You didn't miss much. (Destiny)

by Quirel, Wednesday, May 31, 2017, 04:23 (2823 days ago) @ Kermit

Reading through the 343i section... I guess a lot of people are right to skip it. It doesn't feel like I'm hearing from the people who made the games. Kiki and Bonnie and Frankie and Ryan feel more like upper level managers who never crawled into the guts of the engine with a map and a box of wrenches, you know? They talk about concepts and they talk about creating, but it's shallower and less detailed than the Bungie employees who could say who the level designer was and what content almost wound up on the chopping block.

Part of the problem is that they still work at 343i and 343i is still a machine that turns out Halo games, so they can't talk about concepts that might get used for a future game. Bungie is gone, it's said its goodbyes and it's never coming back to Halo no matter how much we want it, and they can talk about the development hell that they slogged through. But I can't help but suspect that the majority of the 343i employees talk like disconnected managers because they really are disconnected managers. They don't lead* a small team of artists or programmers, they manage the Halo franchise and oversee entire games and planned marketing blitzkriegs. Their perspective on what was really going on at the ground level was limited.

Maybe one day, when 343i has been put out to pasture and some of the old programmers and artists and writers are willing to talk, then we'll here of the troubles that plagued the later Halo games. But that is not this day

*There is such a vast gulf between leadership and management. You respect a leader, but you need a manager. A leader is right there in the trenches with you, but a manager is a pig on the wing. Flying up there somewhere, someone you can't talk to but is looking out for you... hopefully. You think. That metaphor kinda went nowhere, so let's try again. A manager doesn't do the same work you do. A manager doesn't work on the assembly line. And because they don't work on the shop floor, they have the detachment and the objectivity needed for the kind of leadership they are called to give. At the same time, they don't know what's going on down there on the shop floor except in the most general terms. They read a summary of what this group did and that group did this week and how it's affecting the overall program, but they read a lot of summaries and all those progress reports just blend together.

Maybe I'll quit while I'm ahead.