Category: Audio&Games

Mass Effect Andromeda behind the scenes.

From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game,

It will never be not weird to have NDAs that long. The game has been out for months, it’s a $100B industry. We should be able to talk and have conversations without all that hiding going on. It’s unhealthy, we can’t learn and do better this way.

Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months.

Five years. Half a decade. Probably 3 years of trying things out and 2 years of absurd pressure. Classic, quite standard but definitely not good.

Rather than develop a Mass Effect 4 at the studio’s main headquarters in Edmonton, which had made the first three games, BioWare decided to put its Montreal studio in charge.

Game companies have massive tax cuts in Montreal. Games cost a lot. It makes sense to send an expensive franchise to be made where it costs less. Cutting off the main team though, is… Very risky.

“No Man’s Sky with BioWare graphics and story, that sounds amazing.”

I mean. Any seasoned designer or programmer would tell you that it is ultra risky to do something like that because tons of technical reasons. It blows my mind that they would try something that cocky on a huge franchise. Cockiness should be in the polish, not the scope. Try new things out on short projects, not pillars.

Frostbite is capable of rendering gorgeous graphics and visual effects, but when BioWare first started using it, in 2011, it had never been used to make role-playing games.

No problem! Risk on top of risk on top of more risk for a beloved franchise. All good! This is going to work!

I just don’t understand how Electronic Arts, a 35 year old game company that produced hundreds of games still makes pretty much all the bad decisions possible on one of their biggest franchise. Wouldn’t you polish the previous games main features, perfect them? Create a spin-off, less costly, with procedural exploration? Have a RPG engine or layer developed and perfected for years for RPGs to come? Five years, hundreds of people working hard and the result is memes and an IP put on halt. Pretty sad and probably avoidable.

People in games, listen.

Hidden Figures

– Budget: $25M

– Box office: $228.4M

9X

Moonlight

– Budget: $1.5M

– Box office: $55.8M

– An academy award

37.2X

Get Out

– Budget: $4.5M

– Box office: $194.9M

43X

Empire the TV show renewed for a new season, averages 15M viewers.

Fate of the Furious, directed by a black man, just crossed the billion dollar mark at the box office, making four times what it cost.

ALL of those are prominently about black people, minorities and sport a diverse cast.

ALL of those are doing more than extremely well. What does the game industry offer this year?

Another WWII shooter. Another walking simulator where everybody is dead and you’re a white dude smashing aliens or whatever. Another RPG where your white self crafts stuff and roams endlessly.  I mean.

Blizzard paid attention and included a diverse cast in its last game Overwatch. It won all of the awards, has apparently 30 million players monthly and is now a billion dollar franchise. IN ONE YEAR.

It’s nuts to me how bad we are in games at listening and paying attention to society, societal changes. Game development is an ultra risky business and we refuse to do anything to help sustain ourselves, despite answers being around us. 2017.

It’s mind-blowing.

It’s been interesting. First, Ian Bogost article on how video games are better without stories. Which I agree with, without denying the attraction for people to play games FOR the story. It’s a matter of taste but also as Ian says, it’s not where games are the strongest, I don’t think we can argue against that. Video games were about gameplay before anything else. The article talks about narrative in games with a new story-heavy game that just came out, What Remains of Edith Finch.

Watching a playthrough my immediate reactions are:

– Make it a movie.

– Cool assets. That’s a lot of work to cram in some interactivity that is not that central to the game: it’s about the story, not mechanics or fancy way to advance the plot through game scripts. Thus back to my first point.

It made me think about why I have such a hard time connecting with stories in games –and everywhere else- and it’s because writers always think they’re slick to talk about family because that’s universal right?

Wrong. Family is a vague concept to my adopted ass. The all genealogy thing and what happened to uncle Bob, I just can’t give a fuck. And it’s not because it’s not compelling, but it’s really not to me. It’s bland. It’s washed out. It’s the past that isn’t really what’s going on today.

It made me think. What kind of stories do I like? The ones that are vague. The ones that leave room for interpretation. The ones where relationships are absolutely not about that ultra classic view of family. I’m starting to think that if I loved Akira, it wasn’t so much because of the amazing sci-fi and paranormal stuff going on but because it’s just a bunch of kids with no family. They are their own family. I connect with that. Same with Mr. White and Jesse in Breaking Bad. It’s like emergent families. That’s a lot more interesting to me because that’s how my life has been: many families, none with which I share anything biological.

