Lazy developers

Copypasta. Ain't the 2 CODS a bit similar?

 

I think you meant to type "every modern FPS game"

 

No one on this forum is allowed to call actual professional game developers with deadlines to meet and higher ups to answer to lazy. Also wow jeez I had no idea Call of Duty games where similar. You sir are an original thinker contributing new things to very big discussions.

 

No one on this forum is allowed to call actual professional game developers with deadlines to meet and higher ups to answer to lazy.

Uh, yeah we are. These are "professional" game developers. If anything we should hold them to a higher standard than ourselves.

 

We can critique their work all we want. But going out and specifically targeting a person in a team of 40 people with no experience there and calling them lazy is stupid. Call of Duty is a cash in and we all know it but the opinion should be held for the game and not the stressed individuals you know nothing about. The product should be viewed with a separation from its creator. See Phil Fish.

 

Yeah, that does look pretty similar.

Well, at least they have a few new maps and slightly better graphics. That's always good.

 

We can critique their work all we want. But going out and specifically targeting a person in a team of 40 people with no experience there and calling them lazy is stupid. Call of Duty is a cash in and we all know it but the opinion should be held for the game and not the stressed individuals you know nothing about. The product should be viewed with a separation from its creator. See Phil Fish.

I don't know about you, but I think people should, and inherently do, take responsibility for their creations or projects they are involved in. I guess we can't say whether or not it was the devs' decision to reuse that animation, but it is a sign of laziness, regardless.

 

Yeah, that does look pretty similar.
Well, at least they have a few new maps and slightly better graphics. That's always good.

Problem with it though, is that anyone, with enough skill and the right software, can simply edit stock cut scenes from previous work, and that's what it looks like here.
It wouldn't surprise me if these weren't just similar, but had the same source as well, with the same software and engine, only with some partial edits to the aesthetics.
I'm not one to harp on CoD (Albeit I despise the fanboys with a burning passion), but I'd be completely lying if I didn't admit a great deal of games in the industry, especially sequels are made "on the cheap"
As Matt said, yes, it could be considered hypocritical of anyone here to call the development companies "lazy" especially with all the standards they meet, but that's no excuse for a noticeable conveyance of laziness shown in developing some of these games.

I'm looking at you, Dawn of Sorrow and Mario Galaxy 2.

 

Problem with it though, is that anyone, with enough skill and the right software, can simply edit stock cut scenes from previous work, and that's what it looks like here.

Yeah, I assumed that. 10/10 job, guys.

 

Why take a risk with original ideas that may be a waste of money when you could simply churn out slightly updated sequels to existing franchises for bucketloads of money... at least until stagnation becomes rife and the 3rd great videogame crash takes place.

 

What was the second one?

 

No one on this forum is allowed to call actual professional game developers with deadlines to meet and higher ups to answer to lazy.

"Professional game developer" involves being given one task to do, do that task, move on to the next task, like clockwork. Slap the end result together and fire everyone who does the actual work (especially testers), except the art designers*. Hire/rehire new "professional game developers" and repeat for the next one.

*This is why all modern games look the same.

 

What was the second one?

I suspect that your question needs to be revised to "What was the first one?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games#Video_game_crash_of_1977
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

 

No one on this forum is allowed to call actual professional game developers with deadlines to meet and higher ups to answer to lazy.

I am a professional too with deadlines to meet (sometimes 60 patients to see in 5 hours, you have 1 for every 5 mins, but some require more time so all deadline goes to hell). So if I take shortcuts and do not listen the lung sounds or look at the skin and miss a skin cancer I am not lazy? "I am sorry that I overlooked your infarction/cancer but you know how it is m8, time flies and I just don't care". We are required to work overtime for free if we do not manage to end all work by time - giving enough time for examination even with that cost. I earn around 650 dollars a month and our salary will drop soon, but there is big money in gaming. Every day I work 1-2 hours for free. I think that every professional is responsible for the quality of his work and you cannot call bad work good because one is a so called "professional".

Of course not every member of the CoD team is lazy, but there is the guy who made the animation and the team called "quality control" in video games, not the ones who made the music for example, etc.

 

Because being lazy in a video game studio and being lazy in a medical work environment are the same thing.

It is not good habit to call out personal shit on people you don't know. And since you aren't a 3d animator, or story board artist, or level designer, or audio technician, or voice actor, or producer, then how would you know what work went into those two scenes. If the animation was blatently reused or recreated then what is a reason other than laziness? Perhaps that's the only way they know to portray that scene while keeping both characters in shot, or perhaps that design allows them to slow down animations to accommodate for multi language dialogue, or perhaps they ran close to deadline and needed something there rather than nothing, or maybe the campaign mode got less of a budget to work with all around and they needed to make shortcuts. Say what you want but the people in that studio probably were running around working their asses off until the last minute.

