Famously Overrated Developers

[General Zod]

I just wanted there to be a bit more definition, sometimes the "Renegade" option was just that touch too far past what I wanted or would automatically lead to combat. Goddamnit - I'm a war-hero rolling with Wrex and Garrus, my "intimidate" option should be: "you know this doesn't end well for you don't you?" or something similar to make them give up through threat of violence, not just "enough talk, let's fight."

Most game developers suck ass at writing dialogue that gives you anything resembling a choice. In FO3 when you were presented with good, neutral or evil choices pretty much anything but "good" makes you look like a complete douchebag, and the "good" choice more often than not makes you look like a namby pamby sissy, which I thought was hilariously broken.

[Stark]

They may be aware the market for these games has a perception of split between 'angelic' and 'omg so hardcore'. Bioware was actually proud of their hilarious renegade/paragon system, because now actions can't 'cancel each other out' because there are two scales!

Except ME has no scope for trivial crimes (theft etc) and the game only reads 'highest value' and 'is R/P beyond 25/50/75%', so actions don't impact each other at all. But hey, we knew it was a marketing point, like 'Shooter 2.0'.

[TheFeniX]

For example, my Shepherd looks about 40+ and is ravaged (lined face, scars etc) and is a Spacer/War Hero. I split points early on between Charm and Intimidate, but it just became so irritating because like all their other games the "renegade" was in fact "Fuck you, I want to drown your babies" which didn't play into the character I had in mind.

The issue is that they didn't even define what "Renegade" meant. At times, it meant you were a paranoid xenophobe who stuck with the mission at all costs and thought humanity should go it alone. At other times, you were willing to forget Garrus and Wrex were aliens because they enjoyed randomly killing people as much as you do. You can really tell where one writer left off and another took over and it all just makes Shepard look like he can't decide between being an evil bastard or just one who doesn't put up with bullshit. There's only one instance where being an asshole costs you something: if you threaten the reporter after getting Fist's data, she won't show up to give you the second side-quest. Whoop-di-fuckin' do!

As for overrated: I'd have to say Bungie, not because Halo sucks, but because the fans of Halo make Halo suck. I played Halo 3 online for about 3 matches and literally couldn't get a word in edgewise to my teammates because of kids screaming obscenities about my mother and my sexual preference. These same kids are the ones who talk Halo up like it was the second coming of Christ. They compare it, and claim it beats in all categories, every other game (not just FPS) while they, I assume, furiously masturbate to Cortana pornography.

That and reviews I read for it basically went "The single player campaign is short and full of plot-holes. The action goes from great to mind-numbingly slow, but the MP is awesome: 9.5/10." Fuck you, half the game cannot suck and you give it that high of a score. Although I can't blame them for not giving it a 7/10 and having to deal with death-threats from Halo fanboys.

[Vympel]

There's only one instance where being an asshole costs you something: if you threaten the reporter after getting Fist's data, she won't show up to give you the second side-quest. Whoop-di-fuckin' do!

Yes she does.

And being an asshole will cost you (or at the very least, effect you) - in Mass Effect 2, supposedly. One example they've touted is that you meet that douchecock, Conrad Verner (your 'fan') again.

I just wanted there to be a bit more definition, sometimes the "Renegade" option was just that touch too far past what I wanted or would automatically lead to combat. Goddamnit - I'm a war-hero rolling with Wrex and Garrus, my "intimidate" option should be: "you know this doesn't end well for you don't you?" or something similar to make them give up through threat of violence, not just "enough talk, let's fight."

Well they do have that in the game sometimes. On Feros, you can simply intimidate the company slug into backing down because you're a Spectre and his odds of killing you suck ass.

[Stofsk]

Bioware's problem is that they so desperately want to portray the pen and paper type experience with a lot of depth and scope, but they instead become the most irritating rail-roading GMs because they have a story that they desperately want to tell you.

I don't have a problem with a linear plot for a game that's supposed to be a single player experience anyway.

For example, my Shepherd looks about 40+ and is ravaged (lined face, scars etc) and is a Spacer/War Hero. I split points early on between Charm and Intimidate, but it just became so irritating because like all their other games the "renegade" was in fact "Fuck you, I want to drown your babies" which didn't play into the character I had in mind.

Pardon me, but what do you want from intimidating someone? Is there a polite way of saying "Fuck you do what I say or else"?

The prime example here is Noveria with the Rachni queen, you have to either kill it or release it. You can't hold off on the decision, or call the council for their input or anything - it's a false dilemma because there should be no timeframe to this decision. And it drives me nuts. Then when I let her go, Wrex remains steadfastly loyal and seemingly undisturbed by my actions, only grunting a few syllables of displeasure.

