Because most games aren't interesting enough to hear about their backstory
I don't really care to hear "so in this section we were debating on how many minorities we should add to make it feel diverse and we arrived on the consensus of 5 Black folk and 3 trannies"
publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
more pessimistically, most of the devs are too moronic to do commentary on why they did it or they were strongarmed into doing certain things by their managers
Valve did do in-game developer commentary tracks though, showing that they aren't afraid of developer cults.
That said, it is worth noting that people freaked out and still freak out over Marc Laidlaw and Kelly Bailey not being at Valve back when Half-Life Alyx released, showing that cults do form. Probably why the cults formed around those two and not over Greg Coomer (who is still at Valve) or John Guthrie, Steve Bond, Ted Backman, etc. is that Laidlaw and Bailey have "writing" and "music" labels that people latch onto more easily than more nebulous "game design," "programming," "monster design," etc.
That’s because Laidlaw and Bailey were the sole persons in those roles for a long time. The same thing can happen to any role if the person in them appears that way, such as John Carmack or CliffyB.
Bailey also did sound effects and sound programming, not just music.
>Bailey also did sound effects and sound programming, not just music.
Yeah, he was the entire "audio cabal" in Valve's cabal systems for Half-Life 2. He was also Gordon Freeman's voice actor (the panting sounds after sprinting)
I think a better example of this is with Kojima and Konami. People loved him and he used that to his advantage when getting stuff done his way, and when they finally ended his contract he had enough connections to make his own company. If it were any other man that left Konami I doubt the latter could happen.
You can compare him to Iga, who tried to coin the term Igavania for Metroidvanias. While his name as a producer certainly helpd make the Kickstarter for Bloodstained a success, he didn't really had any kind of power or relationships in the industry.
>WORTH THE WEIGHT
Also finding out just how moronic playtesters actually are.
They brought in an outside playtester to test an early build of Half-Life 2 Episode Two and watched the playtester walk in a circle for a half-hour until they finally awkwardly stopped the test and thanked him for his time.
>an outside playtester
They brought in loads of outside playtesters, constantly, for all of their games.
Hell playtesting during design phases of a game used to be the norm.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I know. I saw their 2006 GDC talk where they talked about bringing in a playtester every week.
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
kek i never even thought about this frick, imagine if people were actually personally interested and invested in how game development was conducted again like in the hl2/l4d era. how terrifying, amirite?
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
Any examples of this?
I can only think of Kojima, Reggie, Miyamoto, Todd Howard and maybe Miyazaki, but only Miyamoto and Todd actually have the company in check.
Now that I think about it most western developers end up fricking up one way or another and lose their status, like Richard Garriot, or simple don't have time to get a following since they quit the industry after few years.
It's less western developers leaving or fricking up, and more "director" being a made up role specifically used to create these kinds of personal cults in Japanese games.
A game's 'director' is literally just a producer role they want to give special emphasis to since Japanese culture cannot truly comprehend a work being a group effort and not the work and responsibility of one person.
Because modern developers are not using any quantifiable standards like they used to. They can't explain their art theory because they have no theory. They can't explain their coding practices because those practices don't exist. They're also potentially greedy stingy homosexuals who purposefully remain obtuse because they think their "artistic masterpiece" is too "complicated" for us mere mortals to understand, or they really think people will "steal" their ideas.
Quite a lot of great developers lasted only about a decade before disbanding, getting acquired, or being restructured and turned into shit. See: Looking Glass, Rare, Clover, and Epic. Most developers rarely reach 20 years, much less stay good that long.
I think this video shows why developer commentaries aren't a thing anymore
In the L4D segments with the commentary, you can see the thought that went into designing the game and the intentional decisions that made it what it turned out to be. It gave nuance to things players probably noticed but never grasped. In the B4B segments, you can see they didn't take those lessons on board, signalling they didn't think about the game like L4D.
Dunno quite about Richochet, but I am sure at one point they thought Artifact and Underlords was a good idea, considering both are major expansions to the lore of DOTA.
