LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
"Utter nonsense."
http://metro.co.uk/2016/09/07/pete-...-raise-to-a-certain-level-of-quality-6113553/
http://metro.co.uk/2016/09/07/pete-...-raise-to-a-certain-level-of-quality-6113553/
GC: I saw Prey yesterday, and it looked fantastic. But since I’ve never been able to raise this subject with anyone at Bethesda before I feel I have to ask about Prey 2, specifically the IGN report about your relationship with developer Human Head.
PH: I’m not gonna talk publicly about the back and forth, and the he said/she said. It does absolutely no good to anybody. And I’m certainly not about to say anything to try and cast anybody in a bad light, one way or another. Here’s the fact: the game didn’t turn out like we wanted. It didn’t work, and it didn’t happen.
I find it really interesting that I get abundantly more questions about Prey 2 being cancelled than Doom 4 being cancelled. Everybody seems to forget that we did actually cancel a Doom game at id for pretty much the exact same reasons, and started over. And all anybody talks about, and rightfully so, is the game that we did make and how it turned out. Not, well whatever happened with that other Doom, and why did you decide…
GC: But I’m not sure the situations are that similar. The rumour wasn’t that the game was turning out poorly, the rumour was that you were purposefully failing their milestones…
PH: Utter nonsense. I will simply say this: I don’t know what possible good reason we would have for spending millions and millions of dollars to create something to then suddenly arbitrarily decide, ‘No, we don’t want to actually make our money back off what we’ve put into it’. Because we were footing the bill, right? We’re the publisher, we’re paying the developer. We’re putting all the money into it.
I’m spending my own time taking trips up to Madison, creating brand, creating trailers, putting effort into it, taking it to E3, doing all that stuff. And to take all of that time and investment, and for the notion to be, ‘Oh yeah, for arbitrary reasons we decided to fail the milestones and are just going to wave goodbye to all that and never see any of it returned is the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard.
GC: Okay, but according to the rumour the reason wasn’t arbitrary. It was that you were trying to force them into a situation where you could acquire them against their will and for less than they were worth. And I’ve personally spoken to a veteran developer who, although he knows nothing about Bethesda specifically, states that this has always been a standard industry tactic for many different publishers.
PH: We don’t have any real predilection towards acquiring somebody or not. We haven’t acquired anybody, that I can remember, in the last five or how many years. I think Tango [Gameworks, the studio behind The Evil Within] was the last acquisition. It’s not like we’re on some acquisition tear.
We work with third party folks, like with The Elder Scrolls: Legends, like with Quake Champions. We have a perfectly good third party relationship with them. We’re gonna make the game, we’re not acquiring them, we haven’t failed milestones… again, it boils down to one thing and one thing only: we’re in the business of making games and we’re only going to put out and make games that we think raise to a certain level of quality.
It’s no different to BattleCry, which isn’t anywhere. Isn’t being talked about, and it’s on hiatus because it also wasn’t rising to the level. Just like the Doom game that we cancelled.
GC: Okay, but I felt I had to ask.
PH: I understand, I understand why.
GC: You don’t want to feel beholden to publishers, so that there’s certain things you can’t bring up.
PH: Sure. Sure.
GC: But thank you for answering those questions properly. And on a less contentious note… why are you reusing the Prey name anyway? Is it because you want people to remember the first game or just because it’s a cool-sounding name?
PH: No, it’s been a decade, right? It’s more about… we looked at calling it Prey, we looked at a calling it any number of other things. We came up with a number of them and where we netted out was that we did like the name, and that they [developer Arkane Studios] felt that it was a good fit for the thing that they were making.
And their one concern was that, ‘We don’t want to be beholden, in the design choices that we’re making, to anything from the original game. And so if we can sort of run with the idea of aliens are hunting you, and do our own reimagining take on that, then we should call it Prey, because that fits the vibe and tone of the thing we’re making.’ And we said, ‘Good, let’s just call it Prey’.