Posts by Furyo

  • Now playing 2010

    I've been on a PSN demo streak lately, trying Mini Ninjas (which I thought as simple as the design was, the game really was doing what it was going for rather well), DeathSpank, Earthworm Jim, NBA 2K11 and Lego Harry Potter. Still got Mafia II to go through.

    As for entire games, God of War III has been absolutely magnificent. I'm done with Hades now so I'll be looking forward to finishing this game this week

  • Management within games industry

    I have so many of them too I could write a book. But that's still an over-generalization to classify all studios that way. I would probably agree with the statement that it is the majority of the studios, but some teams manage to stay away.

    The problem lies in locating these teams, getting on board, moving to the end of the world and staying there. It's not for the faint hearted.

  • Management within games industry

    It's an overgeneralizing rant (as all rants) so it's painting a skewed reality with a large brush.

    Where I agree is that your middle management should absolutely always emerge from the production ranks, so they know who and what they're dealing with. There is absolute great value in leads/managers and producers that have made games themselves because they won't be easily BS'd by slackers and will push for the right things at the right time.

    Looking back, the best games I've worked on were always headed by such people. Assassin's Creed 2 for instance was such an elite group of people that none of the meddling with publishers ever came down to my level. Because in reality it was kept to a very minimal impact. Both by people on the team that knew what they were doing to perfection and because the publisher trusted those guys and no one else to deliver a game like AC2. It helps that the team was literally an insider to the publisher. When the head of publishing sits down with the team, things that could take weeks to know about get solved in hours.

    The more you work in this industry, the more you realize that faults are on both sides. The publisher's and the developer's. It usually starts with the developers lying to their heart's content about their capacity to make a game/feature in time and in budget so they can secure their budget. Due diligence should always be key, but publishers themselves aren't necessarily all that savvy about the business (the suits come from all sorts of other industries) and they're just happy to see something that looks good on a screen.

    The worst games to work on are the ones where the producer comes back from securing funding then asks himself : "How the hell will we make that game now?"

    The future to me lies in self publishing on one side for small teams, and the continuation of massive AAA teams internal to the publishers with a very close collaboration. In both cases it fills the gap between publishers and developers and that can only be a good thing. The games and studios that have been successful for a few years have all followed this

    Valve (self published, self developed)

    Naughty Dog (Internal team to Sony)

    All indie darlings of the past 3-4 years (self published or in the case of ThatGameCompany, something similar to internal team)

    Sony Santa Monica

    Rockstar (internal teams that can get all the publishing they need like GTA and RDR)

    Ubisoft Montreal and soon Toronto

    Bioware (they're good enough on their own to have all the publishing support they need)

    Bungie (very close publishing partners with Microsoft on Halo of course)

    Crytek (which partnership with EAP makes them able to make the games they want to make, with all the publishing muscle EA can have)

    Infinity Ward (despite the way it ended, their partnership with Activision was absolutely the source for the galactic success of the MW series)

    Let me be clear, this close relationship is absolutely necessary, yet should always remain a balancing act without any sort of corporate lackey that just aims to please the other side and not watch for his own best interest and that of his team. The best work will come from those sorts of work relationships, much like it does on every level of the production as good ideas are born from regular ideas everyone has. It's all about balancing both goals and ideas while always keeping the vision of the project intact.

    And the people that can do that, the executive producers and creative directors that can do that for their production team, are worth all their weight in gold and much much more. As someone who has worked with two such individuals, I can only wish that everyone get to experience it one day.

  • EA Montreal is now Visceral Montreal

    Oh I'm a noob too, but at least I don't claim to know what I'm doing

    In all seriousness, sorry for the heated reply there. It wasn't even a bad day, just that I keep hearing this generally from juniors with no clues in all teams I've worked with. I'm sure I have said the same thing when I started too, but with experience and the teams I've worked with you understand that you're really just a noob with a very narrow view of the overall picture most of the time.

  • EA Montreal is now Visceral Montreal

    Oh please... I'm so sick and tired of this "grunts Vs leads vs managers" mentality...For all the bullshit grunts throw around at the "suits that don't get it", there is a metric ton of fucktards that don't know their left hand from their right and couldn't possibly get anything done by themselves.

    Good teams make good games, and everyone has his role to fulfill. People that don't get what leads and managers do only prove they should never climb to these positions themselves. Same thing for the salary.

  • Lara Croft and the guardian of light.

    This Lara Croft game (notice it's not called Tomb Raider) has of Lara Croft only the name. It's an obvious business savvy decision to limit the risks on this attempt at exploring XBLA and PSN on the part of Square Enix (Crystal Dynamics was bought a few years back). It could easily be a brand new IP with a new character, and I expect they very much used this game to explore new design ideas for a brand new IP they might be revealing in a while.

    As a game, (I played the demo) it is a very solid action adventure title, quite a AAA one for the target platform and at a relative low price for its production values.

  • Medal of Honor

    Ginger Lord was telling me today how bad the SP was, with multiple occurrences of getting stuck over a 10 minutes play session. Getting in buildings with no way outs until you snipe two guys at a distance with no hint whatsoever as to what to do etc...

  • Now playing 2010

    Been playing a shit load of....Puzzle Quest 2. Got a free steam key from the devs and I must say I'm enjoying it a little too much I only played the first on the iPod and really really loved it. The second is more of the same in game mechanics but when it's that good I can't blame them. More spells, more gameplay modes besides the fights, it's an all around gem.