Failing as a game developer can be a rather frightening thing. When your big budget product doesn't turn a profit, the general consensus is that you may be on the chopping block. Go ahead and ask the former developers of Bizarre Creations, or Black Rock Studio how understanding their publishers were when their labors failed to deliver big sales numbers. And then feel free to buy them a drink. It's the least you can do.
Maybe it didn't sell, but that makes Bulletstorm no less awesome in retrospect.
Epic Games apparently doesn't think the way most publishers do, possibly because they have been in the development game themselves for so long. In speaking to Kotaku late last week, Epic president Mike Capps made it clear that they stand behind the products they believe in, whether they make money or not.
In this case, Capps was specifically referencing Bulletstorm, the gleefully immature first-person shooter Epic co-developed alongside the Polish development studio it recently acquired, People Can Fly. Though the game came close to cracking 300,000 units in its first month, Bulletstorm hasn't earned back its hefty budget at this juncture, and seemingly is destined to forever exist within the dreaded "red" zone.
That said, Capps had no interest in putting any sort of blame on People Can Fly. Bulletstorm might not have made any money, but Capps believes in the studio, stating that Epic has no interest in using them to simply churn out additional Gears of War content, and rather expects big things from them.
"The studio has shipped AAA content," he said. "The next thing we do with People Can Fly will be great."
Capps plans to further tout Bulletstorm, and the other various IPs at Epic Games at next month's GDC Europe, giving a talk called "Size Doesn't Matter: How Epic Brings AAA Attitude to Every Game, from Gears of War 3 to Infinity Blade." It's a catchy title, and certainly should make for interesting listening for anyone who wants to understand Epic's approach to making games. Still, it could have used a little more dicktits, if you ask me.
If you're one of those sad, depressing old people who likes to kick back and enjoy a long, labored schedule of character reveals stretched out over however many months a PR team has to in order to maximize coverage for a game that's essentially a reboot of a game that came out less than six months ago, you can just go read something else right about now, grandpa. Why? Because your elderly, liver-spotted face is about to get blasted with so much Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 new character info at once, it's going to knock you off your walker and onto your wrinkly behind, inadvertently removing your catheter and crushing your colostomy bag in the process. So seriously, please go read something else, because that's going to be really gross.
Thanks to the most minimal amount of sleuthing ever required to dig up unannounced information for a video game ever, Joystiq managed to find character art assets for all 12 of the new fighters coming to the updated version of MvC3 by, of all things, just looking on Capcom's press site. It was all just right there, ripe for the taking, leading one to believe that this could all be an elaborate ruse, designed to ensnare any sneaky bloggers who might be hunting for a scoop. Or, someone just put some image files live too early. Either seems a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Yup, this is totally happening.
The twelve new characters you'll (allegedly...okay, probably) be playing in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 are...
I can't wait to watch Phoenix Wright "Objection!" the living hell out of Rocket Raccoon. Believe me, I never thought I'd get to type that sentence in my lifetime, either.
It's probably worth reiterating that Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is retail-only, much as Super Street Fighter IV was. According to a statement from Capcom, "We think everything offered in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is worthy of a full retail release. With updates oft he game system, spectator mode, etc. it would be a quite a lot for a DLC update." So, to be clear: If you want these 12 characters and everything else available in the update, you're gonna have to buy a disc.
Here's a gallery of images for all the characters, if you're into that kind of thing.
One cannot help but get the impression that Capcom isn't super into Mega Man these days. After cancelling Mega Man Universe back in March, all that was left on the franchise's development docket was Mega Man Legends 3, a 3DS sequel to the long-dormant Mega Man Legends action RPG series propelled heavily by community input.
Awww, I miss Servbot... =(
Today, Capcom threw a goose into that propeller, as it officially put the kibosh on the entire project. According to the company's official blog entry, "it was not felt [by Capcom management] that the Mega Man Legends 3 Project met the required criteria" to go into full production. Both the full game, and the Prototype version, have been entirely shelved.
Since the sequel was announced last year, Capcom had been taking feedback from enthusiastic community members on the content of the game. The Prototype version of the game was even planned for launch with the 3DS e-shop back in June. When that didn't happen, that probably should have been our first clue that something was amiss. Actually, come to think of it, series creator Keiji Inafune's departure from Capcom (and the project) back in November probably should have been our first hint (even though the blog entry proclaims that Inafune's departure had nothing to do with the cancellation). So, really, we had two hints. We really are thick-headed sometimes.
