15 ms·

The human toll of Fallout 76’s launch

119 points by danso 4y ago

uejfiweun 4y ago
It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. Hidetaka Miyazaki was the mind behind Souls / Elden Ring. Shigeru Miyamoto was the mind behind Mario. And it's because these people really care about the product they are making. They have PASSION. When it comes to a game like 76, which was clearly mandated by some greedy executives who don't play games, the lack of passion permeates the whole game. From what the article describes it seems like nobody wanted to work on this thing - not the QA, not the devs, not the managers. The end result is no surprise. Nobody cared. If I was a games exec, I would do everything to empower the great minds that produce great games to pursue the projects they are passionate about. Unfortunately there are a lot of very successful companies out there that do the exact opposite of that, but the tide seems to be turning. EDIT: I want to clarify that part and parcel with being a talented passionate game director is the ability to build a great team and keep the team motivated. Obviously passion isn't the only ingredient to make a great game. As with any other massive undertaking, teams of humans are what get the job done. I simply observe that these singular figures have the two-part gift of understanding what makes a great game, and also being able to attract others who can help execute that vision.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  > It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever. Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I agree. Producers and designers that frontline a successful project get the visibility but they have to be backed by highly effective teams of equally gifted folks that collaborate effectively. I don’t think this is different for any complex human endeavor. Often times the front liner isn’t the one who built the team - there’s often an anchor person more in the middle of the project that attracts talent and creates the atmosphere of collegial collaboration. Smart front liners bring those folks along to the next projects. From the article it sounds like that was Starfield, not 76, which is probably why it was so miserable.
    - swivelmaster 4y ago
      As soon as a project is known internally as the one the B team was assigned to because all the “favorite” people went to the “better” project, it’s basically doomed. This has happened so many times, the game industry has enough people who should know better, and yet…
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    That's a totally fair point, and I completely agree. I should have clarified this in my original post. If you're passionate about games, but nobody wants to work with you, then that passion won't permeate throughout the development team. All these gaming visionaries tend to have the gift of extreme charisma and strong passion for games - you need both IMO to make a great result. You may have a great idea, but you need to get people fired up about it too and articulate it in a way that can be understood.
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      Even still this isn’t correct, even building a great team isn’t the work of one person and plenty of great games are built by teams lead by people who don’t get press as visionaries. You’re falling for marketing, both personal (where extreme charisma does help) and company lead where wheeling out a famous name sells units. Which isn’t to say famous people are all rubbish but that the hype and the reality are very different to one another.
  - OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
    This sounds just like the great man theory in history [1]. I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
- antisthenes 4y ago
  > Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument. It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments. I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean. Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    Haha, that's fair. I certainly didn't like it the first time I played it. However, I recently tried again on survival mode after a friend's recommendation, and it feels totally different. No fast travel and saving only at beds changes the game completely. Suddenly vertibirds are useful, settlements are mandatory, and the world feels absolutely gigantic rather than a sandbox separated by loading screens. Highly recommend checking it out (although it still won't scratch your RPG itch).
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    I loved Fallout 4, I'm sorry. Every second. I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG. I played NV after 4 and NV was good too. Fallout 3 I keep giving up on and I'm not a quitter. It just doesn't draw me in like the other ones. It seems crude and simple comparatively, due to its age I guess.
    - kaibee 4y ago
      Try Fallout 2.
    - ericd 4y ago
      It's not just nostalgia, go play Fallout 2, GoG has a copy that should work. It holds up extremely well, because it's just a much better game than the Bethesda versions. The writing, the humor, the world building, it feels a lot more alive and real than the much more technically advanced iterations. Fallout 1 is less polished, but also great. Fallout 3+ always felt like a reskinned Elder Scrolls to me.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Hero worship is bad in games development because it can lead to just as tortuous experiences for those working under a supposed visionary who takes the praise and becomes a megalomaniac.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4 There are also many great results that are a team effort. And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example: "[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    Yeah, its my bad for not articulating this in the post. Obviously, any giant product like a modern movie or game is made by teams. I think one hallmark of a great director is the ability to build a great team around you, which is just as important as being passionate and understanding the medium.
    - synu 4y ago
      I’ve never once experienced the “face” of a game doing all the hiring, or even being involved in too many interviews (except for marketing purposes, of course, but I mean hiring interviews). It’s quite a full time and important job to do the PR.
  - bradhe 4y ago
    Having a vision is "part of the problem?"
    - kristofferR 4y ago
      If the vision is bad then obviously.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Lots of visions are mediocre, incoherent, or superficial.
    - 4y ago
- synu 4y ago
  I worked in the video game industry for a long time. This is a story you’re being sold - it’s the teams who build great games, not some singular great passionate mind. It’s a way for marketing teams to build a brand, not much more than that.
- izzydata 4y ago
  I don't think it comes down to a singular person, but I'm pretty sure it is about passion. Modern large game studios have removed all the passion and turned game development into an assembly line of 100s or more people working on it. Creating a very large game and also having it be good seems more like an exception at this point. Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
  - urthor 4y ago
    I find the presence of the "auteur" is valuable because it's a signal to people. When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work. Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions. But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
