Game Developers Burn Down the House

Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Wow, the next time someone says "Don't pirate that game, download the demo and if you like it, buy it!", just point them at that "Burn the House Down" rant. Here are gaming's top people, all saying "Pirate my software!"

Interesting.

[Alkaiser]

I for one, found the overall tone of the speech to be disheartening...it felt like the top names had given up. They pointed out problems and demanded solutions...that they didn't have. It was if they were imploring the audience to fix the problems for them. Kinda sad.

I did like how they all jumped up to smack down the guy who was complaining about game rentals. "Not all money streams lead to your wallet!"

Haha! BURN!

"games cost too much"

[Sv-Manowar]

"games cost too much" has been said since the invention of video games, yet everyone still buys them, this is why the game companies still overprice what they sell

It's unrealistic to tell people to boycott games, they will still be bought. Games prices will remain high as long as games are sold

1rst action paced MMOG = zillions of dollars

[CrazyJim1]

Asheron's Call was popular in that it had a generic action aspect where you could dodge and move. But it stopped there. If someone made a MMOG that had action oriented hack and slash fights with some semblance of balance and counters for PVP, it would rule above all.

Re:Of course, Chris Hecker is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that while today's games are locked towards that performance model because of market needs, tomorrow's games will be locked in it because the hardware dictates it.

No room for innovation.

That was beautiful

[Torgo's Pizza]

I just read the Burn the House Down article. It brought a tear to my eye. I follow Spector and Rocca closely and I email Costikyan everyonce in a while. We all pretty much think that the development and distribution is broken.

I've contributed to two books about the subject. The first book I talked about implementing a total quality assurance system to the game industry that's been in use for decades in the auto industry. The second book was built around ways to prevent bug defects which include eliminating the counter-productiveness of 80 hour work weeks.

The game industry is totally insane. There's no way I'd ever go back unless I could have total control over quality, which means we don't ship until QA has final sign-off. (Yeah, I'm going to get a smartass reply saying "That'll never happen then" but I've got a system and it works.)

I know work in the health/medical field and deal directly with the Food & Drug Administration. The quality controls I deal with put anything in gaming to shame. Why the gaming industry doesn't use established practices in other industries is a mystery.

Well, actually it isn't. The problem is that managers have really never truly managed a large scale project outside of the industry and the developers and artists have never worked anything other than games. Gaming is too insulated and is becoming inbred. This practice is slowly making an army of retarded game developers who will shortly implode.

Regarding AI

[PromANJ]

Well, if you look at Quake 3 and the bot AI they just made the bots slide around on a preprogrammed path while pointing the aim exactly at the target and then adding some shake based on skill. Yes, I do know it's not a new game, but the AI is pathetic compared to the gfx.

Why not give the aim a bit of weight so it has to be swung around, and gradually stabilize on the target if it stops moving relating to the aim angle? That's what players do and it wouldn't be hard to simulate. Right now it doesn't matter how much I move. If I stand 100 meters away they keep missing me when trying to snipe, and if I'm in close combat and move a lot in relation to their aim they always hit me. That's not how players work.
Why not have the AI's gather information just like humans and then face the same/similar weighted choices as the player? Anything better than - if shot then target=attacker - that seem to be popular.

I know this would probably make the bots more stupid, but I'd prefer that over predictable.