Destiny Podcast Version 0

by Miguel Chavez, Saturday, May 04, 2013, 07:59 (4230 days ago) @ Stephen Laughlin

As Cody said right at the end, it only really got interesting when I came on board. ;-) Before that it was like being forced to attend an economics lecture and two TA's were debating supply-side vs kenyesian.

"Ass kissers, the lot of them!"

Now that's an entrance. :)

Heh, thanks.

You can claim the Halo reveals were fake at their core, but what they were *not* was imprecise setters of 'tone'.

I definitely appreciate that argument, but I'm saying the process of creating each of those demonstrations was also a pretty big timesink that may have been better spent actually working on real game mechanics rather than what amounted to an internal goal-setter. One could question whether the reveals created even more drive to push further and create a better final product than they would have otherwise, but who knows? It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Exactly which is why I don't understand the cautious approach. As you state, there's a tipping point between 'let's show them/us what we WANT this game to be like' and 'm-f'er we're wasting so much time on this and who knows if even half of this will be in game!' Internally, I would hope a company in the biz this long has sussed out how to dance along that line.

The reveal might be that even if you spent 15 years working on a game, that commitment to a 'demo' is fraught with virgin-nervousness. Am I doing it right? Am I doing it long enough? Is she going to yell for the cops?

Down the line, after release, there was always that point where they declassified the insanity that went on behind the scenes during the development process and we found they were NOWHERE NEAR the level of progress that the reveals implied, which would have been a major letdown if the public didn't already have the game in their grubby little hands by then. With the current size of the development team and all the leaks these days, I actually wonder if Bungie could have pulled off another "fake it 'til you make it" demo without facing down an embarrassing media shitstorm.

You bring up another good point, that again puzzles me, kinda, in how it dictated their approach. Yes, when Halo 1/2/3 blah blah was shown, and then when those same games shipped, we could see what changed from conception to delivery. And more often than not, it was in a negative. Feature A was demo'd, but feature A was first on the chopping block.

Here's my point: HAVEN'T WE LEARNED OUR LESSON? After one or two games, isn't it NOW a mature sensible take that ANYTIME a demo is created, to not take it at as set in stone? Why should that one emotional problem we as gamers have with 'oh, you robbed me of my expectations' prevent a game company from ever showing their own hopes and dreams? Granted I'm talking in measures... an FPS demo'd that turns into a RTS game would be a surprise. But showing troop phalanxes and then not seeing it in game... really? That's the deal-breaker? It almost feels like Bungie would have to go to the lengths of creating a Bungie Labs wing where they can willy nilly show each and ever fevered dream they come up with, with no expectations of it appearing in any damn game because folks can't take a chill pill! The 'embarrassing media shitstorm' should be met with 'Well, that's how gaming dev goes. You shoot for the moon and then pull back until it's something manageable and shippable - and thank you for spending the last 7 years working on this until it was shippable and dammit I'm still having fun.'

And yes, I'll head you off at the pass: the above is a pipe-dream. Gamers mature and sensible? Pish posh!

The bottom line is I'm looking forward to hearing about/seeing this game. It hasn't happened yet. I'm a patient man though, I ain't going anywhere.

I hear that. I'm sure there will be some interesting backstory to this whole piece. I'd wager that Bungie found themselves in an all too familiar situation, pressured to make a public entrance at a point where they weren't quite ready, and simply made a tough call: to repeat past mistakes by spending valuable resources on producing a dishonest bombshell demonstration, or gather genuine materials from their current build and just show the world a bit of what they're actually working on. I guess time will tell.

Yep, and my only issue is that the former is a fireworks media event (that however dishonest as you label it, is a blood-pumping extravaganza), the latter is not. And the 'Bungie' that's lodged in the back of my head would've been upfront about it.

- M