This latest cancellation does seem to leave the Mega Man brand between a Rock(man) and a Hard (Man) place. Capcom has nothing announced for the foreseeable future, leaving fans of the little blue robot boy bereft of anything to look forward to. Capcom's FAQ does state that, "Mega Man is still an important franchise within Capcom’s portfolio and we will continue to pursue opportunities to create new titles in the series," but exactly how long we'll have to wait for them to "pursue" those "opportunities" remains unknown.
Now excuse me as I pull out my copy of Mega Man 2 and sob uncontrollably for the remainder of the day.
Right now, ModernWarfare3.com is a dead URL. Going there just gets you a fat "403 Forbidden" error. Perhaps that has a little something to do with the fact that, up until recently, the site was redirecting to the official website for EA's rival military shooter, Battlefield 3.
The ModernWarfare3.com site, as it appeared prior to the Battlefield 3 redirecting chicanery.
Oh, snap.
As it turns out, ModernWarfare3.com was registered all the way back in 2009, back when Activision's third entry in Infinity Ward'sModern Warfare franchise was still little more than a glint in some game designer's eye. The mysterious person who registered it (who is as yet unnamed) evidently is no fan of the series. At one point, the site was set up as a parody of the official Modern Warfare 3 site, using the exact same trade dress elements and assets as Activision's official product website, albeit with decidedly nastier language used to describe the game. These include such ridiculously infantile product descriptions as:
"Modern Warfare is crap. On November 8, 2011, the most over-hyped first-person action series of all-time returns with the copy and paste sequel to the lackluster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Check out the E3 2011 gameplay demo featuring the Black Tuesday level for a look at the epic fail of the campaign. Pre-Order Call of Duty MW3 Today for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC to secure exclusive bonuses only available online for Modern Warfare 3 fanboys who don’t know that Battlefield 3 is the better game"
Right.
Activision's lawyers have reportedly been haranguing the owner of the site since its existence came to light, to the point where last week, the owner just up and set the domain to redirect straight to Battlefield 3's official site. It was a much stronger statement that made the social media rounds last week in great quantity.
Evidently, it was the last straw for Activision, as Fusible is reporting that the publisher has officially filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum. This effectively means that Activision is angling to get the rights to the name back for itself based on, well, fairly obvious reasons.
EA has been rather exhaustive with its registration of Battlefield-related domains, but Activision has run into this problem multiple times in the past. The company apparently still does not own ModernWarfare.com, nor does it own the rights to ModernWarfare4.com, which currently directs to a site in which the owners threaten to torture a clown if their demands of "dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2" are not met. So that's a thing.
For a while, MTV Networks was a video game publisher. MTV Games started out producing titles based around shows produced by the network (like Pimp My Ride) and licensing them out to other, better-equipped publishers. Then MTV decided to become an actual publisher when it acquired former Guitar Hero and current Rock Band developer Harmonix Music Systems, partnering with EA to help distribute the title while MTV handled the bulk of the marketing and PR. Somewhere in there, MTV Games also made overtures regarding publishing games that weren't called Rock Band. A deal was made with Jerry Bruckheimer to publish games created under his newly formed development banner. Pitches were repeatedly made regarding other, non-music game products.
For a time, it looked like MTV Games was going to become a real publisher. It never quite did. Bruckheimer Games slowly faded into the vapor without ever producing a product (though no definitive word on whether the studio still exists or not has ever come to light), Harmonix was eventually sold back to itself, and MTV Games was quietly, unceremoniously shuttered earlier this year, with its employees either pushed to other divisions of the company, hired on by Harmonix, or simply laid off. Presumably, MTV Networks was out of the game development business.
345 Games is focused solely on Spike TV and Comedy Central-branded titles. Sorry, no Teen Mom or My Super Sweet Sixteen games for the foreseeable future.
Except, it isn't.
Back in April came the surprising announcement of 345 Games, a new publishing arm from MTV's Entertainment division. What is MTV's Entertainment division? It's the division that handles networks like Spike TV, Comedy Central, and TV Land. They're in an entirely different New York City office from the rest of the MTV Networks crew (at 345 Hudson St.; hence the name), and despite having the MTV label on their products, they're pretty much their own thing. So, in effect, they're MTV, but not. That probably sounds remarkably confusing, but such is the way of a major media conglomerate like MTV, and parent company Viacom.
