75e444 No.16051290
We all know stories about when Publishers like EA ruined a promising game's development, but what about other circumstances? There are thousands of games and no doubt plenty of stories about shit like retarded "fans", staff drama, natural disasters, and so on that end up wrecking a game's development, let's talk about some.
I'll start with a fairly well-known one, Heroes 3 - Armageddon's Blade. Heroes 3 is to this day still considered one of the greats, but man did its expansions get fucked. They had planned for the first expansion the Forge Town, which was a gritty dystopic sci-fi faction, that would have a bunch of monsters merged with machine. The idea here was that Might and Magic, the main RPG series that Heroes of Might and Magic is based on, had a bunch of sci-fi stuff, but most of it missed the Heroes spin-off due to circumstance, so this would allow them to bring that aspect of the series to the spin-off. The problem was that Heroes fans at the time (Not many but enough to sperg out) sperged out about sci-fi in their fantasy game and sent death threats, petitions, and other gay shit, enough to make a few staff quit and force them to scrap the town despite it being almost done and rush a new town that was planned for a later expansion. This is why Conflux is an unbalanced and awkward mess, and why many parts of the expansion feel rushed.
With the fact that Heroes 3 is to this day still played often, it's curious to think how different it would have turned out if its dev had been able to deliver on their original vision unfettered.
e3685e No.16051293
Did Jagex have a publisher they answered to? If not, Runescape "3".
e67ca1 No.16051297
man this looked so cool, why do people have to such fucking spergs
dddce5 No.16051301
>tank
i'd still hit it. Cyber zombie looks cool too.
c6c836 No.16051307
Funny enough a game called Disaster Report 4 was delayed and it's developer essentially folded because of an earthquake.
381c99 No.16051318
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
I recently finished Demon's Souls and found out the entire 6th world was completely scrapped despite having the entire level geometry finished, completed assets, with models and animations for all of the monsters that would be in it.
I have no idea why this is. The jewtube comments only gave me conflicting rumours, like it not fitting "Miyazaki's vision" or whatever.
If you could mod the game, you could arguably make the world because all you'd be doing is placing assets on the map and adding polish.
>>16051297
It would have been a very awkward fit.
HoMM3 worked much better as a pure fantasy game, despite the lore in the M&M games.
612ac9 No.16051331
>devs giving in to the vocal minority
always fucks up a game beyond saving, also devs may be faggots themselves or just 1 guy is a faggot but also happens to be the boss like what happened with duke nukem forever and the entire MGS series
d5fd2e No.16051403
>>16051331
>devs giving in to the vocal minority
>devs giving in to the vocal majority
>devs giving in to the publishers
>devs giving in to videogame journalist
>devs giving in to outrage
>devs giving in to retard front man
Devs making stupid decisions because of outside influences are always humanities biggest crime. A dev should be able to make a game and make decent decisions without being swayed, because they know what kind of game to make and how to make it.that is the choice they wanted to make. Vocal minority/majority is bullshit; did the people arguing have a decent argument is the question.
And no I'm not giving a shit about devs who have sold their soul to AAA giants who forced them to make shit decisions, most of those games nowadays aren't worth a shit. This was the bed they've made and they get to lie in it.
f5d143 No.16051419
>>16051290
It's a shame, but I like Conflux too. It was easy to balance, that one legit mod with multiplayer cuts the phoenix growth.
a6b77c No.16051467
>>16051318
They wanted the 6th world as DLC but scrapped it due sales.
118782 No.16051474
>>16051419
The real unbalanced thing about Conflux are the Level 2 Storm Elementals. Can clear most of the map with just them - no other town can do that with their own Level 2.
d3c40a No.16051562
It still hurts, but serves me right for trusting (((KikeZ))), at least his halfling art goblin makes quality shit.
8fe811 No.16051760
>>16051290
The cucks making Ion Maiden completely changed her design because a sexy female triggered the soy in their blood.
65c78d No.16051817
>>16051290
Might & Magic 7 evil ending that was cannonical for the planned Forge town
c4bd85 No.16051830
>>16051290
Fuck, I remember this, I've seen this concept art in print after Armageddon's Blade was announced. I stopped playing HoMM around that time so I thought all this stuff made it in. M&M always had aliens and sci-fi shit though, I don't get why they sperged out all of a sudden?