    - synu 4y ago
      That’s why marketing teams work hard to create that perception in the audience.
      - urthor 4y ago
        The difference is that, having worked in the industry, I can say that film directors are given exactly the power they are advertised as having. The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way. Software hasn't.
        synu 4y ago
        So less that in the video games industry great results are driven by singular, great people today, but games would be better if they were?
        urthor 4y ago
- pacetherace 4y ago
  What you mean to say is that there are guys who get much more credit than they deserve when a game or for that matter any product becomes a success. Fallout 76 seems to be a classic case of unrealistic development and testing deadlines.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    Fallout 76 was deeply flawed as a concept. The concept of "remove the characters and story from the game and let them collect it with junk to basebuild" made the whole game deeply unenjoyable compared to a regular fallout game. Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game. The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.
- 127 4y ago
  Only proof I've seen Todd being good at is marketing. That's it.
- na85 4y ago
  >It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Firstly as other people have pointed out, teams build great products, not some individual with a messianic vision. That's just marketing. Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary. Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".
- robonerd 4y ago
  > It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap. Hideo Kojima, I'm looking at you.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  >Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4 He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.
danso 4y ago
I had some hope that Microsoft's purchase would somehow change things (not that Microsoft is necessarily more benevolent, but maybe could realign the team's priorities and politics), but the (pure) speculation suggests "no": > Bethesda officially became a part of Xbox Game Studios on March 9, 2021, which placed Fallout 76 under Microsoft’s stewardship. When asked whether or not the acquisition had improved the internal work culture within Bethesda, several sources offered lukewarm responses. > One source suggested that Microsoft’s emphasis on a “hands-off” culture toward its studios meant that the new owners trusted Bethesda to take care of its own problems. Sources at Undead Labs also mentioned that Microsoft had a “hands-off” policy, which they claimed had “allowed dysfunction to fester” at their studio. No quality of game could justify the senseless anti-human mentality and processes described. But the fact that Fallout 76 was just such an abysmal and hated release just increases my contempt for Bethesda. Not seeing the moral value in treating their employees ethically is bad enough; not even having the cold business sense to see how it obviously affects their bottom line is just pathetic: > Some sources noted that the project drove an exodus of senior developers who had worked on some of Bethesda’s most prolific titles. Many developers developed physical health issues, such as tinnitus and back pain. One source said it “wasn’t uncommon” for artists to have wrist braces. Senior staff who’d remained loyal to the company for 20 years finally found their reason to quit. Some had been around since Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 76 was their final breaking point.
- sourthyme 4y ago
  This is sick. What does anyone learn doing by working like this? Is anyone gaining experience from this? It just feels like people are ground down so they can't physically work anymore.
  - fnimick 4y ago
    The people running the show see no benefit from their team members "learning" or "gaining experience". If they ship the game and are so ground down they're burned out and ineffective, that's a problem for the next guy; the manager who got the game shipped by burning out the team got a huge bonus and has leveraged it into a shiny position somewhere else by the time any of the consequences rear their heads. IME this type of short-term thinking inevitably infects most companies, unless there is a very strong culture to combat it.
ansible 4y ago
Why are things so bad in the games industry? As compared to other IT / programming fields?
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago
  * very strict deadlines decided by publishers years in advance * incredible passion making the workforce exploitable and more tolerant of abuse * explosive revenue growth bringing in scammers, hucksters, and MBAs * incredible passion from consumers who will buy the same game over and over * the advent of gambling in the form of microtransactions * the consolidation of the industry to a handful of big publishers * incredible technical complexity * exclusive rights on media like star wars or sports like basketball giving some publishers a complete monopoly in some cases
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Many of the problems and potential of abuse as present in the entertainment industry, with none of the organizing to protect workers.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      isn't this literally supposed to be why screenwriters, actors and others are unionized in the hollywood system? and all the behind the camera IATSE members.
      - mort96 4y ago
        Yeah, and the exact same reason why the lack of unionization in VFX is such a large problem. Unions work.
  - extrememacaroni 4y ago
    +1 for "incredible passion from consumers". I've never seen a mass of customers so easy to fool as gamers are. Imagine a washing machine company releasing broken products, and the average joe going "yup, I really want another washing machine from this company after seeing this ad which showed something I like, even though the last time I bought some they were barely working and only half washed my clothes, please take my money". If bethesda/microsoft announced Fallout New Vegas 2, everyone would lose their shit and preorder instantly. Also it disgusts me how happy everyone seems when a company announces that they won't do microtransactions. If the company has a history of keeping promises and releasing games without mtx, sure, it's warranted. But otherwise? Are you an idiot? They'll update the game half a year after you and the other fools bought the game and introduce microtransactions then. I wish there were laws that clearly defined what monetization in a game means and forbade developers from changing monetization schemes during the lifetime of a game, I just can't trust cloud-enabled games nowadays that promise a non-mtx non-p2w experience. It's worthless promises if you can change your mind down the line after I invested time and maybe money in your game. First get the money from the gamers who think they're really smart for "supporting games with fair monetization schemes", then when they're exhausted introduce mtx and go after the whales for the big bucks. Fuck this industry, you don't even know what kind of product you're buying anymore. People waiting for "a full review of Diablo Immor(t)al to figure out how much money you need to spend to get a good build" - what's the point? By the time the review is out blizzard probably already changed the sliders and everything's different. Although from what I hear about the game, the only way they could change them at this point would make the game better, so there's that. $100k (that's one.hundred.thousand.dollars.) to get a fully equipped build. Jesus christ. Go back in time to when Diablo 2 is released and tell the gamers that soon they'll have to pay one hundred. thousand. dollars. to get a fully equipped build in the latest Diablo. They'll just cry and jump out the window. An even sadder thing is if you told them the latest Diablo will be a mobile game, they'd think "what? you can play Diablo anywhere like with a Gameboy? That's freaking amazing dude!" ugh. But you need to tell them this before telling them about having to choose between a nice house and a cool armor for their barbarian, burst that bubble properly. I hate this. My comment here is the incredible passion from consumers, you can see it live now, you're welcome. The incredible passion from developers is also me still being interested and working on gamedev crap even though I wish I could just turn back time instead.