345 Games is effectively a return to the roots of what MTV Games started out as, a small publishing group dedicated to producing products based on MTV Entertainment's various properties. Their first official release was the sequel to last year's game based on the Deadliest Warrior TV series. Next up is a cooperative shooter based on Comedy Central's animated program Ugly Americans. And if creative director Prithvi Virasinghe has his way, this is just the beginning.
Virasinghe is just one of four full-time employees at 345 Games (development is largely handled by outside studios--Backbone Entertainment is handling Ugly Americans), none of which came from the original MTV Games group after the shutdown. The company is solely focused on producing downloadable products, which makes the size of the team tenable. Still, you get the impression from talking to Virasinghe that he has hopes of growing their operations over time, hopefully with a string of successful products geared toward more casual audiences.
"We're really trying to focus on the connected console market," says Virasinghe. "We feel like that's a really good, emerging space that isn't completely saturated, unlike, say, Facebook. I think this is a good space for us to exist in."
It hasn't been super easy going so far. Deadliest Warrior, while critically-panned, was a successful title. The sequel has evidently been selling fairly well, though critics once again haven't been overly kind to the game's simplistic brand of fighting, and crash bugs in the multiplayer (related to difficult-to-test live server issues) have presented headaches for the team right out of the gate.
You won't be seeing Deadliest Warrior featured at EVO any time soon, but the games are selling.
"We can't reproduce the issue because it only happens on the live servers, not our debug testing servers," said Virasinghe. "Essentially, we have to wait until [Microsoft] goes through our code and their code and find out what's wrong. It really hurts us from a consumer standpoint and a review standpoint, because, you know, we're on the message boards, we're talking to people. It's unacceptable for a game that relies heavily on multiplayer. That's been a problem for us. That's the major thing we're trying to address."
"But despite all that," he added, "It is the number one game on XBLA as of right now."
Next up is Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon, a $10 title set for release this August. It takes the characters of the TV series--who occupy an alternate reality version of NYC where humans, zombies, demons, and wizards all coexist in a sort of disastrous harmony--and puts them in an original story line penned by one of the show's writers. The full voice cast is on board, and the game features about a full episode's worth of cutscene animations, albeit at a much lower animation frame rate. Cutscenes are essentially a series of still frames cut together. According to Virasinghe, it would have more-than-doubled the game's entire budget to fully animate the sequences.
As for the game itself, it's a strange brew of cooperative dual-stick shooting and cartoon characters cursing a lot. You control your character with the left stick, and shoot with the right. All the levels are in 3D, but you're really just running from side-to-side as you would in an old school shooter. Each playable character (which includes the human Mark, demon heroine Callie, overly intense cop Lt. Grimes, and lazy wizard Leonard) has their own set of weapons they're particular to (everything from golf balls, to machine guns, to rocket launchers are included), and the game even includes something of a leveling system, with points upgrades in a surprisingly wide variety of categories you can use to beef up your character.
This isn't quite what Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon looks like in-game, but in absence of any screenshots, it'll do.
The few levels I played of Apocalypsegeddon gave the impression of an extremely simple game. The mechanics require minimal explanation, and while there are certainly some amusing moments to be had when playing cooperatively, this is not what you'd call a particularly "deep" gameplay experience. It certainly speaks to the kind of casual audiences 345 is aiming for, even if it is squarely targeted at the M-rated audience as well.
Where that focus evolves from here depends entirely on what properties Virasinghe and crew are able to get their hands on. Though it's currently unlikely that TV Land will be seeing any of its shows transported into the game world any time soon (though a Hot in Cleveland dating sim sounds like a killer idea, if you ask me), Virasinghe has plenty of ideas as far as Spike and Comedy Central go. On Spike, he seemed particularly interested in the TNA Wrestling brand, and the network's various mixed martial arts programs. The UFC license is squarely in the hands of THQ these days, but Virasinghe hinted that there may still be a way for the company to create something MMA-related in the near future.
And as for Comedy Central?
"For Comedy Central, it's a little harder, because those properties don't naturally blend into gaming properties, except for South Park, maybe. You could easily do big properties like The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Futurama is definitely something interesting. I would love to get my hands on Futurama."
