Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[abija]

Obviously devs care about reviews. Human nature, we want feedback and reviews are the best way to get it.

How is some mongoloid that cares more about maximizing controversy or pushing some agenda a good way to get it (nevermind best).

 

[Grauken]

Obviously devs care about reviews. Human nature, we want feedback and reviews are the best way to get it.

How is some mongoloid that cares more about maximizing controversy or pushing some agenda a good way to get it (nevermind best).

Well, at least they are more polite than you. Being an asshole only works here, in the real world, not so much

 

[luj1]

1) Fallout is his best game going by how many people talked about it in a positive way

2) The Outer Worlds is his best selling game by far, Codex seething

3) His highest rated games on metacritic are Fallout and Pillars of Eternity, Codex seething

4) His longest game is Bard's Tale Construction Set since you can make an endless amount of content with it, Arcanum coming in second

5) Arcanum is his most original game, but Fallout could also qualify

6) One could argue many of his games are bad because they're buggy

7) ToEE could also be bad because of the dialogues, pacing, and quests

"A good game is a game you like" tsk.

Here's an objective way to analyze things: "What were the goals and how well were they accomplished?" There is some level of subjectivity to this on account of how a game can't be all things to everyone (and games made for the broadest possible audience will turn off a lot of people who want something that caters to their niche), but you can get by it if you can think from more than just your own perspective.

TLDR everything Black Isle and Troika made was good

everything after was trash. 2004 was the cutoff point as everyone well knows

 

[Bad Sector]

Reviews can be useful but IMO nowadays by far most useful are Let's Play videos where the player comments on what is going on. These will give easily 10x more information than any review.

Assuming they're done in good faith and the player engages with the game of course, i've seen some videos where the player is more interested in making a clown of themselves and miss (or worse, willfully misinterpret) a bunch of stuff in a game and then rages about it.

 

[ds]

On the other hand, Steam's simple up/down vote is probably worth paying attention to. If more than half the people who bought a game don't like it, you've clearly messed up

Steam aggregate ratings are a pretty accurate measurement how well a game fulfills expectations set by the store page and other marketing material but it's pretty bad as an absolute score - and completely useless for comparing games from different genres.

 

[Terra]

There are plenty of seagull designers out there, not enough programmer's designers

Modern video game development discourages multiple roles per person unfortunately.
But I agree that any designer needs to understand the game engine/tools to even remotely make something viable. It also helps to see through programmer's bullshit when they lie about what can be made in said engine.

It does, furthermore, you may also be typecast. I recall being asked point blank in one interview why I wasn't applying for a programming role within a company over the design position I was applying for, as though my preference for what I want to do wasn't a factor. HR & whoever else is involved in the hiring process will think they know what you *should* be doing more than you do and you may find yourself unable to move out of a particular discipline, even if you could potentially have worn multiple hats in the past. It actually keeps people that have both technical & creative sides out of fields like design and therefore it should come as little surprise that the more well-rounded candidates (rare though they are) are screened out (and that's if hybrid roles even exist in any capacity in the first place). Outside of indie, gone are the days where a couple of people get together and just get shit done, not even worrying about who is doing what.

And in my experience, true "imposters" don't feel imposter syndrome, even when they should. You can mock and laugh at these seagull designers all you like yet they typically exist within a web of likeminded shirkers and thus get away with continued inadequacy while moving through life quite seamlessly.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about my ideas on how to tell stories in MMORPGs, pulled from a talk I gave at GDC Online in 2010.

The talk in question:

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Why does he wear so many popsicle shirts?

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Reviews can be useful but IMO nowadays by far most useful are Let's Play videos where the player keeps his mouth shut. These will give easily 10x more information than any review.

fypnp

 

[Alter Sack]

Why does he wear so many popsicle shirts?

Who knows?

Spoiler

 

[None]

Why does he wear so many popsicle shirts?

He has a video where he explains the reason:

 

[Roguey]

If Meb were still around she'd be disappointed that Tim-m-o stopped playing them before Final Fantasy XIV fixed itself.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about crunch: what is it, what causes it, and how can we minimize it?

 

[Roguey]

Tim blaming overscoping on publishers, which is fair, but they're all dumb. Obsidian and inXile's overscoping problems on their crowdfunded projects are entirely on their own leadership.

 

[abija]

Everything he listed is a management issue. Denial was strong in this video.

 

[Butter]

What's the last AA/AAA game you heard of that didn't have overscoping/crunch? There are probably a few examples, but it's apparently a really widespread problem. It makes me think it's just incompetent developers. No matter how little you put on their plate, they're going to complain that it's too much.

 

[None]

What's the last AA/AAA game you heard of that didn't have overscoping/crunch? There are probably a few examples, but it's apparently a really widespread problem. It makes me think it's just incompetent developers. No matter how little you put on their plate, they're going to complain that it's too much.

I think most of it is just normal project flow and any extraordinary issues stem from poor handling on the individual and managerial level. Almost every project, technical or not, that I've worked on or been witness to has always had some sort of crunch unless it was a very routine project where there are very few unknowns. All this crunch talk really just feels like the games industry catching up with the rest of the world now that games are becoming less of a guaranteed return on investment. Carie Patel's talk at GDC was particularly alarming to me as she was talking about some fairly standard and common sense practices in order to curb crunch, but that might just be an Obsidian thing.

 

[pickmeister]

Haven't worked on a video game but was unlucky enough to work through many small crunches in other industries and it's always a combination of lazy people and mismanagement.