Animats 4y ago
Union, yes! I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland. Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.
- danuker 4y ago
  > how this "metaverse" thing works out Not looking too good. Especially since the interest rate hike (the free money faucet was tightened), but the timing might be coincidence. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2021-01&end=2022-05&pages=Metaverse https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
- Hamuko 4y ago
  What is my incentive as a game developer to make a "big, high-quality shared virtual world"?
  - Animats 4y ago
    Second Life is "a cash machine", according to its owners. Turns out that no advertising, rent land, sell memberships works.
    - kaibee 4y ago
      This is good motivation to make a metaverse. It is not a good motivation to enter one as a developer.
      - filoleg 4y ago
        Presumably, the stuff you develop in metaverse would allow you to monetarily benefit from it as well, and that should be good enough of a motivation for a lot of devs to enter the space. For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.
siskiyou 4y ago
If anyone looking for a career in the tech industry says they love games and game development, please tell them not to work for a gaming company. I suppose they're not all horrible, but the percentage of horrible companies in the gaming industry is too damn high.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Tell them to work in robotics instead. A lot of the technical challenges you find in games can be found in the computer vision and robot simulation spaces.
  - Asooka 4y ago
    Embedded usually pays worse than equivalent jobs writing "big iron" software. Is robotics any different? What would you recommend as an entry point to the field?
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Robotics is great, you can make bank and it’s not a saturated job market. I would say get started at one of the driverless car startups, they are at the forefront of the robotics industry now as it would relate to gaming. Things like industrial robotics and control heavy systems (think Boston Dynamics) might not appeal to game devs.
- TylerE 4y ago
  This is true of pretty much of any job people want to do (performer, commercial pilot…) Jobs are generally; Demanding, Requiring Skill, Well Compensated… pick 2
  - siskiyou 4y ago
    I had great experiences in the tech industry for over 25 years with very little overwork, great pay, and though I have some skills, really nothing special. My way to win was getting along in teams, and being vigilant on behalf of customers/company. I have a high school diploma. This was easy money for me.
aftergibson 4y ago
I went to several Universities to interview undergraduates for a paid summer internship for our small SAAS startup (I was barely out of college myself). A huge percentage of technical students were hoping for internships at video game companies, many hoping to start with testing. So no wonder video games companies feel grinding through QA engineers it’s a viable strategy. All we can really do is warn the younger generation to steer clear of the video games industry even if video games are a passion. You’d think with such a terrible reputation they’d be struggling for hires, but there’s always fresh blood to grind into the ground.
- RicoElectrico 4y ago
  If we assume that indeed games are art, it really checks out: artists being paid on the free market is an anomaly of the recent times, the norm before was patronages and commissions paid in advance.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks. I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.
- lukewrites 4y ago
  > You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    Or even gamedev!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - lethologica 4y ago
    Unless the coding of boring business logic crushes your soul so much that you burn out and end up losing interest in being creative altogether.
    - justinhj 4y ago
      I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner
    - Asooka 4y ago
      What is quest design if not heaps of business logic with a different name.
mhh__ 4y ago
Bethesda need just let obsidian make the fallout games from now on. They don't understand the franchise's message or the lore, they can't write very well, and they also really struggle with technology apparently.
- ssully 4y ago
  I won't say it will never happen, but Obsidian has basically already made their own property in the style of Fallout with The Outerworlds.
tmp_anon_22 4y ago
I think a lot about the emotional abuse the Overwatch team has faced over the years. They created a once in a generation experience which outperformed every reasonable expectation (OWL was not a reasonable expectation unless you are on shrooms).
wly_cdgr 4y ago
It's really a testament to how soul crushingly boring working in non-games tech is that people keep eagerly volunteering to be abused exploited and disrespected like this (at not even one of the very best game companies, just a mid-high tier one!) rather than work a Series C startup making 2-3x with good WLB
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I guess this relates to another current thread [1]. The games industry is it's own weird universe of madness at quite another level. I once had business with a large AAA house in Cambridge England, in a big glass corporate headquarters. When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. A senior person turned up and there was a really weird dynamic. She was obviously not supposed to have met me. The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. This was at least 5 or 10 years before the gamergate and metoo stuff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31664203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31664203
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. > The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. That's probably someone who based her whole self-worth around impressing people making the games she loved.
bradhe 4y ago
I'm all for the unionization of labor in this industry. But this article absolutely has a spin on the whole thing. They're painting QA in a light where by they're underappreciated despite their deep talent comparable to engineering and art. Am I wrong in thinking that, indeed, while their skills are important, they're easily replaceable as compared to developers or artists?
