Years in the Bunker

In case you hadn't noticed, Ophelie of Bossy Pally is back posting after an extended hiatus. She's been focusing on single player games these days, and she's been working her way through the Mass Effect series.

Her most recent post was about single player versus multiplayer games, their profitability, and the potential future of Mass Effect titles. While I think that ME will make a return after the bones of the system (the Frostbite engine in particular) are fleshed out enough to accommodate the RPG that Bioware wants to create, the lure of cashing in on ME style multiplayer might pull the game in a direction that fans of Bioware RPGs might not like.*

That said, a link to this article by Kotaku author Jason Schreier really caught my eye. It was a detailed article on the development process for ME:A, and everything that went wrong in development. (TL;DR: a LOT went wrong.) Schreier even mentions in the article that it was amazing that ME:A actually shipped at all, given all of the issues with the development process.

But for me, reading the article felt like deja vu.

***

As I alluded to in a previous post about the potential issues of new software releases, I worked for several years in a software development house. Those five years were some of the best years of my life, when I worked hard for bosses that both pushed me beyond what I thought my limits were and yet respected my effort and output. I made some friendships that are still going strong today, and the skills I learned during my years in the barrel (so to speak) still serve me well today.

But those five years were also among the most stressful I ever experienced.

When you're on the inside of a development house there is an occasional tendency to get consumed with the work that's right in front of your face. Teams who work together day in and day out develop the feeling that their (piece of the) project is the most important part and frequently miss warning signs. But if you can break out of that silo, you can also see a train wreck coming a mile away. Sometimes it's salespeople who overpromise to critical customers without asking in advance "can we do this?"; sometimes it's the defection of critical personnel that a company had relied upon for years as a hero to fix the emergencies at the last second; other times it might be the promotion of people who prove to be incompetent at managing a development team; and then there's the occasional directive from the top to change direction in a project. Sometimes you might just get three or even all four.

I've been in good releases and bad releases, but the one that still haunts me is the last release I was involved in, which was a real shitshow.

This particular release was a perfect storm of overcommitments to customers, loss of senior staff to higher paying jobs**, an inflexible deadline set by said commitments, and major stability issues with the development environment. In spite of all of the (new) development staff we had, there were personnel shortages during the entire release cycle as the company had underestimated the new devs' capabilities.*** I was our team's representative on the weekly release meeting, and every week there were major complaints from all of the QA teams about the quality and stability of the product. We felt that the product needed at least 2 months to straighten out all the bugs, but we were informed by upper management that was simply not possible.

Things were so bad that they had to create a tiger team dedicated to simply having a workable daily environment for devs to code with, because every other day it seemed like some new code change would crash the entire system. I got drafted into that team for a couple of months, and I lost a lot of sleep because my pager (remember them?) would go off multiple times a night letting me know that a build had failed and we needed to find what code change broke the system.

In the end, you can kind of guess what happened: the product shipped, it was incredibly buggy, and the company took a lot of flak for it. A year and a half later, the company was gutted of "overpriced personnel" and sold to a competitor.****

So yeah, I know what it's like to be in Bioware's shoes with the result of the ME:A release.

***

The thing is, the development cycle didn't have to be that way.

Blizzard is practically alone in not announcing a release date until it feels that the software is ready to go. But that's because while Blizzard has given themselves a ton of goodwill from the gaming community over the years, they have also their reputation as a producer of good and stable games at stake. Of course, they have had their share of release fiascos lately --such as Diablo III and Overwatch-- so they're not immune to problems either. But I do believe these issues also stem from the pressure that Activision is placing on Blizzard to release on a regular schedule, in much the same way that ME:A would have benefited from an extra year of work rather than release on a date set long in advance (whether internally by the staff or externally by the suits).

