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Al! posted:Also I'd imagine that casting famous hollywoodman Elijah Wood as one of your main characters makes scheduling a little difficult Considering his only current acting gig is on an FX tv show that's ending as I type this comment, and considering the utter ease, scheduling-wise, it is to provide VA (it can be knocked out within an afternoon), and considering this is essentially a personal favor that Elijah is doing (I've heard that he's doing it for scale) for the creator of his favorite genre of games, that's not the reason why part II is taking fuckin' forever to come out Accordion Man posted:
1) those situations aren't comparable, you're comparing like two guys working out of an office to a full-fledged studio 2) they admitted it was a giant mistake to wait that long and that they can't let their production pipeline be bogged down like that ever again, even though ep 3 was fuckin' incredible and worth it also Kr0 is flat-out a better game series than broken age has been NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 00:17
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Toxxupation posted:also Kr0 is flat-out a better game series than broken age has been 
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Aug 27, 2014 00:57
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Ammat The Ankh posted:I'll never understand how people can get so upset over delays. I'd rather have the best product later than a sub-par product now. This is a false dichotomy unless your company is terribly managed.
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Aug 27, 2014 01:08
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I was at PAX and checked out the massive chalice demo and how have I never heard of this fantasy xcom game before? I want to pre-order it but the options are bitcoin and paypal. 
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Sep 5, 2014 16:51
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Lurdiak posted:This is a false dichotomy unless your company is terribly managed. not really. Video games' quality is money=time/(manpower*individual skill).
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Sep 5, 2014 16:55
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Lurdiak posted:This is a false dichotomy unless your company is terribly managed. Almost every game ever released has been delayed at some point or another. The difference is that DoubleFine were transparent, most games don't get announced until years into development.
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Sep 5, 2014 19:42
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Mr.Pibbleton posted:I was at PAX and checked out the massive chalice demo and how have I never heard of this fantasy xcom game before? I want to pre-order it but the options are bitcoin and paypal. Giant Bomb did a Quicklook EX (as in, they played a build with a Doublefine employee in the room) last week of Massive Chalice, if you want more video of what it's like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8KyN5TZkZA
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Sep 5, 2014 23:27
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Bobulus posted:Giant Bomb did a Quicklook EX (as in, they played a build with a Doublefine employee in the room) last week of Massive Chalice, if you want more video of what it's like. I'm already sold on it, I just would like to be able to invest without paypal or bitcoins.
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Sep 6, 2014 01:39
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Huh, Massive Chalice looks a fair bit cooler than I expected. Will wait until it's actually out though.
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Sep 6, 2014 01:43
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Chairchucker posted:Huh, Massive Chalice looks a fair bit cooler than I expected. Will wait until it's actually out though. Yeah, the timeline and event system has me sold. So sleek.
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Sep 6, 2014 02:00
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Mr.Pibbleton posted:I was at PAX and checked out the massive chalice demo and how have I never heard of this fantasy xcom game before? I want to pre-order it but the options are bitcoin and paypal. I did the same thing but they told me they'd be going to Early Access by the end of the year, certainly better than either of those two options.
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Sep 6, 2014 04:02
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TheOrange posted:I did the same thing but they told me they'd be going to Early Access by the end of the year, certainly better than either of those two options. Well pre-ordering on steam will have to do, I just wish I had of known about this in time for Clan Pibbleton to get established.
