6 ms·

I had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.

by jweir 4y ago

ethbr0 4y ago
This is why I'm amazed really bad games get made! "Playing games and recognizing if you're having fun" isn't some rare skill set that only certain people have. It's universal. We may have different tastes, but I can't see how some games went through development, QA, management, etc. and no one said "This isn't much fun to play." Or even recognized that people weren't excited and smiling at the game! How screwed up of an organization does one have to have for there to be that little feedback shared and listened to?
- syntheweave 4y ago
  The majority of the work in games is making assets and delivering code. Neither of these have fun as a KPI. Further, defining fun as a KPI presents challenges of sociology, psychology, and philosophy: People are happy to exclaim "this is fun!" And then quit playing within a few minutes. Absent a very, very careful understanding of the belief structures that drive the combination of purchase and interest that makes someone a "fan", the metric degrades to raw "engagement", which leads to meetings where it is determined that the engagement metric should be boosted through the introduction of gambling-style addictive loops. In other words: lots of people like playing good games. Almost nobody knows precisely why they like a game, and therefore they do not know how to make a game equivalent to what they like. What the industry does instead is to clone whatever worked last time and try to give it a twist or add a little more scope. Whatever formula worked for another game, everyone is going to try adding to theirs, whether or not it's sensible. Specific game teams manage to see farther and make exceptional work by dint of being able to frame the discussion appropriately, so that it brings in everyone's perspective. Without that, every meeting is just a discussion of deliverables. But in many, many cases, the team has to make the game twice to be able to sink their teeth into the problem. Hence the common thing of game sequels being much better than the first entry.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  I've worked on games, huge productions, which ended up receiving really low ( and well-deserved) review scores. Everyone knew it was about to happen, but this was a multi-year product where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough but management simply wouldn't hear it. Concerns about unrealistic scope, poor design, etc. were met with demands that we believe in the game and put our backs into it. Even then, I did find myself enjoying the game and every now and then lost track of what I was supposed to be testing (as a software engineer testing my changes, not QA) and simply lose track of time playing the game.
  - dagw 4y ago
    where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough The other variation I've experience is everything starts out great with a clear design and reasonable time line. Then a couple of years later, when you are almost done, some people start worrying that what you're making might be a bit too 'niche' and start adding some 'minor' changes to make the it appeal to a larger demographic.
    - Agentlien 4y ago
      I originally wrote but removed another paragraph (because I didn't want to make the comment too long) about another wrinkle... The worst production I was part of, which lead to a full year of crunch for my team, started with everyone saying we were way over scoped and then the studio leadership decided, halfway through production, to change the entire campaign to be built around five huge set pieces each of which required months of work to develop bespoke stuff only used in one mission.
  - aliswe 4y ago
    What baffles me is that the data-driven mindset is supposed to counter this, but the people in charge in these cases were probably already thinking they are daa driven by essentially following assumptions.
    - Agentlien 4y ago
- pragmatick 4y ago