570dd3 No.16051849
I was young when the Forge drama happened, but I played a lot of hot-seat MP with my brother and cousin at holidays and remember them showing me the town pic and telling me it was a bunch of Soccer moms pulling a "think of the children" that got it cancelled. Fuck, this pisses me off.
23b4a0 No.16052149
>>16051331
So how's the Duke 3D mod that recreates DNF based on the old trailers?
f5d143 No.16052214
>>16051331
What's the story behind it? Never paid attention to Duke Nukem.
612ac9 No.16052232
>>16052214
>DNF gets 90% made
>broussard changes the engine
>DNF gets 90% made
>broussard changes the engine
>DNF gets remade again
>something something randy pitchford
>releases on 2011 despite being half finished since 2006
0b1e91 No.16052282
>>16051290
Good. I hate sci-fi and it didn't mesh with the aesthetic of HoMM 3. A rare case of removing shit being good for the game
adafbb No.16052337
Wonder how this would have effected Dark Messiah if it got made.
c7ec17 No.16052379
>>16052232
>that win10 border
oh you cheeky cunt
still hurts though
1a4936 No.16052406
>>16052282
Absolutely this. It looks silly as fuck and when you compare it to the rest of the castles it really sticks out. Sometimes the dev's really don't know what is best for the game.
381c99 No.16052407
>>16052337
Not at all because Dark Messiah is set in the universe of Heroes 5, which is new and has nothing to do with 3 or 4.
>>16051467
>we're going to withhold this content so we can make more money
>oh no our game didn't sell
>I guess we'll never make it then
What a joke.
612ac9 No.16052415
>>16052379
yep, im still waiting for some faggot to leak it
adafbb No.16052432
>>16052407
Yeah, but from the sound of it the spergout is why Ashan has none of the sci-fi stuff from old M&M.
381c99 No.16052453
>>16052432
I think it has more to do with the devs wanting to cut ties with the old lore which had probably become a bit bloated by that point and a story that lost all focus a long time ago.
Don't forget that the Might and Magic series has about 10 games if not more and 4 heroes games.
In comparison, HoMM5 lore and story are pretty generic, but they have some interesting twists here and there.
Being able to dump the sci-fi part of the setting was probably a secondary convenience to them.
8fe811 No.16052508
>>16052232
Pitchford is still a piece of shit for not releasing the old builds of DNF into the public.
612ac9 No.16052582
>>16052508
you think the new owners of duke will release the builds? i doubt randy will still have the rights after the shit show of terrible games, getting swindeled 2+ million and being investigated for CP
5d27a7 No.16052594
>>16052282
SF elements (VARN's, cyborgs, laser pistols, Kreegans actually being aliens from space) were always a part of this universe and that's exactly what made it unique. Without them it's just a generic, bland Tolkien-esque fantasy, and it's not a reason why HOMM is an immortal classic. Inclusion of Forge wouldn't have changed anything for worse.
c4bd85 No.16052627
>>16052594
All true what you just said, but mind that out of the original WRPG lineup of Ultima, Wizardry and M&M, all three had sci-fi elements and M&M was still the most generic, by far.
b29801 No.16053227
>>16051467
>>16052407
Bullshit, Demon's souls sold far better than ever anticipated. You guys don't even remember that it was brought over to the west thanks to the amount of people importing Japanese copies?
bf3bda No.16053246
Lots of people assumed it was due to EA was why Alice Madness Returns was so rushed and incomplete, but when Mcgee did his AMA here he said it was just because of the dev team running out time and not because of EA meddling. Though whether that was him trying to cover for EA for that third game I don't know.
381c99 No.16053265
>>16053227
Well, I never said I knew, I specifically asked why they never finished the 6th world.
3591da No.16053295
>>16052594
>sci-fi elements in a sword and sorcery setting makes it unique
Practically every fucking gaming fantasy IP does this shit.
adafbb No.16053582
>>16052582
Depends on who it is. THQ Nordic? Absolutely. EA/Activison/Whatever? Not a fucking chance.