- Avshalom 4y ago
  what makes you think devs and artists are difficult to replace at Bethesda's scale. or indeed at any scale in the video game industry. more expensive maybe, but that's not the same as difficult.
  - friedman23 4y ago
    Devs are absolutely hard to replace in any industry right now given that I have to give 2 interviews a week in my current job.
    - Avshalom 4y ago
      so at minimum two people apply and get past HR's filters per a week. hard to replace is when there are no interviews a week.
      - friedman23 4y ago
        Everyone in my company is interviewing and we hire very few of the applicants because few are qualified. Having to spend 2 hours of every single employee's time a week and each employee is being paid close to 1/3rd of a million dollars or more is difficulty in hiring. Oh, and when you do find someone qualified they have 5 other offers.
- thedz 4y ago
  I don't know that replaceability (true or not) should have that much of an outsized impact on the expectations of humane treatment I realize capitalism rewards scarcity here, but imo this is a piece explicitly about the tolls that tends to bring
mysterydip 4y ago
"Press Reset" by Jason Schreier has many examples of this cycle: crunch, layoff, repeat at next company (or go indie, or exit the industry). In many cases, the people responsible for the decisions are insulated from the fallout (no pun intended).
xen2xen1 4y ago
Sad. 76 is one of my favorite things. I didn't bother to play it until they added NPC's though. Fallout with no NPC's is like a Hershey's bar with no chocolate.
- panzagl 4y ago
  I thought the game was much better without NPCs- it was creepy and sad with unexpected outbreaks of violence. I still love it, though- I play maybe once a week with my brother and we just wander the map looking at messed up stuff, collecting junk and hunting for cryptids. I think we were exactly the audience the game was intended for- but unfortunately that is not the audience the gamer press caters to. Those people are still on /r/fo76 simultaneously bragging about grinding out 50 levels over a weekend and complaining that there's not enough end game content.
friedman23 4y ago
Video game QA (really any qa) seems like an absolutely terrible job. If you are young and reading this, don't choose professions that require 0 qualifications and have a massive line out the door of willing applicants.
snickerer 4y ago
Listen, kids, if someone tells you to do overtime: run! You-must-do-overtime is a management fail and a strong indicator for bad leading.
cudgy 4y ago
Many state that game devs and qa make less money. How much less? The article rambles on about working extra hours at a deadline (for which almost all companies require at times) and receiving overtime pay (which few tech companies pay), but I read no actual numbers.
j_schmuck 4y ago
Why are megaprojects so reliably running into these protracted fucked launches? What are the actual managerial processes like? How are basic failures of planning and scope and quality so constant for the biggest players in the industry? What actual ingredients are missing?
- scotty79 4y ago
  Acceptance of mismatch between reality and pre-agreed plans?
- glitchc 4y ago
  Megaprojects are difficult to execute without a clear vision and a core group of individuals (less than 5) driving that vision to fruition. Every other style of management results in failure to deliver a product, either through feature creep, death by a thousand cuts, or misaligned incentives.
Justsignedup 4y ago
This is a Kotaku article, and given the quality of the reporting there, for all I know every developer save 1 on Fallout 76 loved working on it, and it was the project that drew engineers to Bethesda! I don't trust this source. It sounds like something close to accurate based on previous game industry insights, but again, I don't trust Kotaku for telling me if it is currently raining while we're standing outside.
mardifoufs 4y ago
>Effective multiplayer design requires precise mathematical knowledge of how long it will take for players to clear encounters This sounds interesting, but I don’t really understand what it means. Why would they time encounters in a multi-player game? Wouldn't those have to be run in a separate instance if they are timing sensitive, especially if you don't want other players to interrupt the event? But I have 0 knowledge in game design and I'm pretty sure they are probably talking about something completely different! :')
- stagger87 4y ago
  I don't know the exact issue they are referencing, but if I had to guess... these sorts of multiplayer games typically have respawning enemies that are shared with everyone in the world. If you respawn them too slowly, then you will have tons of people standing around waiting for an enemy to respawn. A quest might require you to kill 10 of those enemies. You can see how this might be a problem. Smart games do this dynamically based on current populations.
drdebug 4y ago
While I've always understood overtime for startups, or to solve an unexpected problem, I simply do not understand why people put up with systemic overtime for large companies making large amount of money. They are simply abusing your time, you should refuse. They are saving money by not hiring enough people. It's management saving money, or being incompetent, but then it's management's problem, not yours. Of course, during difficult times one may have no other choice, but I'd just run asap.
ben7799 4y ago
The games industry seems to be massively overrated. People who think non-game software is devoid of interesting problems to solve have blinders on. We hear so many more problems about bad working conditions at game companies than any other type of software. All this BS about siloing QA off is ridiculous. The celebrity worship of project managers/game designers/executives at game companies is way out of context. The whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game and then selling each copy for $50-60 and having to rely on millions of fickle gamers to buy it is hugely problematic and inferior to other types of businesses. The whole adjacency to the entertainment industry is problematic. The vast # of creatives/artists & non-technical employees doing "toil" is problematic. I have been working 22 years.. if you asked me when I was 13 or 18 I would have said I wanted to build games. By the time I was 21 I already knew it was a bad industry. All my friends who did go into the games industry left within a few years. Everyone is vastly more happy now that they went to work on commercial/enterprise stuff.
- my80thaccount 4y ago
joshstrange 4y ago
Are there any good examples of single player -> MMO that were successful? I loved Fallout and Elder Scrolls but absolutely hated ES:O and FO:76. I loved those games for having my own little world that was my own. Lack of multiplayer was a feature itself, not something I wanted to be implemented. As with most MMO's I feel like I wanted to play an MMO I'd just mainline WoW, not some crappy imitation reusing IP.
- feoren 4y ago
  Ultima Online. (Assuming you don't count WoW itself as an example, since the gameplay of Warcraft 1-3 was completely different.)
vkazanov 4y ago
Ah, Gaming companies... I remember moving from Eastern Europe to UK, and getting an offer lower than back home. In London! An the job isn't that good even. Can somebody explain all the kids that scripting an off the shelf 3d engine is not really fun?
ChoGGi 4y ago