They thought, but never executed farther than “oh we released some side games of a deep ass lore game that never got to tell its lore which can be frick ton more interesting that 5v5 moba”
Wasted potential. I’d love to play Underlords more if they expand it out and not lock shit behind a fricking paywall
Yeah same. The core concept of underlords is gotta be the best of the auto chess genre, having your main dude level up and use abilities as well is so much fun.
But alas...
underlords was a complete cashgrab that only got made because the official auto chess devs decided to not work with valve (moronic decision on their part)
then the valve devs got bored of underlords in record time before they could even bother monetizing it lol
>but then again Artifact, Ricochet and Dota Underlords exist.
valve having games that flop means they're mortal just like the rest of the megacorp companies, for better or worse. thank frick they were all just side projects and not mainline half life or team fortress games. that would have sucked
They have potential to be really great. Artifact can be really awesome and worthy a challenge to Heartstone. The concept of 3 lanes table is awesome and really make you think broad and macro rather than hoarding the best of cards.
Underlords is the same. Autochess is sometimes really fun and they can expand the lore of Dota 2 by a lot.
Ricochet was Valve's first attempt to make a "games as a service multiplayer game," basically trying to do in 2000 what they eventually did for Team Fortress 2 in 2008 from the Goldrush Update onward. Then they ended up losing interest and never following through on those plans until, well, Team Fortress 2, though in their defense, they also hadn't invented Steam yet to make constant updates as easy as it became for TF2.
They barely can pull off the game by the time the deadline it's hit so there's no time to be retrospective about it. Also considering how big AAA devs teams are, everyone would fight to be included while at the same time only a few can truly give insight about the game's design.
because nu devs know how incompetent they are and if anyone actually heard the things they had to say about the making of their games they'd either be fired on the spot or laughed at for eternity
Games are not made the same as back then, now everything is outsourced to many different companies, and the main studios job is to use all those assets and like a puzzle build everything.
halo infinite commentary >good morning sirs, i am doing the needful for my temp contract of the game. yeah, i don't really understand any of this stuff, i think someone two temp cycles before me did that.
Playing through Alyx a second time and the developer commentary is actually really good. They have in-game renders you can interact for the things they're explaining and the designs they iterated through and the systems they implemented.
Don't bother. No one would be interested until it's already widely considered a success. It's why Valve didn't start doing commentary until the Orange Box.
This is overblown. The thing is, there still are infinite loops in the antlion tunnels in Half-Life 2 Episode Two. It was just this specific case where they didn't make it obvious enough to be moron-proof (probably didn't help having the Guardian chasing you) and therefore blocked it off.
TF2 was released as part of the Orange Box. TF2 was also the only game that was released 9 years after its announcement. How could "worth the weight" make any sense for Portal 2? It was released in 2011 after being announced in 2010. Waiting a year is pretty standard, or even considered short by modern standards.
>we decided to cut this area down significantly, which also cut the total quests in this zone in half all because we knew the consoles just would not be able to handle it
This is what modern AAA commentary would sound like if it was honest. TF2 devs were proud of their work, you don't see that anymore.
Because there are so little devs who actually care out there. Most modern devs actually hate their job and video games they develop. Asking for something extra from them is futile.
>why don't developers add more stuff to their games?
You don't seem to understand, OP. More stuff = more dev time = less profits. You're apparently under the misguided assumption that most studios are in it for the "art" or the "love" of making games- they're not. It's a business, and they want to sell as many games as they can at as cheap a cost as possible to maximize profits. Any extra features eat into the bottom line
Valve employs literal geniuses and decisions on what goes into a game happens very close to single individual dev level. Its not like management decides what game type the company would make, but an iterative process where the geniuses work on it with more authority than other dev teams.
Since the decisions are made to exactly fit a specific problem the dev had they can comment on it. They have absolute confidence the thing they did was the best solution possible and no one listening would go "what a moron, I would do it This way". Also the games are small and idea dense which allows more frequent talking points while some games there just wouldnt be enough to justify it.
