Happening At STFUandPLAY
•STFUandPLAY’s one year anniversary!
•Gamer Chat: Gameplay Or Story?
•Rachael hosts and posts Spoilercast #19. Writes Herculean BrBa Caps
•Microsoft Under Clocking Xbox One By 100-200mhz
•Konami Pre-E3 Event impressions
Featured Topic
•What we want/expect to see at E3 next week
Gaming News
•How games licensing works on Xbox One
•David Hayter is hating on Metal Gear Solid V
•Titanfall leak
•Sony to have over 40 games at E3
•Last Of Us reviews are stellar. MP details
•Dark Souls II coming March 2014. Getting Xbox exclusive content.
•Dark Souls II getting Xbox exclusive content
•Michael Pachter says PS4 will cost $349, Xbone $399
The story in part 3 of Sony Interactive Entertainment and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us series may explore a "congregation of immune people."
Former Naughty Dog artist Gabriel Betancourt explains why the "sweet spot" for game teams is under 200 people and how AAA "factories" kill creativity.
There’s definitely some truth to this. When teams get too large, coordination starts to outweigh creativity—layers of approval, risk aversion, and tight deadlines can turn bold ideas into “safe” ones. Keeping a team under ~200 people sounds ideal for maintaining clear communication and a shared vision. That said, massive AAA projects also come with huge technical demands and expectations, so scaling up isn’t always avoidable. The real challenge is figuring out how to keep that small-team creativity alive inside big studio structures.
More than that, it's logistically untenable. Inevitably, when teams get too large, how do you keep tabs on accountability? I suspect this massive team size is a consequence of the perfectionism streak Naughty Dog has.
I wish we could have so many people working on something and it turns out great because I'm all for collaboration in spirit - the problem is too many people as part of the larger team and smaller units. Suppose for example that you have too many people in the art department; you will very often come up against fiercely competing visions for how things should look. That competitive vision will cause friction between team members, team doesn't work as a unit, the back and forth can further delay parts that the other departments are waiting for, etc etc.
A 200-person team says, to me, that we need to scale back game development. Even if it means we go back to PS2 era costs and scale, why not? Those games are still great fun, the budgets were in check, and you could literally break the 200-man team into like 10 20-man teams working on different projects.
Over ten years after its release, does Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain still impress? Jump Dash Roll returns to Snake's world for this Brutal Backlog.
I don’t think I’ve ever quite experienced an unfinished game that was slapped together with duct tape and construction paper to be sold as a finished product, basically making you replay the same missions and include a story that clearly was missing so much of the plot, like I did with this game.
I’m actually shocked that it doesn’t get calls out for this more.
Love the Throwdown
And that Warzone with the Throwdown crew, Doc Gamer, Megajack's awesome accent, Tony yelling over Jon Shaw, Tor seemingly not realizing the open mic while busting his kid, and Tor's long lost 15 year old dad showing up and cussing him out was glorious :D