119 points by danso 4y ago

It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. Hidetaka Miyazaki was the mind behind Souls / Elden Ring. Shigeru Miyamoto was the mind behind Mario. And it's because these people really care about the product they are making. They have PASSION. When it comes to a game like 76, which was clearly mandated by some greedy executives who don't play games, the lack of passion permeates the whole game. From what the article describes it seems like nobody wanted to work on this thing - not the QA, not the devs, not the managers. The end result is no surprise. Nobody cared. If I was a games exec, I would do everything to empower the great minds that produce great games to pursue the projects they are passionate about. Unfortunately there are a lot of very successful companies out there that do the exact opposite of that, but the tide seems to be turning. EDIT: I want to clarify that part and parcel with being a talented passionate game director is the ability to build a great team and keep the team motivated. Obviously passion isn't the only ingredient to make a great game. As with any other massive undertaking, teams of humans are what get the job done. I simply observe that these singular figures have the two-part gift of understanding what makes a great game, and also being able to attract others who can help execute that vision.

meheleventyone 4y ago
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever. Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I agree. Producers and designers that frontline a successful project get the visibility but they have to be backed by highly effective teams of equally gifted folks that collaborate effectively. I don’t think this is different for any complex human endeavor. Often times the front liner isn’t the one who built the team - there’s often an anchor person more in the middle of the project that attracts talent and creates the atmosphere of collegial collaboration. Smart front liners bring those folks along to the next projects. From the article it sounds like that was Starfield, not 76, which is probably why it was so miserable.
  - swivelmaster 4y ago
    As soon as a project is known internally as the one the B team was assigned to because all the “favorite” people went to the “better” project, it’s basically doomed. This has happened so many times, the game industry has enough people who should know better, and yet…
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  That's a totally fair point, and I completely agree. I should have clarified this in my original post. If you're passionate about games, but nobody wants to work with you, then that passion won't permeate throughout the development team. All these gaming visionaries tend to have the gift of extreme charisma and strong passion for games - you need both IMO to make a great result. You may have a great idea, but you need to get people fired up about it too and articulate it in a way that can be understood.
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    Even still this isn’t correct, even building a great team isn’t the work of one person and plenty of great games are built by teams lead by people who don’t get press as visionaries. You’re falling for marketing, both personal (where extreme charisma does help) and company lead where wheeling out a famous name sells units. Which isn’t to say famous people are all rubbish but that the hype and the reality are very different to one another.
- OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
  This sounds just like the great man theory in history [1]. I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
antisthenes 4y ago
> Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument. It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments. I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean. Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Haha, that's fair. I certainly didn't like it the first time I played it. However, I recently tried again on survival mode after a friend's recommendation, and it feels totally different. No fast travel and saving only at beds changes the game completely. Suddenly vertibirds are useful, settlements are mandatory, and the world feels absolutely gigantic rather than a sandbox separated by loading screens. Highly recommend checking it out (although it still won't scratch your RPG itch).
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  I loved Fallout 4, I'm sorry. Every second. I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG. I played NV after 4 and NV was good too. Fallout 3 I keep giving up on and I'm not a quitter. It just doesn't draw me in like the other ones. It seems crude and simple comparatively, due to its age I guess.
  - kaibee 4y ago
    Try Fallout 2.
  - ericd 4y ago
    It's not just nostalgia, go play Fallout 2, GoG has a copy that should work. It holds up extremely well, because it's just a much better game than the Bethesda versions. The writing, the humor, the world building, it feels a lot more alive and real than the much more technically advanced iterations. Fallout 1 is less polished, but also great. Fallout 3+ always felt like a reskinned Elder Scrolls to me.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Hero worship is bad in games development because it can lead to just as tortuous experiences for those working under a supposed visionary who takes the praise and becomes a megalomaniac.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4 There are also many great results that are a team effort. And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example: "[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Yeah, its my bad for not articulating this in the post. Obviously, any giant product like a modern movie or game is made by teams. I think one hallmark of a great director is the ability to build a great team around you, which is just as important as being passionate and understanding the medium.
  - synu 4y ago
    I’ve never once experienced the “face” of a game doing all the hiring, or even being involved in too many interviews (except for marketing purposes, of course, but I mean hiring interviews). It’s quite a full time and important job to do the PR.
- bradhe 4y ago
  Having a vision is "part of the problem?"
  - kristofferR 4y ago
    If the vision is bad then obviously.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Lots of visions are mediocre, incoherent, or superficial.
  - 4y ago
synu 4y ago
I worked in the video game industry for a long time. This is a story you’re being sold - it’s the teams who build great games, not some singular great passionate mind. It’s a way for marketing teams to build a brand, not much more than that.
izzydata 4y ago
I don't think it comes down to a singular person, but I'm pretty sure it is about passion. Modern large game studios have removed all the passion and turned game development into an assembly line of 100s or more people working on it. Creating a very large game and also having it be good seems more like an exception at this point. Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.
- urthor 4y ago
  I find the presence of the "auteur" is valuable because it's a signal to people. When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work. Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions. But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."
  - synu 4y ago
    That’s why marketing teams work hard to create that perception in the audience.
    - urthor 4y ago
      The difference is that, having worked in the industry, I can say that film directors are given exactly the power they are advertised as having. The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way. Software hasn't.
      - synu 4y ago
        So less that in the video games industry great results are driven by singular, great people today, but games would be better if they were?
        urthor 4y ago
pacetherace 4y ago
What you mean to say is that there are guys who get much more credit than they deserve when a game or for that matter any product becomes a success. Fallout 76 seems to be a classic case of unrealistic development and testing deadlines.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  Fallout 76 was deeply flawed as a concept. The concept of "remove the characters and story from the game and let them collect it with junk to basebuild" made the whole game deeply unenjoyable compared to a regular fallout game. Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game. The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.
127 4y ago
Only proof I've seen Todd being good at is marketing. That's it.
na85 4y ago
>It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4. Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.
seanhunter 4y ago
Firstly as other people have pointed out, teams build great products, not some individual with a messianic vision. That's just marketing. Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary. Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".
robonerd 4y ago
> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap. Hideo Kojima, I'm looking at you.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
>Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4 He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.

