Damn it's cool. Shinkawa is super talented. Also, Pacific Rim was awesome.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Hideo Kojima IGN interview
- Thread starter zsynqx
- Start date
Damn it's cool. Shinkawa is super talented. Also, Pacific Rim was awesome.
RevolverRoden
Member
HE'S BACK!
eyeball_kid
Member
This is what I said last night. It was silly to think MS ever had a chance of courting Kojima when they just haven't fostered the kinds of personal relationships in Japan you need to make a deal like this. This was never about moneyhatting; Kojima was put through the ringer at Konami and wanted to partner with people he trusted and liked first and foremost.
anothertech
Member
Seems like a harsh week for Xbone fans. Happy for Kojima.
Ghost Slayer
Member
The game won't come out soon and by that time, PS4 will be dirt cheap. If they can't play it because of controller preference, PC is there for them.
Pinko Marx
Banned
But I'm sure that fat wad o yen helped him along the decision too.
Screaming Meat
Unconfirmed Member
I look forward to see what they come up with.
Not you specifically, Alienous, but it's interesting to see how the narrative seems to have shifted with GZ; from being dismissed as a "paid demo" to it's a "tighter, more focused experience".
Not you specifically, Alienous, but it's interesting to see how the narrative seems to have shifted with GZ; from being dismissed as a "paid demo" to it's a "tighter, more focused experience".
Guerrilla are like a 300 person team. A 100 person team won't be able to make an open world RPG in 2015.
Damn, someone should tell Bethesda...
Romars202129
Member
That Fox engine loss has to be it's own phantom pain,
badum tsh.
johnnydrama
Banned
Lys Skygge
Member
Wasn't The Witcher 3 made by a pretty small team (by AAA standards)?
It had a 5 year development cycle, I don't think most publishers want that, they can cut that time in half with more staff.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make an open world RPG with a small team, it just takes an awfully long time.
Lys Skygge
Member
True. I honestly hope Kojima doesn't do another open world game. MGSV was mostly amazing, but the open world felt wasted. Hopefully he does something tight and focused.
johnnydrama
Banned
Three and a half year development cycle.
TW3 released four years after the release of TW2, if you add approximately ~1 year of pre-production time during the development of TW2 (that's what most studios do, to avoid downtime within the studio after shipping a new game), that's about 5 years.
Anyway, that's just semantics, more staff means shipping the game much faster, which is what publishers want.
johnnydrama
Banned
Well, every source on the internet, including CDPR themselves say three and a half years of development time, so...
Although the team at CDPR that worked on The Witcher 3 was much larger than the Bethesda team that worked on Fallout 4.
More staff = ships faster is a myth. There are some things in development which can be hastened by having more staff, or by outsourcing certain components and modules to other partners. But there are also a lot of things which contribute to how long it takes to develop and -polish- a software product where the amount of manpower you have will really not make any difference at all. At best having a ton of staff means that during those periods of development, the other staff can work on other projects which they can contribute to, at worst it means you have a bunch of people paid to twiddle their thumbs because of poor management.
Man this is just awesome seeing Kojima in a creatively free environment.
That interview makes it sound like he really needed to get the fuck out under Konami's heel. So happy for the guy :')
Now Koji pls, not a pure horror game haha
Ehh not always.
Staff are human beings and you can imagine a bloated workforce causing less agility and thus longer dev times.
It's not a perfect science.
That interview makes it sound like he really needed to get the fuck out under Konami's heel. So happy for the guy :')
Now Koji pls, not a pure horror game haha
Ehh not always.
Staff are human beings and you can imagine a bloated workforce causing less agility and thus longer dev times.
It's not a perfect science.
I wouldn't say it's a myth, if Bethesda had more modelers or texture artists, FO4 probably wouldn't look like a cross-gen game.
After a certain point, you of course start to have redundancies, but that's why studio directors and publishers need to manage their studio and budget well, it's not a choice between a Ubisoft's 1k devs strategy or Bethesda's 100 devs strategy, you need to have a good balance.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I don't think throwing a bunch of contracted Sony staff at the project would necessarily be what Kojima wants. It's a bit fanfiction, but reading into what Kojima says seems to imply he wants to get back to more personalised, less industrialised work. The guy has been bolted to massive Metal Gear projects for over a decade, all of which have gotten bigger and bigger as he not-so-subtly laments not working on other franchises. Now he has no choice other than to work closer with a tight nit team on an entirely new idea with a publisher that's actually going to let him do it. Often working within perceived limitations (staff and budget) can do wonders for the creative process, rather than working on yet another 300-man AAA behemoth.
