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I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already

by ukdm 16y ago

I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server. There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers. You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally. When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship. I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.

ahoyhere 16y ago
A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.
- singular 16y ago
  I think the key factors are politics and managerial ignorance - there appears to be a general consensus that the most qualified person for the job is the a. biggest suck up and b. the least technically knowledgeable guy/gal available. The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion. Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible. Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    >The problem with having politicals in senior positions This is a problem having politicals in any position of power what so ever.
    - kemayo 16y ago
      The old saw about how the only person who should be in power is the person who doesn't want to be in power, huh?
      - loewenskind 16y ago
        Well, to be honest I think in some future time people will find it so strange that there was a time when decisions about critical aspects of a country where in the hands of people who were only experts at making people like them.
  - gaius 16y ago
    This is why creating an "advanced technology" or "R&D" unit in the business is very risky. You have to be sure you actually do get the elite, and not just the people who want to play with shiny toys and have the connections to get the plum assgnments.
    - Tamerlin 16y ago
      That's very true, and sadly it's also true that most of the time, the people choosing the purported elite are the least qualified to do so.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  Sometimes it feels this is so because we have a lot less number of ruins when it comes to IT related projects. Stop construction of a building you have a gigantic half constructed bloat of concrete and bricks. Nothing can be reused (except for the land). Stop construction of a program and you will have some files which can be deleted, all the machines are general purpose and all this can be reused.
  - patio11 16y ago
    I think it is partially because nobody has figured out how to reliably estimate project costs and timetables for software. If houses routinely came with estimates like "We think this house will cost between $200k and $2.6 million to build, and it could be done in between 6 months and 10 years, and at the end it may or may not have a bathroom", every general contractor in the country would be in the unemployment line. "Oh, the wizards burned through another $300,000 last month. Well, who knows what those wizards do. Tell them to get the payroll system ready by next month, OK?"
    - weavejester 16y ago
      I think the problem is more fundamental than that. The requirements for a house are pretty much static. The requirements for an application are often in constant flux.
      - rikthevik 16y ago
        I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly. I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine that most dysfunctional teams would manage to bone up a perfect spec anyway.
        weaksauce 16y ago
- pmjordan 16y ago
  I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care. We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones. Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.
  - silverbax88 16y ago
    Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere. Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.
      - batasrki 16y ago
        Well, that's because bank and medical software usually falls under the "enterprise" umbrella. So, while you may be right that a lot of enterprise software is terrible, there are projects in said enterprises that work great and for which people developing them care a lot. You generalized, so he/she struck back with a general statement.
        pmjordan 16y ago
        Wait, I'm generalising? silverbax88 interpreted my "I don't know about the enterprise area" to mean "Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all" And I'm the one jumping to conclusions? All I know is I've yet to meet someone in gamedev who doesn't care about the product they're working on. Probably because the pay is much lower for the same level of skill as elsewhere, so you won't find anyone doing it for the money. Have I met software developers in other areas who don't give a crap? Lots. Have I met ones who care? Also lots. None of this contradicts anything I've said.
- fleitz 16y ago
  The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.
  - gaius 16y ago
    But why would I want to do all these things for the benefit of a toxic organization? That system feeds off people who try to do the right thing, then it chews them up and spits them out. In fact it relies on there being people who will do the right thing even tho' it means extra stress and no extra reward. Organizations like that deserve to collapse under their own weight.
    - dasil003 16y ago
      Same reason millionaires want more money: it's about the game.
    - nl 16y ago
      Not quite. I read it as a strategy for firewalling off a section of the organisation from the useless people, which enables you do enjoy your work.
      - gaius 16y ago
        ... For the benefit of the management tier above that allowed the toxic situation to develop in the first place. You can bet that you won't see any of the profits yourself, and they're laughing all the way to the bank, they took their eyes off the ball and still scored.
Torn 16y ago
Did you make it clear to Games Workshop why things weren't progressing properly?
- ukdm 16y ago
  Yes, I just told the truth of what was happening and they seemed to take it on board. But at the same time I think they were quite powerless to do anything. So much money had been spent, I believe at that point they needed a sustained gamer base of around 300,000 if they released within a year to make the investment work. I have no idea what that grew to once the switch to Mythic had been made.
robryan 16y ago
I would be annoyed to if I was games workshop, having spent decades painstakingly creating the IP to have a flop of an MMO created that was clearly pushed out before it was done.
- pilkers 16y ago
  It's hardly unprecedented for games based on existing franchises to turn out less than stellar. They knew what they were getting in to.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    Absolutely. It's Games Workshop's IP, it's theirs to make sure that they only entrust it to people who will make good use of it and theirs to make sure those projects are well run. Reminds me about a story about JK Rowling during the early negotiations with Warner Bros about the Harry Potter films. They all sat down and Warners came up with a list of things that they said they were going to chang. JK Rowling stood up, wished them good luck and went to leave. They asked where she was going and she simply replied that they obviously had very clear ideas they wished to follow and that was fine, just not with her characters or books. Now you can argue that she was being precious, awkward or whatever (I was going to write unrealistic but as she got her way she was being perfectly realistic it would appear) but whatever else she was doing, she was managing her IP in a way many others could learn from.
    - nkassis 16y ago
      Well she used an old car buying trick. Never take the first offer, walk out at least once.
      - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
        That might be true though she never changed her position on things - hence the almost entirely British cast, films that remain largely true to the books (within the limits of crushing 700 pages into two and a bit hours) and so on. Obviously it helps with negotiations when you're holding all the cards as she was - owned what looks like it will be the most valuable franchise in film history, undoubtedly had competitors queuing round the block, didn't need the money...

