The Game's Development Story Discussion

Started by Salt The Fries, Feb 08, 2013, 08:18:47 PM

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The Game's Development Story Discussion (Read 99,979 times)

ScardyFox

The blame game is just coming out of the woodwork. Here is one saying TimeGate didn't "do it".

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/sega-aliens-colonial-marines-sp-was-not-outsourced-to-timegate-studios/

Dusk

Oh boy. Gearbox, just what the hell were you doing?

SM

SM

#137
The word coming out of Timegate is that they did a lot of work on it, but have to play the game through to work out how much of their stuff made it to the final product.

thecaffeinatedone

Quote from: Xhan on Feb 14, 2013, 01:28:20 AM
As with Alien³, there's plenty of blame to go around.

To those whom say the Borderlands 2 did not interfere with A:CM's development, you are quite simply wrong. It's never going to be brought up in public or brought from behind closed doors, but BL2 impacted A:CM severely in the same way NOLF2 impacted AvP2, but to an even greater degree.

As for the story, it was done years ago. Literally. I actually pretty much called what was going to happen to the story point for point in 2007 and posted pretty much what we see in game then on the GBX forums. It wasn't word for word, but it was close enough that Mikey and Randy both addressed the thread directly themselves to allay concerns and give reasons why LV-426 should and would be re-explored, and why Marine gun-pr0n was the key to keeping user interest.

The story did get vastly simplified in regards to NPC happenstance and twists and turns, and some of that is actually still in the files thereof, but most of it, including what happened to other marines was set in stone.

Contrary to popular belief outsourcing happens all the time, and your favorite game probably contains a metric f**kton of outsourced or freelanced assets. I should know, it's one of the things I do.

Your favorite sword in that one adventure game was probably made by a chinese twentysomething in a literal art asset factory.

Assets outsourced can be an issue when there's no oversight or consistency amongst the art design and leads, and that's what happened here. When outsourcing you need a wrangler, Dead Space 2 and 3 contain a ton of chinese outsourced assets and the reason you can't tell between Visceral's and the contract people is because there was folks on both ends cracking the consistency whip.

That didn't happen in A:CM.

Hopping staff is also game design suicide, and it happened frequently throughout A:CM's development, by every company involved, including GBX, and even SEGA themselves.

Gearbox is a good company. They have a very flat management layer, they adapt quickly and their staff is loyal to a fault, and I mean literal fault, but even well intentioned folks can f**k stuff up, especially when you're playing musical chairs with design and implementation, again as  Alien³ showed rather handily.

Sticking with the horrendous story and leaving behind the original tactical decision design base when the first iteration didn't work perfectly doomed SP from the beginning, the bad programming and lack of polish is simply icing on the cake.

Not sticking to canon for events and Alien design also shut a door before anyone could get through it. There's always a risk when you reinvent an already perfectly balanced wheel, and in THAT instance, yes GBX is guilty as hell and they knew they would be from the beginning and chose to do it anyway for the sake of colonial marine gun-pr0n fanservice, and it's pretty clear that was absolutely the wrong choice.

That's actually a good thing though. It's proven once and for all that you need balance and the Alien itself to be held in absolute esteem for a licensed product to have a rat's chance in hell of succeeding, and the oorah-gun-masturbation fantasy is just as terrible and ridiculous as it sounds on paper.

As for the combat design itself, those things could still be fixed, but this is SEGA, a game company literally fifteen years behind the design curve of modern interactive digital fiction and one of the WORST licensed-game producers in the world, hands down.

They aren't going to put out the money for more than the allotted set of rollouts and probably a preapproved number of title updates, whether patches or DLC. They are legally obligated to support the game until august, so you can expect to see stuff further down the road, but there's never going to be a total overhaul, and frankly there's never been one from from any other game company either, ever; expecting one now is pretty naive.

Never license something you don't actually understand, and never commit to something you're not really interested in are the lessons to be learned here.

While the external stuff could be fixed, no one's going to put up the money, and for the story, anyone who paid the least bit of attention knew it gonna be bad from day one.