Plus, you know, despite the senior member experience this is entirely new startings for KojiPro. I'd rather see Kojima and co really pour themselves into a project they can manage and are passionate about at the expense of logistical development size in favour of a more passionately woven creative work, then once the studio has found its footing then can blow up into bigger things.
Let the dude breath a bit basically.
Plus, you know, despite the senior member experience this is entirely new startings for KojiPro. I'd rather see Kojima and co really pour themselves into a project they can manage and are passionate about at the expense of logistical development size in favour of a more passionately woven creative work, then once the studio has found its footing then can blow up into bigger things.
Let the dude breath a bit basically.
Maybe? But would the game ship -faster- than 3+ years it already takes? Having more resources means you can do more things at the same time. What I'm saying is that certain core things simply take time regardless of how many people are put on it. Level design iterations for example, or getting the game design right, balancing the game, studying the results of testing and feedback, these things don't go faster with more people. While these things are happening, if you have more people you can do more to improve the game, but those are all extras.
This. Please stop with the mech stuff. He just says "mechanical design", nothing more.
SprachBrooks
Member
Ah, man. I want that cup!
BreezyLimbo
Banned
Mhm. That's what I figured the postings were for-One, a sort of beacon for KojiPro members to go to and apply, those who want to leave Konami and continue working with Kojima. Ken and Yoji joining him already show that there are those who want to continue with Kojima. I'm sure there are more.
Very true. Kojima for example, seems to be involved in many facets of his games design. Writing, directing, producing, how the characters look, how they move, etc. There's something very personalized about having a smaller team and being able to look over their shoulders and provide instant feedback. It's why the MGS games have so much detail in them, because Kojima can be a bit neurotic about it(Most apparent in MGS2, with the lighting, reflections, the ice cube insanity), and if you have over 300 people working on it then it becomes less personal, it becomes a matter of him reviewing files sent to him, then sending them back with notes, loss of communication...
And I feel that Kojima would be one to hand pick the people he works with. People that he's built trust and communication with over time. So it's not as simple as using Sony's assets or going on a hiring spree. And that's not a bad thing. I don't want KojiProd to rush development on a game just to say 'Hey look we did something', nor should they feel the need to(Except to Sony of course, but I mean...Last Guardian.)
Probably, that's been Ubisoft's model for years, regardless of my or your opinion on their games, they ship their games very quickly.
Ubisoft's model works because they make dozens of games at the same time. That's part of my point which you don't seem to understand. Ubisoft may release an Assassin's Creed every year, but that doesn't mean it takes a year to make each one. They take 2-3 years to make each one, but they have so many resources they can juggle the developments such that they finish one each year. If they had the same resources (1000+ people) and made one Assassin's Creed game at a time with the same leads and core team for consistency, it would still take 2-3 years to make each one.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Yeah. It's like Call of Duty. We get one each yeah, but they're obviously not a 12 month turnaround on each one as the distinction is made between studios. 'Creed is the same thing; we get one every year, but they're each technically 2 - 3 year projects that benefit from immense data sharing between teams.
Based on their new logo, I wouldn't be surprised to see Futuristic Knights hopping into Steam-Punk-esque Mechs heading out to battle Alien-Human hybrids encased in biologically-grown hardened exoskeletons.
Why not?
Damn, I just want the cup!
It can be both.
I got it on the cheap so the amount I paid for it was negligible.
StardustPain
Neo Member
And stealth-action-tactical-operation-survival-portable?
There are things that take time regardless, but there's no doubt that a 200 person team would ship a game faster than a 100 person team making the same game, as I said redundancies will happen once you start having too many devs, but I don't think 100 is anywhere near the ideal number for efficient development.
There's a balance between the two, it's not a linear progression of more devs = faster development, but it's not the opposite either, you get to a point where you don't have enough devs for efficient development.
artsi
Member
Not all tasks of course, but a lot of creating a huge open world is brute artist / scripting work though, and more staff helps with that.