Why call the council? Especially when your ship is planetside and you need to be there to conference with them. That also defeats the purpose of having Spectre autonomy. Spectres operate all the time in environments where communications may not be secure or convenient for real-time conferencing. That's why they're given virtual carte blanche when it comes to their operations.

[Stark]

If they'd had a clue they would have had the queen already escaped or in the process of escaping, so that no middle ground was available. As it is, you could 100% just have fucking left it there. It was a false dilemna (and the writing is so bad people are unconvincingly pissed either way).

Genocide is only good when it's done by higher races in Mass Effect.

[Havok]

As I have only played Mass Effect, KOTOR and Jade Empire (I didn't even know who made them. let alone it was the same company until this thread) I vote Bioware. All of them had me fairly excited, but became pretty blah as they all went on. It was more my need to finish games, then anything else like story or characters that drove me.

[Oscar Wilde]

Bungie, because while their games are a bit fun, the story became shit, the gameplay never evolved beyond "OMG DUAL WIELDING!" and the latest innovation was forge, which Far Cry already did, and films, which I'm sure some other game has done, and I do like those things but Halo has just become complete overrated shit.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Yeah, Stark definitely hates him some Gears, that's why we're playing it all the time. Burnout too.

People who say that Stark hates video-games are misunderstanding him, which he why he comes down so hard every time somebody accuses him of being a crotchety git. ITT Stark is actually criticizing the difference between claims and end products, which is always larger for developers who are supposed to be awesome. Gears of War, which is a self-consciously retarded game that never really pretends to be more than "Quake 1 with cover mechanics" gets a pass, as does a game about driving cars really fast. To put it in a movie analogy, you wouldn't necessarily criticize a lightweight action movie or even give a shit about it, but if it was hyped as the best film since Orson Welles fucked a toboggan, you might think that was dumb. Thus this thread.

I voted for Bungie because I reflexively dislike HALO for getting so much attention while being so bland, but to be fair they're probably not the most overrated developer. I don't know much about the HALO community but I would have guessed they were too busy playing HALO, being racist, and mixing Mickey Finns for the Delta Phi girls to actually worship Bungie. Bioware is probably the most overrated, in terms of the difference between what they're hyped as being and what they actually deliver. Bethesda is close on.

The idea of criticizing Valve for harvesting talent from the modding sector doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In one sense it is a shortcut around the brainstorming phase of game development ("hey those guys have ideas let's steal them") but on the other hand buying out smaller players with good ideas is standard practice in basically every industry, and it just makes good sense. If Bethesda did the same, they would have fixed their shitty skill mechanic years ago and probably figured out a better way to design balancing. If you want to see how utterly broken their games are, just play through any of them while focusing on stealth. Morrowind, Oblivion, and FO3 all become a total breeze, because they included a stealth mechanic without bothering to figure out how to fit it into gameplay. The most flagrant example of this was the 100% Chameleon exploit in Oblivion, whereby you could build an "I win the game" stealth suit, but FO3 is almost as bad.

But in terms of Valve not turning shit on in time, that's a legit criticism, to which I would add that a while back they said they were writing new netcode that would totally redefine online gaming by reducing the effect of lag to almost nothing. Oh wait, that never happened and they haven't mentioned it in years.

[Stark]

I'm glad some people get it.

I hate Bioshock, not for all the crap shit in it, but because it was 'Shooter 2.0' that 'revolutionised the genre' with a pile of lies and blandness. I like all kinds of crap games, but if you don't talk a pile of shit about your game I'm likely to actually get a chance to enjoy it before being assaulted by dishonesty.

[Starglider]

to which I would add that a while back they said they were writing new netcode that would totally redefine online gaming by reducing the effect of lag to almost nothing. Oh wait, that never happened and they haven't mentioned it in years.

I can imagine exactly what happened there, because that was the main subject of my BSc dissertation. There are various minor, incremental approaches you can use to reduce the effect of lag (beyond simple linear prediction), and a very few revolutionary ones. Examples would be a temporally continuous physics model (as opposed to a quantised one), hybrid peer-to-peer/client-server state updates, and prediction of future player (movement) input. All of those sounds great on paper and simple in principle, but quickly turn out not to be in implementation. The former two are a bitch to get working reliably and without seriously impacting performance or engine complexity (although we mostly did, at my first start-up). The later one is just a bitch to get working full stop; to a large extent it's an open machine learning problem. As in so many cases, the cost in time and effort to get this working must have exceeded the commercial gain, assuming the developers didn't run into complete brick walls. That's a risk you take whenever you try to push the envelope.