Licensing and accessibility issues ultimately determine which properties 345 will be able to work with, though Virasinghe seemed especially interested in working with Stephen Colbert, noticeably beaming when discussing what a Colbert game might entail. "There are so many possibilities with Colbert, it's just about finding the right pitch and the right execution to be worth his while."
Apparently, the idea of a Colbert game has been broached to the comedian before. "We had a pitch to Colbert that was called 'Colbert Quest,' sort of in the vein of the old Space Quest and Police Quest games. You'd either be taking direction from him and completing tasks, or you are him, and he has his enemies you'd fight, the enemies of America, like bears, of course. Tek Jansen is another character that would really work well."
Are you ready to save the world as Tek Jansen?
Unfortunately, gaining access to the faux-conservative pundit has been difficult thus far. "He's so high profile that it's hard for a group like us that's so small to be like, 'Hey, we want to make a game about you!' The hope is that something like Ugly Americans takes off, does well, and gives us leverage to try and do something a little more ambitious."
Ambitious, in the case of 345 Games, sounds somewhat relative. The company seems set on maintaining its focus on smaller titles and MTV-branded products for the foreseeable future, perhaps specifically in the hopes of avoiding MTV Games' fate. Still, Virasinghe echoed a sentiment that likely sounds eerily familiar to anyone who worked at MTV Games during the company's lifespan.
"Even though we're part of a big company within MTV, we're still like a small little group. We're trying to do video games in a TV network, you know?"
Stuff with genuinely endearing art styles gets shunned constantly, yet this? Why is it so praised? Why doesn't anyone call Ubi Soft on their overtly retarded characters? Globox was always an idiot, but there's nothing heroic about Rayman now. They're clearly just two dipshits. This is worse than Ren & Stimpy. I can't believe I keep hearing people claim things like this art style is "fetching". Unless "fetching" now means vomit-inducing, you're waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off there Alex. This is CRAP! It's getting to be like that episode of the Twilight Zone where I'm sane and everyone else is crazy.
Stop caring about the fact that it's animated looking, and start looking at the actual style of the animation! It's AWFUL. AWFUL. Thanks to the XBLA and PSN, there are loads of platformers out there. Why the f*** does this get so much attention when it's so overtly stupid? Oh that's right; Video game journalists are stupid. Something here's working on the same wavelength. And that's a shame. This is a disgrace to Rayman's platformer lineage.
Okay, so that's an incredibly inarticulate way to state outright how much I dig a game, but when thinking back on my experience playing Rayman: Origins, articulation tends to give way to a thick, intoxicating brew of rainbows, funny sound effects, catchy music, and the infectious laughter of children. As psychotic as that might sound, I assure you, there were actual children around when I played the game. And they were laughing quite a bit.
Cooperation is the name of the game in Rayman: Origins. Also the name of the game? Rayman: Origins.
Ubisoft recently debuted the newly retail-bound version of Rayman: Origins (it was once meant to be episodically released via digital platforms) at its bonkers-as-hell E3 press conference, with series creator Michel Ancel demonstrating both the game's incredibly fetching art style and clever cooperative mechanics. I sadly missed the chance to go hands-on with the game at E3, but Ubisoft's recent press event in New York City thankfully helped me rectify that terrible oversight.
Right off the bat, Rayman: Origins grabs your eyeballs and screams, "LOOK AT ME." The visuals are an arresting combination of an incredibly sharp and colorful 2D art style with a fantastic animation system. The result is a game that looks like a fully interactive cartoon, and one with a thoroughly eclectic aesthetic. Evidently, four different art directors at Ubisoft contributed to elements of the game's overall art style. It shows as you play, with characters, environments, and bosses that all seem just a bit different from one another, but somehow still gel together seamlessly.
Much of that detail I admittedly only took in when watching others play the game, as the gameplay itself is far too engrossing to allow you to just sit there and stare at all the pretty little visual fluff. At its core, Rayman: Origins is a fairly standard 2D platformer, complete with all the usual traps, platforms, and enemies that description typically entails. However, when you get a couple of friends together for cooperative play (it supports up to four total), the experience morphs into something a great deal more exciting.
Cooperative platforming has been done before, but Rayman's take on it is so exquisitely paced and creatively designed that it somehow blends together into this feverish rush of jumping, stomping, punching and flinging that keeps you glued to the screen. It helps that the controls have a tight feel to them, ensuring you won't find yourself constantly missing jumps and ledges that you clearly shouldn't be. More importantly, the cooperative mode allows for plenty of challenging, yet exceptionally fun scenarios.
