Publishers = bad RPGs?

[Emotional Vampire]

It sold to utter fucking morons who paid for tower defense game.

And it was indie. Try to sell it for $50 and get back to us on how well that goes.

 

[JarlFrank]

Blizzard's games usually have "older" graphics, technologically speaking, and their games sell really well because they put more effort into art design and gameplay and the games also run on older PCs because they require less uberleet hardware.

 

[Longshanks]

"Though wasn't that the case where Feargus was insanely ambitious and promised Lucasarts that they would get it done by X-mas to start with?"

Yup. Release date was Christmas to start THEN it got opushed back a couple of months then it got pushed up again to Christmas. This isn't a case where they were told x date and it got changed to y randomly.

Quite possibly true. But which games have not gone over time? Virtually none of any ambition. It's actually very difficult to predict precisely how long a major software project will take. Where smaller companies get screwed over is in not having the clout to continually delay their games. This often means bugs or cut content.

Maybe these smaller companies should scale back their efforts, conceding the AAA field to their bigger counterparts. Maybe. But we'd be missing a number of quality titles if that were the case.

 

[Red Russian]

Every developer dreams of outdoing Fallout. I mean, *every single one*. And then they come to a publisher asking for 10 millions the project demands, and a publisher sayeth, "no, I will not give 10 millions to fund this project. But I might consider giving 200k". And so the developer sits down and cuts out everything that would overtax the 200k budget, and the world ends up with another piece of shit, which, naturally, achieves 200k of returns at best. The question is, whether a 10m project in its original vision would achieve any more returns. You can't blame people for being unwilling to dump 9m 800k of their cash, can you?

Fair enough. But not all games get done in by a publisher giving them smaller budgets. You think most games being presented to publishers get shoestring budgets? It is a risk to the publisher, true. But I'm sure you've heard the saying of "risk vs reward". Surely publishers can say: "Hey, this might be cool. Let's give it a wirl. Sure it might fail, but the idea is there." Didn't Ubisoft or Activation or some other major publisher turn down the idea of The Sims? You'd think EA would say "Jeez, this looks crap boring! All you do is sleep, work, eat, fuck and clean your shitter the whole day!"

Developers have to do what publishers want, because they have to deliver what players want. The only one to blame for shitty games is the player.

Which is why I don't hate beth or bio, they are only giving most players what they want / accept.

Okay, I can agree with this, but what about The Sims? There was no market for crap like this, but when it was released it sold millions! So where did the publisher in this case go from saying "We need to focus on what players want!" to "Someone has an idea for eating and shitting. Let's try it out."?

EA published DA:O only because it bought Bioware, not because they suddenly were interested in RPG's. Bioware was apparently a logical choice for EA to buy.

I see. I guess the real test will come when we see the sequal of DA:O. If EA sticks to the same formula, but improves in other areas then surely other types of RPGS will work as well. Granted, I am sceptical about turn-based combat for some odd reason. We'll see what happens then...

Anyhow, publishers do market research, have test audiences, follow demographics and whatthefuckelse, meaning that when Troika tried to sell them an idea about a turn-based RPG with loads of dialogue, content and whatelse, no-one gave a shit. When they changed their pitch into a real-time 3D first-person vampire ACTION-rpg with tits and blood, publishers were interested, all of a sudden..

Out of curiosity, how do you know that their original offer was Turn-Based with loads of dialogue (I'm assuming more than in the original)". I'm assuming one of the ex-employees of Troika might have said something after they closed doors.

So yes - if publishers only want to support the development of certain games, games which are safe bets to maximize their profits, it is fair enough to blame them for the suffocation of our genre.

That would depend on what you mean by "suffocation". Trying to please the masses is seen as dumbing down, true. Do you think C&C and heavy dialogue falls into that category? If memory serves, DA had a decent amount of dialogue that one had to read and listen to. One might not be able to compare it to Planescape, but surely DA has already surpassed that line of "Too much reading".

 

[Squeek]

Developers have to do what publishers want, because they have to deliver what players want. The only one to blame for shitty games is the player.

Which is why I don't hate beth or bio, they are only giving most players what they want / accept.

I'm not one to be harsh, but that's pure crap. I realize it's conventional wisdom (and well put, actually), but I couldn't disagree more.

You would be right if everybody was already aware of and already properly understood every great idea. But they don't. It's up to smart businessmen to recognize potential markets, correctly analyze them, and identify opportunities to take advantage. Customers don't have to understand any of that. They fit in only after that work is done.

Data communications is a perfect example of that, btw (my own background). "Experts" used to laugh out loud at the suggestion that data would ever amount to anything.

 

[St. Toxic]

Developers have to do what publishers want, because they have to deliver what players want. The only one to blame for shitty games is the player.

