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And, most controversially, everyone who makes video games has to crunch, sacrificing personal lives and family time for a job that seems to never end.
a single holy moment when a game’s disparate parts coalesce into something that finally feels complete.
Doom came out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in which John Romero and John Carmack allowed their fictional world to become overrun by demons.
Wait, wasn't it Quake?
All game studios crunch,
Sad that he keeps bringing this up as if crunch were unavoidable, a necessary hardship if one is "making games."
The Last of Us trusted players to fill in the blanks themselves.
Not much trust…
At Naughty Dog, as at all game studios, the answer was always to estimate. And then, when those estimates invariably turned out to be too conservative, the answer was to crunch.
Some players enjoyed trading, sure—especially the ones who were farming loot and selling it for a healthy profit—but for many, the auction house made Diablo III a significantly worse experience. It reduced the thrill of hunting for gear. What was the fun in getting a great roll on a cool new piece of armor if you could just hop on the market and buy a better one?
True also for the game-run stores in Assassin's Creed?
Every prospective employee had to go through a rigorous interview process that, for a while, included meetings with all twenty-something people at the studio. If just one person said no, the prospective employee was out. “It was really like a family,” said Rich Geldreich, a graphics engineer. “It was a combination family slash a little bit of a frat house.”
Whoa, that seems alternatingly harmonious and terrible!
Fans were hyped,
Bleh. What else.
It’s a common dilemma in game development: when you’re working on the same game for years, you’ll inevitably get bored. It’s tempting to make changes just for the sake of making changes, to spice things up because you’re sick of using the same simple control scheme when you get into work every day.
Dragon Age: Origins became a massive success, selling millions of copies and, most important, inspiring hundreds of thousands of lines of fan fiction.
"Most important"
“People were complaining, ‘Oh there wasn’t enough in Dragon Age 2.’ OK, you’re not going to say that. At the end of Inquisition, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level.’”
Well, congrats?
“Morale took an astonishing turn for the better that very week,” Kading said. “It’s not that we could recognize the problems. It was that we weren’t shirking from them.”
Aha!
Not everyone played the game every day, and few of them could visualize what Destiny would ultimately look like, which led to, as a different former employee described it, “a bunch of great ideas that are all siloed off, and none of them actually complementing each other.”
Destiny, sitting in the pantheon of great stories alongside Star Wars and Lord of the Rings? It could barely sit next to Twilight.
Dude, why Twilight? It's just as cornball
CD Projekt’s big break arrived when they convinced the publisher Interplay to give them the Polish rights to Baldur’s Gate, one of the most popular role-playing games in the world.
Funny how a game that was formative for BioWare was in some way also how its current competitor or successor got started.
Every quest, no matter how small it should be, should have something memorable in it, some little twist, something you might remember it by. Something unexpected happening.”
There was something special about realizing that the developers of a game actually took the time to make it so tree branches rustled and crackled when it was windy, and so the sun would rise earlier and earlier the farther north you went.
Having details like this can be sufficient to convince and assure players that the game is of high quality--how could it not, if they bothered to get even food props to make sense? To have horses' testicles sgrink in cold weather?--and the Halo Effect the makes it seem like it is as thoughtful and complete and worthy of praise in many more of its aspects.
Markus put the studio through what one former staffer described as “a boot camp” for controls, camerawork, and basic gameplay rhythms. Markus believed the best way to make a video game was to spend as much time as possible in preproduction,
So Ubi: 3Cs and docs docs docs
