John-ShepardThe nuts and bolts of development and publishing in the video game industry can be all sorts of intriguing.
But sometimes it's just plain stupid and depressing.
High Moon Studio's Deadpool didn't turn out all that well, and one of the team's former artists spoke about the problems they faced. It appears that publisher Activision could be blamed; check out what was written in the Polycount forums :
"We had a couple of weeks were we crunched pretty aggressively on Deadpool. Having activision cut aand cut and CUT just took its tole on so many of us. For a studio to demand that we do mandatory overtime for a project and then keep cutting so much time and money from it was ridiculous. At about halfway into development we were told that we weren't even aiming very high in terms of score.
Can you imagine working on a game where your higher ups say "yeah we're shooting for a 64 or lower" and then have them give you mandatory overtime?"
Ironically, in our review , we gave the game a 6.3, which is almost exactly what it deserved. But it's interesting to see that Activision didn't want it any higher; in some ways, I'm not even all that surprised. But when it comes to lower-budget games, publishers aren't expecting as much, and they're also not expecting to dump a ton of resources into the project, either.
I think they made good use of their problems though, in the game Deadpool keeps getting phone calls about budget cuts and then the game goes into a brief period of being old school zelda or 2D scrolling style until more money is greenlit.
Even though I haven't play the game myself, I've watched someone play the game in its entirety. The gameplay were repetitive but I kinda like the humor.
See, I don't get Activision. They'll happily pump endless amounts of cash into the latest CoD, but anything other than a guaranteed seller gets as little as possible. Okay, it makes sense financially, but it's still kinda sad.
Activi$ion is a company that only cares about money i truly hope COD sees the guitar hero effect 1 of these years everyone remember guitar hero the game that took off and was pushed out every year and fans got sick of it and stopped buying it and it now guitar hero no longer made well i hope COD gets that just to slap activision in the face for treating developers like cr*p
as far as im concerned activision should die out their workers get paid well but they fire alot of them after 1 game is made and they have to re apply
so honestly activi$ion cant surprise me well they could if they started to develop RPGS but thats not going to happen
this news isent exactly surprising, theres constant pot shots at antivision in the game.
makes you wonder why they still work with them, i mean antivision dont own them do they?
hope not, theres so many studios out there that have been ruined by them!
look what happened to IW!
half the studio left and formed respawn, and now one of IWs lead creators has left the industry for good!
or radical entitainment, one of the industries oldest companies now disappeared after prototype 2 tanked.
beenox have been putting out some pretty impressive stuff too, just like high moon and raven software the guys who did the wolfenstein reboot and singularity.
wish all those guys would go indie, id be interesting to see what they can come up with without antivision holding them down.
and who knows, maybe radical, and co would still be with us!
Actually, yes. High Moon is a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision.
Activision isn't all that dissimilar from EA. They're both evil but Activision stays under the radar.
High Moon needs to get free of Activision and make Darkwatch 2.
I hate Activision.
Stupid, Deadpool could have been one of the best games of the year if given the opportunity and even though everyone might not be a deadpool fan, most gamers can get behind a well done third person action game.