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RoadCrewWorker posted:Betting it's when you can't be bothered to coordinate anything so everyone just kinda works on their own grain of sand and at the end you all just throw it together and hope that the sheer height of the random pile will impress people That'd be my guess, just grab stuff they could knock out quickly, eventually enough stuff piles up and they got something playable, whether much of it was designed/tested to work together is another matter.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:51
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Man image how pack that room would have been full of people with morbid curiosity of just what the hell happened/pissed off they wasted their money on Anthem.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:51
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The only "pile of sand" process I've heard of is the idea that if you take enough small grains of something and put them together, eventually the sum of the grains form enough to be considered a "pile". Which... wow that explains a lot. Like they produced the combat, menu screens, Fort Tarsis, the story, etc all separately with their own teams and then piled them together and hoped it made a game if they glued them together with enough loading screens. And that, fellow goons, is the story of how Anthem happened. e: or maybe the "grains" were their ideas and hoped piling up enough ideas would make a single good idea.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:37
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Anthem: The POS development methodology
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Mar 18, 2019 19:43
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I suppose the general idea would have been like an hourglass, until the team realized their opening was like a millimeter thick and they needed to filter the sahara desert through it
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Mar 18, 2019 19:44
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Disargeria posted:The only "pile of sand" process I've heard of is the idea that if you take enough small grains of something and put them together, eventually the sum of the grains form enough to be considered a "pile". Thanks for the info.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:45
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I bet is some agile methodology that priorize the smaller task first. Or something like that.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:48
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I still think it might have something to do with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model But I don't know how you'd make a development process based on dynamic criticality. The only other thing I can think of is the idea of 'landfill development' where you keep older, lovely code around and just patch over it until you get something that works. Which fits, but I don't know why you'd brag about it.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:50
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The sad thing is that Bioware wrote up that GDC blurb thinking Anthem would be some triumph of last-minute term paper writing and not a studio killing disaster.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:53
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For the love of god let that power point/paper/presentation get leaked to the public.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:55
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exquisite tea posted:The sad thing is that Bioware wrote up that GDC blurb thinking Anthem would be some triumph of last-minute term paper writing and not a studio killing disaster. I wonder who, if anyone, at Bioware knew what a disaster of a game they had on their hands. People generally say that developers usually know that a game is lovely long before it releases and sometimes there's just no turning that ship around. What's fascinating is that I think Bioware's leadership seemed to really believe in the game. They showed off a lot of gameplay before release. They planned this GDC presentation. Hell, they had an open beta weekend--you don't do that if you think people are going to try your game and hate it within a couple hours. All of their pre-release actions suggested that they thought the game would do well. I want a postmortem on this more than I think I've wanted one for any game, because the disconnect between the confidence of the game's marketing and pre-release previews and the actual quality of the game is so gigantic I have to wonder what it was like being a rank-and-file developer at this studio dealing with what had to be willfully blind creative leadership.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:58
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That guy Ben Irko guy or whatever looked like he was half dead in the "ACTUALLY THE LOOT IS GOOD" stream
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Mar 18, 2019 20:03
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it's almost like the structure of strict hierarchy used in corporate entities doesn't actually lead to the best and brightest steering the ship
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Mar 18, 2019 20:06
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Harrow posted:I wonder who, if anyone, at Bioware knew what a disaster of a game they had on their hands. People generally say that developers usually know that a game is lovely long before it releases and sometimes there's just no turning that ship around. I initially dismissed it as marketing hype, something we've seen many times before. These games hit huge levels of hype that spiral way above what the devs ever predicted and they're left struggling to meet those ideals. And Anthem's also heavily affected by that, but it seems like the leadership literally believed they were delivering something that actually met the inflated hype and marketing. Usually these big studios do private review research, where they literally try to work out their projected Metacritic scores based on private, trusted reviewers. Heck, even the public test events they had were review disasters! I'm dying to know what went on in those upper level meetings. Was everyone just blindly positive because the alternative was doom for the studio? Disargeria fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 20:07