Now other teams with lesser employees can make talks about specific mechanics they worked on to solve a problem, but it might make much worse commentary tracks.
Most games don't have the thought put into them that Valve's did.
There simply wouldn't be enough to talk about. The vast, vast majority of decisions in most games are "this is popular so we put it in" and "this was the easiest thing to do so we just threw it together".
Valve's developer commentary was interesting because they had so many iterations of changes which created worthwhile narratives around almost any little part of the game.
Because few games are made with enough passion now. I can't fathom a single interesting fact about why certain choices were made in the newest Halo, or CoD, or Battlfield. It would be like: >So why did you choose to go in this art direction? >Because photorealism is what's "in"
Listening to the TF2 dev commentary on Hydro and Gravel pit gives you info on things you may not have even thought about like >All characters are back-lit so that they don't blend into the dark >The artstyle is based off of the works of J.C. Leyendecker >Glass is never breakable and is explicitly used to safely see into and out of points of interest >Medic's medi-beam has the little plus symbols floating into the player you are healing to help new players understand you are actively healing your target >Spy's iconic paper mask wasn't the first attempt at showing teammates what he was disguised as, using it cut down on hud elements and blended into the artstyle.
I forget the GDC talk, it was one of the former guys who worked at Naughty Dog.
He talked about how publishers and marketing departments ACTIVELY try to obfuscate development in order to prevent cults of personality from forming. Publishers are trying to avoid something like the movie industry where certain directors, actors, or writers are so popular they draw audiences, it gives these people too much power.
There was a story of a couple of developers trying to attend a release party for their game. Someone from the marketing department saw them, talked with a bouncer, they got bum rushed out of the party. The marketing department is at war with the development team, and they are winning the war.
West and Zampella leaving Call of Duty after being screwed out of their bonuses should have been huge news, but it was barely a blip and people kept on buying CoD without even realizing the original developers were gone. Exactly how Activision wanted it to be, you buy the franchise name, not the creators name.
Found it. Jason Rubin is the guy. It's shit quality and shit format, but it's still watchable.
It hurts them a frickload less than being able to say "Directed by wienerSUCK MGEE and staring ASSLICKER PRIME" as their entire marketing angle.
>one of their anonymous grunts
That's exactly the point. There are loads of people. Videogames are, more than any other medium, a team effort.
Movies are also a huge team effort, directors tend to have teams under them, writers work in teams, etc. We still elevate the leaders. We can do the same in video games, we can elevate the lead game designer, the lead artist, the lead musician. It's not impossible, Kojima has hundreds working under him, Miyazaki has co-directors and hundreds working under him, Ocarina of Time had three different directors, Miyamoto is the only one people remember though.
Is this a perfect system? Frick no, but it's better to recognize a couple names then refuse to recognize anyone.
But that's wrong. Companies still try and push major talent, look at game mags which have always tried to leverage devs for interviews etc. or the recent massive push to institute actors into games the same way they are in movies. Do you think having star power somehow hurts the publishers or something? Having an abstract way to sell their game that isn't directly related it its quality is bad for Marketing?
The truth is games just that no one person has creative control over a game the way they do in other media.
>Do you think having star power somehow hurts the publishers or something?
having one of their anonymous grunts doing all the good work for pennies turn into a star hurts the puiblisher. poaching a grunt-turned-star from another publisher does not hurt the publisher. see how that works, corporate bootlicker?
lol could you imagine dev commentary these days >uh i opened ue4 and pasted in the zip file assets from the files we got from china >uh i hit save as and then uhhh we shipped it
Because most modern games don't ship finished products as it is. A commentary track makes no sense if there's constant potential for it to become obsolete every bug fix update. >don't talk about that then
Then you've got a shitty commentary track that's barely addressing anything.
Modern games release in such a broken state, there would be questions about why they wasted resources to jack themselves off instead of finishing the game
Because most games aren't interesting enough to hear about their backstory
I don't really care to hear "so in this section we were debating on how many minorities we should add to make it feel diverse and we arrived on the consensus of 5 Black folk and 3 trannies"
I wanna hear your mother's developer commentary as she gave birth to you.