The ME:A release disaster was another perfect storm of staffing, management, focus, new tech, and time. And the Bioware Montreal office paid the ultimate price by being shut down and absorbed into EA Motive. But this disaster should be used by Bioware to focus on the weak points and improve them, not to go and hide. Shelving the (single player) Mass Effect franchise would be the wrong solution to the problems of ME:A.

Now, if only the suits would let Bioware work out the solutions...





*Think of it this way: Blizz was known for the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft franchises. Now, along comes Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. The money that Blizz gets out of the latter three have muscled aside the original three, and so guess where the development dollars go? While WoW still pumps out content but it is no longer the star of Blizzard's lineup, and that means that WoW will take a back seat to content for the new titles, which are correspondingly cheaper to develop and maintain. (Such as a lack of story content to the level that WoW/Diablo/Starcraft have.)

**This was the late 90s, when the original dot com bubble was inflating rapidly. I knew several of these people very well, and almost all of them cited the desire to a) make more money and b) feel appreciated. While this may sound at odds with my statement as to how I was respected, you have to realize that these people had been taken for granted by management that they'd be around to clean up everyone's messes. They'd been around for a decade or longer, and they'd realized that the internet revolution was passing them by, so they jumped ship.

***The new devs also had an alarming lack of discipline. If they were assigned to work on boolean logic issues, we'd frequently find them deep within the mathematical algorithms instead, claiming that they wanted to see where the bug led them. We had to explain numerous times that it's not your job to worry about the algorithms, we have an entire math team to handle that. Hand the bug off to them and let them deal with it. Curiosity is one thing, but when you've got 10 bugs to work on and you need to get them fixed in 3 days you don't have the luxury of drilling down past the code you know.

****By then I'd already left the company, as everybody could see that the CEO was going to cash in by selling us and getting his golden parachute.

On Releases and Glitches

I've been watching the launch of Mass Effect Andromeda with more than a passing bit of interest, even though a) I'm not even finished with the first Mass Effect game, much less the entire trilogy, and b) I don't really have the money to drop on a new game.*

Still, the armchair quarterback in me has been following along with the hype and inevitable problems at the game's launch.

You know the old adage "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"? This definitely applies to software releases these days. Even the supposed gold standards of software development and release, Blizzard and Apple, have had their share of software launch bugs.

This makes me wonder why someone would even bother buying the game at launch, much less pre-ordering, when you know that bugs will frequently be the reward of playing the game first. Another way of putting it is "Why pay to be a beta tester?"

Sure, you may get extra goodies such as an extra in-game item or the soundtrack**, but is it truly worth the headache of dealing with a game that is frequently in need of major patches to even make it enjoyable?***

***

In the case of Mass Effect Andromeda, there are bugs, and there are features.

The bugs are the obvious items: system crashes, graphical glitches, selections that don't work, etc. You know, the usual stuff.

But features, those are design decisions that may seem like bugs but aren't.

There are animation glitches in Andromeda, no doubt, but the overall look and feel of the animation is not a bug or a glitch. That was a design decision.

I'm reminded of the behind the scenes extras in the DVD release of The Incredibles. In the video article, they were talking to Pixar developers and engineers about the technical leaps they had to make for The Incredibles to work. As it was Pixar's first animated movie with an almost exclusively human cast****, they had to expand their technical capabilities to get certain aspects of animating humans right. At one point during production, one of the engineers had to go to John Lasseter (the head of Pixar) and tell him that "at the moment, hair is still pretty much theoretical." The concept of having hair move properly when animating a human --whether that hair is dry or wet or in a convoluted design-- confounded the developers for a long while.

And in the work surrounding Mass Effect Andromeda, the scale of the game meant that Bioware likely had to determine what priorities the developers worked on, and what aspects of development they were going to use an off-the-shelf or generic solution for.

