I absolutely know how AAA's can screw all interest out of a game (especially if it is not a top tier franchise with a successful formulae they have already used x times!).

It's why i stopped buying new AAA titles. Like the majority of Hollywood film releases (and that is an appropriate analogy, as the Film Industry has encroached more into the Games Industry, through business ideology etc), AAA games are very, very stale and lack depth and interest, most of the time (not all). They play safe (or what they perceive is safe) because of the huge sums of money now involved.

But yeah, i've seen first hand where that Corporate ideology and all the career-games that goes with that, coupled with a large dose of 'not being from a gaming background' can kill a game stone dead. No matter how much they try to make it, creating a great game is not an exact science, and it takes a certain mix of the right 'magic' ingredients that can mean the difference between a huge hit and a spectacular failure. As long as we are not talking 'just another sequel' or 'inspired by rip off'.

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Anyway, from what you are saying (and taking the background you are coming from in this), are there specific examples you can list where you can see the effect of the Sony QA process? Like what did you actually witness? We can all guess at stuff, but having some hands on comment on specific things would be really helpful in clearing the huge confusions around all the current 'rage on Hello Games' thing.

Also I wonder if that flood in December 2013 had not taken place would any of this have come to pass even? Did Sony accidentally kill NMS here? Would other AAA's have done the same (I personally would think it likely)?

Which then leads to can Sean fix this? Can he get NMS back to where they originally wanted it to go?

The criticism over the 'silence' from Sean and Hello Games is telling i think, and you allude to that in your post, but i fully suspect the main reason for that 'silence' is a legal one. And really Hello Games are doing all they can in this situation by fixing stuff as quickly as hey can, and i hope being ready to improve the game via updates.

So much potential in NMS, i think most non rabid hate-boys can see that and hope it makes it to reach that potential. My modding tools are ready for when i get the game! :)

You make a lot of (in my opinion) wrongful and somewhat niave assumptions. A wall of text don`t make you right. i`ll answer a couple of things...

1. Evidence shows that sean lied or if you want to be nice was `economical` with the truth. Why? Was he pushed? Did he get over excited by the media glitter? Who knows, he lied.

2. it`s not unusual for gaming companies to hold back the release of a game a month or two longer. I take it as a good sign as it show they want to make it right. In this case that wasn`t so, but for quite a few games I`ve played it was a good idea. A rushed out broken buggy game is worst than a delayed fixed game.

I don`t have time for the rest of your words as I have to go out now and buy a kitten.

Sure. Thing is that we're not really talking about a magical fairy that suddenly stopped flying because there was one clap too little, or something like that. And I'll give you an exact example to explain why.

So in the Killzone 2 pre-release build, the one that the press had access to, and Sony UK sent out to (at least that was my impression from the insane beta-feedback) friends and family, etc. In that build, Guerilla Games had already adjusted a lot. Some of us had been following this via unofficial leaks and small drips of tech-info, so we also got to read about ways to incorporate sixaxis controls, and things like that. This game had been having a lot of tweaking done, by GG internally, before it came to us.

And we sort of expected it to be very raw, specially given the early press-feedback Sony highlighted. So when I got to see basically the most amazing animation system ever created, I.. didn't really understand anything. Because this system here is absolutely gorgeous. Sure, it breaks if people lag more than 700ms (i.e., around the globe 1.5times), but no one wants to play with that amount of lag anyway. And GG knew the exact limit of the ping-syncs before their distributed p2p server system stopped giving playable response times for all the clients.

Which, incidentally, was very high. Partly because of the speed of the game, but also because the way the game was very deliberate and tactical.

This of course also tied into how the controls were set up - which.. you can read all kinds of notes about if you can pilfer up the old killzone 2 web-site. They were reasonably public with that very serious changes were made here over time.

But before all that, overall this title was unbelievably impressive. They had insane amounts of lighting sources, the online and offline game was very similar, and the impression I had was that the game was extremely polished. Like I said, I really didn't get why there were so many complaints. I could sort of see that the controls might need some getting used to, but they fit very neatly with how the game played. And if you saw it from the outside, you had things like that you could see where the soldiers were turned towards. And that corresponded to when you would start to pull the gun and turn your character (which was slower than smacking it up in ready-position). So this just made so much sense. Not only that, GG did something here that had never been done before on a console - and the reactions were a bit like if someone does a wallrun up across the roof or something like that. No one expects it, and the ones who see how amazing it was sort of just hope the rest of the people won't take too long to catch on.