That's very sweet of you, anon.
ywbaw
>ywbaw
I wanna be a woman?
That's just IWBTG on Medium mode.
was probably something like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
you don't need an interesting story if you have an interesting enough narrator
you dont need an interesting narrator if you have a good enough game
publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
more pessimistically, most of the devs are too moronic to do commentary on why they did it or they were strongarmed into doing certain things by their managers
Ah yes, the Greg coomer cult that destroyed Valve
Valve did do in-game developer commentary tracks though, showing that they aren't afraid of developer cults.
That said, it is worth noting that people freaked out and still freak out over Marc Laidlaw and Kelly Bailey not being at Valve back when Half-Life Alyx released, showing that cults do form. Probably why the cults formed around those two and not over Greg Coomer (who is still at Valve) or John Guthrie, Steve Bond, Ted Backman, etc. is that Laidlaw and Bailey have "writing" and "music" labels that people latch onto more easily than more nebulous "game design," "programming," "monster design," etc.
That’s because Laidlaw and Bailey were the sole persons in those roles for a long time. The same thing can happen to any role if the person in them appears that way, such as John Carmack or CliffyB.
Bailey also did sound effects and sound programming, not just music.
>Bailey also did sound effects and sound programming, not just music.
Yeah, he was the entire "audio cabal" in Valve's cabal systems for Half-Life 2. He was also Gordon Freeman's voice actor (the panting sounds after sprinting)
There are no panting sounds after sprinting
I think a better example of this is with Kojima and Konami. People loved him and he used that to his advantage when getting stuff done his way, and when they finally ended his contract he had enough connections to make his own company. If it were any other man that left Konami I doubt the latter could happen.
You can compare him to Iga, who tried to coin the term Igavania for Metroidvanias. While his name as a producer certainly helpd make the Kickstarter for Bloodstained a success, he didn't really had any kind of power or relationships in the industry.
In Valve's case most of the cult formed around Gabe. The guy who founded and owns the company.
That one tunnel playtester he commented on is probably why Portal 2 was just a string of setpieces connected by cringeworthy humour
portal 2 is good though
>portal 2 is good though
yes 🙂
The tunnel playtester made a huge impression on Valve. They even mention it in passing at their 2006 GDC talk, even before Episode Two's release.
QRD? I can't find anything about a tunnel playtester
See
They brought in an outside playtester to test an early build of Half-Life 2 Episode Two and watched the playtester walk in a circle for a half-hour until they finally awkwardly stopped the test and thanked him for his time.
>an outside playtester
They brought in loads of outside playtesters, constantly, for all of their games.
Hell playtesting during design phases of a game used to be the norm.
I know. I saw their 2006 GDC talk where they talked about bringing in a playtester every week.
See
Also he was a redditor
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
This
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
kek i never even thought about this frick, imagine if people were actually personally interested and invested in how game development was conducted again like in the hl2/l4d era. how terrifying, amirite?
it's terrifying when you are living off your projections of the profits of the release of Left 4 Dead 9 as if you already have them in your account
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
/Thread
>publishers and executives don't want personality cults forming around devs because it gives them more leverage in the company
Any examples of this?
I can only think of Kojima, Reggie, Miyamoto, Todd Howard and maybe Miyazaki, but only Miyamoto and Todd actually have the company in check.
Now that I think about it most western developers end up fricking up one way or another and lose their status, like Richard Garriot, or simple don't have time to get a following since they quit the industry after few years.
tim schafer
mark cerny
tetsuya nomura
michel ancel
katsuhiro harada
toshihiro nagoshi
cliffy b
It's less western developers leaving or fricking up, and more "director" being a made up role specifically used to create these kinds of personal cults in Japanese games.
A game's 'director' is literally just a producer role they want to give special emphasis to since Japanese culture cannot truly comprehend a work being a group effort and not the work and responsibility of one person.
