Uncharted director criticizes triple-a development, says it can 'destroy people'

[potato_hamster]

SvennoJ said:

potato_hamster said:

Honestly, probably a game developer's union of some sort. The film industry would be just as bad if it wasn't for unions protecting their workers from profit driven corportations. Otherwise, there's nothing you can do. There's hundreds of people who have never made a game in their life, who haven't gone through the grind of making a video game from start to finish that are willing to do your job, with the same hours, and same pay. It's hard to have a bargaining chip when employers know that.

... but if developers pulling the shit they do led to strikes, or walkouts, or triggered automatic financial compensations to those who are forced into the meat grinder, it would change.

I'd love to see gamer's reactions to a developer strike. PD get criticised all the time for being slow to deliver. I have no idea how the crunch situation is there, yet dare to take more than 2 years to make another release and gamers already start complaining.

But true, the film industry has learned to time manage projects, why can't game development studios learn. I've been there too, and with a group of passionate people it's always, let's try to get this in too, let's do this a bit different, etc, until it's too late and the list of issues that still need to be fixed has grown out of hand. Someone needs to step in and say cut, stick to the original script, don't promiss anything else, good enough.

Well unlike the film industry, not every problem is solvable with time and money. Sometimes a game feature is too ambititious and too innovative, and there's just no way to make it work within the hardware constraints if they can make it work at all. Sometimes a gameplay mechanic that the game was based around is plain isn't fun no matter how much is tweaked. There are unsolvable problems where the only real solution is to not do them, and to fundamentally replace them with something else that may or may not solve the problem as well. Sometimes it's a very cuttable feature like an extra game mode or an optional setting, or weapon. Sometimes its super critical and then you're fucked, and your whole project is fucked, and there is no saving it.

The only time the film industry really faces such similar problems like that is when actors die, and even then they can get around it most of the time, especially with CGI - even terrible CGI is a solution no matter how bad it is.. There's no "CGI bandaid" that can fix, say, a climbing pathfinding mechanic that doesn't actually bring the player where they intend on going 80% of the time because of a fundamental flaw in its design. You can't "good enough" that without your game still looking like a buggy, unpolished piece of shit.

There's only so much planning you can do before a project quite literally