This isn't exactly a newsflash to people who have worked in software development; in my time at a software shop we handed translation from our software's format to other formatting standards --akin to converting from JPG to PNG and back-- to a third party. The trick was to integrate the third party's software into our existing package seamlessly, and that was not as simple a task as you might think. The number of bugs that resulted from that integration was... pretty large at times. A lot of times it had nothing to do with the third party software at all, but with coding in a completely unconnected part of the software.*****

What does all this have to do with the facial and character animation? My speculation is that part of the Andromeda animation wasn't a high enough priority to deal with as an internal project, and so Bioware used an off the shelf product to handle the animations. And the issues with the facial and character animation could be due to a) integration with the main software, b) the third party software needing tweaks to work better with the overall product, or c) the third party software is being asked to handle something that might be beyond its current capability.

Or maybe a combination of all three.

But this isn't just my speculation, here's an Animstate Roundtable which included professional animators discussing this very issue, pointed out by an article from PCGamesN and Gamasutra. The entire roundtable is interesting, but this part I found resonated with me the most:

"Simon: Before I speculate on what the cause of these animation issues are, I think it’s important for people to understand some of the numbers behind a game like this. I don’t have exact figures from ME:A, but we do know that Mass Effect 3 had over 40,000 lines of dialogue and Dragon Age had about 60,000. If we split the difference at 50,000 and conservatively estimate that each line averages out to about three seconds, that puts us at around 41 and a half hours of dialogue. That’s about 21 feature films worth of just talking. Most of the major animated feature films have a team of about 70+ animators working for two or more years to complete just one movie. A game like Mass Effect might have somewhere between five and ten focused on more than 20X the content in the same amount of time. To add to that, we need to also factor in localizing (translating) the game into at least 4-5 additional languages.

Now, it’s just not possible to keyframe that amount of content to any acceptable level of quality, so teams looking at that much scope try to find procedural solutions. I know in the past they’ve used an off the shelf solution called FaceFX, which analyzes the audio tracks and creates animation based on the waveforms, projection, etc. At a base level, it can read as a very robotic performance and I suspect that is what we’re seeing in some of the footage. You can work with the audio and the procedural tools to polish the performances in various ways of course, but when you’re staring down thousands of minutes of performance to clean up, your definition of “shippable” is a sliding bar that moves relative to team capacity and your content lock date. If it were my team and project, I would try to gather metrics on which scenes were the most watched based on playtest and use whatever polish time I had with those as a priority, letting the lesser seen ones go with a default pass." --From Animstate.com ROUND TABLE – MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA

***

Back to the original thought behind this post, why bother buying a game at launch if you know there's glitches and/or features that need to be cleaned up? Part of that is, I suppose, faith in the development house to get the job done right. Or if not done right initially, then to fix the problems quickly. Reputable development houses don't just sit on problems, they fix them.

And another part of this is the reality behind software development. It is much more complex than, say, building a fence or even a car, and constant tweaks in response to unforeseen problems is pretty much par for the course.

And finally, there's also the recognition that very few software development houses announce a release when they feel it's ready --okay, it's Blizzard-- and that when a release date is presented to the public there becomes an enormous amount of pressure to meet that date. The company doesn't want to lose face to its investors, the investors are constantly asking each quarter "What have you done for me lately?", and the development staff doesn't want to disappoint the fans. For my money, Blizzard does it the right way, but even they aren't immune to the occasional bad release.

From my perspective, I have absolutely no need to rush in and buy something the moment it is released, so I'm content to wait. I did that once, when I bought the original AMD Athlon system back in 1999, and six months later I could have paid about $600 less for the same system. I learned my lesson that time, and I've not wavered from it.






*Yes, I'm quite aware that you don't need to have played the original ME trilogy to have played Andromeda, but it provides a good buffer to rushing out and buying the game from the get go. Besides, immersing yourself into the world of Mass Effect prior to playing Andromeda isn't necessarily a bad thing, even without the Geth or Reapers.