danso 4y ago

I had some hope that Microsoft's purchase would somehow change things (not that Microsoft is necessarily more benevolent, but maybe could realign the team's priorities and politics), but the (pure) speculation suggests "no": > Bethesda officially became a part of Xbox Game Studios on March 9, 2021, which placed Fallout 76 under Microsoft’s stewardship. When asked whether or not the acquisition had improved the internal work culture within Bethesda, several sources offered lukewarm responses. > One source suggested that Microsoft’s emphasis on a “hands-off” culture toward its studios meant that the new owners trusted Bethesda to take care of its own problems. Sources at Undead Labs also mentioned that Microsoft had a “hands-off” policy, which they claimed had “allowed dysfunction to fester” at their studio. No quality of game could justify the senseless anti-human mentality and processes described. But the fact that Fallout 76 was just such an abysmal and hated release just increases my contempt for Bethesda. Not seeing the moral value in treating their employees ethically is bad enough; not even having the cold business sense to see how it obviously affects their bottom line is just pathetic: > Some sources noted that the project drove an exodus of senior developers who had worked on some of Bethesda’s most prolific titles. Many developers developed physical health issues, such as tinnitus and back pain. One source said it “wasn’t uncommon” for artists to have wrist braces. Senior staff who’d remained loyal to the company for 20 years finally found their reason to quit. Some had been around since Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 76 was their final breaking point.

sourthyme 4y ago
This is sick. What does anyone learn doing by working like this? Is anyone gaining experience from this? It just feels like people are ground down so they can't physically work anymore.
- fnimick 4y ago
  The people running the show see no benefit from their team members "learning" or "gaining experience". If they ship the game and are so ground down they're burned out and ineffective, that's a problem for the next guy; the manager who got the game shipped by burning out the team got a huge bonus and has leveraged it into a shiny position somewhere else by the time any of the consequences rear their heads. IME this type of short-term thinking inevitably infects most companies, unless there is a very strong culture to combat it.

ansible 4y ago

Why are things so bad in the games industry? As compared to other IT / programming fields?

tmp_anon_22 4y ago
* very strict deadlines decided by publishers years in advance * incredible passion making the workforce exploitable and more tolerant of abuse * explosive revenue growth bringing in scammers, hucksters, and MBAs * incredible passion from consumers who will buy the same game over and over * the advent of gambling in the form of microtransactions * the consolidation of the industry to a handful of big publishers * incredible technical complexity * exclusive rights on media like star wars or sports like basketball giving some publishers a complete monopoly in some cases
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Many of the problems and potential of abuse as present in the entertainment industry, with none of the organizing to protect workers.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    isn't this literally supposed to be why screenwriters, actors and others are unionized in the hollywood system? and all the behind the camera IATSE members.
    - mort96 4y ago
      Yeah, and the exact same reason why the lack of unionization in VFX is such a large problem. Unions work.
- extrememacaroni 4y ago
  +1 for "incredible passion from consumers". I've never seen a mass of customers so easy to fool as gamers are. Imagine a washing machine company releasing broken products, and the average joe going "yup, I really want another washing machine from this company after seeing this ad which showed something I like, even though the last time I bought some they were barely working and only half washed my clothes, please take my money". If bethesda/microsoft announced Fallout New Vegas 2, everyone would lose their shit and preorder instantly. Also it disgusts me how happy everyone seems when a company announces that they won't do microtransactions. If the company has a history of keeping promises and releasing games without mtx, sure, it's warranted. But otherwise? Are you an idiot? They'll update the game half a year after you and the other fools bought the game and introduce microtransactions then. I wish there were laws that clearly defined what monetization in a game means and forbade developers from changing monetization schemes during the lifetime of a game, I just can't trust cloud-enabled games nowadays that promise a non-mtx non-p2w experience. It's worthless promises if you can change your mind down the line after I invested time and maybe money in your game. First get the money from the gamers who think they're really smart for "supporting games with fair monetization schemes", then when they're exhausted introduce mtx and go after the whales for the big bucks. Fuck this industry, you don't even know what kind of product you're buying anymore. People waiting for "a full review of Diablo Immor(t)al to figure out how much money you need to spend to get a good build" - what's the point? By the time the review is out blizzard probably already changed the sliders and everything's different. Although from what I hear about the game, the only way they could change them at this point would make the game better, so there's that. $100k (that's one.hundred.thousand.dollars.) to get a fully equipped build. Jesus christ. Go back in time to when Diablo 2 is released and tell the gamers that soon they'll have to pay one hundred. thousand. dollars. to get a fully equipped build in the latest Diablo. They'll just cry and jump out the window. An even sadder thing is if you told them the latest Diablo will be a mobile game, they'd think "what? you can play Diablo anywhere like with a Gameboy? That's freaking amazing dude!" ugh. But you need to tell them this before telling them about having to choose between a nice house and a cool armor for their barbarian, burst that bubble properly. I hate this. My comment here is the incredible passion from consumers, you can see it live now, you're welcome. The incredible passion from developers is also me still being interested and working on gamedev crap even though I wish I could just turn back time instead.