By the time the game released, a rescue patch had already been put out. So that if you ever installed the game and logged on to the psn, the first version would do the following: 1. remove all ping and throughput limitations for online play. 2. speed up the game significantly. 3. disconnect the animation system from the controls (making the first person perspective the proper COD-clone GG clearly wanted it to be, etc). 4. the game has all the level ranks increased to the point where it really played like the Duty Calls parody.

The lead gameplay design guy (who I think was appointed later on) then explained (also in public, actually) that the reason for this was that they had received "feedback" to the effect that the controls were not very good.

What had actually happened was that a small group of people from Gaf had spammed GG's official forum with the same feedback, which essentially boiled down to something about the controls "not being 1:1". Which.. I still don't get what means, but I'm assuming it implies that unless you make the curson travel without traction across the screen in all directions, then the entire game was broken.

The gameplay design guy then explained how they had made a compromise between the old system and the new suggestion. Which he insisted would please everyone. Where the old system was broken to bits, and the new system became much less speedy than what the complainers wanted.

After taking some pretty hard harassment over this, they defended it on the grounds that they were not just gathering feedback from the official forums, where the official beta-testers were posting pretty amazingly stupid things. But that they also were pilfering feedback from all kinds of other places like Gaf and Reddit.

Now, why did they do this, right? Why a complete knee-jerk patch right before release? Officially they were just sorting out issues players had. But what they were specifically doing was actually patching out the main features of the title, in order to answer complaints such as:
1. I cannot connect to my friend on Mars.
-so they patched out the ping-limits and destroyed the animation system, the host system, and the smooth visual presentation of the game. This had an impact when reviewers started to play the game. Specially since the netcode had been talked up a lot (for good reason).
2. the controls are laggy, not 1:1, too difficult.
-so they patched out the most interesting control system a console-shooter has had. That GG had tested internally for four years, and balanced the game towards. And they broke the animation system - or, they really did patch away that the way the character turned and aimed, etc., corresponded to how the model was moving. Auto-aim was also added on - the game didn't have auto-aim to begin with, and it wasn't needed (like I said, it was unusual, but a very well thought through game).
3. the game is too slow.
-so they made everything run faster, all abilities trigger more often. And now all the levels were too small, and all the games played in a completely chaotic fashion. Gamebalance in general went out of the window - GG spent 6 months trying to fix it again, and couldn't do it.

On top of that they made all the bots extremely powerful (they were more for recon early on - at launch, they sniped people through grates, and not one official tester had pointed that out? Turns out they had requested it), the rocket launcher got more splash, the boost was made faster. And the ISA (the allied faction in the game) got their gun buffed to the point where the other faction's weapon was useless in comparison. Someone in the beta-channels insisted on this, and I swear to you I'm not making this up, because they felt the hero-faction should be stronger than the villains. This stayed in the final release after the control tweaks, regardless of other reports of the game being unbalanced - by other testers and by users at that point.

Meanwhile, actual bugs were never reported, and not sorted out.


(...)

Ah i was meaning more stuff about NMS in particular, i'm very interested in hearing what you were saying about that process, as it seems very much like what i expected.

Thanks for the info on Killzone though, it is always interesting for people to hear this kind of thing. I think if you plan on getting into the industry at all, it is good to go in with eyes wide open, the AAA industry is not a bed of roses to work in, often quite the opposite.

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You mention GG and if that is who i think you are referring too, i also think a huge part of the internet rage has been stoked up by those guys, for probably a variety of reasons (Sean is actually a really nice guy (which negative people and haters really dislike), NMS was not going to be a CoD face shooter etc).

The relationship between those and many of the channels down which the rage snowballed is kind of hard to ignore in all this.

This is not saying NMS shipped with no problems, heck i think we can all see clear examples that something happened over the last six months to a year of development in particular. But the level and type of internet outrage has been too well 'orchestrated' and the pattern (death threats, lots of OTT online anger etc) seems to look very GG, imo.