The game's art is simply gorgeous.
One key example was the brief "desert" level section I got to play. In this level, a huge horde of nasty bug/bat/things swarms around the periphery of the screen. In some sections, they'll dive in and kill you en masse, but not if you manage to ring a giant gong, of sorts, that releases a protective shield for a limited time. That shield can also extend to your character for a short period, allowing you to traverse beyond the gong's spot in the level and get to the next safe zone. The timing is, however, crackerjack, requiring your team to move quickly and avoid pitfalls with expert timing. It's challenging stuff, but not so much so that you'll feel too terribly frustrated. The game's checkpoint system seems fully capable of ensuring you don't repeat too much of the same stuff again and again, and if one or two of your teammates do die, they'll simply begin floating around the level in "bubble" form, waiting for you to run up and punch them to revive them.
Punching your teammates is a rather frequent occurrence. There's no particularly good reason for any of it, but if so inclined, you can screw with your friends as much as you please. Granted, you'll have to do it in the same room, as Rayman: Origins only supports local cooperative play. Still, this seems like a game well-suited to four people sitting in the same room, laughing, chiding, and congratulating one another.
I certainly did quite a bit of the above during my time with the game. While it remains to be seen how well the different worlds flow together, and exactly how much content the game will offer, Rayman is already impressive right from the first moment you get your hands on a controller. To say that Rayman: Origins should be on the radar of anyone looking for a silly, clever, and downright beautiful multiplayer experience this holiday season would be an understatement. It needs to be on your radar.
I did not go into Ubisoft's New York City press day expecting to write anything about Rocksmith, the publisher's debut foray into the realm of non-dancing music games. Given my previous, erm, history with the genre, my intuition was to just avoid the room that housed the title as if it contained a stack of expired plague victims.
Check out how this totally real non-actor dude is totally playing a real guitar in a totally not staged living room set!
My fear was objectivity. I like lots of music games, and I play lots of music games. That said, my earlier industry associations make it difficult to sound objective when talking about products that competed with my previous employer (Harmonix Music Systems, makers of the Rock Band series), especially when discussing a negative impression. Going into a Rocksmith demo, I had a great deal of skepticism regarding the product. Rock Band 3 was the first title to attempt a real guitar game with its pro instrument mode, and the marketing coming out of Ubisoft proclaiming it to be the first "real" guitar experience on consoles seemed like petty grandstanding. Infomercial-type videos like this did little to help matters, and then there's that name...the whole thing was setting off the same alarms that Power Gig did upon its debut.
And yet, I somehow found myself pulled into Rocksmith's orbit. Suddenly, a guitar was strapped to my waist, and I was at the mercy of Ubisoft San Francisco creative director Paul Cross, who slowly but surely began to show me the ropes when it comes to Rocksmith's brand of guitar instruction. After what felt like at least an hour of discussion, observing others play, and playing myself, I can say with definition that this is not Power Gig all over again.
In fact, it's actually pretty cool.
The premise of the game sounds like pure voodoo. A small USB-to-quarter-inch adapter bridges the gap between any electric guitar you may already own (Cross very much stressed that any guitar brand should work) and your home console of choice. When you strum a note on your guitar, the note plays through your television's speakers with any effects, distortion, or whatever else you program using the in-game pedals system.
The crazy thing is that it works. I do not play guitar. I have spent ample time futzing around with Rock Band 3's pro guitar mechanics, and through that I picked up a few things, but eventually I was forced to resign myself to the notion that I am a drummer, and not a guitar player. Ultimately, I may end up having the same reaction to Rocksmith in the long-run, but the early modes I played not only worked, but they gave me hope that I might not be completely worthless at playing a guitar.
A big part of Rocksmith's methodology revolves around its difficulty settings, or lack thereof. There is no expert mode in Rocksmith, nor is there an easy mode. Rather, difficulty revolves around "leveling up" songs. You can choose to play any available song in arrangements of single notes, chords, or full charts, and when you begin playing, you're dealt a minimalist version of that arrangement's note chart. The game reacts to how you play, slowly building up the number of notes it tosses at you based on your performance. Once you level up a song, you can keep practicing it until you eventually are playing the entire thing note-for-note. It's worth noting that if you're already an expert guitar player and know the song in question, the game doesn't penalize you for playing extra notes on an easier chart. As long as you're hitting the correct notes it tosses at you, you can play pretty much whatever you want in between.