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Sep 6, 2014 05:15
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Bobulus posted:Giant Bomb did a Quicklook EX (as in, they played a build with a Doublefine employee in the room) last week of Massive Chalice, if you want more video of what it's like. CORRUPTION
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Sep 6, 2014 09:44
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Bobulus posted:Giant Bomb did a Quicklook EX (as in, they played a build with a Doublefine employee in the room) last week of Massive Chalice, if you want more video of what it's like. This is looking pretty awesome
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Sep 6, 2014 16:23
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TheOrange posted:I did the same thing but they told me they'd be going to Early Access by the end of the year, certainly better than either of those two options. Is the backer page terribly out of date then? They list the estimated release date as September, and Giant Bomb still says October
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Sep 17, 2014 22:47
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/18/double-fine-early-access-spacebase-df9/ Double Fine have announced that development of Spacebase DF-9 is coming to an end and the development plan listing planned features has been removed. The Steam Early Access page has been updated to state that version 1.0 is due for release. It “will be its final major update”, according to the recently updated development plans page. The previous version of that page contained hundreds of features that “might possibly” be implemented at some point. Today’s update makes it clear that any future implementation will be in the hands of the users rather than Double Fine themselves, thanks to a full source code release. For those who haven’t been tuned in, Spacebase DF-9 is a product of Double Fine’s internal jam, the Amnesia Fortnight. As with many games made in such a short timeframe, enthusiasm for the game was invested in its potential rather than its current form. It wasn’t the first game to make people yell “DWARF FORTRESS WITH AN INTERFACE AND A GRAPHIC” but it was one of the first to make them add, “IN SPACE”. Of course, it might well take decades of development to create Dwarf Fortress in space and Spacebase DF-9 will not be that game. The most important words from the Steam update are as follows. quote:As for what will be added between now and the 1.0 build, new features will be aimed at providing the complete experience you’d expect of a non-Early Access game: a Tutorial mode to smooth out the early game a bit and help new players learn the basics, and a Goal system that lets you work towards concrete objectives. That as well as over a month’s worth of pure bug-fixing work and final polish. I used to be of the opinion that story driven games were ill-suited to Early Acess but I’m increasingly coming to believe that ambitious sims are the most likely to suffer. The complexity of what Double Fine intended or hoped Spacebase DF-9 could be – or what players envisioned it might be – was perhaps untenable from the start, which makes the Early Access release an offering of potential and possibility. It’s doubtful that Double Fine wanted to move to 1.0 in this fashion and the hollow hurrah of the ‘it’s in your hands now!’ announcement made me wince like I’d eaten a Jif lemon, but we don’t know the reasons. Staff may be required on other projects, money is probably tighter than it appears to be from an outside perspective (it almost always is). That’s little comfort to those who’ve bought a game that is lacking the features and content they were anticipating, particularly when the company seems to have its fingers in so many other pies. A case of over-reach then? The truth might be that attempting to make the game that Spacebase DF-9 could have been would overstretch anybody. We’ve contacted Double Fine for comment.
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Sep 18, 2014 17:30
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There's a thought running around that Doublefine is shutting/winding down projects to bring all teams on board for psychonauts 2. There was supposed to be an HD rerelease of Psychonauts earlier this year that has since disappeared. My best guess is they've pushed into to next year to coincide with the 10th anniversary and announce Psychonauts 2.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:00
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Between Broken Age, Massive Chalice, Hack'n'Slash, Stacking 2, DF-9 and Grim Fandango HD it's clear that they overextended. Something had to give and I assume that DF-9 just wasn't bringing in enough cash to justify further development.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:12
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double nine posted:Between Broken Age, Massive Chalice, Hack'n'Slash, Stacking 2, DF-9 and Grim Fandango HD it's clear that they overextended. Something had to give and I assume that DF-9 just wasn't bringing in enough cash to justify further development. I think you meant Costume Quest 2 and not Stacking 2. Costume Quest 2 is even worse than the rest in that it pretty much has to come out by Halloween.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:24
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I don't know exactly WHAT is wrong at Double Fine, but it seems pretty clear that SOMETHING is. It's just crazy to me that, starting after Double Fine, and given roughly the same amount of money, inXile and Obsidian have been able to turn out massive deep RPGs that literally have orders of magnitude more content/writing/assets with complex branching quests etc, than Double Fine... who has barely managed to get out half of a short point-and-click adventure game. It's kinda sad, and it frustrates me to think that the companies who ARE doing great things with Kickstarter and Early Access are going to get screwed over by those who fail. It's probably why Obsidian and Larian (Divinity:OS) have both made noises about not going back to Kickstarter/crowd funding, because they know the Happy Days are over. 
