the good things he's ever made suddenly dissipated or really don't matter anymore over this Godus bs. No, it's more "while they were good they were still plagued with Molyneux's 'promise the moon, deliver a rock that some guy down the road swears to god is a moon rock' nonsense, which is the point of offense people are complaining about". Kinda like Psychonauts, really.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:31
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Seconding reading Masters Of Doom. Also, I once IM-d with John Romero. The conversation went like: me: Are you really John Romero? JR: Yup. me: *can't think of anything to type* okbye! That was back when his site was registered in Romania. Speaking of Kickstarter, I felt bad about Shaker not making it... then again it wasn't exactly his game. Imagine Romero coming to KS with something Strafe-like. I'm willing to bet he'd clean up. Also, I unironically love the avatar my sycophantic love of Tim's chubby charms has earned me. Thanks guy
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Feb 17, 2015 19:37
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Zaphod42 posted:What happened to Ken Levine? As 2K started its death throes it was revealed that Levine had Infinite remade from the ground up over and over and over, every time some new bullshit whim popped into his head - the example I saw was that the entire Shantytown area needed to be scapped and re-modeled from the start because it "wasn't beautiful," and we already saw all the cut material in the release trailers and so on. Basically his prima donna tendencies turned Infinite into such a money hole that it would have doomed the studio no matter how well it did. And that was before he hosed up the game's few positive qualities with that god-awful DLC campaign.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:37
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:This is pretty heavy hyperbole. Its flaws are minor, the platforming is fun, and the rest is pretty great. Yeah, DF makes games that don't draw people in for the gameplay, but it's a pretty big example of "everything has to be one extreme or the other" internet mentality to say the gameplay is an active hindrance like Deadly Premonition. Mr Underhill posted:Seconding reading Masters Of Doom. I'm surprised they didn't go for red text.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:38
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JossiRossi posted:I thought the studio was shut down because B:I was in terms of compensating long protracted production costs, a financial failure. Hmmm, I don't know about that one dude. B:I was a huge success, it topped all sales charts for months internationally and sold more than 6M copies. A New York Times article argued the game cost $100M to make and $100M to market. 6M sales can still recoup that and make a profit. Ken Levine also came out in response to that article and categorically disagreed with the $200M valuation, saying they didn't spend anywhere near that. So I dunno. Maybe not a huge roaring success, but I don't think that 2K was like "That's it Irrational, you're done! We're pulling the plug!". Therw was a whole series of articles about how Ken wanted to get away from big-budget production and work on more intimate projects at the time; maybe that's just the spin but I buy it.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:40
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Zaphod42 posted:Hmmm, I don't know about that one dude. B:I was a huge success, it topped all sales charts for months internationally and sold more than 6M copies. I likely was just wrong in that case. I dunno, in a way I feel sore about it because a ton of talented folks in my back yard (Boston) lost their job over this. I don't see why he couldn't have spun out a small side studio to do his vanity projects and kept what appeared to be a successful blockbuster creating game powerhouse running. Maybe that's why I think the behind the scenes situation must have been poor actually.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:48
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The video game industry is notorious for having some of the worst working conditions and attitudes towards workers rights you can find in a white collar industry. A big studio treating employees like absolute poo poo doesn't mean they were having financial troubles, it just means they're an average video game studio.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:52
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From the NYT article:quote:At the end of a day at the studio Mr. Levine contemplated a second act in life. He estimated that he was owed over 130 unused vacation days and said that because of his workaholic ways his wife at one point thought he would have a heart attack. Now, he said, leaning back on a rolling office chair, he looks forward to “a palate-cleansing vacation.” Yeah, sounds like he's taking a sabbatical. JossiRossi posted:I likely was just wrong in that case. I dunno, in a way I feel sore about it because a ton of talented folks in my back yard (Boston) lost their job over this. I don't see why he couldn't have spun out a small side studio to do his vanity projects and kept what appeared to be a successful blockbuster creating game powerhouse running. Maybe that's why I think the behind the scenes situation must have been poor actually. Yeah, a bunch of people did lose their jobs, which sucks. I did hear a bunch of other studios reached out and hired most of the team, though. A Fancy 400 lbs posted:The video game industry is notorious for having some of the worst working conditions and attitudes towards workers rights you can find in a white collar industry. A big studio treating employees like absolute poo poo doesn't mean they were having financial troubles, it just means they're an average video game studio. Sadly this is overwhelmingly true. A few big names get tenure'd and can last forever, but everybody else is super expendable. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Feb 17, 2015 |
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Feb 17, 2015 19:58
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senrath posted:The thing that gets me about DF9 isn't that they stopped developing it. It was an EA game, I bought it knowing that it might never be finished (and got my enjoyment out of it). It's that they're still selling it without any warnings attached to it. Geokinesis posted:I know you love DF like double hard but can you not see how DF9 was mismanaged and had DF actively lie to customers is a bad thing. The thing is, with it being an EA game quite a few people (myself included) bought it because we felt sure that Double Fine would finish the game. It might not have every single feature on the exhaustive wish list, but we figured it was a safe bet we'd get a solid sandbox game that included the humor and quirkiness Double Fine tends to be known for. It's the main reason we put up with how buggy the Alphas were (they were Alphas, after all); we always figured that it'd get sorted out eventually because Double Fine wouldn't let us down like that. Unfortunately for us all, they did end up on abandoning the project, for all intents and purposes. The last Alpha prior to release was still a super buggy mess, and as far as I know the actual 1.0 build wasn't much better. The absolute icing on the cake in this whole fiasco was when JP (the lead Dev) said in response to a long period of silence "Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally ;____;" That was just prior to their final Alpha release prior to 1.0, and while they didn't silently pull the plug, their reputation certainly took a big hit amongst those of us who backed them (and gave more ammunition for those who were already critical of DF).
