18-08-2012 17:18
Cita:Bioware: algunos jugadores quieren DLC el día uno[/url]"]Fernando Melo, director of online development at BioWare Montreal defended day one DLC for BioWare titles as part of his GDC Europe talk this week, explaining that "players want more content, and they want it now -- the problem is that there is no single 'now', so it should be there when they're ready for it."
Given that some players can take months to complete a game, while others can blast through games in a matter of days, this means that providing extra content from the get-go is the only real way to fulfill all players' expectations.
Melo argued that on the occasions when BioWare hasn't provided DLC from day one, those players who complete the game quickly then complained that there was nothing more to play and asked for extra content. If DLC isn't provided for these players, they may well move on to a different game and never come back to play DLC later on.
As proof that day one DLC also works in terms of sales, Melo said that 53 percent of all sales for the first Dragon Age: Origins DLC pack -- which was released on the same day as the full game -- were made on release day.
Melo also urged developers to remember that post-release downloadable content is now a necessity for video games, and can lead to some great benefits for your development team.
The BioWare executive noted in particular that, "using post-ship content is a great way to train your next set of leaders with very little risk, and the fans will also appreciate it."
He said that as your main game is ready to ship, your team will most likely be working together at the peak of its abilities, and so it makes a lot of sense to use that period to create even more content for the title, rather than taking a break and losing that edge.
There are plenty of benefits to DLC in terms of sales too, of course. "Everything you do post-ship is totally independent on the success of your game," noted Melo, "and DLC tends to sustain sales over time even better than your main game."
DLC holds its initial price better than your main game too, he continued, and releasing extra DLC packs can give sales spikes to both your original game release and spikes for all previous DLC packs too.
Cita:Lo que salió mal al hacer Journey[/url]"]"We were addicted to 'just in time' extensions." Hunicke said. "The fact of the matter is we signed an unrealistic schedule believing, in our heart of hearts, it would probably be extended later, and we paid for that stress in the entire project."
"We were poor at extracting realistic individual estimations and people failed to confront the true costs of 'just in time' changes to the game. Managing a task list is a drag and if you're used to working on a team with 3 to 5 people, the amount of communication you need to do to keep designers and artists motivated and on the same page with you is really frustrating - it can feel like a straightjacket."
She went on to warn that, as teams grow in size, there is a clear and present danger of miscommunicating and getting off-course. "Always, always talk to each other. It doesn't matter if you're two hundred people or ten - the risk is always great."
Greed was another mistake. "We had eyes that were much bigger than our stomachs. While we were iterating, there were many ideas that we chucked. They just didn't seem right. Being attached to those features and ideas but being unwilling to expand the team or the process in ways that made them feasible in a realistic period of time was very costly to us."
"Not only did it wear down individual people on the team who felt the burden of being pressured to perform way more than they actually could, it eroded trust in the creative leadership of the game because it sounded crazy. The best way to avoid is to let some of your ideas, some of your best ideas, to not be implemented on THIS project."
According to Hunicke, another mistake had been the 'anxiety train'. "We were really hard on each other."
She explained that they had given in to internal, unexpressed anxieties. "When you work on high pressure projects, you're bound to get into situations where you are angry and frustrated at the people you work with and it's impossible to hide that but it's often really difficult to confront it and process it in a way that gets resolved."
Though hard to deal with, Hunicke observed that when such issues go unaddressed, they have a tendency to make appearances at inappropriate situations like design meetings where everyone is trying to be supportive of each other instead.
Lastly, Hunicke cited what she called the 'culture war' as their final hindrance. "There were definitely two distinct types of people on that project - people who really needed to work constantly to get a sense of progress, who felt the weight of each day, and people who needed ample time away from the stress and the pressures of the office so as to be able to relax and clear their mind to be able to feel creative about the work we're doing."
"You could argue that running this project to the extreme end, that the team was finally forced to deal with the misalignment in the culture, which eventually made it possible to have fresh starts for the people who founded the company.
"But it is hard for me not to imagine an alternate universe where, through improved communication, key contributors avoided or overcame personal grudges that slowed the production down and, instead, created an ample amount of trust and ownership among their peers."