  Knowing that a game isn't fun (or good) does not mean that you know how to fix it. Or that you have the budget left to fix it. You can tell a book isn't fun but you may not know how to make it better. Or the game may just go in a different direction that you originally planned. I've read about authors complaining that their characters didn't develop how they initially wanted and you may think "How is that possible?" but the same can happen with games (or software or any product you design).
  - antifa 4y ago
    IMO 99% of bad games these days fall into 2 categories: - Indie devs who need to skill up/budget up/work on it more - big corp sweatshops that don't care because they're doing the micro-transaction whale hunting/gambling addiction angle.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  The book, and later CBC tv show, jPod, gives a fictionalized account of how bad games get created. Douglas Coupland loves to exaggerate reality a bit but he generally does good research on the core of whatever cultural segment he is writing about.
- dagw 4y ago
  Once you have a game that is playable enough for you to really realise that "This isn't much fun to play" you're often too far along to start making major changes. Same with 'bad' movies. The people releasing the bad movies aren't oblivious to the fact that the movies turned out bad and not what they hoped it would be, but they're out of time, out of money and contractually obligated to get the thing out the door.
- ido 4y ago
  It's harder than you realize to make good games! And a lot of good games suck until very close to the end where suddenly everything clicks and they become amazing. It's not really a very predictable process & at the end of the day you have to spend a lot of resources (time & money, some of it you're on the line for to publishers or investors) before you find out. It can very easily be better financially (or at least less bad) for a studio to finish up a game they realized (possibly too late) isn't as good as they hoped than to just abandon it - you have contractual obligations, you get paid on milestones, and everyone still has to get a salary even if you decide to abandon the game.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I'd be super curious to get a representative sample on this from inside the industry. Do studios not prototype games? Maybe it's rose tinted glasses from a simpler time, with shorter development cycles, but almost all these famous game retrospectives seem to begin with "once we had the initial systems in playable form, before assets or polishing, it turned out the game was a lot of fun."
    - ido 4y ago
      You prototype a lot but a promising prototype doesn't always turn to a good (and original) game. Not every game is fun in prototype form (think for example of SimCity or Civilization - you have to have a certain level of complexity before it's interesting) and other times something that seems fun for a few minutes in a prototype doesn't necessarily translate to a fun X hours game. Or you can find a fun core (matching gems in a match 3 game and causing a lot of cascades is fun!) but is not something that will on its own make a game commercially viable in 2022. And sometimes you run out of time before finding a very promising prototype and have to get started anyway or you'll have people idlying (while getting paid & costing you money you may not have before you sign a publishing deal) so you just take a leap of faith on whatever seemed best among what you did find... The cases in your quote are really the rare exceptions where everything went great but it doesn't go that way every single time.
      - 4y ago
- kryptiskt 4y ago
  The problem is that games as they are usually developed require a lot of investment before the systems in them are supposed to gel together and become a playable product. If it becomes clear that it's kind of crappy at that point, there's a huge incentive to just finish it up as best as they can and throw it out on the market to recoup a bit of the costs.
MrVandemar 4y ago
One of the bugs was great: the walking pavement bug was so much fun.
oakmad 4y ago
Thanks! I remember getting a copy in first year uni just before traveling home for break. Upon getting home I stayed up most of that first night playing just enthralled - something I’ve not done since. I don’t remember any bugs.