**Okay, I can understand the soundtrack enticement.

***I'm not a fan of the Assassin's Creed series, but the bugs of Assassin's Creed Unity are infamous among gamers.

****I kind of count the robot as a minor character.

*****Okay, I'm going to get a little technical here, but in C and C++, memory allocation is a huge thing. If you don't do it right, or you go beyond your allocated memory, you could end up overwriting whatever else is in memory. It's very powerful, but it is also dangerous. If you don't clean up your memory allocations, you end up with what are called "memory leaks". And eventually that will kill your performance and potentially cause crashes of software or the computer/server. The greater the complexity of the software, the harder it is to find these memory leaks by yourself and you have to rely upon --you guessed it-- third party software that shakes memory leaks out. But the fun doesn't stop there, because something might be working perfectly fine in its "leaky" state, and once you fix it the function/code stops working right. And then you have to go find out why that's the case, and maybe you find even more memory problems underneath it.

Java has this problem too, and that's why a lot of Java implementations --especially early ones-- have so many memory problems.

How often can you connect a video game with They Live?

The voice of Captain Anderson in Mass Effect is provided by prolific actor Keith David. For some people, he is also the voice of Goliath in the cartoon Gargoyles. For others, he's found in John Carpenter's films The Thing (Childs) and They Live (Armitage). And still others, he's known for his voice work in Halo, Saints Row, and Call of Duty.

But probably his best known current work in the US is something that's rarely heard beyond our borders.

That's because Keith David is the narrator for commercials for the US Navy.

It may not be well known outside the US, but the US military is an all volunteer force. Since they don't rely upon a draft to staff the military, each branch invests heavily in commercials and outreach.

And that includes television commercials.

So when I hear Captain Anderson in Mass Effect, I have this weird juxtaposition of Mass Effect and the US Navy.

This makes me wonder if people who are used to Jennifer Hale's voice in Mass Effect and other video games have flashbacks when they hear her voice as the SWTOR female trooper.

Mass Effect vs SWTOR: A Short Comparison

Okay, this is very short, because I'm only about a couple of hours into Mass Effect itself.

Yes, yes, I bought the Mass Effect Trilogy. I bought it to help fill out an Amazon order to get it into the "free shipping" price area, and besides it was much cheaper than buying it from Origin.*

There were some adventures getting the original Mass Effect to work properly --mainly involving shutting down Origin when ME loads**-- but when it loaded...

Mass Effect is the natural progression of Bioware cinematic storytelling from Baldur's Gate I and II through Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, and Jade Empire. That cinematic storytelling process is actually quite revealing to me, who played BG 1 and 2 in the late 90s/early 00s and then skipped ahead to SWTOR long before going back to Jade Empire and now Mass Effect. In a way, Bioware's original Mass Effect story mirrors the intro stories of SWTOR to a significant degree.

Part 1: Starting Zone

It goes without saying that MMOs have a starting zone where the player first learns the basics before setting off into the big bad world. Even useful learning experiences like "don't stand in the bad" will make an appearance in the Starting Zone and it's adjacent low level zones. But as for the story in a Starting Zone, that's been fleshed out over time.

The evolution of the MMO starting zone from generic knockabout place to one with a specific storyline can be most easily seen in WoW. The Vanilla races, particularly in the pre-Cataclysm questlines, were very much a hodge-podge of "do this", "fetch that", "kill ten rats"***. The BC races had a bit of a questline but still harkened back to that earlier Vanilla era. It was only in the post-Cataclysm races that you found an actual story --using phasing-- that dominated the starting zone experience.

Age of Conan, with its Tortage starting zone, probably is the best of the classic old style MMOs for a story driven starting area. It's a shame, really, that the story driven promise of Tortage wasn't followed up in the regular zones to the same degree.

LOTRO, of course, does have its own story driven zones that propel the player into the next, regular low level areas, but the story line can get lost in the "kill ten rats" quests that dominate the game. It's only when you hit the old "max level" quests does the LOTRO Shadows of Angmar story really shine.