>Any examples of this?
miyazaki went from fromsoft code monkey to company president in 10 years
Truth
Do you really want to listen to trannies and pajeets blabber on about how sexy they are and how everyone wants to frick them?
no. no I don't
dev teams are too large, and dev teams arent passionate about their works enough to talk about them anymore.
because they completely souless and have no comment about the abominations they created
the best part was when they used them to show off the layered effects of different tech
Because most game developers don't have anything interesting to say.
"Have you heard of an animal called 'gorilla'?....I have...."
Because modern developers are not using any quantifiable standards like they used to. They can't explain their art theory because they have no theory. They can't explain their coding practices because those practices don't exist. They're also potentially greedy stingy homosexuals who purposefully remain obtuse because they think their "artistic masterpiece" is too "complicated" for us mere mortals to understand, or they really think people will "steal" their ideas.
Was Sly Cooper the first to do this? That shit blew my mind as a feature to add and a good incentive for beating time trials.
It's fricking depressing that the Valve everyone knows and loves basically only existed from like 1998 to 2012, not even twenty years
Quite a lot of great developers lasted only about a decade before disbanding, getting acquired, or being restructured and turned into shit. See: Looking Glass, Rare, Clover, and Epic. Most developers rarely reach 20 years, much less stay good that long.
I think this video shows why developer commentaries aren't a thing anymore
In the L4D segments with the commentary, you can see the thought that went into designing the game and the intentional decisions that made it what it turned out to be. It gave nuance to things players probably noticed but never grasped. In the B4B segments, you can see they didn't take those lessons on board, signalling they didn't think about the game like L4D.
The part about "Stunt work mocap combined with ragdoll physics" being in L4D and not back 4 blood hurts so much.
i will never not laugh at how worthless turtle rock actually is. they proved it with evolve and they cemented it with back 4 blood
Seems like Valve only wants to make games if and only if they find an idea that’s actually good.
but then again Artifact, Ricochet and Dota Underlords exist.
Dunno quite about Richochet, but I am sure at one point they thought Artifact and Underlords was a good idea, considering both are major expansions to the lore of DOTA.
They thought, but never executed farther than “oh we released some side games of a deep ass lore game that never got to tell its lore which can be frick ton more interesting that 5v5 moba”
Wasted potential. I’d love to play Underlords more if they expand it out and not lock shit behind a fricking paywall
Yeah same. The core concept of underlords is gotta be the best of the auto chess genre, having your main dude level up and use abilities as well is so much fun.
But alas...
underlords was a complete cashgrab that only got made because the official auto chess devs decided to not work with valve (moronic decision on their part)
then the valve devs got bored of underlords in record time before they could even bother monetizing it lol
>but then again Artifact, Ricochet and Dota Underlords exist.
valve having games that flop means they're mortal just like the rest of the megacorp companies, for better or worse. thank frick they were all just side projects and not mainline half life or team fortress games. that would have sucked
You know what’s the saddest thing is?
They have potential to be really great. Artifact can be really awesome and worthy a challenge to Heartstone. The concept of 3 lanes table is awesome and really make you think broad and macro rather than hoarding the best of cards.
Underlords is the same. Autochess is sometimes really fun and they can expand the lore of Dota 2 by a lot.
It literally just came down to the fact that consumers didn't get anything else since portal 2
>150 hours in artifact
Also Day of Defeat, Day of Defeat Source, Alien Swarm, Half-Life Deathmatch Source, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, and Deathmatch Classic
Wasn't ricochet literally a tech demo for the source that later ended up being sold because why not?
No excuses for the other 2 though.
*source engine
Ricochet is on Goldsource, not Source, so no
Even if Ricochet was a Goldsrc demo, I’d never see a reason for Valve to sell it for $5.
Ricochet was Valve's first attempt to make a "games as a service multiplayer game," basically trying to do in 2000 what they eventually did for Team Fortress 2 in 2008 from the Goldrush Update onward. Then they ended up losing interest and never following through on those plans until, well, Team Fortress 2, though in their defense, they also hadn't invented Steam yet to make constant updates as easy as it became for TF2.
Because the developers don't fricking care and don't have any love for their project, and are ultimately interchangeable.
They barely can pull off the game by the time the deadline it's hit so there's no time to be retrospective about it. Also considering how big AAA devs teams are, everyone would fight to be included while at the same time only a few can truly give insight about the game's design.
because nu devs know how incompetent they are and if anyone actually heard the things they had to say about the making of their games they'd either be fired on the spot or laughed at for eternity
that sounds like something for the cash shop!
because the people who make games now hate videogames, for them its a job to pay the bills.
because devs are bound by NDAs. They cant discuss why his game is an unfinished mess
Games are not made the same as back then, now everything is outsourced to many different companies, and the main studios job is to use all those assets and like a puzzle build everything.
Its a waste of time and resources as far production is concerned.
halo infinite commentary
>good morning sirs, i am doing the needful for my temp contract of the game. yeah, i don't really understand any of this stuff, i think someone two temp cycles before me did that.
Playing through Alyx a second time and the developer commentary is actually really good. They have in-game renders you can interact for the things they're explaining and the designs they iterated through and the systems they implemented.
would you be interested in in-game developer commentary in an indie game
asking for a friend
if the game is interesting then yeah but since it's an indie game "interesting" is very important for its success in the first place so yeah
Don't bother. No one would be interested until it's already widely considered a success. It's why Valve didn't start doing commentary until the Orange Box.
only add it as a free update if your game becomes famous
dlc with your definitive edition.
Otherwise just play thru it in a stream and then post the VOD
>WORTH THE WEIGHT
Also finding out just how moronic playtesters actually are.
This is overblown. The thing is, there still are infinite loops in the antlion tunnels in Half-Life 2 Episode Two. It was just this specific case where they didn't make it obvious enough to be moron-proof (probably didn't help having the Guardian chasing you) and therefore blocked it off.
>can still hear gaben's WORTH THE WEIGHT in my head from the portal 2 developer track
that's from the TF2 track though
>After nine years in development, hopefully it will have been worth the weight. My email is GABEN GABEN GABEN GABEN@valvesoftware.com
>that's from the TF2 track though
Huh? I've never even played TF2. Unless this was part of the orange box or some shit idk
huh.
TF2 was released as part of the Orange Box. TF2 was also the only game that was released 9 years after its announcement. How could "worth the weight" make any sense for Portal 2? It was released in 2011 after being announced in 2010. Waiting a year is pretty standard, or even considered short by modern standards.
yeah guess it was just from orange box I primarily only played portal on that, musthave peeked it
why did these things weigh like 50x a fishing ship in gmod
>we decided to cut this area down significantly, which also cut the total quests in this zone in half all because we knew the consoles just would not be able to handle it
This is what modern AAA commentary would sound like if it was honest. TF2 devs were proud of their work, you don't see that anymore.
Because there are so little devs who actually care out there. Most modern devs actually hate their job and video games they develop. Asking for something extra from them is futile.
>why don't developers add more stuff to their games?
You don't seem to understand, OP. More stuff = more dev time = less profits. You're apparently under the misguided assumption that most studios are in it for the "art" or the "love" of making games- they're not. It's a business, and they want to sell as many games as they can at as cheap a cost as possible to maximize profits. Any extra features eat into the bottom line
Valve employs literal geniuses and decisions on what goes into a game happens very close to single individual dev level. Its not like management decides what game type the company would make, but an iterative process where the geniuses work on it with more authority than other dev teams.
Since the decisions are made to exactly fit a specific problem the dev had they can comment on it. They have absolute confidence the thing they did was the best solution possible and no one listening would go "what a moron, I would do it This way". Also the games are small and idea dense which allows more frequent talking points while some games there just wouldnt be enough to justify it.
Now other teams with lesser employees can make talks about specific mechanics they worked on to solve a problem, but it might make much worse commentary tracks.
