Thirith on 20/10/2020 at 11:01
Are you ever not unpleasant as fuck, EvaUnit02?
heywood on 20/10/2020 at 20:23
OK, so now the top three people (presumably) providing creative direction are gone. The optimists view of this is that it's late in development and the creative direction is set and the writing and dialogue is all done. The pessimists view is that the project was off the rails, so they brought in Alex Mandryka and he's butting heads with everyone.
demagogue on 21/10/2020 at 07:46
My knee jerk reaction is always the more polished a game looks, the more I expect its writing is going to be vetted by management and focus group opinion anyway, since they have to be a certain level of risk adverse. Even if they're not directly vetted, there's still that internal ROI pressure to be risk adverse so they don't lose their jobs or get turned down for new projects.
A lot of games have people leaving late in the process though. Didn't that happen with Thief Deadly Shadows & Bioshock? They were kind of let downs compared to the direct predecessors (the holy trinity of gaming), but compared to games that came later and on the whole they weren't bad at all. So it's not necessarily a bad sign.
Malf on 23/10/2020 at 00:12
Unlike RSSbot up there, I have a lot of time for Cara, and always enjoyed her writing on RPS, so I'm sad to see her go. But even so, it's not as big a loss as losing Brian Mitsoda.
He was pretty much the driving narrative force behind VtMB, as well as being the voice of the TV guy.
Not looking good :(
Still, maybe Mitsoda can resurrect DoubleBear Productions and work on making a sequel to Dead State. Love that game.
WingedKagouti on 23/2/2021 at 12:39
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Sounds pretty disgusting that they can just take the game away from the people who've made it, but I guess that's the publisher-developer AAA business model.
I honestly doubt they would do so if the original team was well functioning and delivered milestones within a reasonable timeframe compared to the development roadmap. Enough other third party developers work with Paradox without these kind of things happening to make it a fair assumption that Hardsuit was at fault here.
Pyrian on 23/2/2021 at 14:31
Usually if development is going that badly, it just gets canceled.
demagogue on 24/2/2021 at 00:27
It's late in the dev cycle, they probably have enough to finish it soon, & they've sunk a lot into it to just torch it now. It's a game people have strong opinions about, so I'm not surprised if it found itself in dev hell.
Jason Moyer on 24/2/2021 at 06:11
Probably better to scrap it and cut their losses at this point.