Animats 4y ago

Union, yes! I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland. Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.

danuker 4y ago
> how this "metaverse" thing works out Not looking too good. Especially since the interest rate hike (the free money faucet was tightened), but the timing might be coincidence. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2021-01&end=2022-05&pages=Metaverse https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
Hamuko 4y ago
What is my incentive as a game developer to make a "big, high-quality shared virtual world"?
- Animats 4y ago
  Second Life is "a cash machine", according to its owners. Turns out that no advertising, rent land, sell memberships works.
  - kaibee 4y ago
    This is good motivation to make a metaverse. It is not a good motivation to enter one as a developer.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Presumably, the stuff you develop in metaverse would allow you to monetarily benefit from it as well, and that should be good enough of a motivation for a lot of devs to enter the space. For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.

siskiyou 4y ago

If anyone looking for a career in the tech industry says they love games and game development, please tell them not to work for a gaming company. I suppose they're not all horrible, but the percentage of horrible companies in the gaming industry is too damn high.

ModernMech 4y ago
Tell them to work in robotics instead. A lot of the technical challenges you find in games can be found in the computer vision and robot simulation spaces.
- Asooka 4y ago
  Embedded usually pays worse than equivalent jobs writing "big iron" software. Is robotics any different? What would you recommend as an entry point to the field?
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Robotics is great, you can make bank and it’s not a saturated job market. I would say get started at one of the driverless car startups, they are at the forefront of the robotics industry now as it would relate to gaming. Things like industrial robotics and control heavy systems (think Boston Dynamics) might not appeal to game devs.
TylerE 4y ago
This is true of pretty much of any job people want to do (performer, commercial pilot…) Jobs are generally; Demanding, Requiring Skill, Well Compensated… pick 2
- siskiyou 4y ago
  I had great experiences in the tech industry for over 25 years with very little overwork, great pay, and though I have some skills, really nothing special. My way to win was getting along in teams, and being vigilant on behalf of customers/company. I have a high school diploma. This was easy money for me.

aftergibson 4y ago

I went to several Universities to interview undergraduates for a paid summer internship for our small SAAS startup (I was barely out of college myself). A huge percentage of technical students were hoping for internships at video game companies, many hoping to start with testing. So no wonder video games companies feel grinding through QA engineers it’s a viable strategy. All we can really do is warn the younger generation to steer clear of the video games industry even if video games are a passion. You’d think with such a terrible reputation they’d be struggling for hires, but there’s always fresh blood to grind into the ground.

RicoElectrico 4y ago
If we assume that indeed games are art, it really checks out: artists being paid on the free market is an anomaly of the recent times, the norm before was patronages and commissions paid in advance.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks. I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.

lukewrites 4y ago
> You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home. And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Or even gamedev!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lethologica 4y ago
  Unless the coding of boring business logic crushes your soul so much that you burn out and end up losing interest in being creative altogether.
  - justinhj 4y ago
    I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner
  - Asooka 4y ago
    What is quest design if not heaps of business logic with a different name.

mhh__ 4y ago

Bethesda need just let obsidian make the fallout games from now on. They don't understand the franchise's message or the lore, they can't write very well, and they also really struggle with technology apparently.

ssully 4y ago
I won't say it will never happen, but Obsidian has basically already made their own property in the style of Fallout with The Outerworlds.

tmp_anon_22 4y ago

I think a lot about the emotional abuse the Overwatch team has faced over the years. They created a once in a generation experience which outperformed every reasonable expectation (OWL was not a reasonable expectation unless you are on shrooms).

wly_cdgr 4y ago

It's really a testament to how soul crushingly boring working in non-games tech is that people keep eagerly volunteering to be abused exploited and disrespected like this (at not even one of the very best game companies, just a mid-high tier one!) rather than work a Series C startup making 2-3x with good WLB

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I guess this relates to another current thread [1]. The games industry is it's own weird universe of madness at quite another level. I once had business with a large AAA house in Cambridge England, in a big glass corporate headquarters. When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. A senior person turned up and there was a really weird dynamic. She was obviously not supposed to have met me. The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. This was at least 5 or 10 years before the gamergate and metoo stuff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31664203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31664203

908B64B197 4y ago
> When I visited I was greeted by an attractive, kind of gothy/emo young lady who had visible self-harm marks. > The guy gave her a look, and her reaction was something that stank of domestic violence situations. There was something abusive and creepy going on that really threw me off balance. That's probably someone who based her whole self-worth around impressing people making the games she loved.

bradhe 4y ago

I'm all for the unionization of labor in this industry. But this article absolutely has a spin on the whole thing. They're painting QA in a light where by they're underappreciated despite their deep talent comparable to engineering and art. Am I wrong in thinking that, indeed, while their skills are important, they're easily replaceable as compared to developers or artists?