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Disargeria posted:Usually these big studios do private review research, where they literally try to work out their projected Metacritic scores based on private, trusted reviewers. Heck, even the public test events they had were review disasters! I'm dying to know what went on in those upper level meetings. Was everyone just blindly positive because the alternative was doom for the studio? Their internal predictions said Andromeda would probably be like an 80-85 score game, but "then the gifs started" Harrow posted:I want a postmortem on this more than I think I've wanted one for any game, because the disconnect between the confidence of the game's marketing and pre-release previews and the actual quality of the game is so gigantic I have to wonder what it was like being a rank-and-file developer at this studio dealing with what had to be willfully blind creative leadership. Jason Schreier is working on one for Kotaku
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Mar 18, 2019 20:13
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I bet they said jiffs too.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:14
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Disargeria posted:Was everyone just blindly positive because the alternative was doom for the studio? Bingo. Six years worth of AAA development is a massive sunk cost, and your only hope after you realize it's a dud is to swing for the rafters and hope people try to catch it There's no way anyone in upper brass expects this thing to succeed; they just want it to eke out enough box sales to avoid going completely under.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:15
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Glenn Quebec posted:That guy Ben Irko guy or whatever looked like he was half dead in the "ACTUALLY THE LOOT IS GOOD" stream He’s the same jerk that ruined the Star Wars MMO
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Mar 18, 2019 20:15
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Vermain posted:Bingo. Six years worth of AAA development is a massive sunk cost, and your only hope after you realize it's a dud is to swing for the rafters and hope people try to catch it There's no way anyone in upper brass expects this thing to succeed; they just want it to eke out enough box sales to avoid going completely under. Thing is, you can do that while still being more guarded about it. The reason it read as legitimate optimism on their part was because they showed so much gameplay and also had two semi-public and public beta weekends. Plenty of big games launch without letting players play them early and it isn't considered suspicious. I dunno, maybe they thought they could make a good vertical slice and the whole thing was intended as a smokescreen (which also blew up in their faces because of how broken so many parts of the demo weekends were).
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Mar 18, 2019 20:19
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ZeeBoi posted:He’s the same jerk that ruined the Star Wars MMO I haven't played a good MMO in well over a decade.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:20
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Glenn Quebec posted:I haven't played a good MMO in well over a decade. FFXIV is probably going to go down as the last "classic" MMO
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Mar 18, 2019 20:22
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Harrow posted:I wonder who, if anyone, at Bioware knew what a disaster of a game they had on their hands. People generally say that developers usually know that a game is lovely long before it releases and sometimes there's just no turning that ship around. I personally think they really believed the game would have the current reception The Division 2 is getting: Glaring issues but the gameplay and other things are so good it doesn't matter. They probably got too invested in the things that are actually good about it (the art assets, maps, models etc) and got blindsided by the actual gameplay loop
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Mar 18, 2019 20:22
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Cancelled talk about something to do with developing like sand lol, explains so much right there.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:36
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PS good fuckin luck if anyone is tasked with making a "2.0: No We Fixed It Now" version/patch/DLC" cause that's sounding like spaghetti code.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:39
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So what kind of End of Life date are we looking at here for Anthem? Six months? A year? Running those servers can't be that cheap for EA.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:43
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teh_Broseph posted:PS good fuckin luck if anyone is tasked with making a "2.0: No We Fixed It Now" version/patch/DLC" cause that's sounding like spaghetti code. I bet a lot of it is undecipherable because "the person who did that bit left for another position and we don't have notes".
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Mar 18, 2019 20:46
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teh_Broseph posted:PS good fuckin luck if anyone is tasked with making a "2.0: No We Fixed It Now" version/patch/DLC" cause that's sounding like spaghetti code. oof yeah, if they can't even get drop rates right now after multiple patches... 