The issue with the game was whoever was in charge. Everyone there is probably capable of making something a lot more interesting than what cane out, but a game studio is a hierarchy and everyone is subject to working with the work of those above them and having everything subject to review by a director who pushes everything in one direction. This is how 95% of large game studios work and tbh stagnation like this is probably a direct result of both the system and the fact that the consumer encourages such shitty behavior by buying these products and pre ordering them. It is a way more vastly and stupidly complex issue than "omg look how lazy that animator was"

 

If you White Knighted any harder, Tite Kubo would have to change the name of his manga to compensate.

Because being lazy in a video game studio and being lazy in a medical work environment are the same thing.

Funny you should say that.

 

The issue with the game was whoever was in charge.

You do realize there are these people that are called "Head developers" or "Producers" and that these are also part of the development team, right? And hence could be called "developers"? Since they probably made the decision that reusing the animation was okay.

And if they were "working their asses off to meet a deadline", well then that's their fucking problem. Clearly then they underestimated the time needed to make a good product and/or just wanted to slap together another game to cash in quick.

But really, Matt, no one here cares about the "Animator" here. No one cares about the grunt who was hired to do the bidding of the people directing the game. We're calling whoever made this decision "lazy". And this isn't calling "personal shit" on people we don't know, because this isn't "personal shit". Calling some unspecific person/set of people "lazy" because they did their job sloppily isn't a personal comment.

I hate to agree with ZT here, but you really are white knighting hard. It makes me feel like *you* are taking this comment personally.

 

"You aren't a /whatever/, what do you know about the work they put into it?"

Little. In all honesty, it's not our occupation...but that doesn't mean it isn't lazy.

You know what, if you look at it from a certain way, CoD is awesome. It has fair animation, level design, story, music. It's well built and professional. (Probably, I don't play many first person shooters. But it's not like CoD is a horrible, unplayable, buggy mess.) But it's still lazy. Something can have real work put into it, and have lots of quality in it, and still be lazy. The things in it are decent, but they're just reiterations of past things, unoriginal new content. All those animators and storyboard artists are doing their job and doing it well enough. But on a creative side of things, it's still indolent, and exactly what the others in this thread accuse it of being.

And an animator reusing an animation is only a shade above laziness. If it's not broken, don't fix it - understandable enough if time is short. That's more of a gray area - on the one hand, it's still a lack of working, and deadlines don't entirely absolve that. On the other, maybe it doesn't even matter, and that animator is just one part of a bigger problem. But the people at the top who push more of the same for huge amounts of profit, and the producers and top developers who don't mind or even encourage laziness - their actions are totally slothful. Maybe consumers reward more of the same. But again, that doesn't totally justify such decisions.

It's not a personal thing of "this guy was lazy", but a more general thing of "this decision/model/animation, regard of who made it, is lazy."

 

I agree with Polaris, in a way.
It's not easy for someone to make a perfect animation for a game. But the animation in that first game is clearly a decent animation, which shows that they're capable of making a good animation. There may have been tons of effort put into that first one, and maybe they didn't want to do something that hard, but it shows that they are perfectly capable of making something good, and there's no reason they shouldn't do that again, rather than just do something without any real creativity or originality.
Although I do wonder, what was this thread for? Was it to share that video? Or for us to generally discuss this topic?

 

Well I'm sorry to misinterpret what you say as attacks on people's characters but it's an easy mistake to make when you compare being lazy in a game studio to being lazy where it could get someone killed. Honestly I have a list of reasons the Call of Duty franchise is poison but I'd rather play Devil's Advocate here and talk about the more complex issues of the matter then sit around talking bout how much cods sucks or how lazy it's reuse of assets and animations and sounds are. Not liking Call of Duty isn't a super productive thing.

On the note of reuse of animations. They might consider that style of animation a staple of the series. It's not uncommon to reuse things like the throughout sequels to try and give the game's a similar feel when working with all those other titles. Link always pulls the master sword out of it's pedestal in a certain way and there are probably way more examples like that. Or maybe it's all just bullshit hell if I know.

I'd appreciate someone not just saying I'm trying to be a hero or anything here because that's a damn stupid personal attack to make in a discussion. Lord forbid I disagree with calling people lazy or whatever. It's honestly the most frustrating thing in the world to have a conversation with someone and then be called something or labeled as if to say, "As a result of this label nothing you have or will say about this will be right. You are just white knighting."