The in-game interface mirrors the neck of the guitar, and is surprisingly easy to work with.
Weird as that may sound to those who have spent years playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it's actually perfectly workable in practice. Largely, that's because there are no dead spots in the music when you mess up. Cross told me that while the team had played around with chopping up the masters and adding failure-oriented sound effects for missed notes, playtesters ultimately found it too distracting. So much as you would in a guitar lesson, you simply play over the song in its entirety. The volume differential between your guitar and the song seemed such that it shouldn't be too distracting to play over the existing track.
Rocksmith's interface does a great deal to engender feelings of ease when picking it up for the first time. In videos, the mirrored image of strings and frets to what your hand actually is required to rest upon looks a little odd, but in practice, it works extremely well. Once you start a song, you're required to strum each string individually to make sure they're in tune (a tuning prompt appears if they aren't), and once the song begins, notes move toward the represented fret bar on the screen, with colors and numbers depicting which string to strum, and which string to hit, respectively.
My first attempt to play was on The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which has a fairly iconic opening salvo of notes. Early struggles audibly signaled that I had no idea what I was doing, but after a couple of reboots, I hit that first signature note, and from there, I began to improve. The timing window for the notes seems reasonable, as I am not perfect at strumming in time, and I still hit most of the notes that I had locked to the correct fret.
Unfortunately, a bug in the build I saw prevented Cross from showing me some of the more complicated, leveled-up note charts, but I could see a bit of progression as I got better, and as Cross (who himself was not a guitar player when the project first began, but began to learn alongside the development of the game) played on songs he'd spent some time leveling up manually. I do look forward to seeing someone play along with a fully-leveled up version of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love." That ought to be a sight.
Speaking of the soundtrack, the build I saw at Ubisoft's event actually had a few more songs than the nearly 30 that have thus far been announced. While I can't spoil what I've seen beyond those announced songs (which include everything from Bowie to Black Keys and back again), I can say that the soundtrack reminds me a lot of the first Guitar Hero soundtrack--with master tracks instead of covers, of course. It's geared less toward the notion of a radio-friendly playlist of non-stop hits, and more toward finding songs that simply play great on the guitar. The developers are looking for riffs, solos, and iconic guitar lines that are going to be fun to play. While there are undoubtedly some classics, there are as many smaller indie rock bands, including a few bonus tracks from projects headed up by developers at the studio. Unsurprisingly, those are some of the more challenging tracks in the game.
DLC will, unsurprisingly, be added to Rocksmith post-release, but Cross and other Ubisoft representatives were mum on what kind of songs might be coming down the pipes, as well as how frequently they'd be coming. You can likely expect at least monthly offerings to start, though how frequently they come beyond the early release days will simply depend on how well the game performs.
The interface adjusts over time as you "level up songs," adding more notes to play.
I went into Rocksmith expecting nothing, and came out of my demo shocked at how wrong those expectations were. It's easy to get cynical in this business, especially after hearing ad infinitum how thoroughly dead music games are, and seeing the blitzkrieg of cringe-worthy marketing Ubisoft has thus far inundated consumers with. That Rocksmith was able to penetrate that initial skepticism and show me something legitimately cool is a testament to what Ubisoft is aiming to do with this game.
Is Rocksmith absolutely, 100% guaranteed to make you into an expert guitar player? I have absolutely no idea. You'll probably have to wait for the reviews to start hitting to find that out. Will Rocksmith help revitalize the flailing music genre? Again, it's too early to tell, but to hear Cross tell it, he hopes Rocksmith will simply help push innovation in music titles, much the way Rock Band did with its last iteration, and inspire competition in the genre once more. Is Rocksmith a fun way for newcomers to test the waters of learning the guitar? From my time playing it, I certainly think so.
"I know, I know. I'll be labelled as 'Brendan McNamara's sock puppet' or worse," begins Dave Heironymous' post on GamaSutra today, "You'll just have to take my word that I'm doing this because I enjoy working at Team Bondi and don't want to see it destroyed by anonymous ex-employees."
Team Bondi's Dave Heironymous says the story of the studio's work practices has been a one-sided argument thus far.