Good thing MP is really fun, if not even remotely balanced (marine dragon punch elbow, 1 hit across the map battle rifle for three points, super megaton exploding kamikaze spitters)

Sir, your post is thoughtful and enlightening.

scm


Xenomorphine

"Curiouser and curiouser..."

ShadowPred

Quote from: scm on Feb 15, 2013, 01:19:04 AM
http://www.destructoid.com/so-who-the-hell-did-make-aliens-colonial-marines--244939.phtml

Article with everything thats happened so far in it.


Wow, this is becoming a bigger clusterf**k than I imagined would happen. This is truly f**king insane. From that article that states everything so far that has happened; I gathered from it that Gearbox is completely at fault, SEGA basically sounds like they didn't even know about the outsourcing, and it seems that Time Gate was under strict supervision by Gearbox, yet GB made horrid f**king decisions....jesus christ...how the hell did Gearbox drop the ball. Pitchford alone must be to blame, there's no way that any of this wasn't made by his approval in some way, shape, or form.

I really do hope that we get to the bottom of this, because this is definitely going to be one of the most talked about stories for a long time. It's amazing how everything exploded overnight.

Bjørn Half-hand

All those making of vids and interviews of the GBX guys damn near ejaculating with excitment over this game (especially you Randy), about how great it was and rumours suggest they barely touched the SP, they didn't even make the f***ing thing.

szkoki

FUN FACT!!!!

i posted these words by that guy from that other forum in a topic a few days ago...and a few hours later it was deleted?

Any particular reason for that?

ikarop

Quote from: szkoki on Feb 16, 2013, 02:52:25 PM
FUN FACT!!!!

i posted these words by that guy from that other forum in a topic a few days ago...and a few hours later it was deleted?

Any particular reason for that?
Most links and quotes regarding the game's development have either been removed (if duplicated) or split and merged with this thread when posted in unrelated topics to avoid derailing the threads.

Inverse Effect

Quote from: ikarop on Feb 10, 2013, 08:39:11 PM
Quote from: Darkness on Feb 10, 2013, 08:05:48 PM
Why didn't Sega just use a bigger developer in the first place if GBX was too busy?
It's not that much about them being busy but about making a game based on such a big franchise. It's always a delicate and tricky process.

If this game was such a big service and honor for them. Why the f**k did they move onto boarderlands 2 and give the game to someone else to work on. Apparently when they gave the game to Timegate to work on, timegate scrapped and removed all of the original assests and when GBX Got the game back, it was really shitty and they had to rebuild it.

DRAKE M.

They just need to release the SDK and this game will get fixed! Shit, that one cat added DX10 support in like a day...

chupacabras acheronsis

Quote from: Guts on Feb 16, 2013, 04:12:02 PM
Quote from: ikarop on Feb 10, 2013, 08:39:11 PM
Quote from: Darkness on Feb 10, 2013, 08:05:48 PM
Why didn't Sega just use a bigger developer in the first place if GBX was too busy?
It's not that much about them being busy but about making a game based on such a big franchise. It's always a delicate and tricky process.

If this game was such a big service and honor for them. Why the f**k did they move onto boarderlands 2 and give the game to someone else to work on.

greed.

Gearbox was never a big company, Borderlands got to their heads.

ikarop

Quote from: Guts on Feb 16, 2013, 04:12:02 PM
Quote from: ikarop on Feb 10, 2013, 08:39:11 PM
Quote from: Darkness on Feb 10, 2013, 08:05:48 PM
Why didn't Sega just use a bigger developer in the first place if GBX was too busy?
It's not that much about them being busy but about making a game based on such a big franchise. It's always a delicate and tricky process.

If this game was such a big service and honor for them. Why the f**k did they move onto boarderlands 2 and give the game to someone else to work on. Apparently when they gave the game to Timegate to work on, timegate scrapped and removed all of the original assests and when GBX Got the game back, it was really shitty and they had to rebuild it.

The game industry is that, an industry (and a complex one). What is said in public doesn't always match what happens behind-the-scenes. Neither are always things as simple as they seem as you can tell by recent events.

Elicas

Quote from: DRAKE M. on Feb 16, 2013, 04:19:10 PM
They just need to release the SDK and this game will get fixed! Shit, that one cat added DX10 support in like a day...

Not going to happen mate.

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