Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 dev Tim Willits explains why the game was able to achieve massive success when so many big budget games have failed lately.
Star Citizen is in this picture. They added hunger and dehydration to a space exploration, cargo, and fighting game.
I'll be "that guy" but according to Chris Roberts (the guy who owns CIG that is making the game) star citizen is supposed to be a "space life" game. It's not an "arcade game" where there is a specific game type it is built around. You're supposed to just be a dude/dudette living your life out in space and do what you want which can include all the things you mentioned. I personally want that very much. There are a million games out there that do the basic space pew pew thing or mining, but nothing like a life sim.
There's going to be more than just hunger and dehydration, they built toilets and showers into some ships for a specific reason not just atheistics lol
Yeah, the problem is it wasn't sold as a space life game a decade ago. And there's a vast gulf between space life sim and actually having to eat/pee. It was already controversial when he said capital ships wouldn't despawn so you'll have to hide it and keep a 24/7 watch to make sure it isn't stolen. A game isn't supposed to be a job, there's got to be a happy medium there.
I really feel there would be a market for something like star citizen without all the realism stuff that gets in the way of the gameplay. I'm a backer, and when I can get to playing the game it's fun, but finding my way to the launch pad after every two years break when I'm trying to checkup on progress sucks.
Years ago I made a space game that was basically, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, but with spaceships. I made it way too complicated and basically only I could play it, but I've often thought that it was a good basis for a game if only I made it less stupid.
I cannot believe nobody has made a space game since, where being the master of your ship is the whole goal. Basically Euro truck simulator in space. One of the nice things about that game is that all the gamey stuff is just handled by menus so that you can actually get to the experience without having to wander around a supplemental environment that doesn't really add anything to the experience.
Literally any other space game.
I think it’s cause of envy. Every once in a while, a game comes that just seems to do a lot of things and become very very successful (like red dead and gta).
Then these other studios get FOMO and turn to a go big or go home attitude.
So what you end up with is this inflation of features when only a few devs can land a big game like that.
"Of course it was cost-intensive to program an engine that will render every single eyelash at a resolution that will require the player to buy an additional graphics card for each eyelash concurrently on-screen, but now we only need twelve and a half billion people to buy, no, what am I saying, to pre-order and pre-pay the Ultra-Super-Deluxe-Collector's Edition and we'll start to turn a profit."
- current AAA gaming
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they're worse off for it. Assassin's Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they're over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it's much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I'd love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh.... Spend forever doing side quests because you don't know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road.... No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around.....
I liked the more structured narrative. Don't get me wrong - it's cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
Halo as an open world is fucking awesome. I love Infinite.
The next step, in terms of budget and computing power required, which I eagerly await, is a massively multiplayer co-op Halo:
- open universe
- Humanity versus Covenant
- massively co-op
- 10,000+ humans in perpetual battle against endless Covenant invasion
That’s probably gonna require billion dollar budgets and quantum computers to pull off, but it’s coming. And I can’t fucking wait.
And development teams are too big. No game should realistically be having 500+ people working on it. That's too many people, too big a ship to steer fast enough for the changes that happen in game development. Even the biggest games have done very well with teams of 250 or less, including all staff that work on the game, how about development studios pay attention to that?
I once worked on a dance game that officially had a team of 400
I've worked on a team of 12 at one point and I remember that being a pain to organize. Not that I was the one doing the organization mind you but it just seemed like it was a nightmare.
How did that go
People expect all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of new content.
That’s why you need to have a 500 person team. Someone needs to be designing and coding the valentine's event for 2025 right now
Companies want all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of microtransactions money.
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Who is these people that want this? And even if they do. Creating a good game does not need 500 people. And if you want to provide content after setup several small parallel teams to make cosmetics and stuff.
But the whole live service is something the companies want. So they can keep monetizing it and turn if off once a new iteration is done.
To quote Bernard Black: "Well expect away!"
Single player games with a good story and fun replayability are what I'm after. Or co-op. Occasionally, a fun multiplayer with a risky, innovative design like Lethal Company.
If a game requires me to collect 100 goddamn feathers, or press X 20 times to "survive" a heavily scripted encounter, you are doing your game wrong. Look at Black Mesa, look at Subnatica. Look at the games that took risks like Lethal Company or Elite Dangerous. You don't have to appeal to everyone. You have to tell a story well, and the gameplay should be unique and interesting. Larian understood that with Divinity 2, and made improvements to both story and gameplay in BG3.
Unfortunately the good taste of people who actively comment about games often has only slight overlap with what makes money.
Three of the top ten US game earners in 2024 were yearly sports game rehashes. One of the top ten games was Call Of Duty. One was Fortnite.