Most games don't have the thought put into them that Valve's did.
There simply wouldn't be enough to talk about. The vast, vast majority of decisions in most games are "this is popular so we put it in" and "this was the easiest thing to do so we just threw it together".
Valve's developer commentary was interesting because they had so many iterations of changes which created worthwhile narratives around almost any little part of the game.
Because few games are made with enough passion now. I can't fathom a single interesting fact about why certain choices were made in the newest Halo, or CoD, or Battlfield. It would be like:
>So why did you choose to go in this art direction?
>Because photorealism is what's "in"
Listening to the TF2 dev commentary on Hydro and Gravel pit gives you info on things you may not have even thought about like
>All characters are back-lit so that they don't blend into the dark
>The artstyle is based off of the works of J.C. Leyendecker
>Glass is never breakable and is explicitly used to safely see into and out of points of interest
>Medic's medi-beam has the little plus symbols floating into the player you are healing to help new players understand you are actively healing your target
>Spy's iconic paper mask wasn't the first attempt at showing teammates what he was disguised as, using it cut down on hud elements and blended into the artstyle.
I forget the GDC talk, it was one of the former guys who worked at Naughty Dog.
He talked about how publishers and marketing departments ACTIVELY try to obfuscate development in order to prevent cults of personality from forming. Publishers are trying to avoid something like the movie industry where certain directors, actors, or writers are so popular they draw audiences, it gives these people too much power.
There was a story of a couple of developers trying to attend a release party for their game. Someone from the marketing department saw them, talked with a bouncer, they got bum rushed out of the party. The marketing department is at war with the development team, and they are winning the war.
West and Zampella leaving Call of Duty after being screwed out of their bonuses should have been huge news, but it was barely a blip and people kept on buying CoD without even realizing the original developers were gone. Exactly how Activision wanted it to be, you buy the franchise name, not the creators name.
link to that talk?
Found it. Jason Rubin is the guy. It's shit quality and shit format, but it's still watchable.
Movies are also a huge team effort, directors tend to have teams under them, writers work in teams, etc. We still elevate the leaders. We can do the same in video games, we can elevate the lead game designer, the lead artist, the lead musician. It's not impossible, Kojima has hundreds working under him, Miyazaki has co-directors and hundreds working under him, Ocarina of Time had three different directors, Miyamoto is the only one people remember though.
Is this a perfect system? Frick no, but it's better to recognize a couple names then refuse to recognize anyone.
thanks anon watching it now
But that's wrong. Companies still try and push major talent, look at game mags which have always tried to leverage devs for interviews etc. or the recent massive push to institute actors into games the same way they are in movies. Do you think having star power somehow hurts the publishers or something? Having an abstract way to sell their game that isn't directly related it its quality is bad for Marketing?
The truth is games just that no one person has creative control over a game the way they do in other media.
>Do you think having star power somehow hurts the publishers or something?
having one of their anonymous grunts doing all the good work for pennies turn into a star hurts the puiblisher. poaching a grunt-turned-star from another publisher does not hurt the publisher. see how that works, corporate bootlicker?
It hurts them a frickload less than being able to say "Directed by wienerSUCK MGEE and staring ASSLICKER PRIME" as their entire marketing angle.
>one of their anonymous grunts
That's exactly the point. There are loads of people. Videogames are, more than any other medium, a team effort.
Here's a fun one for Conker if you have the time, old Rare devs talking about their memories of the game over a few beers.
I loved this so much, best part of the orange box.
lol could you imagine dev commentary these days
>uh i opened ue4 and pasted in the zip file assets from the files we got from china
>uh i hit save as and then uhhh we shipped it
Because most modern games don't ship finished products as it is. A commentary track makes no sense if there's constant potential for it to become obsolete every bug fix update.
>don't talk about that then
Then you've got a shitty commentary track that's barely addressing anything.
Because it's more convinient to have GDC talk instead.
because they're just shitting out a product
Modern games release in such a broken state, there would be questions about why they wasted resources to jack themselves off instead of finishing the game