Some examples:
1) I have a task A. For the task A, I need info/mock-up/foundation from person Z. Person Z claims to be busy with other tasks or waits for someone else. I think person Z is a lazy fucking idiot who's only good at making excuses but project team doesn't object so what can I do. Therefore I proceed with other tasks to enjoy crunch before deadline.
2) Here are tasks B, C, D, and E. B is an important foundation many other tasks are built on and was quickly hacked together at the start to have a minimal viable product to work with. Task C, D, and E are partially (or even fully) reliant on task B. Project team focuses on tasks C, D, and E.
"Hey, project team, shouldn't we focus on task B for a short while, to clean it up and flesh out other functions we need, so we have a smoother process with the other tasks and avoid waiting for dependencies?"
"Are you crazy? Those are important extremely high visibility tasks that need to be shown to the CEO/board/director/customer/whoever. Otherwise, there would be nothing to present!".
Aight ya fuck but don't say I didn't warn you.
3) Here we have 20 small tasks that would take 2 - 3 days to complete and more small tasks keep piling up and are going to be a huge annoyance once deadline comes. Some require collaboration and decision. Perhaps we should do them now when we have a bit of a breathing room?
"We can't afford dedicating our resources to these small tasks when we have the big ones here.".
4) "Hey, how is it going with that big task you're working on for half a year now?"
"Yeah, they changed their vision of the final product, which means we're starting again. For the third time now."
5) "What are you working on? Shouldn't you be fixing the bugs we got from quality?"
"Yeah, but the boss just stopped by with a new feature that needs to be ready for the presentation next week. He said it's for the big guy and extremely important. You know how it is."
"Yeah..."

And tons of others I could come up with. It always comes down to working with idiots.
The moment deadlines comes, suddenly, everybody is extremely efficient, no one is coming with useless reworks or adding useless features to please higher-ups and small decisions are made by individuals as they can't afford to wait for approval with every bullshit.
I'm sure it's absolutely the same in vidya industry.

 

[Nano]

Opinion: crunch is *necessary* for developing complex games in a reasonable amount of time. Go back and read about the development of a lot of Codex classics. Some of the Thief 2 developers were living in the Looking Glass offices unbathed.

 

[Hagashager]

Crunch is an inevitable fact of life- not just in a Capitalistic sense, but in general.

You can jolly well bet there was an awful lot of life threatening crunch during Stalin's Five Year Plan.

That doesn't change the fact that crunch, as experienced in Tech, appears to be unreasonably protracted. I work in manufacturing, we have deadlines, crazy ones too, including same-day orders. At the worst of our days no one's pulling all-nighters, napping next to the machinery or skipping breakfast.

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

 

[pickmeister]

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

Yeah. That's because they can "afford" it. When a manufacturing worker is tired and sticks his hand in a running lathe, you have fucking problem. There's no equivalent for that in tech. When a dev team goes full retard in a code, most won't notice. When customers start complaining, it's already too late and the management is already on to something else. Or excuse it by whatever. It's harder to make excuses for a worker that has some new stamps on his spine and skull because he fainted into a powerhammer.

 

[Hagashager]

Valid point. A large chunk of our rigorous curation of schedules and times comes from the fact that the alternative is someone loses a limb at the plasma cutter or shear-saw.

 

[Bad Sector]

Everything he listed is a management issue. Denial was strong in this video.

It is a management issue in that everything (including tasks to do, hires, projects, etc) boils down to some manager's decision, but that also makes the argument kinda worthless.

Go back and read about the development of a lot of Codex classics.

Or, more related, watch Tim's "lost decade" video.

 

[toucanplay]

That doesn't change the fact that crunch, as experienced in Tech, appears to be unreasonably protracted. I work in manufacturing, we have deadlines, crazy ones too, including same-day orders. At the worst of our days no one's pulling all-nighters, napping next to the machinery or skipping breakfast.

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

I've worked in (non-game) tech for about ten years now, and I'm married to someone who's worked in (game and non-game) tech. We've run into the latter here and there (and we're both very critical towards incompetent people), but astonishingly bad managers/leadership are everywhere.

A lot of the problems in tech are the same as everywhere else: managers that come from "outside" and don't know how things work, or that are only interested in their own careers instead of things functioning smoothly, or narcissism (talking over you, interrupting you, fobbing you off, stealing your ideas), or just being a cunt in general.

With tech, you have the additional problem of people treating it like it's voodoo magic, and not knowing just how much they're speaking out of ignorance. Some small change may sound simple, but depending the code/data/physical tech, that simple thing could be days of work, and sometimes even the experts won't know until they've worked on it a little. Turnover is very high in tech as well, and a lot of stuff is very badly documented and code is often written in a rush (often for management-driven reasons) so it's easy to lose key people who know what's going on.

Game tech has the additional problem of not nearly paying as well as elsewhere, so turnover is even higher than usual, and big dev companies can get away with it because a lot of people think making games is "fun" and "cool". There's also a lot of middleware involved to cover for skill gaps, and if game middleware is anything like the "middleware" I've used elsewhere, it'll be only slightly better documented, and full of kludge because that'll have been made by some other tech team working under the same sorts of pressures.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Not long started watching. Illuminating how enthusiastic Cain remains when talking about the classics. Boyarsky too in an indirect sort of way. Everybody really gave a shit when they made those games and it shows.