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Sep 18, 2014 18:25
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Fintilgin posted:It's probably why Obsidian and Larian (Divinity:OS) have both made noises about not going back to Kickstarter/crowd funding, because they know the Happy Days are over. That's sad, did they go into detali as to why?
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Sep 18, 2014 18:29
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double nine posted:Between Broken Age, Massive Chalice, Hack'n'Slash, Stacking 2, DF-9 and Grim Fandango HD it's clear that they overextended. Something had to give and I assume that DF-9 just wasn't bringing in enough cash to justify further development. I'm not ready to accept that DoubleFine has completely abandoned the project. I think we can all agree that Tim Schafer isn't the most competent project lead or manager, and there's definitely some reshuffling of the workforce to account for the situation. But if they abandoned the project entirely they'd lose a lot of good faith (because they did charge money for the early access) and I'd be the first to shout gently caress off to their next kickstarter.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:32
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Rinkles posted:That's sad, did they go into detali as to why? Larian blog quote:As I mentioned in this interview, the current thinking is that we shouldn’t go back to Kickstarter. That’s not because we’re ungrateful of the support we received through our Kickstarter community or because all those rewards caused a bit of extra work, but because I think the crowdfunding pool is limited and it should be fished in by those who really need it. Since we now can, I think we should first invest ourselves and then see if we need extra funds to fuel our ambitions. Only then it makes sense to look at crowd funding. I know several of our backers will be displeased by this, so it could be that we still change our minds, but if that is the case, I do think the the format we’ll use or the way we’ll do it will be different than how we did it for Divinity: Original Sin. I think Obsidian has said they're hope is that Pillars of Eternity does well enough that PoEII could be funded entirely out of the profits of the first game. They may be pessimistic that they can 'go back to the well' and do as well again. On the other hand, there's inXile, who did their Kickstarter for Torment long before Wasteland 2 was finished and made MORE money then W2 did! I'll be curious to see if we see a Wasteland 3 Kickstarter sometime after the new year... Demiurge4 posted:I'm not ready to accept that DoubleFine has completely abandoned the project. I think we can all agree that Tim Schafer isn't the most competent project lead or manager, and there's definitely some reshuffling of the workforce to account for the situation. But if they abandoned the project entirely they'd lose a lot of good faith (because they did charge money for the early access) and I'd be the first to shout gently caress off to their next kickstarter. I was always amazed in the backer videos where they talked (multiple times) about needing Tim to finish writing the next segment before they could do X. It's a loving point and click adventure game. How do you not have the whole thing scoped and written up before full speed production starts kicking in? 
Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 18, 2014 18:35
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To me it's kind of incredible to think how long it's taken df to put out the amount of content they did at the budget they had Like there's probably less than 20 screens total in broken age part 1, and act 1 takes at the very outset maybe 4 hours to beat This took two years to make But that's not the issue, I'm fine with paying a premium price if my level of enjoyment is commiserate with it, but to me the insane, ludicrous delay in production between acts 1 and 2 has virtually destroyed any interest I have in the game Like optimistically speaking were looking at a December release for act 2, realistically speaking were looking at a sometime next year release for act 2, and pessimistically speaking were looking at a late next year release for act 2, which even in the best case scenario is kind of an unacceptable time frame for a plot focused game to have, especially in comparison to games like telltales walking dead/wolf among us, which each episode of a season (of which there are FIVE) are far more technically demanding and nearly as large in content and playtime with a release schedule that means you actually still loving care about it when it comes out Like that's the worst thing, broken age isn't bad, it's quite good if v short for the amount of time spent developing it, it's just that they completely hosed up on release such that when act 2 comes out I don't even know if I'll care any more I barely care now It's a game that could've been a goty contender for me (if act 2 has sufficient narrative payoff) that due to their pipeline I shrug and go "yeah I played it, it was decent" NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 18, 2014 18:52