It would be foolish to claim that companies should never talk about technology that isn't 100% complete; aside from the fact that R&D news is very interesting if you're in the industry, for startup studios it's often necessary to get the finance needed to complete the title. On the other hand, the marketing department (typically) see this such efforts as fuel for the hype machine and unless forcibly restrained will spew press releases claiming the new hair physics technology will revolutionise the player experience, transform the industry etc etc. The press go along with that because reformatting that into an article is an easier way to fill column inches than doing reviews. On top of that you have egotistical developers who can't wait for the game launch to start saying how awesome their code is (usually at successful studios, if you don't have a track record no-one pays attention), rumor sites desperate for anything impressive sounding, and fanboys who jump on anything and blow it out of proportion as a justification for why their favorite platform/game/developer is the best thing on planet Earth.

To say whether a company is over-hyped, I guess you have to look at the ratio of promises made to promises delivered, possibly giving a bonus for the sheer technical difficulty of the things that are delivered. When it does go wrong, the question of how much over-promise was deliberate and who exactly was responsible for it is interesting, but I guess not terribly relevant for comparing developers.

[Pablo Sanchez]

II hate Bioshock, not for all the crap shit in it, but because it was 'Shooter 2.0' that 'revolutionised the genre' with a pile of lies and blandness. I like all kinds of crap games, but if you don't talk a pile of shit about your game I'm likely to actually get a chance to enjoy it before being assaulted by dishonesty.

I don't follow video game hype very much since I bought the first Black and White. Never again, I said. But with respect to Bioshock and shooter 2.0, how do you say that something is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, while at the same time calling it a revolution in the genre? That's not even logically consistent on it's own terms.

[Stark]

I remember watching the dev videos, where some nerdy programmer goes on and on about how revolutionary and new and outrageously border-shattering the game was, while the video was a guy walking down a corridor and shooting things. I think 2K actually convinced themselves of what they were saying, but then I played the Bioshock demo and it was 'walk down corridor and shoot guys' and interest in the game dropped to zero. I'm pretty sure I'd looked forward to that game for like 5 years, with their ludicrous claims of emergent play and dynamic ecology and water flow and shit.

[Eleas]

I don't follow video game hype very much since I bought the first Black and White. Never again, I said. But with respect to Bioshock and shooter 2.0, how do you say that something is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, while at the same time calling it a revolution in the genre? That's not even logically consistent on it's own terms.

Religion and gamer hype are similar in that regard. You present some very pretty images and then, trap baited, you pair them with some vague statement whose points, taken literally, can't possibly logically coexist. Presto! instant beautiful promise immune to reason. Must buy!

[CaptHawkeye]

I'm glad some people get it.

I hate Bioshock, not for all the crap shit in it, but because it was 'Shooter 2.0' that 'revolutionised the genre' with a pile of lies and blandness. I like all kinds of crap games, but if you don't talk a pile of shit about your game I'm likely to actually get a chance to enjoy it before being assaulted by dishonesty.

I hated Bioshock the moment I heard of it. Since we were immedietly assault by the wildest developer claims about its design for years. The first production videos came up at E3 which I saw years ago and I couldn't express just how typical the game looked. Oh but it's got Big Daddies and magic powers!

The entire premise of the game always came off poorly to me. You get the spend the whole game exploring some creepy hermit's basement basically. Here's a dark corridor, look another dark corridor! Like Stark said once, it'd been awesomely cool if the city was progressively flooding. As it is, the game's one flooding event is scripted to not kill you no matter what.

[Zac Naloen]

I'm glad some people get it.

I hate Bioshock, not for all the crap shit in it, but because it was 'Shooter 2.0' that 'revolutionised the genre' with a pile of lies and blandness. I like all kinds of crap games, but if you don't talk a pile of shit about your game I'm likely to actually get a chance to enjoy it before being assaulted by dishonesty.

I hated Bioshock the moment I heard of it. Since we were immedietly assault by the wildest developer claims about its design for years. The first production videos came up at E3 which I saw years ago and I couldn't express just how typical the game looked. Oh but it's got Big Daddies and magic powers!

The entire premise of the game always came off poorly to me. You get the spend the whole game exploring some creepy hermit's basement basically. Here's a dark corridor, look another dark corridor! Like Stark said once, it'd been awesomely cool if the city was progressively flooding. As it is, the game's one flooding event is scripted to not kill you no matter what.

Did they ever make games that had a really "look dude, you have 10 hours to complete this game or you die. It's entirely possible you'll fuck it up after 5 hours but won't find out till the end." game mechanic?

I probably wouldn't play it if they did.

[Lusankya]

Did they ever make games that had a really "look dude, you have 10 hours to complete this game or you die. It's entirely possible you'll fuck it up after 5 hours but won't find out till the end." game mechanic?

I probably wouldn't play it if they did.