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Mar 18, 2019 20:52
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Yeah, I get the feeling that one of the reasons these issues keep coming up is that no one really has a handle of what's in the code, and every time they 'fix' something, three more things break.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:54
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BexGu posted:So what kind of End of Life date are we looking at here for Anthem? Six months? A year? Running those servers can't be that cheap for EA. They have some big event planned for May, so probably around then or after that if the game doesn’t pick up.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:15
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It's also hard to tell what's broken because there are so few feedback numbers and they're also completely fake. Your health is represented by a health bar, subdivided in 400 hp ticks. You'd think that tells you how much hp you have, except you know they had to round something to avoid half tics at the end. Also, there was already a bug where the amount of health per tick was changed in a hotfix. Oh, and there's a health bug where the number of ticks changes every time you load a different area. But it only sometimes affects the amount of time it takes you to actually die... Which means sometimes it's a display issues and other times there's something wrong with the actual amount of health. But maybe specifically the "low health" is actually caused by bugged enemy damage, where we see no numbers except for their impact on your health bar. All of this is affected not only by the stats on your gear, but by hidden base values and an additional scaling factor that takes into account a hidden gear level calculation that may even be taking into account your teammates' gear! Where do you even start debugging that mess? The answer is "nowhere" because it's been a month and still hasn't been fixed.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:16
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nerdz posted:I personally think they really believed the game would have the current reception The Division 2 is getting: Glaring issues but the gameplay and other things are so good it doesn't matter. They probably got too invested in the things that are actually good about it (the art assets, maps, models etc) and got blindsided by the actual gameplay loop I'm curious what glaring issues there are with Div 2? The only one I can think of is the skills despswning which while annoying isn't a glaring issue but simply a nasty bug.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:18
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Hopper posted:I'm curious what glaring issues there are with Div 2? The only one I can think of is the skills despswning which while annoying isn't a glaring issue but simply a nasty bug. There's more things, like the skill mods requirements being completely messed up, higher quality gear mods having worse rolls than lower quality ones, some progression bugs that locked people's chars from progressing the story. I feel like the division 2 was the best release of the genre so far, and that's the level of delusion I think bioware had with their game, that they would have the division 2's reception right now. now changing subjects: Who do you think will acquire this game, like for Tencent and share for Nexon
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Mar 18, 2019 21:25
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Huh...ok none of that hss affected me as I am only lvl 12. But it sound easier to fix than the loading screen mess, the brutal separation of story city and gameplay and the messed up calculations in Anthem. These will never be fixed because its the foundations that are rotten.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:29
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nerdz posted:I feel like the division 2 was the best release of the genre so far, and that's the level of delusion I think bioware had with their game, that they would have the division 2's reception right now. I don't think BioWare have ever properly reckoned with the amount of goodwill they've burned through in the past decade or so -- post Mass Effect 2, literally every single game they've put out has had some massive issue or another. Even Inquisition, which was well-reviewed and successful, is a pretty divisive game
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Mar 18, 2019 21:31
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Pattonesque posted:I don't think BioWare have ever properly reckoned with the amount of goodwill they've burned through in the past decade or so -- post Mass Effect 2, literally every single game they've put out has had some massive issue or another. Isn't the biggest complaint against Inquisition that its tedious? Thats pretty good for the last decade of Bioware releases!
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Mar 18, 2019 21:43
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Inquisition is a single player MMO and it’s as tedious as that suggests.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:45
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hobbesmaster posted:Isn't the biggest complaint against Inquisition that its tedious? yeah the big thing about Inquisition is its MMO "fetch 10 bear asses my lord" leftovers, which unfortunately are a pretty big chunk of content it also suffers from Witcher 3 blowing it out of the water six months later -- not that it's a bad game at all, it just suffers in comparison to a game which seemed to put an extreme amount of care into even the smallest sidequest
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Mar 18, 2019 21:47
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How many months before this turns into free-to-play as EA tries desperately to get some money out of it?
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Mar 18, 2019 21:49
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Mar 18, 2019 21:57
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It was no mistake that BioWare didn’t include a stats screen It would lay bare just how shiiiiiit things are
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Mar 18, 2019 22:06
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