That's about right, yeah. No market for shitty games = no shitty games on the market.

Okay, I can agree with this, but what about The Sims? There was no market for crap like this, but when it was released it sold millions! So where did the publisher in this case go from saying "We need to focus on what players want!" to "Someone has an idea for eating and shitting. Let's try it out."?

Obviously there was a market for crap like the Sims, otherwise it wouldn't have sold a single copy. There weren't any games to fill that gap in the market however, which is why it sells like soft baby skulls in the aids-heart of Africa. While it's easy to assume that the only thing a marketing department has to do is take a look at the top 10 chart of best selling games of all times and copy + paste, they sometimes go out of their way to find new markets that haven't yet been filled or have perhaps been neglected for a longer period of time, simply because the rewards of being the only company sucking the blood of a specific group of unsatisfied retards can potentially be way more lucrative than leeching on to an already heavily leech infested market, though obviously a bit more "adventurous".

 

[Squeek]

I don't imagine it's easy to evaluate the market potential for new games, especially unique new games. So anyone with an idea for a unique new game must have a difficult time, trying to get financing for it.

And you would think publilshers would have the best point of view. That's their business, after all. So if anyone's going to be receptive to new ideas, it really ought to be publishers. But as far as I can tell (as a fan), it just doesn't work that way at all.

So I'm wondering how many game developers actually do a market study, how many hire someone to do a market study for them? When they bring their idea to publishers, how many include carefully-considered discussion about the market opportunity?

Hot markets come and go, but most are never tapped, IMO. Money wants to find them, but it can't steer itself. It gets invested only after people start talking to each other.

 

[St. Toxic]

A study of the market is done as soon as a game is pitched to publishers by developers. And it's not easy, which is why there's plenty of fail to look back on and laugh at, and also one of the reasons innovation is labelled as "dangerous" by the mainstream.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Out of curiosity, how do you know that their original offer was Turn-Based with loads of dialogue (I'm assuming more than in the original)". I'm assuming one of the ex-employees of Troika might have said something after they closed doors.

They said it in interviews. IIRC, it was Tim Cain who lamented that when they went around shopping for money to develop their third game, no-one returned calls as long as they were promoting the same sort of features that made Arcanum great.

And it was Boyarsky, who admitted that Sierra demanded RT and multiplayer in Arcanum, both features which demanded valuable programming time which could have been used for bug-hunting in the .exe, instead of padding the feature list with gimmick "hot names".

Someone here even had the link to that interview in their sig, or something.

That would depend on what you mean by "suffocation". Trying to please the masses is seen as dumbing down, true. Do you think C&C and heavy dialogue falls into that category?

Definitely. It's not that I hate action-RPG's or anything but if the sole motivation in making a game is maximizing your profit and your only tool to reach that goal is to try to sell the game to as many people as possible while also conning them to buy useless extra (horse armour) or actually useful or border-line "cheating" stuff (DA:O dlc), it gets the rage.

Matrix and Paradox are a good examples of a publishers that are not consumed by that "justified commercial venture" - they know their core audience and serve them. Nobody can accuse either one that TOAW3 or HOI3 were dumbed down for the masses. I wish there was a publisher like that for RPGs, which didn't dream of global market domination and would help developers to bring more good rpg's to the market.

If memory serves, DA had a decent amount of dialogue that one had to read and listen to. One might not be able to compare it to Planescape, but surely DA has already surpassed that line of "Too much reading".

Haha, no. Most of the "reading" in DA is hidden inside the Codex. That way the consolekiddies don't get frustrated with it. None of it matters jackshit in the game context. The books of Oblivion are a good comparison - yeah, there might be interesting lore and some good reading sprinkled in there somewhere but it doesn't really matter at all. I wouldn't call DA dialogue heavy either, because the longest conversations are done in your base camp, while you prattle with your "followers", just like in previous Bio titles.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Matrix (...) are a good examples of a publishers that are not consumed by that "justified commercial venture" - they know their core audience and serve them.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, their treatment of Close Combat series totally proves it.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

GarfunkeL

until a few western deved TB RPGs take off on consoles publishers are going to be gun shy. I'm actually surprised that a publisher hasnt gotten behind one. With the exception of Bioware's Sonic game that sold 700K I cant name a recent western deved TB RPG to grace a console.

I'm surprised that it hasnt happened yet. To me its like a Tyler Perry movie. Its a huge niche thats cheap to hit therefore very profitable. Personally I would rather see a deeper RTp system but just from an economic stand point an Arcanum style RPG makes sense if its multiplatform. It doesnt make sense for a publisher to demand RT unless its big budget or there are circumstantial artistic factors cuz afterall I wouldnt have published ToEE as a TB game.