I don't know about that, but games like Zork had a "if you dig up this plant the wrong way then you'll die, but you won't find out until the end" game mechanic. It's a similar principle, I think.

[Zixinus]

My review of the companies in no particular order and my opinion based more on my own experiences than the hype. I do not pay attention to the hype.

Valve: Among the four, Valve is the least overhyped. Their games always hear to a certain standard and their gameplay is solid, archiving goals that are accessible rather than overly ambitious.

They're the only developer on the list that actually focuses on gameplay and always trying to change the formula a bit. They also try to redefine what an FPS can be, even if only with visuals. Not all of their ideas are successful, but they are willing to pay the price for that. That said, I am suspect of their managerial methods, because constant delays can be rather jarring and there is the whole cancelling of the Black Box thing.

Their policy to hire mod teams, I don't know what to think of. On one hand, it's a bit lazy, on the other, it makes the games actually happen and that they adhear to a certain standards as well as to give jobs to promising developers (that could have gone to one of the promising publisher-studios instead where all their dreams go to die).

I'm saying this as someone that got HL2 on release date, both episode packs and Portal, but did not get Left 4 Dead.

I'm a bit worried that with L4D 2 they may be heading towards where other publishers go, of always recycling titles.


Bungie: I've only played Halo 1 and 2 on PC. Their games are OK, something that should have gone off as medicore and forgotten within a decade. Instead, I suspect that someone in the marketing section was clever and did things differently by putting the game on Mac and later consoles. I think they are more praised for their advertising and marketing decisions than what they games made.


Bethesda and Bioware:

Both suffer from a common problem: they are incapable of walking away from their original core formula.

In Bioware this is especially apparent in the moral choice system. They claim with every new game that they changed that, that there is a more complex morality to take place of simple "good and evil" but in practise, its exactly the same old shit. The stories appear to be well-built just stupid (yes, that's a bit of an oxymoron, but you can make a tight story that still has stupid characters and stupid ideas).
(I played KOTOR 1, 2 I didn't finish, Jade Empire I did, Mass effect I didn't and I won't bother with Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2).

In case of Bethesda, its more of a case of lost potential. They appear to try to explore the possibilities they created, but they are still unable to go over their bogged down core or without making severe mistakes. But unlike BioWare, they actually try to change, its just that they are unable to do so properly. I think their problem is that they're trying to stretch out instead of just replacing the core they have.
Their stories are stupid but a bit less so, and they often try to make interesting quests within that.
(Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3, all three finished)

[Bounty]

Did they ever make games that had a really "look dude, you have 10 hours to complete this game or you die. It's entirely possible you'll fuck it up after 5 hours but won't find out till the end." game mechanic?

Burn:Cycle. An adventure game for the Philips CD-i that played in two hours of real-time.

Majora's Mask had the light version of the same mechanic - the world moves on and everybody dies after a set time, but you can reset the clock.

[TheFeniX]

Did they ever make games that had a really "look dude, you have 10 hours to complete this game or you die. It's entirely possible you'll fuck it up after 5 hours but won't find out till the end." game mechanic?

I probably wouldn't play it if they did.

Star Control 2. The Kor-ah(sp) would start their path of genocide after a certain date. You could stall them by creating more Mycon worlds, but if they reach earth, it's Game Over.

[Drooling Iguana]

And then there was the original Prince of Persia, which had to be completed in one hour.

[General Zod]

Bungie: I've only played Halo 1 and 2 on PC. Their games are OK, something that should have gone off as medicore and forgotten within a decade. Instead, I suspect that someone in the marketing section was clever and did things differently by putting the game on Mac and later consoles. I think they are more praised for their advertising and marketing decisions than what they games made.

Uh, all of the Halo games were released on consoles first. Until then shooters on consoles had largely been mediocre or entirely forgettable affairs.

[Zixinus]

Uh, all of the Halo games were released on consoles first. Until then shooters on consoles had largely been mediocre or entirely forgettable affairs.

Correction conceded. I believe that it still furthers my point though: Halo wasn't great because the game was great but because of clever marketing and product placement (if those are the words used to describe where to put your products).

[Civil War Man]

By the way, did Halo create the "all FPSes that aren't about World War II must be about Space Marines" mindset of recent gaming, or did it just popularize it?

[General Zod]

Uh, all of the Halo games were released on consoles first. Until then shooters on consoles had largely been mediocre or entirely forgettable affairs.

Correction conceded. I believe that it still furthers my point though: Halo wasn't great because the game was great but because of clever marketing and product placement (if those are the words used to describe where to put your products).

I'm not saying it revolutionized anything, but more that it proved that shooters could be done on consoles competently without being total shit. If it had been released on PC it would have most likely faded into obscurity.