They can also use contractors for that, so when their specific part is finished they don't have to pay extra.
Screaming Meat
Unconfirmed Member
Definitely agree with that. Limitation is a breeding ground for innovation.
The label of "demo" implies that it isn't a fully fleshed out experience, merely a slice. Particularly funny when that is a criticism often levelled at TPP. Reframing the "demo" as a more "focused experience" kind of flies in the face of that. To me, it's the kind of semantic inversion/dilution of meaning that real estate agents use when they describing a tiny one-room house as "cosy".
Regardless, it's funny how that whole narrative has changed. No one described GZ as a "focused experience" before TPP.
Melchiah
Member
Yeah, I'd love to have a horror game from him. I'd have no objections with sci-fi either, but mech games do nothing for me.
EDIT:
Seconded.
A more "focused experience" than TPP. People didn't refer to it that way before TPP because they had no reason to think that would be the case; they hadn't played TPP.
It's more about how bloated and unfocused The Phantom Pain is, and how the pursuit of scale might not be a worthwhile one. The Phantom Pain might be '200 times' the size of Ground Zeroes, but it isn't 200 times the game Ground Zeroes is.
That's my point. Ground Zeroes is essentially a demo of The Phantom Pain, while simultaneously being more focused than that game, and a testament to the fact that Kojima Productions need not pursue scale over substance, IMO.
motorised mallard
Member
Some proper mech mayhem would be sweet.
Imperfected
Member
Not to mention that even for tasks where you can throw more bodies at the problem, you don't get proportionate returns on efficiency.
Even for engine programming and other core coding work, a hundred programmers just do not do a hundred times the work of one programmer. That is never the case, and never will be, even if you somehow manage to automate all of your efficiency solutions to the point where there's no immediately apparent overhead (ie, if you magically didn't need a management structure to handle all those extra heads), you just run into the wall where there aren't enough "simple" tasks to go around, and the "hard" tasks are going to take days or weeks to muddle through a solution. You just end up with a hundred people muddling through a hundred possible solutions, with the best case scenario being that you get to pick the best one. (More likely, one guy comes up with a solution, maybe two or three contribute by helping him work around conceptual roadblocks, and the other ninety-plus wasted their time.)
Screaming Meat
Unconfirmed Member
I understood in the first place, man. It's still a semantic reframing of the debate. The derogatory "demo" becomes the positive "more focused experience". They're essentially describing the same thing.
I'm not saying it's wrong to think that, nor did I want to get into a protracted debate about it. As I said, I think it's a funny shift in/reframing of the narrative around that game, that's all.
Hypereides
Member
I've often thought that Kojima wanted to let MGS go for a while now. But Konami, as his employer, repeatedly persuaded him to continue. The main positive potentially being his fans who supported and encouraged him.
Imo, the series was good up to MGS3, afterwards it started to feel like overexposure of the MGS saga.
lowhighkang_LHK
Member
Seriously. 3 years?...maybe even more. I'll just get the ps5 remaster as a launch game.
the_milkybar_kid
Member
Here's to you.
vpance
Member
Then again they chose to make one of the biggest open worlds jam packed with tons of quests and had dev issues on top of that. They're a great example of what can be done with a small team and the problems that arise from biting off more than they can chew. An open world RPG that's half the size of TW3 would still be good.
Empyrean Heaven
Member
Can't wait for Iron Cog Opaque, a stealth action game starring Opaque Salamander.
Plus, where are the "Konami was a mistake, it's nothing but trash" Gifs? Get on it, GAF!
voiced by David Hayter.
Plus, where are the "Konami was a mistake, it's nothing but trash" Gifs? Get on it, GAF!
No need for a debate, I just don't think we're on the same page.
The difference between 'demo' and 'more focused experience' isn't semantic. A demo isn't inherently 'more focused' than that the larger experience it is demoing, unless you assume 'focused' to mean 'smaller'.
The derogatory 'paid demo' label isn't a 'framing' of a 'more focused experience', it's a separate label entirely. The reasons for seeing it as a 'demo' and the reasons for seeing it as more focused than The Phantom Pain aren't the same. 'Demo' comes from viewing it as a small vertical slice of a larger game, 'more focused' comes from viewing it as an experience that is less bloated.
TL;DR: Demo simply means less content. 'More focused experience' means less bloated by content.