These are money making machines. We can argue and beg and plead all we want. There is a huge mass of gamers out there was simply don't care, and who will continue to buy formulaic rehashes and microtransaction infested treadmills.
The AAA publishers are not in it for the art. Look at AA and indie if you want games that are willing to appeal to a niche. I'm talking to you and everyone else reading this because this might actually have an effect. Saying what AAA publishers and developers should do is pointless, not like they will ever read it.
“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.
I would argue the market for every kind of game is expanding. There’s a bigger market for Tetris now than there was in 1987, in terms of actual economic resources that could go into making Tetris profitably.
The Tetris market is a smaller percentage share of the overall gaming market, but in absolute terms it’s more money than it was in 1987.
That’s my suspicion at least.
Then the challenge is connecting that market slice with the dev shop that wants to serve that market slice. Which isn’t trivial. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind.
Every market is getting bigger, based on at least these four factors:
- More cultural acceptance of gaming
- Higher percentage of humanity achieving economic status where leisure becomes relevant
- Proliferation of technology to greater portion of humanity
- Expansion of human population
All markets are growing.
Heck, the market for COBOL programmers is larger today than ever before. That’s really interesting if you think about it.
Lethal company is literally just old school d&d tho
You go into dungeons, try to avoid all the monsters because they can kill you in one hit, get the treasure they protect and gold is xp.
Good story and fun replayability (to me that means branching story paths and discoverability) is tough to combine. I’m hopeful for generative AI’s ability to make good stories that are also unique. Real, in depth dialogue that stays in character, AI directors for new story paths, that kind of thing.
Drag wonders what you think of the feather collecting in A Short Hike
Pretty much what I've been saying for almost a decade, mostly in response to "game development is expensive, that's why AAA games need *insert extra revenue streams*". My response has always been that games are bloated with feature creep and if there was an actual issue with development costs the first thing you can cut are features that don't really add to the game. Not only do you cut development costs but you arguably make a better product.
Nice to get some validation because it's been a rather controversial opinion. People have argued nobody would buy AAA if it's not an open world with XP, skills and crafting. Or a competitive hero based online shooter with XP, unlockables, season pass and 5 different game modes. I guess now people don't buy those even if they are all those things
People have argued nobody would buy AAA if it’s not an open world with XP, skills and crafting.
See, I hate crafting systems. A game advertising its crafting system makes me less interested. Too many things to remember and the game grinds to a halt for several minutes while I navigate menus. Dragon Age Inquisition was particularly bad with entire sessions lost to inventory management. The Horizon games are bearable just because I can generate pointers to the stuff I need and I'm generally swimming in components anyway.
Space marine 2 seems like a good example of this.
Single player campaign: mediocre
CoOp missions: mediocre
Competitive multiplayer: poor
Seems like dropping one of those might have allowed the remaining two to earn a "pretty good"
It seems to be resonating pretty damn well for them. In fact, the competitive multiplayer has been praised for its simplicity and feeling a lot like the kind of multiplayer that we used to get so much of back in the 360 era.
Who praised them? But I don't know what measure we'd use to determine the general reception of this particular feature. Particularly given that almost all video game journalism is mere marketing. So that's probably not a fruitful point to argue over.
Instead I'll offer the things that I think earn the competitive multiplayer a poor rating.
- No skill or even experience based match making. Too many games are blowouts because all of the level 1 players were put on one team.
- Teams are static once a match lobby has formed. If the teams are poorly balanced they will continue to be forever. Players can't even switch voluntarily. The only remedy is to bail on the lobby and hop into a different random one.
- Classes and weapons are poorly balanced. The Bulwark is a key example of a too strong and not fun design. The Assault class, and melee in general is in a pretty poor state (unless you have an infinite defense shield that lets you walk up to people). Many of the weapon options for the classes are almost unusably weak, so class loadouts tend to be very samey. Grenades are spammy and the shock grenade blind duration is not fun.
- Players are randomly assigned Imperial or Chaos marines. But there is basically no character customization for the Chaos marines, while the Imperial marines have 5 or 6 different sets. Either the enemy team should always appear to be Chaos with their NPC style, or they should have included equivalent Chaos customization.
- Players have minimal control over which game modes they play. It's either 100% random or selecting a single mode. A configurable selection is a common multiplayer feature.
- Map design is bland. This is perhaps a more personal preference, but I find the symmetrical, arcade arenas with no narrative character boring.
Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.
Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.
If the argument is that SM2 is successful because it limited it's scope to execute a smaller number of features well, I don't think that holds up. It took on three different types of games and (imho) executed merely okay. What more could they have added? Open world? MMO?
I think the more plausible explanation for the sales is that it's Warhammer, it's pretty, and SM1 was good.