Lijik wrote:Um what? The people behind Castle Crashers have been making games and doing animation for well over a decade. The programmer for that game founded Newgrounds.(Back in 1995 if you didn't know). Johnathon Blow also had several small projects he did for few years before making Braid. Those are also 2d games made by smaller teams, which are easier to make look good than a 3d game as the art gets touched by less hands. The concept artist and the animator tend to be the same person in a 2d game. In a 3d game (especially with a larger team of people where you have seperate people doing each job), you've got a concept artist (or several), modellers, riggers, texture artists and animators. For a first time team at the size I'm assuming this one is it is much harder to coordinate a clear artistic vision among multiple people.
No, I completely know about all of those creators, which is why I brought it up. They are not veterans of the professional world, which is a whole different animal. Just because they have had personal projects in the past, including the Newgrounds website (which includes many ugly and badly made games by Fulp), they aren't anywhere close to the time, experience, and variety some of the people at Ubisoft have dealt with working there. Tom Fulp, Jonathan Blow, and Dan Paladin are not equal to the links of Ancel, Raynal, or Mechner (who was usurped by Guyot as Creative Director when Ubisoft pissed him off). Sorry to burst your bubble, but people that work mainly in Flash and more rudimentary C++ coding without dealing directly with 3D engines are still experienced but in no way veterans, especially of commerically made games.
I work at a game studio myself and every programmer and artist here has their own pet projects dating back decades, myself included. None of that means I am a hardened veteran or necessarily anyone else I work with is. I am also aware of all of those jobs and what they entail, so you don't need to talk down to me as I probably know more about how they work than you. None of the small studios and people I named earlier have worked on huge teams and dealt with outsourcing or intense graphics, programming, and international marketing. None of that is bad but it's all a part of being a "hardened veteran."
You can be a good cook at home and make "professional looking" meals, but once you take the step into the commercial world and start presenting your meals at a restaurant, you are in a completely different game.
Whether you need to make excuses for whether the Acadeny of Champions team can coordinate a "clear artistic vision" or not does not matter me. The end product is what matters more than anything, no matter how new or big your team is. This game looks like shit. Sorry, them's the breaks. Ubisoft is a multinational gaming corporation that has the resources and the talent and they are more than able to hire a good capable art director (veteran or not) to spice up some spin off soccer game. What more than likely is going on here is a budget made release that will make some quick bucks rather than Ubisoft making great use of it's great talent on staff. Whatever it's a dumb spin off soccer game, but they could certainly at least make it look nice in the process. I could sit here and design 16 characters with more life than these guys and model them nice in 3D and I've only been in the industry 3 years now. This game is desperately in need of talent and direction and (not that I really care) even then, it sucks they drag their "mascots" into it, that is my point.
Lijik wrote:This tripe is whats funding things like Ancel's creations. If you'll also notice, Ubisoft as a whole is a lot more secretive than they used to be. Back in the mid 90s they showed off anything and everything. There were magazine articles over the original 2d version of Rayman 2 and an early version of Tonic Trouble. Nowadays we don't see much from them until its close to completion. For example, most of Ancel's team had been working on Rabbids go Home since RRR1 was wrapped up but we didn't hear anything about until three years later. BG&E2 is an incredibly ambitious title thats going to take a long time before we see anything of it. Just because he's not showing anything doesn't mean hes not doing something. (unless you're trying to stealth troll that BG&E2 isn't important)
Sorry, wrong. Ancel is directly responsible for Ubisoft's initial success and growth in the 90s and furthermore it sounds like you have no idea how games are developed, since you are going on about Ubisoft's alleged secrecy, which is irrelevant, than actually addressing the issue of what the company is now and how they present themselves and their games. Beyond Good and Evil *will* die if there is no sequel finished soon. People will forget there is even a first game. One of the big rules about marketing is following through.
I will pull you a very important quote about Ron Gilbert's success in the video games industry:
"I remember a meeting once, right after the original Backyard Baseball shipped.
It wasn't selling like Putt-Putt or Freddi. Someone suggested that HE should just stick to adventure games. Let's bury Backyard Baseball and forget it ever happened.
But Ron Gilbert said something like, "No. We have to do 3 of these (Baseball, Soccer, Football) before we think about giving up. We can't give up now." And so when everyone else wanted to cut bait after 1 failed product, Ron wanted to do 2 more! So HE took a gamble, and with the release of BYFootball, the whole line took off, eventually surpassing the extremely successful Junior Adventure line.
No one at Infogramatari ever had the balls or vision to take such a stand. So HE died a slow, whimpering death at the hands of those who were too afraid to evolve, innovate, reinvent.
So say what you will about Ron. Sure his jokes are sometimes lame. His personal hygiene leaves much to be desired. But the man actually put his neck on the line (probably many more times than I even know), which is much more than I can say about any of the losers that eventually killed his company."
Ubisoft has quit the business of following through on anything other than the new moneymakers, cheap outsourced ports and handhelds, and their licenses while almost completely forgetting their original IP and developers that made the company what it is now. If Beyond Good and Evil were important to the company, it would be in *full* development and stated that way three years ago. Shaun White Snowboarding be damned and Assassin's Creed was obviously undeveloped and overhyped if you pay attention to critical reviews over out of 10 numbers and sales. Right now it's more than obvious Ancel and his small team are on the payroll as an asset of respect rather than an actual investment in the ideas the man has. Can you argue against that?
Also, it appears you have not been paying attention, but Ancel was widely reported as unhappy with the Rabbids and refused to support the game as it came out. He threatened to quit and in turn Ubisoft consoled him by giving his Beyond Good and Evil 2 development a thumbs up after saying publicly numerous times that they cannot support a sequel to the game while openly admitting they did not even properly market it in the first place. They are repeating themselves yet again with their new statements.
So who's the troll now?
You can't deny how popular the Rabbids have proved to be... (it kills me to say that.)
).
