[AndriyKunitsyn]

Because technically, they didn't. As they say in the documentary, the version of the game that they made after the first year or so was bad, and they acknowledged it, and they changed their processes and introduced the "cabal" - so they basically paid that first year to gather experience. And what's important, their publisher Sierra was okay with it.

I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Budgets have gone through the roof, and the publisher won't give you a plan B, they will force the developer to duct-tape what they have and ship it no matter what. And the game can always be patched later, right?

[Cthulhu_]

> I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least.

Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of people (if you include outsourcing / engines / etc) for AAA titles today. And the modern day game devs will have enjoyed a relevant education, whereas back then those educations didn't exist yet. Notably, John Carmack did a lot of ground work in translating math into 3D video game engines; he was behind Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake, and the Quake engine was used as the basis for Half-Life's.

Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it, Hollow Knight's Team Cherry has just 3 employees (but they used Unity so they didn't have to do much engine programming, and the ports to various consoles was outsourced); Wube (Factorio) has had a few dozen people working on it. "indie" hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance had like 240 people working on it.

[masklinn]

> Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it

I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games.

That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.

[panopticon]

Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.

[philistine]

Exactly. Indie doesn't come from the word new, it comes from the word independent. Are you a team detached from the traditional large players in the industry. Yes? Then you're indie.

[bombcar]

Reading the Factorio blogs shows their progression from "developer" to "game developer" to "top-tier game developers" - it took years.

You could likely do the same today, but the key would be finding someone (like Gabe) to fund it whilst it got off the ground.

[kevinventullo]

With all due respect to the Factorio devs (it is one of my favorite games of all time and I credit them with essentially creating the genre), have they made even one other game?

[naikrovek]

number of games made does not correlate with game-making skills. They aren't coupled, anyway. It is probably much more correlated with game design skills, but that's not the context, here.

Their skill in honing the game and becoming a respected game development company are what are in question, and while not an AAA studio, they are recognized as a company that knows how to highly optimize their game.

They deserve as much respect as any other game developer, in my mind. Their approach is different than other game studios, and that alone is testament to their abilities to both make a game and run a business. They're doing things their own way, focusing on the one game (at least as far as we know) and they are still simply "killing it" and I mean that in the very best way.

[riffruff24]

I imagine you will see similar things with Icefrog, in their tenure as the custodian of DotA map in Warcraft 3. Balancing a competitive game is something that even Blizzard struggle with.

(well, Icefrog isn't burdened by the need for monetization.)

[tapoxi]

Today they ship in early access, which is a better approach since it opens you up to a ton of feedback. The most recent, and successful, example being Baldurs Gate 3.

[eur0pa]

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

[whywhywhywhy]

The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable.

The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2).

Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.

[Cthulhu_]

In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine.

But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took.

Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom.

But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks.

And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.

[thereddaikon]

I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.

[devnullbrain]

I see it as overspecialisation. When GTA 6 costs 10 years and a billion dollars, it needs to be an unmatched hit. But what if it's just bad on a conceptual level? More money can create more models, textures and 'content' but it can't create fun. For GTA 3, it would have been a setback for a year. For GTA 6, it could be fatal.

[bonton89]

I remember reading Bullfrog would take the engine from their last game and build a prototype to play to see if it was any fun. Then they'd throw it away and start over.

[Goronmon]

"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.

[devnullbrain]

Other games that released in 1998:

- Ocarina of Time

- Final Fantasy VII

- Baldur's Gate

- Starcraft

- Metal Gear Solid

- Resident Evil 2

- Pokemon Yellow

If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were:

- A Zelda game

- A Final Fantasy game

- A Resident Evil remake

- A Baldur's Gate game

[1123581321]

He is talking about first-person shooters.

If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time.

Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.

[kodt]

Unreal, Quake 2, Jedi Knight, System Shock 2, SiN, Blood 2, Hexen 2, Rainbow Six, Turok 1 & 2. There were a number of great FPS games available at the time.

[1123581321]

I did enjoy most of those games, but wouldn’t use them as examples of equivalents of Half-Life. Some did some things better than Half-Life but others were worse in every category and were superseded (e.g. Unreal.) Great list of memories!

[devnullbrain]

In 1998 we still called them Doom clones. Goldeneye didn't even use conventional twin-stick aiming. There's a reason there weren't many. How many non-Nintendo 3D platformers are there today?