597d5a No.16053692
>>16051562
Annie never EVER.
cf44e5 No.16055251
>>16052407
>Dark Messiah
Somebody post those webms. I've lost them.
c8dc89 No.16055383
>>16051760
How is the game anyways? I've never had the drive to go and find the preview campaign. Also do you mind giving more details?
a01fef No.16055421
>>16052594
Well then it's a good thing that the HoMM series is separate from MM. I remember how immersion breaking it was seeing a space ship and laser pistols in my high fantasy game. It sucked in 7 if I remember and it would've sucked in H3. Adding cyborgs and tanks to a world with ferries and dragons is like adding ketchup on tuna. Forge is generic as fuck sci-fi. When you put that in a generic as fuck high fantasy setting you don't get a masterpiece, you get a turd with no artistic cohesion.
514f85 No.16055785
>>16051290
The Forge faction was a stupid idea in HoMM 3, and I'm glad it was removed.
514f85 No.16055801
>tfw almost finished Shadow of Death on Impossible difficulty
Get on my level, scrubs.
a34ff1 No.16055890
>>16051562
>>16053692
MikeZ and mismanagement aside, didn't they get fucked pretty hard by their publisher in the first place?
263be8 No.16057439
Anything good that came from the previous games was neutered in this installment.
c6c836 No.16057449
>>16057439
I'm still amazed they couldn't pull of grappling with as much freedom as Ocarina of Time. What a joke.
8343ae No.16057457
>>16051403
People have lost the art of ignoring non-constructive criticism. Social media makes that even worse. Nothing like having an entire industry dance for tweets that don't have more than 5 likes/retweets.
c6c836 No.16057466
>>16057457
Half the time I think it's the developers sockpuppeting to excuse doing less work. You rarely ever see them cave in to demands to add shit but you always see them do it when it's about taking something out or axing a work in progress.
aa94c8 No.16058076
>>16052232
Duke Nukem 3D was the product of a team less technically capable than Id Software, who they saw as their main competitor at the time.
Specifically, DN3D had an inferior engine to Quake. Quake got all the 3D in, while the Duke was still using 2D sprites. It didn't matter that the sprites were great, the team had to play catch up.
What happened is that they made real advancents in development, but kept finding out that there were technically superior games being released at the time they were still working on their stuff.
Now, DN3D was technically inferior to Quake, but it was still a goddamn gorgeous game for its time, and fun as hell. They might have been technically inferior but they were fucking creative and did understand fun very well.
Had they played to their strengths instead of getting stuck in their weaknesses, they could probably have released a relatively ugly DNF that hit all the fun spots all the other games at the time were not hitting.
The team wanted the game to be bleeding edge technology, but all they needed to deliver was fun.
c4bd85 No.16058182
>>16058076
Duke Forever was a red herring. They were coming up with design ideas that would be utterly impossible for consumer PCs. Have you seen the Prey or Max Payne prototypes? They had a whole lineup of games that couldn't be released to the market.
cc9fd1 No.16058191
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16051290
Forge Town was fucking retarded and removing it was as sensible as removing the ugly nigger horse from fantasia.
d0df04 No.16058210
>>16058191
I agree with you that the version without the black horse is better. The scene is just more wholesome, there's less cluttered emphasis of the scene on this less important character. Not to mention the character clashes with the rest of the color scheme. If I was the director for this film I would have removed it regardless of censorship.
9e3602 No.16058223
>>16052337
Dark Messiah was made and released though.
d1455f No.16058238
>>16058191
>>16058210
Sunflower's presence was a reflection of the times; many black people found themselves in the service industry in the 1930s.
She may seem out of place but ancient Greece did have contact with Africa. If anything's really wrong with her it's that she's not a zebrataur
6bf905 No.16058346
>>16051318
If you were to ask me, the reason the Giant Archstone never made it in was because the entire game was an atrocious stinker midway through development. Some of the earliest footage shows it as being, succinctly, slow. Really slow. Slower than King's Field, but in third person, in Demon's Souls relatively large maps, with seemingly no run function. The entire game was a complete mess, basically a writeoff. That's how the newcomer nobody Miyazaki was able to come on and say, 'Hey, can I take the reins on this?' After which he unfucked it by speeding things up a bit.
But it was still probably considered a write-off up to its becoming a cult hit and surprise mass import purchase on release; as a result, cuts had to be made for time and budget. Yes, they finished lots of enemy assets and the basic pre-alpha level frameworks. But there presumably wasn't time to do everything they wanted to do, especially since the game had to be fished out of the shit and re-railed in the first place. One of the worlds has to go. Which one is the least finished and (probably?) never got trailer footage? The Giant Archstone. Into obscurity it goes, with only dummied out assets that might not even be the most modern versions left in the final build.
