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What happened? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, June 23, 2016, 17:56 (2835 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Didn't they do a ViDoc before Destiny launched about how great Grognok was?

There's no question that it's a very powerful level editor with lots of options. But the Kotaku article (from... a year ago?) stated that it took 24 hours to open a single map, regardless of the change being made. That's crazy talk and I'm really shocked it was allowed. Almost every detail I've heard about how vanilla Destiny was set up, designed, and worked on made my brain hurt. The entire workflow of the company back then seemed to be a list of "never do these things" taken from the wall of my old studios. I'm almost surprised Destiny didn't ship as an FMV game. And listen, I worked in test for 13 years. I'm no veteran designer. But I could easily tell that there were really bad mistakes being made on the back end. If I was Cody, I'd have saved a bookmark of my prophetic statements to that effect, but I don't actually care that much. The point is that a tool can be powerful but if it's not easy to use, it doesn't matter.

I'll relate this to my real life:

I'm a TV editor. I work on Avid. Avid is a piece of flaming garbage wrapped around the dying husk of a giant cockroach, but it's the only game in town (if any of you are programmers and want to get together to make a new video editing suite that actually does stuff, let me know - I'm SO down and the time is right for a new player). There are people, Assistant Editors, who are paid thousands of dollars to do things that a computer should be able to do in seconds. Why? Because Avid sucks and doesn't take advantage of the fact that it's a computer. My job, for many years, was to "group" footage, which boils down to pressing six buttons, in order, ad nauseum. I'm not making this up. You would bind keys 1-6 to the specific commands you wanted done, and then you would just sit there, all night long, for months, pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 over and over and over. Then someone came up with keypress macro software and my life became "Press 1. Tell the computer 5000 cycles. Watch TV for four hours." This is a real job that people still do and earn $1200/week as a starting wage, all because the software we have to use is bullshit (most AEs do more than just group, but being able to press those 6 buttons is the cornerstone of the job). Multiply this by the hundreds of TV shows that have to do this, and you can see how wasteful shitty workflow is.

Unlike the relative cottage industry of TV, video games actually don't have margins wide enough to be able to deliver quality goods while absorbing extra costs due to shitty workflow, so when the workflow sucks, the game suffers.


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