Bioware is a bit of a strech there, Dragon Age 2 was rushed through and it showed up in the final product and the Mass Effect series kinda craped itself in the end.MelasZepheos said:
Valve: "Valve Time" is a Compliment
- Thread starter Jeremy Wilkinson
- Start date
You know Bethesda didn't make Fallout:NV, and Bioware has a team of over 800 people right now, don't you? Just saying.MelasZepheos said:
Well thats the thing I (we) never really said that they had a shitty release schedule but rather they are one of the few devs/publishers who can afford to do it. For examples if you compare Half Life2 and portal 2 to their other game projects such as dead Day of defeat and to some extent TF2 then you can see that there is a vast difference in production time,cost and speed between their community based games and their AAA games. Most publishers wouldnt risk their dev teems working on community based games and even if they did most would be half assed and wouldn't get the community support most valve games and mods do.Ragsnstitches said:
Hell during the development of half life Gabe and Harrington(at this point pretty rich because of their work at Microsoft) the founders of Valve had to dig deep into their own cash to fund it because they kept extending the production time, something most developers wouldn't even attempt lest they go bankrupt.
Agreeing that DA2 was rushed for the publisher, the crappy ending of ME3 was due to the megalomania of one man: Casey Hudson, who single handedly re-wrote the entire ending into the crapfest of "Pick your favourite colour" due to the orginal ending designs being leaked.Ed130 said:
The Mass Effect team was the Central Bioware team, Dragon Age was made by the Edmonton studio and KOR was made by Bioware Vancouver. So your example doesn't tread water.MelasZepheos said:
TES: Oblivion was started immediately after the release of Morrowind, so the actual development cycle was a lot longer than that. Fallout 3 was basically made using the same engine as Oblivion, so it had a short dev cycle. New Vegas was made by Obsidian and publish by Bethesda. So yeah, again, doesn't tread water. Valve actually does a lot of work in a lot of areas at once, its basically several game studios under one banner.MelasZepheos said:
I get that technically they're different. But think of it this way:mindlesspuppet said:
EA: Buys a company under company name, lets them make game, puts out game.
Valve: Buys a company, doesn't let them keep company name, puts out game as valve game.
I mean, I get that there are a few tiny differences, but to me it seems they roughly do the same thing. They're basically a publisher now, I doubt valve staff have ever truly finished a product they've come up with the idea for in a while now. The people who do are the companies that they buy.
Edit: Hell, didn't they hire a completely different team to do l4d2 and leave the team that came up with it to sorta float off into nothingness?
Edit edit: To humour you, these are from google/dictionary.com when searching define: "insert thing here".
Publisher: a person or company whose business is the publishing of books, periodicals, engravings, computer software, etc.
Developer: A person or organization that develops something.
I'm still of the opinion that they develop nothing of their own recently (aside from, you know, portal and even that was an idea from somewhere else). They buy, they market, they sell.
Publisher.
I agree with everything said in these three posts, and will just add: Blizzard.Jove said:
Blizzard has much worse development cycles and relies more heavily on the success of their past games to carry their future games to victory. I mean, just look at the hype train that lead up to SC2: Wings of Liberty's release, and especially D3's release. I'd argue that Blizzard Time is much more wonky than Valve time, because Blizzard knows how popular they are.
Difference is, TF2, L4D 1+2 and Portal 1+2 were at least partially developed in house, whereas, say FO:NV was developed entirely by Obsidian.Jove said:
I'm not saying Valve thought up those games all by themselves, but they at least put plenty of work into them. To say that some other people made the mods for these games entirely and then sold it to Valve for Valve to publish is foolish.
You say it like it's a bad thing. I say congratulations to Valve for being so bold as to create and maintain Steam, one of the largest digital distribution systems we've ever seen. Other developers can't afford to take the same amount of time, it is too risky, but I can't imagine they're going up to the very last second to put the fine detail in, I'm far more inclined it's a publisher rush. Regardless of what it is that limits them, Valve shouldn't be looked down on because they can go to the level of detail and polish that all developers want.Jove said:
OT: I wish more companies followed Valve's structure but, like Jove said, they simply can't. If all developers followed Valve's methods then we'd not really see Valve as a company that stands tall both as a publisher and a developer. I'd be happy with less pressure from publishers to meet a certain release date.
Valve hire talented people, get them to their HQ, form a cabal around then and let the rest of Valve work on the game they make if they want to. That is very different from simply publishing in my opinion. A bunch of HL´s development team worked on Portal and L4D. TF2 also isn´t a mod for Half Life. TF1 was a Quake mod that Valve turned into a commercial game and TF2 was develeoped in-house by Valve itself from scratch.
I like how they think TF2 and Portal were finished products before Valve got a hold of them. I'm sure those modders made their games look that good lolololUNHchabo said:
