Friday, October 27, 2017

"The Collapse Of Visceral's Ambitious Star Wars Game"

Kotaku:
You might not even have noticed the way Dodger touched that door, but for Visceral, that simple animation was months in the making. They spent hours and hours of development time just working on the way in which Dodger would touch the door. This was a frustrating experience for some members of the team, who felt like they didn’t have enough core features in place to be spending so much time on a demo. That demo may have looked good, but people who worked on it said you couldn’t play very much. “Dodger couldn’t even shoot his gun and we’re fine-tuning where his hand placement needed to be,” said one Ragtag developer. “We don’t have a single environment for Dodger to exist in... How do you build a system if you don’t know what your average area is gonna be?”

...

For years, four sources said, Söderlund and Jade Raymond had been asking about what Ragtag’s innovation would be. “What was this game’s ‘gravity gun’?” they would ask, a reference to Half-Life’s iconic weapon. And while the team had come up with lots of ideas—sabotage mechanics, a rotating cast of companions, and so on—executing those ideas had proven difficult.
Meanwhile:
Then Star Wars Battlefront came out and changed everything.

Star Wars is never easy. On November 17, 2015, EA released the much-anticipated Star Wars Battlefront, the first Star Wars game to be released after LucasArts’ demise. Battlefront was a massive success, shipping 13 million copies by the end of 2015