In short I connect with stories where family is a concept but not that hard, body-wired thing. And it’s not just because I’ve been adopted that I don’t connect with that, I think I’ve seen enough toxic biological families to know that traditional family is not something that you should put on a pedestal or imagine as being universal.

I see narrative design –right, writing- as more interesting when you add mystery in the relationship itself, not when you add mystery around a classic family tale.

Anyway.

I don’t get how we end up where we are.

All machines and devices that we use are personal computers. CPUs, RAM, storage, Operating Systems, Updates.

All PCs, all doing the same. Your phone, your console, your laptop it doesn’t matter. All the same.

All running software that we mostly get online because that’s how we’ve been doing since online exists.

I don’t get why we’re spending so much time separating things and making them as if they were different. They are not, at all. People acting like Japanese games would be successful on Steam like, duh. I wanted that for the past 15 years if not more and it’s not slick or anything: we love their games and we don’t necessarily want to buy a new machine to play them.

Like, is that even an argument? Why wouldn’t we want people to play our games on whatever they want, now that we can do that pretty well? Why wouldn’t we want people to pay for computer games, those things that are so damn complex to make?

Instead we create silos inside silos inside silos and bargain our sweat to ludicrous levels.

I don’t get it.

Rock Paper Shotgun talking about Full Throttle:

On release, Full Throttle was perhaps the first sign of adventure fatigue from critics. It was 1995, and the flawless DOTT and S&M had in years past rightly received rave reviews from everywhere, inducing everyone else in the industry to try to copy. The press were perhaps looking to take LucasArts down a peg, and Full Throttle provided the opportunity. It was short, the puzzles were simpler, and it had some absolutely god-awful action sequences. It didn’t receive a drubbing, of course – but it did represent the beginnings of the tedious decision that the time of the adventure was coming to an end.

They. Were. Trying. Stuff. Out. It’s something that critics get-but-don’t-get most of the time. Creative people try things out, find a recipe. They use that successful recipe for a while. Then they want to switch it up, change things. Consolidate, reduce, add.

Short? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people don’t finish games.

Simpler? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people hate difficult, convoluted puzzles.

Action? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people like action a lot.

Yes, most of the time it doesn’t do as well as previous output but… That doesn’t really matter because the reasons for changes are not stupid and if you want the old stuff, it’s still around.

We’re here now in 2017, where the most popular games have some narrative going on like Uncharted or Thimbleweed Park or Mass Effect. Adventure games never really died, that was a headline trick. That’s what I dislike with journalism/coverage of creative stuff: pushing a narrative when really, there’s none.

We just create entertainment and try to sell it to continue to create entertainment. If you want to write about that, dive into the design and business decisions that are shaping games but don’t go for the kind of lazy and obnoxious “X is dead” or “Y is everything now”.

I mean, I get it. We all get it. Charity, good vibes and unity.

But that’s too much. ACLU just got six times the money it receives a year, in one month. It’s got so much sudden money, they felt like they should join Y Combinator to help manage the enormous wealth –$24M received in one weekend- they got. That’s awesome, good for them. Good for us.

So why game developers feel the need to double down by completely eroding games value a few weeks later? $30 for 30 games –$600 worth at full price- is absurd. We already have such a hard time to make people understand that $19.99 is not expensive for a few hours of enjoyable entertainment that sending them the message that they can get that game for virtually nothing sometime in the future, is not something we should do or encourage. At all.

We already have such a hard time to get enough money to make great games, we cannot afford those ridiculous bargains. Developers who already made more than enough can afford it but it’s such a selfish way of looking at our craft, I don’t really get it.

It’s like no one is interested in sustaining our world, setting up an economy? Other entertainment businesses don’t do that. There are no $1 movie tickets, $2 music albums. Bandcamp run a charity thing recently too but people paid the music full price, Bandcamp just redistributed all the money to charities. There are already tons of cheap or really not expensive entertainment.

There’s no need to bargain our absurdly-hard-to-make craft like that. I think it needs to stop.

The first year the global game jam happened, over 300 games were made over the weekend.

Yesterday it was 7204 games. It’s impossible to curate such a huge output, so what’s the point? I mean I know it’s all about the journey but…

I think it’s time to make the GGJ something smaller, with a game, a team per city. Make more ambitious games/prototypes this way. Working in a team of say 25 for 3 days requires a lot of control and focus, it would probably make the GGJ a lot less accessible but there are other jams for smaller teams and people with less experience.

Also the industry is always like “crunch is bad” but we have an annual event that requires people to crunch? Learning to work with a bigger team while avoiding/reducing extremes would be great training for future careers. Just sayin’