by ukdm 16y ago

ahoyhere 16y ago

A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.

singular 16y ago
I think the key factors are politics and managerial ignorance - there appears to be a general consensus that the most qualified person for the job is the a. biggest suck up and b. the least technically knowledgeable guy/gal available. The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion. Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible. Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >The problem with having politicals in senior positions This is a problem having politicals in any position of power what so ever.
  - kemayo 16y ago
    The old saw about how the only person who should be in power is the person who doesn't want to be in power, huh?
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      Well, to be honest I think in some future time people will find it so strange that there was a time when decisions about critical aspects of a country where in the hands of people who were only experts at making people like them.
- gaius 16y ago
  This is why creating an "advanced technology" or "R&D" unit in the business is very risky. You have to be sure you actually do get the elite, and not just the people who want to play with shiny toys and have the connections to get the plum assgnments.
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    That's very true, and sadly it's also true that most of the time, the people choosing the purported elite are the least qualified to do so.
rick_2047 16y ago
Sometimes it feels this is so because we have a lot less number of ruins when it comes to IT related projects. Stop construction of a building you have a gigantic half constructed bloat of concrete and bricks. Nothing can be reused (except for the land). Stop construction of a program and you will have some files which can be deleted, all the machines are general purpose and all this can be reused.
- patio11 16y ago
  I think it is partially because nobody has figured out how to reliably estimate project costs and timetables for software. If houses routinely came with estimates like "We think this house will cost between $200k and $2.6 million to build, and it could be done in between 6 months and 10 years, and at the end it may or may not have a bathroom", every general contractor in the country would be in the unemployment line. "Oh, the wizards burned through another $300,000 last month. Well, who knows what those wizards do. Tell them to get the payroll system ready by next month, OK?"
  - weavejester 16y ago
    I think the problem is more fundamental than that. The requirements for a house are pretty much static. The requirements for an application are often in constant flux.
    - rikthevik 16y ago
      I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly. I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine that most dysfunctional teams would manage to bone up a perfect spec anyway.
      - weaksauce 16y ago
pmjordan 16y ago
I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care. We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones. Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.
- silverbax88 16y ago
  Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere. Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.
    - batasrki 16y ago
      Well, that's because bank and medical software usually falls under the "enterprise" umbrella. So, while you may be right that a lot of enterprise software is terrible, there are projects in said enterprises that work great and for which people developing them care a lot. You generalized, so he/she struck back with a general statement.
      - pmjordan 16y ago
        Wait, I'm generalising? silverbax88 interpreted my "I don't know about the enterprise area" to mean "Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all" And I'm the one jumping to conclusions? All I know is I've yet to meet someone in gamedev who doesn't care about the product they're working on. Probably because the pay is much lower for the same level of skill as elsewhere, so you won't find anyone doing it for the money. Have I met software developers in other areas who don't give a crap? Lots. Have I met ones who care? Also lots. None of this contradicts anything I've said.
fleitz 16y ago
The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.
- gaius 16y ago
  But why would I want to do all these things for the benefit of a toxic organization? That system feeds off people who try to do the right thing, then it chews them up and spits them out. In fact it relies on there being people who will do the right thing even tho' it means extra stress and no extra reward. Organizations like that deserve to collapse under their own weight.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    Same reason millionaires want more money: it's about the game.
  - nl 16y ago
    Not quite. I read it as a strategy for firewalling off a section of the organisation from the useless people, which enables you do enjoy your work.
    - gaius 16y ago
      ... For the benefit of the management tier above that allowed the toxic situation to develop in the first place. You can bet that you won't see any of the profits yourself, and they're laughing all the way to the bank, they took their eyes off the ball and still scored.

Torn 16y ago

Did you make it clear to Games Workshop why things weren't progressing properly?

ukdm 16y ago
Yes, I just told the truth of what was happening and they seemed to take it on board. But at the same time I think they were quite powerless to do anything. So much money had been spent, I believe at that point they needed a sustained gamer base of around 300,000 if they released within a year to make the investment work. I have no idea what that grew to once the switch to Mythic had been made.

robryan 16y ago

I would be annoyed to if I was games workshop, having spent decades painstakingly creating the IP to have a flop of an MMO created that was clearly pushed out before it was done.

pilkers 16y ago
It's hardly unprecedented for games based on existing franchises to turn out less than stellar. They knew what they were getting in to.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  Absolutely. It's Games Workshop's IP, it's theirs to make sure that they only entrust it to people who will make good use of it and theirs to make sure those projects are well run. Reminds me about a story about JK Rowling during the early negotiations with Warner Bros about the Harry Potter films. They all sat down and Warners came up with a list of things that they said they were going to chang. JK Rowling stood up, wished them good luck and went to leave. They asked where she was going and she simply replied that they obviously had very clear ideas they wished to follow and that was fine, just not with her characters or books. Now you can argue that she was being precious, awkward or whatever (I was going to write unrealistic but as she got her way she was being perfectly realistic it would appear) but whatever else she was doing, she was managing her IP in a way many others could learn from.
  - nkassis 16y ago
    Well she used an old car buying trick. Never take the first offer, walk out at least once.
    - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
      That might be true though she never changed her position on things - hence the almost entirely British cast, films that remain largely true to the books (within the limits of crushing 700 pages into two and a bit hours) and so on. Obviously it helps with negotiations when you're holding all the cards as she was - owned what looks like it will be the most valuable franchise in film history, undoubtedly had competitors queuing round the block, didn't need the money...