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Toxxupation posted:To me it's kind of incredible to think how long it's taken df to put out the amount of content they did at the budget they had Like I said, I just can't get over the comparison with Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity. It really confuses me and blows my mind. Also, makes me sad.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:04
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Fintilgin posted:
I don't know, I think the contributing factors to this are fairly clear. Not to diminish what Obsidian have done because I think they've loving nailed it, but in their case they're working in a genre that they specialise in and, not to put too fine a point on it, they've had some experience in putting together amazing results in incredibly short timeframes using engines they haven't used before, and I can't think of another developer that could deal with the poo poo they've been through and come out as strong as they have. I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is to say that Wasteland 2 was working with the same amount of money either - hadn't their team size expanded to 30+ at the beginning of this year, and wasn't it at least 12 or something the year before last? If we take $10,000 a developer month as an estimated overall cost - which is a figure I've heard from multiple sources, including Obsidian - then they've spent significantly more than their kickstarter budget, and more like significantly more than double. (I really wish their sole developer diary video was more than them just saying "reactivity" over and over again and pretending it means something, I'm sure we could learn a lot about the different working processes!) Double Fine, on the other hand, are not a genre specialist and it's pretty clear from watching the documentary that they spent way more time than they were hoping to in getting the basic working processes into place. I'm not entirely convinced the writing is the whole issue - Tim being behind is a running theme and that's definitely caused some issues but I don't get the impression that the rest of the pipeline was ever moving fast enough to overtake what he was doing and it's really clear that there was an early expectation that this would move faster. I think it's a massive shame that the conversation turned around to incompetence because I think a serious analysis of where the mismatched expectations came from would have been really interesting. Was there a difference in the way they produced the early test environment to the way they worked later? Not sure we'll ever find out on that front. But yeah, I think the fact that Tim Schafer is essentially the sole writer and designer for the game, in addition to running the project, being ultimately responsible for the company itself and other projects within it and acting as the company's public face is a clear problem. It's not like they didn't visibly take steps to counteract this, and if they were starting it from scratch is sounds like they'd definitely try and have someone else on board for that as well. I'm not even sure it's that bad a thing for me, because the writing and scenario are absolutely strong points for Broken Age, and if there were another writer on board then Schafer would probably have ended up as an executive producer who didn't contribute much, which might have produced writing just as good or better but wouldn't have been the same. It would definitely have been better for them as a company though. As far as I can tell the only massively funded Kickstarter game that hasn't either had a significant contribution to the budget from another source, split the game into multiple parts and funded the later with the earlier or opened up an additional crowdfund is Pillars of Eternity. And I'm extremely optimistic about that game, but there's still time...
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Sep 18, 2014 20:00
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Sure am glad I spent money on DF-9 when they don't plan to finish it properly! Never buy poo poo from Greenlight.
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Sep 18, 2014 20:57
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Don't buy alpha products you dumb jerks. Stop supporting this nonsense.
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Sep 18, 2014 21:03
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notZaar posted:Don't buy alpha products you dumb jerks. Stop supporting this nonsense. I guess I am too trusting 
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Sep 18, 2014 21:17
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Fintilgin posted:I don't know exactly WHAT is wrong at Double Fine, but it seems pretty clear that SOMETHING is. I don't imagine that it's cheap to operate in San Francisco. Programming is fiercely competitive and cost of living is absurd. Also, general management I'm sure. Did Elijah Wood work for nearly nothing? I know he was the one who actually expressed interest, so I imagine he's not charging DF Hollywood rates for his voicework.
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Sep 18, 2014 22:03
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How ridiculous would the idea of moving Double Fine away from San Francisco be? I mean obviously that's gonna cost a lot but everyone talks about how stupidly expensive SF is just to work in, I figure they could save a lot of money just by.. being somewhere else. Seattle is nice!
