And yet the forefront of games development is in Britain, it seems.
FD should increase size of the team developing ED
- Thread starter Cmdr Eagleboy
- Start date
And yet the forefront of games development is in Britain, it seems.
Nice anecdote. Looking at the lists of games respectively developed in United Kingdom and Germany, the former has objectively released many more successful gaming franchises of higher quality, with standout series like: Elite, Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Football Manager, Total War, Burnout, Forza Horizon, Formula 1, Wipeout, Worms, and Sniper Elite.
What can I say, for example CD Projekt Red could outdo Elite devs several times with the same amount of staff members coupled with their management.
Quantity of people in FD staff will not amount to quality. That's why I said that I feel that management in FD is the main problem.
P.S. I would bet that the better examples: Tomb Raider, Total War, GTA, Forza most likely were massively outsourced.
Most likely those games were developed in UK as being a headquarters while other studios from other countries of those companies were involved.
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CDP do RPGs in are carefully handcrafted worlds. FD does sim like games. Completely different genres.
As always, fact that you don't like game has hardly to do with capacities of developers.
What games don't I like, please enlighten with this personal argument?
Rafe Zetter
Banned
There are currently 17 job vacancies at FD .... and two are for QA audio, who says FD doesn't listen?
Question : how long have those vacancies been there?
advertising vacancies doesn't equal hiring
just saying....
Question : how long have those vacancies been there?
advertising vacancies doesn't equal hiring
just saying....
Quality of potential candidates is possibly more important though...
Rafe Zetter
Banned
Funny. But ....
There are 9 programming vacancies.
There are zero design vacancies.:O
And yet a few - many? - forum posters seem to say there is a lack of design skills as exhibited by what is in Elite Dangerous.
How many games designers does FDev have? Too few or too many?
if they have enough designers then theres a major disconnect between what they are saying (if they are any good, that's not a given by any means) and what the programmers do with those mandates.
Visually ED is stunning and sound is also extremely good - but that just puts it in the same place as the game "Abzu".
That's a bit of an assumption. Even a little Google-Fu would tell you much about the companies involved
Rafe Zetter
Banned
Can you honestly say CQC was designed well? What about C&P. Multicrew? Powerplay?..... Surely Cmdr bounty hunting is a well designed profession, right? Oh, yeah, instancing issues.
How about the BGS and the economy working in harmonic symbiosis..
ok lets try another - the Thargoids - yeah that's the one, where everyone in the game universe has to watch thier backs in case they get..... err oh, yeah you can entirely ignore them altogether...
the UI tools are excell.... wait, nope still leans heavily on 3d party apps.
Galnet - the ingame news service of important events nearby? oh.. not ingame.
A bit of help here anyone?
Wings? surely the P2P wing system is bombproof and works every time....
what do you mean, NO? Oh, yeah, instancing issues, again.
Caveat - never designed a game in my life, only dabbled in code years ago, most I do now is mess around with game mods under the hood, but yeah, what do I know about anything?
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Fact checking is helpful, I find.
CD Projekt Red are based in Poland, not Germany.
Your P.S.'s bet would amount to a loss - all the following devhouses are British:
- Eight Tomb Raiders from 1996's original to 2003's Angel Of Darkness are by devs Core Design.
- Total War series of games are by devs Creative Assembly
- Grand Theft Autos 1 to 5 are by devs Rockstar North (formally DMA Design), with assistance from other Rockstar studios.
- Forza Horizons series of games are by Playground Games (fun news: earlier this year I was Best Man for the wedding of one of PGG's devs, whom I've known since we were 3yr old)
Fact checking is helpful, I find.Question : how long have those vacancies been there?
advertising vacancies doesn't equal hiring
just saying....
FDev's employee count has grown from around 260 at Elite Dangerous' release to 380 this summer.
David Braben's interview said:
Yes, but as I'm sure you are aware, the mythical man month is essentially an application of 'the law of diminishing returns' (or 'too many cooks') after a certain, optimal, size of team is reached. Unskilled/unfamiliar staff hamper progress and clear lines of communication can be lost. However, *Before* you get to that point, *if* the staff are already familiar with the code base, or add a needed specialisation, you *do* get greater output. If I have to do a simple 'rote' task, e.g. picking crops from a field, you can bet I'm not going to want to do it all by myself. Likewise, if I need to do something out of my capabilities, like doing some plumbing, I'm going to get better results be getting a specialist in. Dammit Context! Stop being King!
So the question really should be 'is Elite sufficiently resourced'? And only Frontier's management and HR department can answer that one. And their answer will be different to what we, the unwashed masses, think should be the answer to yield the outputs we desire, to the timescales we yearn for, in our selfish, avaricious, hungry little hearts.
Yes, of course. But how many games/projects were Frontier developping when they were +240 in 2013-14, and how many today in 2018-19, when they are developping and supporting ED, PC, JWE, and (unknown title project),and the seed of the team for another new fifth one?
I don't think that ED is abandoned, I think that ambitions clash with the limitations of reality and workforce management priorities (old projects that revenue money vs new projects that don't give money until be sell, so priorized, specially if franchised), and we are at an intermediate point between be doomed XD and the greatness XD
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And you do realise that not all of those 380 will be developers?
For a bit of (completely useless) fun using those absolute numbers, let's say at Elite's release, we knew of only one major 'self-published' project (so let's inaccurately say all 260 people were on Elite). Or if you like we could say (still inaccurately) that 130 were on Elite, and 130 secretly working on Planet Coaster. Now, with three big projects and 380 staff, that makes only 126.667 people on each of those projects!
Bottom line is still, at any given moment, we aren't privy to how many people are working on how many projects, nor what excesses, shortfalls or timescales those projects are working to or with. Still - it appears Frontier as a whole are in rude health.
I never implied that all 380 are devs. I was correcting a misinformed comment.
It will increase output but it has diminishing returns.