But SWTOR is a different animal entirely. Designed to be strictly a story driven MMO from the start, each of the eight class stories deals with the same general process:

• Player is given an initial couple of quests
• Player deals with a sudden shakeup of the current order, and has to spend the bulk of the starting zone making sense of the shakeup
• Player is handed a sudden story twist that turns the entire conflict on its head and propels the story to the faction's capital planet.

This by itself isn't too remarkable, since LOTRO's, AoC's, and WoW's Cataclysm races have similar trajectories. However, the other three's lack of fully acted cutscenes lack the same emotional punch that SWTOR's has.****

Which leads me neatly into Mass Effect, which has cutscenes that heighten the dramatic impact when the unexpected twist happens. You could also argue that there were two unexpected twists for the intro zone for Mass Effect, the *mumblety mumble* one and the one at the very end of the mission, and I'd not disagree with you.

Hell-lo, bad boy.
From multiple places on the web.

Part 2: Capital City and Intrigue

It kind of goes without saying that in MMOs a standard exit from the starting zone is the pilgrimage to the faction/race's Capital City/Planet. You leave Shadowglen and end up at Teldrassil. Your Cimmerian leaves Tortage and ends up at Conarch Village.***** Your Sith leaves Korriban and ends up at Dromund Kaas.

And so it goes with Mass Effect that you end up at The Citadel.

For a space based SF game, Mass Effect and SWTOR are eerily alike: you arrive without a means of interstellar travel as a passenger on a ship, and you have to navigate the consequences of the story twist on the starter world. You're introduced to galactic politics, various races, and no small amount of intrigue along the way. An older game such as Mass Effect compresses the experience a bit compared to the more fully realized MMO environment, but it still provides an eerily similar experience to the SWTOR capital cities. Mass Effect's angle is a bit different than most of the SWTOR class stories as the politics is more direct and at the highest levels of (what passes for) government, but all revolve around the same basic theme of dealing with the fallout from the starting world.

Part 3: A Ship and the Means to Go Where We Will

I thought Joachim's line from The Wrath of Khan highly appropriate for this last part.

The SWTOR player has conquered the immediate threat on the Capital world, and as a result more issues appear on other worlds. Time to give that player a starship!

(Or, in the case of the Smuggler, 'I have GOT MY DAMN SHIP BACK! and I now want to go and... What's this? Treasure you say?')

From swtor.wikia.com.

And Mass Effect follows the same pattern. (Sorry kids, no spoilers here.)

From masseffect.wikia.com.

The Normandy has some really nice lines and a great look, but my fondness still goes with the Smuggler's starship.

The Normandy and a SWTOR starship are outwardly dissimilar, but inside you can talk to your crew and advance crew questlines. Since Mass Effect is rated M, that presumably means a romance that enters into R rated territory, unlike SWTOR's romances. However, since the crew in SWTOR is somewhat limited in scope (at least initially), the Normandy not only looks bigger it feels bigger.


Part 4: No More Hurry Up and Wait

On the flip side, the missions for Mass Effect are akin to taking an entire SWTOR planet story and compressing it a bit. That has the effect of heightening the tension while at the same time making you feel like you just might be missing something somewhere. MMO zone/planet stories have enough time spread out between them that you have a bit more leisure time to take care of any side quests without rushing things too much.

I suppose you could say that Mass Effect --and other Bioware console/PC games-- have had an impact on SWTOR in Knights of the Fallen Empire by eliminating a lot of the side quests and enabling the player to focus strictly on the main questline with few interruptions.


Conclusions: What, you were expecting spoilers?

I've obviously not gotten very far in Mass Effect 1. Among other things, I'm playing ME1 at the same time as LOTRO and keeping myself afloat in SWTOR and some other MMOs, and I'm resisting the impulse to play until 4 AM.****** But the more I play ME1, the more I think that the experience with the Mass Effect series in particular has influenced Bioware's design for SWTOR.  There's been more than once when I've exclaimed "Hey, that feels like SWTOR!" while playing the game.