I think all Sean and HG can do in the face of this kind of thing, is just to knuckle down and keep working on the game. The better it gets the less crap will stick and eventually they (GG etc) will get bored and move onto other targets.

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Please, please don't threaten to kill it unless Sean makes NMS the game it seemed to be ASAP!! ;)

Hehe!

Well we have her now. Poor little thing, she`s sooo tiny.

So clearly, the gaming industry is murdering itself, because of the false idea of basing popularity and "what is mainstream" on obscure forum posters and community threads.
It's like saying, "Donald Trump is the most popular candidate ever, because on his Facebook page there are posts of his ideas liked by thousands of others". Actually- for a fact- I know well, that many online journalists and self-proclaimed critics base their opinion on illogical and unscientific statistics like that.

This is nothing, but horrible statistics. Horrifying logic and horrifying statistics. If Sony (and other companies ) doing this, they deserve all the shit thrown at them, although the shit slinging seems to be aimed toward Hello Games, because they are the developers, and people aren't informed. Several days ago, I posted a thread, that Hello Games are seasoned pro-developers, despite being a small team. Once, i found that information (I search), I know there is something very fishy going on, including their 3 weeks of silence, since release, beside the robotic "Hello Games Twitter update on the patch", which I do not count as communication.

I'm just so disappointed, that games aren't treated as a form of art and a form of expression. Imagine Michelangelo painting Mona Lisa, based on what people want to see or don't want to see. It would have ceased to be what it was all about, and probably ceased to be a painting altogether.

I wasn't on the NMS early release, though. But because of the other betas, and the way things were done there, it's very easy to believe that .. they would genuinely manage to come up with a way to patch out planet rotation, patch in an autopilot that prevents you from coming closer than 100m to the ground. And then patch out all the functions they didn't have "time enough" to implement over again in the way q&a wanted.

GG refers to Guerilla Games, the studio that made all the Killzone 2 games. "That shitty little European developer", like one tester said. :D But yeah, pretty sure some of that controversy spilled over outside the sony forums. Fanboys were pretty harsh with GG as well over not getting a 10/10 score. Which was the context of the tweaks, right..? That they were just adjusting for perfection here, to "save the ps3", etc.

But I hope this illustrates what Sony q&a actually does, specifically, and what concerns were picked up. Apologies about being extremely long-winded here, btw.

MAG may have been even worse. Zipper had demoed their netcode I think a couple of years before the game came out, with something like 1024 individual player instances being updated in real-time. I think that story was made public at some point, with pics from the demo and everything (bouncing balls on a wireframe). So this is around when the ps3 is launched, with the tech being hyped, etc. And Sony basically engaged several studios to go crazy with the toolkit, which they did. GG with the animation and world reduction algorithms, Zipper with the netcode, Factor 5 with the streaming tech on lair, etc. There was some sort of concerted effort going on here.

So Zipper went for MAG. They had made the Socom games on the ps2 - not the most well-known series, but it had a sort of reputation for being a bit more tactical than most shooters. And I think most expected something similar to Socom, with squads and mission objectives being the core of the game, over just pvp duels and so on.

Game was presented at E3, the E3 Sony basically pushed a bunch of unwashed devs up on the stage to do some gameplay. It didn't really look that great, but they had a live demo. I was pretty interested, and for whatever reason I got into the early beta for MAG. Super-fun game. Lots of small bugs in that game, with some testers zealously going through the entire map to mark the visible polygon edges or various holes, etc. Some of the testers were extremely enthusiastic about this.

But, like in the Killzone 2 beta, very few had actual concerns about the gameplay. Because it really was extremely well done. So well done that when we played the beta several people were completely stunned that the game didn't play the same way twice, for example. It's this simple setup, with the same maps, but because of the way the game was structured, and because the people you played with were different, you just didn't see two identical games. I know several of the testers were pretty casual in the sense that they didn't like shooters all that much, and they were hooked. I played as many hours as I could, and I wasn't even near playing the game the most. Meanwhile, people who normally played less deep games also liked it.

So not only was the game a success technically, it also fit into a spot where it appealed to a broader audience than the usual COD crowd. Some were overhyping the game a lot, and the graphics weren't exactly amazing, and so on. But I think the zipper devs who played with us a couple of times were genuinely hopeful here that they had managed to pull of something unique.