Heironymous is one of Team Bondi's original employees, having joined the company straight out of University as a junior programmer, and eventually worked his way up to a position of team management. He spent the last four years working as L.A. Noire's lead gameplay programmer, and self-identifies as one of the "management goon squad" referred to by the ex-employees of the studio who have decried the working conditions at the studio in recent weeks. Heironymous had much to say on the subject of Team Bondi's working practices, and his own experiences with the alleged crunch hours that have drawn so much ire.
In Heironymous' mind, longer working hours were an inevitability of the development process. Indeed, most developers will tell you that crunching is simply a fact of making a game, but the issue many have taken the studio to task for regards falsified claims of crunch hour needs, pertaining to perpetually missed release dates and milestones. However, Heironymous says that no one at the studio worked any harder than management themselves did, and that compensation for additional hours was routinely given.
Recognising that working on the weekend was inevitable, Team Bondi put in place a scheme to (generously) reward employees for their weekend days spent at work. Additionally, in the last 6 months of the project a scheme was put in place to reward employees for staying back late on weeknights, and this resulted in myself and most of my team getting an additional 4 weeks of leave upon completion of L.A. Noire, on top of the weekend working payment.
Towards the end of the project I was probably working (on average) around 65 hours per week. Apart from a few isolated cases (various demo builds) this was the highest my regular hours ever got to, and at no time did I ever work 100 hours per week. If you think about it, that's 14 hours per day, 7 days per week, which is huge. I can't say that no-one ever worked 100 hours per week, but those sorts of hours were not encouraged. In fact, if someone on my team was working that hard I would have done my best to stop them.
I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn't expect of myself. The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched. Brendan himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was.
In regards to the accusing parties who have repeatedly commented (albeit anonymously) on the dire working conditions at the studio, Heironymous challenged their motivation for coming after the company.
== TEASER ==
If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I'm all for it. I have a wife and friends who didn't see very much of me during the latter stages of L.A. Noire, and I'm lucky my wife was so understanding. All of the management and staff at Team Bondi want to improve our processes so we can make even better games in a decent timeframe, without burning people out along the way. However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see Team Bondi destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job. That seems to me to be a less laudable motivation.
At no point in Heironymous' missive does he lay down any theories as to why former employees would be banding together to ruin the studios' reputation, nor does he address the crediting issues that left a hundred former employees without published credit for their work on L.A. Noire (most recently covered by our own Patrick Klepek here). However, Heironymous does concede that over the course of the game's lengthy development cycle, some mistakes were likely made, and simply asks for the chance to improve on things for the future.
Saying all of this, no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project. The people at Team Bondi are great to work with and I'm confident that we can make Team Bondi a leading game studio on the international stage.
Please think about that when you talk about boycotting L.A. Noire or about how heinous Team Bondi is. There is a team of dedicated game developers here in Sydney that look forward to learning from their mistakes, improving on their successes and taking on the world again next time around.
As you may have heard last week, EA spent a metric tonne of money in its acquisition of social gaming gurus PopCap Games. Specifically, the publisher ponied up a whopping $750 million (that could be worth as much as $1.3 billion, based on performance incentives). While that sounds like a lot of up-front cash, evidently, PopCap could have had even more, but turned it down.
NBA Jam creator and new Zynga employee, Mark Turmell.
Based on what Forbes is reporting today, PopCap had another offer on the table from rival social games behemoth Zynga, makers of all that "___Ville" and "____ With Friends" stuff you're deeply ashamed to admit you occasionally partake of, the way a junkie only "occasionally" uses heroin. According to the Forbes story, Zynga had an up-front offer of $1 billion dollars on the table, but PopCap ultimately decided to go with the EA deal, which has more lucrative potential based on those incentives.
While Zynga was ultimately Reeeeeeeejected! by PopCap, the publisher managed to Jam It In! with another EA-related deal, as the company Intercepted! former Midway creative head and EA Sports executive Mark Turmell away from the company, presumably for far less than a billion dollars. Boomshakalaka?
Turmell helped create the NBA Jam franchise for Midway back in 1993, and once again helped revive the series at EA when the publisher bought the rights to the franchise from his suddenly defunct former employer. Turmell had been rumored to be working on a revival of NFL Blitz at the EA Tiburon studio, but evidently isn't anymore, if he ever was. EA confirmed last night to Kotaku that Turmell had left the company. Neither Zynga nor Turmell have yet commented on Turmell's new position at the company. One can surmise that an announcement of "Jamming with Friends" and/or "FootballVille" cannot be terribly far off, however.
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