Article is not detailed like that old Anthem one. Still, it was everything you expect. Zenimax pushing for live service games during the late 2010's so it could find a buyer (thank that for Fallout 76 and possibly killing the new Wolfenstein trilogy with Youngblood). Management trying to trend chase mediocre slop like Far Cry and Borderlands (it's fine if you like those, I like garbage too). It was also supposed to be filled with microtransactions until they pivoted in 2021. But the nail in the coffin was probably this:
Arkane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio’s Austin office employed less than 100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. Even additional support from ZeniMax’s Wisconsin-based Roundhouse Studios and other outsourcing houses couldn’t fill the gaps, they say.
Yeah just make one of those smash hits in a genre outside your niche, in a saturated genre, with one tenth of the budget and none of the staff. Come on I've seen my kid play Fortnite it shouldn't be that hard.
Morale at Arkane suffered. Veteran workers who weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Redfall’s development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey’s credits.
R.I.P. Hope they got to work on cool shit after this. And fled T*xas.
Filling vacancies became a challenge. Within the industry, ZeniMax had a reputation for paying lower than average salaries, and convincing some progressive or moderate video game developers to move to Texas could be difficult due to the state’s conservative social policies. Since Redfall wasn’t yet announced, the studio couldn’t describe its details to prospective employees — a predicament that exacerbated the staffing issues, sources familiar with the process said. Arkane wanted to hire recruits with experience on multiplayer shooters, but the people who applied were by and large looking to work on single-player immersive sims.
:surprised-pika:
:bloomer: I want to work on the cool stuff you guys make
:doomjak: Sorry we only make shit now
Well, one of my favorite studios is basically fucking dead now. Thanks, Bethesda.
I think Arkane Lyon might be fine, but losing the studio that made Prey sucks.
100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite
The idea that Fortnite took more work to develop than Prey seems insane to me
Not to discount the amount of work it would take to make something like Fortnite, but how does ToonTown island of randomly scattered guns take more development effort than a carefully crafted immersive sim full of intricately designed encounters, puzzles, and storytelling?
Fortnite produces new content daily. High fidelity premium slop content. So they need legions of artists continuously making the slop that will get sold every day. Also fortnite is constantly afraid of becoming left behind, so they steal new mechanics from other games constantly and shove them into fortnite. Do they work? Not really, but there's cars, skating boarding, web slinging, dragon ball energy blasts, light sabers and probably more by now. Is any of it actually good or cohesive? No not at all. But when you're afraid of losing your hundred million players you keep throwing shit at them so they can't ever notice if it's good or bad, they are stuffed with slop and that shuts them up.
I honestly don't know how too. My best guess as someone who is not a gamedev is that most of the work on something like fortnite goes into network stuff, infrastructure, making the framework for an endlessly updatable "content platform" and a lot of research on player psychology so they can hook people on the freemium model. Also from what I remember Prey is very efficient with it's use of assets and mechanics.
Multiplayer games are just an order of magnitude more complex and finicky than single player games
Fortnite runs extremely well for how often it’s patched.
It’s also fairly regularly changing the map, and it honestly has some great layouts and designs to push players into an encounter pattern they will be familiar with, but that is also different enough every time.
Tons of testing of new features and iterations before public release.
No mention of Deathloop, which was made by a different team, but considering it had a multiplayer element wouldn't it have made more sense to have some of the team at Arkane Lyon contribute as well? Not that Deathloop's multiplayer implementation was all that great either. Would be best if all of these studio execs got their heads our of their asses and remember what players actually like their games for rather than trying to force themselves into whatever the latest trend is.
but considering it had a multiplayer element wouldn’t it have made more sense to have some of the team at Arkane Lyon contribute as well?
:porky-happy: That would cost more money tho