The beta ends, a bunch of concerns had been taken care of, some of the mechanics were tweaked, a few updates were done to a couple of particularly exposed map-locations, etc. But generally the game was kept intact by the time the semi-closed beta ended. My impression was that this is when the design-folks at Zipper were done with the game and delivered the product to Sony.

Between that beta and the launch, several things were changed. Maps were shortened, spawn-times were reduced, walking and running was sped up. The rocket-launcher was given splash damage (why? No one knows). The ping limits and matching sequences were removed. Several barriers were put into the game at very strange locations on the maps to separate squads from moving out of their sectors, apparently. In the 128 player modes, they added physical barriers between the maps so the platoons were separated in the first sequence of the map. Bridges were made easier to blow up, etc., etc.

And again, the "concerns" they pulled in were the same type as in the other releases. People who got wasted in particular spots in particular maps had at one point a truck put in in the middle of the map to make it harder for the defense to shoot the enemy (we had a long and very ridiculous discussion about a sniping spot on one of the maps - the main gist was that because people don't learn, the game has to be changed to not favor one specific side). The blur filters were added to reduce the view-distances. The maps were shortened to answer complaints about down-time.

And the matching was removed in order to have everyone be able to play on the same squad as their psn-friends, etc. The netcode didn't agree well with that, even if it hid lag extremely effectively up to a point. So after they removed the matching requirements, the lag started showing up.

And that became the main thrust of the argument that Zipper had actually been overselling the engine, and that it just wasn't capable of having 256 players with real-time updates. The speculation about the seventh core on the ps3 being disabled turned up as an explanation. That Zipper had lied to Sony became a meme, also among the beta-testers. And this spilled into actual articles about the game around the launch. "Ambitious but perhaps too ambitious". Technical problems was natural for such an ambitious game. Weaknesses in the design didn't survive the launch. Etc.

But a bunch of us had tested this game before the last beta-stint, and knew that it actually did work. Even when squads with players located geographically far apart played. We had the opportunity to check a couple of times, talking to other people in the test, and we measured that if the squads updated towards what we assumed were a master node within 100ms, the game effectively hid lag between squads up to 400ms. Meaning that europe and the US didn't have to worry about lag at all. And even Oz would have completely normal gameplay with either the US or China. So this was some seriously amazing feat they pulled off here.

Bombed at launch, because internal testers had Zipper remove the matchmaking. And Zipper "couldn't deliver". Zipper is no longer a studio, and the last game they made was a mobile game. But they really did it - they really made that game and managed to pull it off, exactly as advertised. Until the last q&a stint.

Yep. Would be the headline of my review if I still wrote those.

Another story: Psygnosis used to make a lot of curious games. They were probably best known for Lemmings, I guess, but they also made the Lander3d game based on glide (and one of the first games to come on cd-rom). I'm mentioning this game because it used glide/3dfx acceleration in some extremely unusual and hard-coded way. I don't know the details about that but some of the programming here was fantastic. The sales were abysmal, but the actual game was extremely well done. Then it's the Wipeout franchise, of course. They eventually turned into Studio Liverpool, subsidiary of Sony. And supposedly retained some kind of studio independence that was somewhat special under Sony.

With the ps3, they were engaged to make WipeoutHD, with the entire 1080p@60fps sales-pitch. In reality, the achievement of this title wasn't really that it had 1080p@60fps, but that it actually updated all the animation adjustment, flight-paths and effects in real-time, rather than use canned effects. The track had these equalizers running down with textures mapped against the music that was playing, for example. And the models for the ships they used were reduced from a very high polygon model to the rendering target depending on the distance of the viewport. So not just 1080p@60fps, but super-detailed and extremely smooth as well. Absolutely fantastic game.

Towards the release, things started to get interesting. Turns out the studio wanted to distribute the title as a digital only title, and supposedly Sony agreed with that as a way to front the psn. They had a few online only titles that were sort of indie-games, but this was a full title at almost full price (which it was worth).

At release, the ever ridiculous guy at Eurogamer doing the "Digital Foundry" thing had this expose where he "proved" that WipeoutHD was actually upscaled, and things like that. It was complete bull, but it gained some traction in the fora Sony's community folks were active. And somehow this digital only title that sold the ps3's strong points in all possible ways ended up either not meeting expectations in sales immediately, or else the expectation was that it should have been higher than it was, and that something had to be done with it.