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Feb 17, 2015 21:09
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Step aside, Lord British. There's a new overpromising scumbag developer in town, and his name is Tim Schafer.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:39
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Maybe someone should make a Early Access Thread.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:45
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DolphinCop posted:Step aside, Lord British. There's a new overpromising scumbag developer in town, and his name is Tim Schafer. I've never considered Garriot a scumbag, even though I've not really grown up with any of his games or played any of his later outings. I don't know, looking at what he's done he doesn't seem like a bad person?
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Feb 17, 2015 21:47
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Zaphod42 posted:What happened to Ken Levine? B:I burnt money like crazy because it was run poorly and it wasn't an artistic pursuit to lay off ~100 people. It was a critical success but not a financial one.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:51
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evilmiera posted:I've never considered Garriot a scumbag, even though I've not really grown up with any of his games or played any of his later outings. I don't know, looking at what he's done he doesn't seem like a bad person? Yeah even Garriot's failed games of the past decade or so weren't actually all that bad, I don't know what that is supposed to mean.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:54
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Didn't the company he was working with on his sci-fi MMO literally screw him over while he was in space and wasn't even on Earth to be able to object or something like that? Kind of hard to blame him for poo poo like that.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:58
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Garriott's done really nerdy things with his money but he's made good games so I don't really think he should be in the same conversation.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:05
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Didn't the company he was working with on his sci-fi MMO literally screw him over while he was in space and wasn't even on Earth to be able to object or something like that? Kind of hard to blame him for poo poo like that. Well, he did go to space instead of working on the game he was supposed to be creating.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:16
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DolphinCop posted:Step aside, Lord British. There's a new overpromising scumbag developer in town, and his name is Tim Schafer.  What get's me about DF-9 is that their idea from the get-go was that the game would be financially self sustainable through early access sales. If only more loyal fans had paid full price for the pre-alpha they could have continued development! The logic seems so backwards and stupid. And let's not forget they raised $3,336,371 on KS and had to release 1/2 a game because they ran out of money.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:22
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mycot posted:Maybe someone should make a Early Access Thread. Nah, we just need a Double Fine Hate Thread, so that the Kickstarter thread doesn't get overrun with DF bashing every few months.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:23
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Didn't the company he was working with on his sci-fi MMO literally screw him over while he was in space and wasn't even on Earth to be able to object or something like that? Kind of hard to blame him for poo poo like that. Yes. While he was in quarantine before his space flight NCSoft forged a letter from him saying he was leaving to pursue other interests. They also killed Tabula Rasa at the same time without his input, though it was probably not profitable enough to survive longer anyway. He won a lawsuit against them later on over this, but it was too late for Tabula Rasa, which is too bad because it was actually okay at this point. A friend and I who had played during the beta had a "hey, remember Tabula Rasa" moment a short time before this and we both chucked in for a month to see what it was like. Before that month was up this nonsense happened and we got the free crap that NCSoft threw at subscribers as a sorry for cancelling the game.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:25
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I played Tabula Rasa a little bit in beta and a fair bit with friends in release and while flawed, it was a lot of fun.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:30
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Great Rumbler posted:Nah, we just need a Double Fine Hate Thread, so that the Kickstarter thread doesn't get overrun with DF bashing every few months. I don't think there would have been a problem if it wasn't for Mr Underhill arguing passionately against passing comments.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:33
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Okay okay, enough DF hate. Top Down PC Game quote:Hi everyone. I a creating a top Down Game which needs your help. I will be creating the game with the help from you the funders. I will be making the game similar to League of Leagues, Warcraft and more. I want this game to be a single and multiplayer game. The reason I am asking for funding is I am able to create more assets for the game. As you can see from the screen shot this is just start of the game, a lot more needs doing more detail putting in. I will be updating this campaign with more screen shots and videos so you the funders can see how its coming along. There's something about projects like this that makes me profoundly sad.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:54
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Warcraft and more!
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Feb 17, 2015 22:57
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