[1123581321]

We were calling them first-person shooters by the mid 90s (though I also remember ___ clone.) Interesting recent thread about it on another forum: https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/our-favorite-old-magazine...

[masfoobar]

1998 was a great year for gaming... as a N64 and PC gamer (voodoo2 graphics)

[kipchak]

Thief, Sin, Shogo, Delta Force and Rainbox Six were 1998, and if you go out to 1999 there's system shock 2. 1997 had some classics also like Dark Forces II though they're more of the doom clone variety like Blood.

[kodt]

There were plenty of single player FPS games then. And I don't think anyone was arguing that Half-Life was an example of a 7/10 game. Quake 2 and Unreal were both games with great single player campaigns when Half-Life came out, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 didn't come out until the following year. Dark Forces II Jedi Knight is another good example.

[chungy]

Unreal Tournament didn't exist yet, and both Quake 1 and 2 were very much single-player focused games.

[sitzkrieg]

laughs in quakeworld

[Goronmon]

You know, I was wrong on this. I had forgotten how many games were available around that time. Plenty of competition was available in that space around when Half-Life was released.

[rib3ye]

Somehow audiences will respect effort vs resources as long as there is community outreach and the price makes sense.

There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience.

Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.

[devilbunny]

Goat Simulator is not a good or deep game, but I definitely got my $3 or whatever I paid out of it. It’s just mindless fun.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10

That's fighting talk round my way!

There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.

[leviathant]

Everything about Vampire Survivors made sense to me upon learning that it was developed by an Italian guy who used to work on slot machines. It also reinforced that I've been right to avoid casinos my whole life.

I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.

[riffruff24]

Same thing with Dead Cells and Slay the Spire. Many similar games but very few of them managed to imitate the delicate balance of carrot and stick.

[jimbob45]

no-effort art

In fairness, isn't is specifically meant to look like a ported Italian game with laughably incorrect translations?

[filoleg]

I suggest trying the new Robocop: Rogue City game. It is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of a 7/10 or AA type of a game, where it is just fun, solid, well done, has quite a great amount of soul in it. But isn’t aiming to be some do-it-all open world AAA michael bay type of an affair.

One of the most enjoyable games this year for me, and it says a lot (given how many amazing games of all kinds we got this year). And yet, it isn’t overly ambitious. Just overall, that’s pretty much the exact type of a game that you are talking about, which I’ve noticed we had an almost complete drought of over the past decade.

[bitcharmer]

Sadly today 9/10 just means the game is actually finished upon release.

[ajmurmann]

I think time and trust is so critical. I remember a talk by the people who made FoundationDB about their approach to testing. They spend a year just creating a variant of C++ that allowed them to control concurrent execution order and build a framework to simulate/mock network, disc access etc. It's incredible work and AFAIK more than paid for itself. Yet, at most places it would be impossible to get a year-long testing effort of that scale funded or really any engineering effort that produces nothing shippable. All too often you might get 3 months and after 2, a urgent product request comes up and the work sits and rots away till it's useless and nobody gets back to it

[hello281237]

Sierra is an interesting company. In the video game industry has very few well known female game designers, and that was even more true back then. Yet the adventure game genre had several - Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen, and Christy Marx (not as well known, but her games are well regarded), all of whom worked for Sierra. One has to wonder if Roberta Williams being co-owner of the company (and the designer of the first graphical adventure game) is one of the reasons for this.

Another interesting story is when Ken Williams (Roberta Williams husband, the other co-owner of the company) hired middle-aged retired police officer Jim Walls to design the Police Quest adventure games (he designed the first three). Ken apparently was talking to his hairdresser about his idea for a police adventure game, when she mentioned that Walls, her husband, might be an interesting person to talk to.

[bena]

If you're the only one willing to tap into a talent pool, you get to pump that resource as much as you want.

So if Sierra is the only company really willing to hire female game designers, they really get to take all the best.

[bzzzt]

I don't think others were not willing to hire female designers; some Infocom games from that time also had female authors. I think it's more to do with the time they started. Somewhere during the 80s the 'white male nerd' stereotype became a self-reinforcing thing which scared a lot of women away from everything computer-related. Also, I don't consider Sierra games 'the best designed'. Some of their games have lots of 'personality' and they were first with many innovations, but it's clear everyone was still figuring out how to design games at the time.