Alternatively, the ingame/manual explanation I remember is that the North was so fucked up and monster filled thanks to the Giants being Giants that the Nexus dwellers decided to destroy the Archstone to prevent it from becoming a horrible meatgrinder. This might've been a funny way of communicating, 'our internal test versions were too fucking hard,' which is ironic considering how the series ended up in a kind of anti-player arms race to make sure the same old tricks got progressively harder to exploit.
Personally, my question is 'why'd they keep getting fucked for time and/or money after Demon's Souls?' They proved their stuff then and more after. Beside some different quests and NPC placements, and dialogue that was fully recorded but unused, Dark Souls was never supposed to have a DLC, the Oolacile content was meant to be in the base game with a pre-DLC rump of data left over. Dark Souls 2 allegedly had management/production problems under Shibuya that led to a reshuffle by Tanimura, but it seems like the entire game and its original time-centric plot was garbled as a result, with the Ashen Mist segments and the Emerald Heralds' sudden voice change in the Aerie as the only remnant of this. Dark Souls 3 had a couple Izalith like mesh oversights here and there and absolutely huge changes from the initial vision of the leaked screenshots, for who knows what reason. Maybe just because it leaked to begin with? Bloodborne's earliest footage had some totally orphaned things like the soul sword animation with Demon's Souls looking particles, and datamining revealed all kinds of interesting enemies and assets, like more Watchdog style chaosy demons and demon tainted people, or temple knight werewolves. How do they keep ending up with so much unused stuff on seemingly rushed schedules? Is it FromSoft, or publisher dickery?
aa94c8 No.16058415
>>16058182
They were utterly impossible because they depended on a higher level of genius than they had in their team. There might have been a studio or two capable of pulling those games off, but it wasn't 3D Realms.
They lacked the ability to properly assess their skill level and work within it or at least target a level they could have grown to.
There are so many fucking great games that are in no way technical marvels and might even be technical clusterfucks, and that's what they failed to recognize.
Of course, I'm placing the blame on them but the reason might also have been some retarded investor not understanding the kind of asset he had and just wanting to copy another's exact success path rather than think a bit harder and forge a viable success path.
e521f8 No.16058430
>>16055383
It's pretty damn good honestly.
4c4632 No.16058448
>>16051290
Robocraft has no publisher, so it could only have been the fault of one group.
By the way they got Tencent to start publishing in China.
eae94f No.16058468
>>16058448
wasnt tencent chinese the whole time? or are you saying theyre partnering with tencent to post mighjt and magic games in chiny
4c4632 No.16058508
>>16058468
You seem a bit confused, I don't think I can answer your question.
414490 No.16058536
>>16051403
>A dev should be able to make a game and make decent decisions without being swayed, because they know what kind of game to make and how to make it.that is the choice they wanted to make
tbh i've never been a huge fan of this when done to excess. it helps to have devs work under a little bit of publisher pressure because it activates some kind of subversive creativity. most of my examples are from television, but there are a lot of time where they made arbitrary little changes that did no harm because they knew something was good and were going to fight tooth and nail to keep it. the devs don't just create perfect ideas off the cuff, ideas almost invariably need refinement and even arbitrary challenges from uneducated publishers can be a good thing if they help the developers refine the core concept.
it's almost inevitably a little disappointing when you're given everything you want without having to fight for it.
a28634 No.16058547
>>16058536
You just described every kickstarter/patreon project. It's proven time and time again that people under pressure will produce the best work.
cc9fd1 No.16058557
Here's a based developer that does whatever it wants and doesn't give a fuck about the opinions of nerds.
381c99 No.16058818
>>16058346
Interesting.
In the end, it's probably better that they scrapped it if they were so short on time. It's better to have less, more polished content than to have an unfinished mess.
>Some of the earliest footage shows it as being, succinctly, slow
Do you have any videos?
I tried searching for this on jewtube, but found nothing.
It's also a bit strange that they were having time constraints after the massive success of DaS.
It sounds more like they were throwing in ideas that sounded good, but then couldn't easily go through with them rather than publisher fuckery.