I had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.

by jweir 4y ago

I had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.

ethbr0 4y ago

This is why I'm amazed really bad games get made! "Playing games and recognizing if you're having fun" isn't some rare skill set that only certain people have. It's universal. We may have different tastes, but I can't see how some games went through development, QA, management, etc. and no one said "This isn't much fun to play." Or even recognized that people weren't excited and smiling at the game! How screwed up of an organization does one have to have for there to be that little feedback shared and listened to?

syntheweave 4y ago
The majority of the work in games is making assets and delivering code. Neither of these have fun as a KPI. Further, defining fun as a KPI presents challenges of sociology, psychology, and philosophy: People are happy to exclaim "this is fun!" And then quit playing within a few minutes. Absent a very, very careful understanding of the belief structures that drive the combination of purchase and interest that makes someone a "fan", the metric degrades to raw "engagement", which leads to meetings where it is determined that the engagement metric should be boosted through the introduction of gambling-style addictive loops. In other words: lots of people like playing good games. Almost nobody knows precisely why they like a game, and therefore they do not know how to make a game equivalent to what they like. What the industry does instead is to clone whatever worked last time and try to give it a twist or add a little more scope. Whatever formula worked for another game, everyone is going to try adding to theirs, whether or not it's sensible. Specific game teams manage to see farther and make exceptional work by dint of being able to frame the discussion appropriately, so that it brings in everyone's perspective. Without that, every meeting is just a discussion of deliverables. But in many, many cases, the team has to make the game twice to be able to sink their teeth into the problem. Hence the common thing of game sequels being much better than the first entry.
Agentlien 4y ago
I've worked on games, huge productions, which ended up receiving really low ( and well-deserved) review scores. Everyone knew it was about to happen, but this was a multi-year product where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough but management simply wouldn't hear it. Concerns about unrealistic scope, poor design, etc. were met with demands that we believe in the game and put our backs into it. Even then, I did find myself enjoying the game and every now and then lost track of what I was supposed to be testing (as a software engineer testing my changes, not QA) and simply lose track of time playing the game.
- dagw 4y ago
  where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough The other variation I've experience is everything starts out great with a clear design and reasonable time line. Then a couple of years later, when you are almost done, some people start worrying that what you're making might be a bit too 'niche' and start adding some 'minor' changes to make the it appeal to a larger demographic.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    I originally wrote but removed another paragraph (because I didn't want to make the comment too long) about another wrinkle... The worst production I was part of, which lead to a full year of crunch for my team, started with everyone saying we were way over scoped and then the studio leadership decided, halfway through production, to change the entire campaign to be built around five huge set pieces each of which required months of work to develop bespoke stuff only used in one mission.
- aliswe 4y ago
  What baffles me is that the data-driven mindset is supposed to counter this, but the people in charge in these cases were probably already thinking they are daa driven by essentially following assumptions.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
pragmatick 4y ago
Knowing that a game isn't fun (or good) does not mean that you know how to fix it. Or that you have the budget left to fix it. You can tell a book isn't fun but you may not know how to make it better. Or the game may just go in a different direction that you originally planned. I've read about authors complaining that their characters didn't develop how they initially wanted and you may think "How is that possible?" but the same can happen with games (or software or any product you design).
- antifa 4y ago
  IMO 99% of bad games these days fall into 2 categories: - Indie devs who need to skill up/budget up/work on it more - big corp sweatshops that don't care because they're doing the micro-transaction whale hunting/gambling addiction angle.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
The book, and later CBC tv show, jPod, gives a fictionalized account of how bad games get created. Douglas Coupland loves to exaggerate reality a bit but he generally does good research on the core of whatever cultural segment he is writing about.
dagw 4y ago
Once you have a game that is playable enough for you to really realise that "This isn't much fun to play" you're often too far along to start making major changes. Same with 'bad' movies. The people releasing the bad movies aren't oblivious to the fact that the movies turned out bad and not what they hoped it would be, but they're out of time, out of money and contractually obligated to get the thing out the door.
ido 4y ago
It's harder than you realize to make good games! And a lot of good games suck until very close to the end where suddenly everything clicks and they become amazing. It's not really a very predictable process & at the end of the day you have to spend a lot of resources (time & money, some of it you're on the line for to publishers or investors) before you find out. It can very easily be better financially (or at least less bad) for a studio to finish up a game they realized (possibly too late) isn't as good as they hoped than to just abandon it - you have contractual obligations, you get paid on milestones, and everyone still has to get a salary even if you decide to abandon the game.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I'd be super curious to get a representative sample on this from inside the industry. Do studios not prototype games? Maybe it's rose tinted glasses from a simpler time, with shorter development cycles, but almost all these famous game retrospectives seem to begin with "once we had the initial systems in playable form, before assets or polishing, it turned out the game was a lot of fun."
  - ido 4y ago
    You prototype a lot but a promising prototype doesn't always turn to a good (and original) game. Not every game is fun in prototype form (think for example of SimCity or Civilization - you have to have a certain level of complexity before it's interesting) and other times something that seems fun for a few minutes in a prototype doesn't necessarily translate to a fun X hours game. Or you can find a fun core (matching gems in a match 3 game and causing a lot of cascades is fun!) but is not something that will on its own make a game commercially viable in 2022. And sometimes you run out of time before finding a very promising prototype and have to get started anyway or you'll have people idlying (while getting paid & costing you money you may not have before you sign a publishing deal) so you just take a leap of faith on whatever seemed best among what you did find... The cases in your quote are really the rare exceptions where everything went great but it doesn't go that way every single time.
    - 4y ago
kryptiskt 4y ago
The problem is that games as they are usually developed require a lot of investment before the systems in them are supposed to gel together and become a playable product. If it becomes clear that it's kind of crappy at that point, there's a huge incentive to just finish it up as best as they can and throw it out on the market to recoup a bit of the costs.

MrVandemar 4y ago

One of the bugs was great: the walking pavement bug was so much fun.

oakmad 4y ago

Thanks! I remember getting a copy in first year uni just before traveling home for break. Upon getting home I stayed up most of that first night playing just enthralled - something I’ve not done since. I don’t remember any bugs.