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Sep 18, 2014 22:10
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Geight posted:How ridiculous would the idea of moving Double Fine away from San Francisco be? I mean obviously that's gonna cost a lot but everyone talks about how stupidly expensive SF is just to work in, I figure they could save a lot of money just by.. being somewhere else. Seattle is nice! Would not be possible. That would effectively just be Tim Schafer starting up a new studio in a different place. Lots of people at Double Fine have been there for many years and have families with spouses who have jobs in the area and kids in school. It's a 60-person company, it isn't feasible to move without essentially destroying it and a bunch of jobs.
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Sep 18, 2014 22:17
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GrandpaPants posted:I don't imagine that it's cheap to operate in San Francisco. Programming is fiercely competitive and cost of living is absurd. Also, general management I'm sure. Did Elijah Wood work for nearly nothing? I know he was the one who actually expressed interest, so I imagine he's not charging DF Hollywood rates for his voicework. From what I understood he worked scale- probably VA scale too, so that's even cheaper
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Sep 18, 2014 22:53
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Chris Remo posted:Would not be possible. That would effectively just be Tim Schafer starting up a new studio in a different place. Lots of people at Double Fine have been there for many years and have families with spouses who have jobs in the area and kids in school. It's a 60-person company, it isn't feasible to move without essentially destroying it and a bunch of jobs. That sucks. Double Fine is a neat company but SF seems like a terrible place to work and live in.
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Sep 18, 2014 23:16
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Did they ever bother removing GFWL from Iron Brigade like they promised?
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Sep 19, 2014 00:48
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Geight posted:That sucks. Double Fine is a neat company but SF seems like a terrible place to work and live in. To be fair it's a hotspot for the games industry, I kind of figure that given how often people move between studios being in a spot with others in your vicinity probably works as a benefit, somewhat. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be running a company in that region though. This news sucks, I love Double Fine as a studio but it feels like they're cutting their losses and moving on, leaving people with some half-baked games in the process. Part of me is hoping that they'll give SpaceBase and Hack N' Slash some post release updates and that this is a means of trying to get out of early access but I doubt it. I'm hoping that whatever this amounts to benefits them as a studio, part 2 of Broken Age and Massive Chalice are both things I'm really hoping will be great.
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Sep 19, 2014 00:48
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Geight posted:That sucks. Double Fine is a neat company but SF seems like a terrible place to work and live in. It is, on balance, a great place to live and work, which is why it's expensive.
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Sep 19, 2014 01:19
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Waldorf Sixpence posted:Sure am glad I spent money on DF-9 when they don't plan to finish it properly! Never buy poo poo from Greenlight. I think you mean Early Access. Greenlight is just a way for games to appear on Steam, the alpha stuff is due to Early Access.
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Sep 19, 2014 01:30
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GrandpaPants posted:I don't imagine that it's cheap to operate in San Francisco. Programming is fiercely competitive and cost of living is absurd. Also, general management I'm sure. Did Elijah Wood work for nearly nothing? I know he was the one who actually expressed interest, so I imagine he's not charging DF Hollywood rates for his voicework. Yeah, I tried not to theorize on what is wrong, `cause hell if I know. It means a lot to me that Double Fine's heart is clearly in the right place (which is why I even love broken messes of games like Arcanum), and I don't regret backing them at all, but it is sad and frustrating. If you can make a giant RPG bigger then the first Baldur's Gate for 'X' dollars, with 150+ areas and tons of branching dialogues and quests then you really ought to be able to bring in a linear point-and-click adventure where you walk into a room, hear some witty dialogue, and USE the SPORK on the THROBBING PISTON to get the CAT HAIR MUSTACHE. Then, while I've been scratching my head and frowning pensively about Broken Age, Spacebase DF-9 goes hurtling by, on fire, and craters nearby, and I just throw my hands up in the air and say "Welp." Welp.
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Sep 19, 2014 02:12
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Wait, I'm confused was Pillars of Eternity released yet or is this just speculation that this is a spalling 100 hour Bauders Gate RPG?
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