This week, despite it being a pre-E3 podcast, Phil and Tom continue their multiple-hour-over-several-eps discussions of both the Xbox One and Deadly Premonition—gasp! But Tom has finished Deadly Premonition, and so ends an era.
Metal Gear Solid 5, the drunken escapades of Katsuhiro Harada, The Last of Us and its terrible; great reviews, Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Rolf Harris all make the cut as well.
Most importantly GameUnder's anonymous source lets you know exactly what's going to happen at this year's E3.
We also open our lines to our listeners, and take a live call from George in Cyprus. If anyone else wants to chat to us on air; just call in! Or at least leave a comment.
And in what is surely a world first, Tom provides first impressions and final thoughts of the same game in the same podcast: Remember Me!
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.