This is allegedly when SL put the foot down and ran into some difficulties with Sony. And somehow they were forced to accept an in-game advertisement system from one of Sony's internal advertisement companies. Double Fusion, I think they're called. And there was of course a complete meltdown - no one wanted this, specially when they had been paying full price for the game. Sony's community team and testers were hot on how this was a completely proper thing that they could do, and that it didn't affect either loading times or framerates when the background process was pulling ads off the internet. In reality it did - it caused all kinds of crunches and the internal scaler started struggling over 720p resolution. It wasn't tested properly, and the entire idea was ridiculous, but they pushed it through anyway.

This amazing PR blunder was followed up with Sony's first ad-campaign for the title (after several months), and a disc-release. Which supposedly was going to resurrect the title. No such thing happened, of course - the game was a small download title, and it was produced for download and storage on the hdd. And loading times, noise and everything else - it just wasn't a good deal, specially when the actual price was lower on the psn.

Of course, they removed the ads in the end after the backlash (Which certainly didn't help sales). And what follows this was a layoff of gigantic proportions at SL, completely unannounced. Until the Studio was disbanded and absorbed into the North-West Group, a part of Sony doing things like Buzz, etc. They produced the brilliant Motorstorm RC later on, but that probably was the last interesting game to come out of the people from Psygnosis.

What we don't know here is how this hangs together. What sort of requirements Sony made of SL, and what caused the studio to close. All we know is that people lower in the team, on models and coding, and so on, said it came as a shock, completely out of the blue. And some suspected that it was a personal tug-o-war between SL's director and whoever was promoting the disc-release effort and the relaunch campaign. The ad-money through Double Fusion supposedly was involved.

In the end, though - no more Studio Liverpool. And lots of talented developers without jobs. Even though they fulfilled every possible goal they were supposed to meet when it came to a ps3-title that showed off what the hardware was capable of.

This kind of thing is a theme here when it comes to Sony. A title succeeds technically in every possible way. The people who playtest externally are impressed, very impressed. But the title fails to gain the approval as a title that Sony believes they can sell with wider appeal(too difficult, too little appeal to particular types of gamers, etc). And things start falling apart. In spite of the actual game being an absolute gem.

3. non-gameplay thing.

"Memories imbued into the rock long ago by the ancient Gek hannel into my brain..." -> channel (or hammer would be good :p)

The games plain text files must surely have been opened up by the modders by now? Hmmm. I'll soon have the game and will add to your thread here on what i find. It might be a 'fan patch' type thing may be one of my first mods, fixing typos and obvious stuff etc. We can document things here :)

:D no, no don't do that. HG can just search for the string and make an edit (they fixed the typo in the list on top, by the way- hope they kept the eheu thing too). You would have to find the individual file, hope it's limited to one resource so it won't overwrite something else on later patches, and then carefully update it every time the dump of text references change (when they insert new ones and displace the filenames, things like that..).

I guess if we could figure out if the game has a resource path where you could add extra text files, that then would be used in events - that would be sort of interesting.

Then again.. not sure I'd want to start writing in stuff in someone else's game anyway. Or have much of anything actually changed. Honestly, the entire idea of doing that - being a guy at a cinema, stopping the movie, sending the movie back to the studio, having them patch out something you didn't like, based on vague directions and approval ratings.. etc. It's just so arrogant. Never occurred to me that anyone would seriously think like that - until beta-tests at Sony. Where we basically broke games in half over bullshit-complaints from ten posters on neogaf.

3. Non-gameplay thing
From looking at overview before starmap, testing from landing and up to starmap again, etc. And looking at the small hud-model of the ship: landing gear won't retract after taking off from random landing spot outside pylons/landing pads. Gear is then extended through warp, etc. Will retract after taking off from pylons/landing pads. When extended in flight, will rapidly re-extend right before landing. Then won't retract again on take-off, unless from a pylon/pad, etc. Seems pretty consistent.

(Thank god you had Sony qa to take care of the bugs, right. Well worth the money spent, I'm sure.. XD)