What I dont get is why so many people bash consoles. It will be console gamers that make western deved TB game profitable and build the niche. The niche is there. When games like Two Worlds are selling more than any Troika game on just one console you know the niche is bountiful.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

What I dont get is why so many people bash consoles.

Because you're dumber than two bags of bricks.

 

[Volourn]

"I wouldn't call DA dialogue heavy either,"

Compared to what? It has as much if not more dialogue than the vast majority of RPGs. You are gonna be hard pressed to find a RPG that is more dialogue heavy than DA is, that's for sure.

 

[St. Toxic]

Bullshit!

 

[Azrael the cat]

Publishers get blamed for fucking over RPGs in general simply 'cause they're after l00t. It's understandable if they are since they are likely business oriented and will do the "right" thing to ensure business is successful.

The thing is, is it the developer that comes up with a shitty RPG (according to Kodexian standards) and presents it to the publisher in exchange for phat l00t, or is it the publisher telling another developer (that brought something else to the table) to make something else instead which, ofcourse, ends up being a shitty RPG?

Dragon Age: Origins might be plain shit according to the Kodexian Standards but it is still a decent step in the right direction when compared to other more... INfamous RPGs, right? And this was published by EA! Which begs the question: Did Bioware just design a better RPG this time round, or did EA pull the strings in the back in the right direction? I'm sure EA could have saved money by making the plot linear. Why didn't they? And what happened to that other nutcase who said something about "its stupid to make stories have different paths, because of moar work and less laziness"? I THINK it was the guy who made Deus Ex.

Sequels is another matter (or the same, I guess. Fuck, I'm just winging this post as I type). Look at the Gothic series. There wasn't much change from Gothic to Gothic as far I can tell. Graphics changed, they tried to make the combat system more accessible, but generally kept it true to the original Gothic (bar atmosphere. It felt different in Gothic 2). So in this case the publisher kept the game the same.

So I'm asking, is it really fair to attack publishers for shitty RPGs when in reality it might be developers making shitty RPGs and presenting them to publishers? To be fair, Bioware will most likely have "collar grabbed" EA due to their already standing background in RPGs and thus have pursuaded them in publishing with minimal inteference.

I'm sure that if Spiderweb were to actually attempt something like Dragon Age only with Vogel's flair, that publishers might look at it.

Bad example for the argument you're making:
- Bioware has much much more bargaining power and a stronger track record financially than almost any other rpg developer in the business. And their fans are rabid enough that EA knows that if the ex-owners and leads were to leave and form a new company to make 'I-can't-believe-it's-not-Mass-Effect', their fanbase just might follow rather than buy EA's Dragon Age 2. I can't think of another crpg maker in that kind of position, other than Bethesda whose games are infinitely worse than Bioware's, and who are a hefty sized publisher in their own right.
- Despite Bioware's pulling power and track record, look how EA treated the game. They tried to do everything they possibly could to disguise it being an overhead-view crpg. They had horrible advertising with Marilyn Manson songs calling it 'the New Shit', full of absurd blood and gore, trying to market it as actiony and beat-em-up as possible. All sex and violence, and trying their hardest to disguise any tactical aspects. EA clearly didn't believe that a traditional crpg could possibly succeed in today's market, and did everything they could to try to 'trick' gamers into buying it without showing what the game is actually like (not saying the game was good, but it was nothing like the shite that the marketing campaign suggested). If anyone else but Bioware presented them with DA, let alone a late 90s-style crpg, EA would laugh them out of the building.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Out of curiosity, how do you know that their original offer was Turn-Based with loads of dialogue (I'm assuming more than in the original)". I'm assuming one of the ex-employees of Troika might have said something after they closed doors.

They said it in interviews. IIRC, it was Tim Cain who lamented that when they went around shopping for money to develop their third game, no-one returned calls as long as they were promoting the same sort of features that made Arcanum great.

And it was Boyarsky, who admitted that Sierra demanded RT and multiplayer in Arcanum, both features which demanded valuable programming time which could have been used for bug-hunting in the .exe, instead of padding the feature list with gimmick "hot names".

Someone here even had the link to that interview in their sig, or something.

That would depend on what you mean by "suffocation". Trying to please the masses is seen as dumbing down, true. Do you think C&C and heavy dialogue falls into that category?

Definitely. It's not that I hate action-RPG's or anything but if the sole motivation in making a game is maximizing your profit and your only tool to reach that goal is to try to sell the game to as many people as possible while also conning them to buy useless extra (horse armour) or actually useful or border-line "cheating" stuff (DA:O dlc), it gets the rage.

Matrix and Paradox are a good examples of a publishers that are not consumed by that "justified commercial venture" - they know their core audience and serve them. Nobody can accuse either one that TOAW3 or HOI3 were dumbed down for the masses. I wish there was a publisher like that for RPGs, which didn't dream of global market domination and would help developers to bring more good rpg's to the market.

