henke on 19/9/2022 at 09:05

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I've seen so many dumb takes from gamers in regards to this footage, and this thread is no exception.

Starker on 19/9/2022 at 16:28

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As obnoxious as all the culture warriors are, it is at least a little funny to hear complaints about the game looking unfinished.

heywood on 19/9/2022 at 20:03

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Not sure I agree, other than that complaining about the visuals in leaked early footage is stupid. An insular development team is at risk of getting used to the smell of their farts. See Thief 4.

Once your game is out, those gamers are the people who are going to decide whether you made a good game or not. And if you're doing this for a living, they are your source of income. So if you can't convince your target audience that you're making the right design decisions, you're probably not making the right design decisions, assuming your intention is to make money by selling it to them. And if you're not soliciting or taking feedback on board, then you really don't know where you stand. Seems obvious to me anyway. None of that requires taking input directly from the public though. I think it's more a matter of seeking input from people outside of the team, both developers and play testers representative of the target audience.

Anyway, I am curious to see how Rock Star navigates around hot button issues and workplace culture change while trying to retain its irreverent sense of humor.

demagogue on 20/9/2022 at 06:10

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Well you're right about a difference of opinion! The problem with Thief 4 in my view was definitely pandering to the lowest common focus group denominator and not being insular enough. LGS making The Dark Project is closer to what I would picture as an insular development team that wanted to make a cool game first and had no really clear picture what their audience wanted, except hoping that they thought it'd be fun like they did.

But anyway I was talking more specifically about my experience in a dev team listening to fans talk about what they wanted TDM to be, and understanding what they understood and what they didn't.

It's a mixed bag. I shouldn't be too reductive. But there are a lot of things gamers don't understand about how games work to understand why their idea, which sounds good in their head, is either (1) totally unworkable in the code (for technical reasons like memory allocation or just not fitting with other systems well) or (2) is actually awful in practice, but you wouldn't have guessed it until you've playtested it for a while, or (3) seems good at first by itself, but after a few hours of playing with it, you realize it actually fatally compromises or messes the game up. It doesn't fit with the whole package.

So if I could be a little more nuanced in what I'm trying to say, fans know what they want at the high level, and their opinions can be trusted at that level, but they can have bad opinions down in the weeds, not because the ideas are bad per se, but just because they don't know how the code works or they haven't play tested it.

I mean, the assumption is the devs are probably thinking like the gamers, because they're gamers too and we should all have the same way of thinking if we're working in a particular genre. What I'm trying to say is playtesting matters. People's first instincts are often bad just because they can't have the playtesting in their mind until they do it. But when the devs do it, they'll usually know how the gamers themselves will receive it. It's a funny thing, but I've seen it happen a lot of times. The devs can predict what gamers will think after they've gone through the 100s of hours of testing, even if the gamers themselves don't see it coming. But if you could actually get those gamers into the discussion threads and catch them up to speed, which I've also seen happen lots of times, 9 times out of 10 they'll come on board with the team consensus too. It's just how things work.

I wasn't trying to claim more than just that experience I described.

heywood on 20/9/2022 at 18:21

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To be clear, I am not suggesting that games be designed by internet mobs. Feedback needs to be filtered.

But PC gaming isn't the low budget niche that it was in the 1990s, where excessive difficulty was almost a badge of honor, and games were routinely being released in a beta state, to be fixed up later if they sold well. It's big business now, the stakes of failure are higher, and auters aren't succeeding like they did before.

I disagree with you guys about Thief 4. I don't know if any of you followed the EM forums during development, but they got repeated, consistent feedback from a community full of veteran Thief players and modders that they flatly ignored, and when the community didn't come around to see it their way, they stopped communicating. That would be OK I guess if the decision was made to leave existing Thief players by the wayside rather than making them the core of the new game's fan base. But I don't think that's what they intended. It was more like, just trust us, you're going to love it.

Obviously, they were hoping to make a game that would appeal to a broader audience, but I'm not sure they ever figured out what kind of gamers they were going after. If they did focus group the game, they obviously did it with the wrong group, because they ended up making a game that didn't appeal to casual mainstream gamers or fans of the series, and sales dried up in just a few weeks.

Rock Star, on the other hand, seems to know what their fans want, which is more of the same, just bigger and better.