Which isn't a bad thing in my book.





*Or buying a used XBox 360 and the games that way.

**There's actually a setting box for this in the game's settings menu in Origin --not the Settings menu IN GAME, but the one in Origin itself. If you deselect the option for keeping Origin running while ME plays, you're able to play the game properly. Took me about 45 minutes of tweaking and Googling to figure that one out.

***Often literally so.

****Like, oh, the cutscene for the Trooper's or the Knight's sudden twist.

*****Yes, I know, Cimmerians don't have a capital city because they are nomadic tribes, but as an in-game necessity the Cimmerians use the home village of Conan's tribe as the "capital".

******Although this election season has made me want to lose myself in a game --or drink a lot-- for obvious reasons.

Friday Musings

Yeah, it's a gloomy kind of day today --both outside, where it's rainy, and inside at work-- so my mind has turned to more whimsical musings.

• Do Elves ever get seasonal allergies? When I see the Night Elf pic below, all I can think of is that in September and October, I'd be miserable.

From walldevil.com, based on a Blizzard artwork.

• Unlike their common counterparts in fiction, the dwarves in Terry Brooks' Shannara series are scared as hell of being underground. (It was mentioned heavily in the very first book about how the Dwarves had to deal with all sorts of things underground during the years that they "became" Dwarves that it left a scar on their collective psyche.) Why don't you see that sort of thing more often in Fantasy fiction?
• The Star Trek Next Generation Federation jumpsuit is one of those outfits that flatters most forms, so why did Cryptic Studios feel the need to sex up their loading screens and whatnot? There's absolutely no need, and I can tell you from having been to Star Trek conventions before that a well done ST:TNG jumpsuit does VERY well all by itself without having to unzip or sexy up anything. To quote George Takei: "Oh mmyyy....."

I'm not posting the pic from A New Dawn, as it likely shows
someone from the alternate ST "Imperial" universe. (From reddit.com)

• I realize that for the sake of continuity that Governor Saresh had to disappear from Taris' questlines on SWTOR, but I still miss her. Even though my Smuggler was unable to successfully flirt with her. (Hey, it fit that the Old Man would find an older woman like Saresh attractive.)
  

  

  Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard that one before, Saresh.
  From Reddit.com

  
  
• Yesterday I pulled out my old copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook (now called A Tolkien Treasury) and perused the articles inside. The article The Evolution of Tolkien Fandom by Philip Helms reminded me how I really really wanted to run my own fanzine back in the day, using mimeograph to put everything together. But I never a) had the money for a mimeograph machine, and b) never really had the oomph to start and keep running a fanzine all by myself.
  
  And now the Tolkien fanzines at least are either mostly gone or have evolved into real scholarly works, and I'm not that into the History of Middle Earth series. Blogging is about as much of a "fanzine" mentality as I can handle.

A copy of Orcrist #3, circa 1969/1970, published
by the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society.
From tolkienguide.com

• I've been tossing around the idea of splurging on a used Xbox 360 so I (and the mini-Reds) could play the Mass Effect trilogy (among other titles) without having to buy multiple copies of the game for the PC. I'd consider a 360 over the current gen consoles because the multiple disk games (such as ME2 and 3) aren't quite ready for backwards compatibility with the XBone, and the PS4 is now going to release yet another version of the PS4, and I don't want to get on that treadmill. Besides, I'm more likely to find a used 360 (or even a PS3) at garage sales than the current gen consoles, anyway.

As if I don't have enough things to do.
From masseffect.bioware.com

• The Boss has the day off, and is over watching Muhammad Ali's funeral procession on television (thank you, Chromecast). And the news just broke a short time ago that another sports legend, Canada's Gordie Howe, passed away. The fact that it is raining outside is somehow appropriate.

EtA: Fixed some grammatical issues.