If memory serves, DA had a decent amount of dialogue that one had to read and listen to. One might not be able to compare it to Planescape, but surely DA has already surpassed that line of "Too much reading".

Haha, no. Most of the "reading" in DA is hidden inside the Codex. That way the consolekiddies don't get frustrated with it. None of it matters jackshit in the game context. The books of Oblivion are a good comparison - yeah, there might be interesting lore and some good reading sprinkled in there somewhere but it doesn't really matter at all. I wouldn't call DA dialogue heavy either, because the longest conversations are done in your base camp, while you prattle with your "followers", just like in previous Bio titles.

Yeah, it's worth remembering that even GAIDER, when he used to visit occasionally, made a few posts about how much he would prefer things if publishers and the industry focused less on pushing graphical hardware and more on intelligent gameplay, and how he wished that a greater variety of combat styles (such as TB, not that that's ever been his thing) and non-combat play was allowed.

The 'hide lots of reading inside the Codex' seems a blatant concession to publisher attitudes. If he didn't want to make a game with lots of reading and lore, he wouldn't have directed that significant amounts of time and money be spent producing it at all (especially not in a skippable form). It reeks of 'I'd really like to have this stuff in my crpg, but if I make it non-skippable or in any way obtrusive, publishers will force me to cut it'. Oblivion isn't a great counter-example, as that had massively reduced numbers of books and details of reading inside them compared to either Morrowind or DA's Codex.

 

[GarfunkeL]

"I wouldn't call DA dialogue heavy either,"

Compared to what? It has as much if not more dialogue than the vast majority of RPGs. You are gonna be hard pressed to find a RPG that is more dialogue heavy than DA is, that's for sure.

The straight-up, "regarding the plot", dialogue. There's a shit load of conversation with your followers as I already wrote Volly. But the amount of plot-related conversation I've gone through so far is more like Mass Effect.

Oh and EA had no problems killing Origin and Westwood back in the day. I'd like to think that they had, back then, comparable clout vis-a-vis Bioware now.

And I have no idea what evils Matrix has done with Close Combats, since I'm not very familiar with anything in that series since the third one (Moscow to Berlin) but my experience with their other games hasn't shown that they would try to press devs to make "wide audience" games. I mean, they mostly publish hardcore strategy games for armchair generals.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

And I have no idea what evils Matrix has done with Close Combats, since I'm not very familiar with anything in that series since the third one (Moscow to Berlin) but my experience with their other games hasn't shown that they would try to press devs to make "wide audience" games. I mean, they mostly publish hardcore strategy games for armchair generals.

They have a bunch of amateurs working on CC re-releases, with one programmer that is the only person in the team that actually gets paid.

They didn't fix the horrible vehicle pathfinding and non-functional AI, because they already paid much for rights to develop new CC games. Yeah and they are basically selling modded old CC games with very few programming changes for 50$ each.

Anyway:
Glaring data errors in a game that claims to have an accurate depictions of equipment. No patch for over a year and a half and they didn't bother to correct the false information in the product description despite that it was pointed out many times.
This and the convenient lack of warning about the joke of path-finding and non-functional AI makes them a bunch of con artists that just seek to remove money from inventory of their customers.

Fascinating communication with their customers - guys with red names are from the CC development team.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

- Despite Bioware's pulling power and track record, look how EA treated the game. They tried to do everything they possibly could to disguise it being an overhead-view crpg. They had horrible advertising with Marilyn Manson songs calling it 'the New Shit', full of absurd blood and gore, trying to market it as actiony and beat-em-up as possible. All sex and violence, and trying their hardest to disguise any tactical aspects. EA clearly didn't believe that a traditional crpg could possibly succeed in today's market, and did everything they could to try to 'trick' gamers into buying it without showing what the game is actually like (not saying the game was good, but it was nothing like the shite that the marketing campaign suggested). If anyone else but Bioware presented them with DA, let alone a late 90s-style crpg, EA would laugh them out of the building.

How is DA a traditional RPG? Its as big a step backwards from BG as KOTOR was. When we first got a taste of DA it was a PC exclusive that looked like an IE game. If EA didnt believe it could sell they wouldn't have ported it to the PS 3. The commercial was no different than what you see from most tactical RPGs. When is the last time you saw real TB combat in a commercial or trailer? Go look at PST's trailer.

It was reviewed falsely IMO aside from its difficulty as a hardcore RPG and a successor to Baldurs Gate yet its still going to sell 2 mill on consoles. Why would a publisher not consider backing a game like DA? That makes no sense. Even if DA was more like BG it still sells because as I always say in this industry perception is reality.