Avshalom 4y ago
what makes you think devs and artists are difficult to replace at Bethesda's scale. or indeed at any scale in the video game industry. more expensive maybe, but that's not the same as difficult.
- friedman23 4y ago
  Devs are absolutely hard to replace in any industry right now given that I have to give 2 interviews a week in my current job.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    so at minimum two people apply and get past HR's filters per a week. hard to replace is when there are no interviews a week.
    - friedman23 4y ago
      Everyone in my company is interviewing and we hire very few of the applicants because few are qualified. Having to spend 2 hours of every single employee's time a week and each employee is being paid close to 1/3rd of a million dollars or more is difficulty in hiring. Oh, and when you do find someone qualified they have 5 other offers.
thedz 4y ago
I don't know that replaceability (true or not) should have that much of an outsized impact on the expectations of humane treatment I realize capitalism rewards scarcity here, but imo this is a piece explicitly about the tolls that tends to bring

mysterydip 4y ago

"Press Reset" by Jason Schreier has many examples of this cycle: crunch, layoff, repeat at next company (or go indie, or exit the industry). In many cases, the people responsible for the decisions are insulated from the fallout (no pun intended).

xen2xen1 4y ago

Sad. 76 is one of my favorite things. I didn't bother to play it until they added NPC's though. Fallout with no NPC's is like a Hershey's bar with no chocolate.

panzagl 4y ago
I thought the game was much better without NPCs- it was creepy and sad with unexpected outbreaks of violence. I still love it, though- I play maybe once a week with my brother and we just wander the map looking at messed up stuff, collecting junk and hunting for cryptids. I think we were exactly the audience the game was intended for- but unfortunately that is not the audience the gamer press caters to. Those people are still on /r/fo76 simultaneously bragging about grinding out 50 levels over a weekend and complaining that there's not enough end game content.

friedman23 4y ago

Video game QA (really any qa) seems like an absolutely terrible job. If you are young and reading this, don't choose professions that require 0 qualifications and have a massive line out the door of willing applicants.

snickerer 4y ago

Listen, kids, if someone tells you to do overtime: run! You-must-do-overtime is a management fail and a strong indicator for bad leading.

cudgy 4y ago

Many state that game devs and qa make less money. How much less? The article rambles on about working extra hours at a deadline (for which almost all companies require at times) and receiving overtime pay (which few tech companies pay), but I read no actual numbers.

j_schmuck 4y ago

Why are megaprojects so reliably running into these protracted fucked launches? What are the actual managerial processes like? How are basic failures of planning and scope and quality so constant for the biggest players in the industry? What actual ingredients are missing?

scotty79 4y ago
Acceptance of mismatch between reality and pre-agreed plans?
glitchc 4y ago
Megaprojects are difficult to execute without a clear vision and a core group of individuals (less than 5) driving that vision to fruition. Every other style of management results in failure to deliver a product, either through feature creep, death by a thousand cuts, or misaligned incentives.

Justsignedup 4y ago

This is a Kotaku article, and given the quality of the reporting there, for all I know every developer save 1 on Fallout 76 loved working on it, and it was the project that drew engineers to Bethesda! I don't trust this source. It sounds like something close to accurate based on previous game industry insights, but again, I don't trust Kotaku for telling me if it is currently raining while we're standing outside.

mardifoufs 4y ago

>Effective multiplayer design requires precise mathematical knowledge of how long it will take for players to clear encounters This sounds interesting, but I don’t really understand what it means. Why would they time encounters in a multi-player game? Wouldn't those have to be run in a separate instance if they are timing sensitive, especially if you don't want other players to interrupt the event? But I have 0 knowledge in game design and I'm pretty sure they are probably talking about something completely different! :')

stagger87 4y ago
I don't know the exact issue they are referencing, but if I had to guess... these sorts of multiplayer games typically have respawning enemies that are shared with everyone in the world. If you respawn them too slowly, then you will have tons of people standing around waiting for an enemy to respawn. A quest might require you to kill 10 of those enemies. You can see how this might be a problem. Smart games do this dynamically based on current populations.

drdebug 4y ago

While I've always understood overtime for startups, or to solve an unexpected problem, I simply do not understand why people put up with systemic overtime for large companies making large amount of money. They are simply abusing your time, you should refuse. They are saving money by not hiring enough people. It's management saving money, or being incompetent, but then it's management's problem, not yours. Of course, during difficult times one may have no other choice, but I'd just run asap.

ben7799 4y ago

The games industry seems to be massively overrated. People who think non-game software is devoid of interesting problems to solve have blinders on. We hear so many more problems about bad working conditions at game companies than any other type of software. All this BS about siloing QA off is ridiculous. The celebrity worship of project managers/game designers/executives at game companies is way out of context. The whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game and then selling each copy for $50-60 and having to rely on millions of fickle gamers to buy it is hugely problematic and inferior to other types of businesses. The whole adjacency to the entertainment industry is problematic. The vast # of creatives/artists & non-technical employees doing "toil" is problematic. I have been working 22 years.. if you asked me when I was 13 or 18 I would have said I wanted to build games. By the time I was 21 I already knew it was a bad industry. All my friends who did go into the games industry left within a few years. Everyone is vastly more happy now that they went to work on commercial/enterprise stuff.

my80thaccount 4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago

Are there any good examples of single player -> MMO that were successful? I loved Fallout and Elder Scrolls but absolutely hated ES:O and FO:76. I loved those games for having my own little world that was my own. Lack of multiplayer was a feature itself, not something I wanted to be implemented. As with most MMO's I feel like I wanted to play an MMO I'd just mainline WoW, not some crappy imitation reusing IP.

feoren 4y ago
Ultima Online. (Assuming you don't count WoW itself as an example, since the gameplay of Warcraft 1-3 was completely different.)

vkazanov 4y ago

Ah, Gaming companies... I remember moving from Eastern Europe to UK, and getting an offer lower than back home. In London! An the job isn't that good even. Can somebody explain all the kids that scripting an off the shelf 3d engine is not really fun?

ChoGGi 4y ago