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Kotaku: What Went Wrong with Silicon Knights' X-Men Destiny? Also Eternal Darkness 2

T

TheOddOne

Member
Say what you will about Activision, but they got balls:
Former employees say Dyack was confident that history would repeat itself, and that yet another publisher would cave to his demands for extensions and further funding injections. He was wrong. "SK kept getting stonewalled by Activision regarding extensions for the game and pushing back the launch," says a source. "However, SK management was convinced they would have to delay; as a result, they started shifting a few more resources very quietly to ED2." The idea was to slow down production more than ever before, to try to apply pressure for an extension.

It didn't work. Instead of offering an extension, Activision turned up the pressure by publicly announcing the game, and attaching Silicon Knights' name to it prominently.

The October 7, 2010 release of the game's first trailer , released about a year before the eventual launch date, essentially put Silicon Knights on the hook to turn out a sellable product in a realistic time frame.

"I believe that's the video that Denis did not want released," said one source. "By putting the SK logo on the project for the first time publicly, Activision forced SK to start taking it seriously. But by then, it was pretty much too late."

"This was the first time that a publisher basically said, ‘No, finish the project and get it out the door'," the source said. "Keep in mind that during this time, SK continued to have some pretty senior people staffing [Eternal Darkness 2], and had no intention of moving them back over to XMD to help out the title."

Impossibly tight deadlines and publisher-pushed rush releases are two of the most commonly-cited factors when poor-quality games appear on shelves. Yet none of my eight sources believe that Activision was putting undue pressure on Silicon Knights. "They gave SK enough time; SK just didn't use it wisely at all," says another source. "SK over-promises to get a contract, and then always under-deliver. Activision was just the first publisher to hold their feet to the fire, so to speak."
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tumblr_mbem43Rh4O1rs0al3.gif


Fucking boss move.
 
S

ShockingAlberto

Member
Trying to play chicken with Activision is the dumbest fucking move.

What about their past history would make you think they'd happily agree to another year of development time?
 
G

grimshawish

Banned
God damn it Kotaku. For every 100 shitty articles you do you make one article worth more than some sites put out in an entire year. God damn.

Good to know theres someone whistle blowers have to contact though. Bet a lot of people are remembering Andrew's name.

Odd how many companies Nintendo gets involved with that have some serious internal issues.
Thankfully they outright bought Retro.

Startlingly, XMD chewed through four design directors during the course of development.
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Just wow. Activision are partly to blame ofc; they should have intervened as soon as trouble began. Good on them though holding their ground eventually.
 
T

TheOddOne

Member
Goddamn Activision, game suffered because of the deadline but they did some things good:
Another source suggested that "Activision caught wind of Denis Dyack's plan to leave everyone off the credits and forced him to put everyone on." (SK and Activision wouldn't comment on any of this for this story, though Silicon Knights has previously said that the names were intended to be included in the game in some way all along.)
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Fucking amazing.

Several sources report that the company today exists as a shell of its former self, employing less than five staff—including Denis Dyack
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Mitt-Romney-Laughing.gif
 
R

Ridley327

Member
Spieler Eins said:
I would have loved to see some of the concepts in Eternal Darkness return - too bad about this companies incompetence.
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Nintendo actually owns the sanity system implementation, which would mean that any potential spiritual successor to ED would have to survive on the rest of the gameplay, and I don't think anyone wants that from modern SK.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Takao said:
Probably The Box/The Ritualyst for SEGA.
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Was that the same project known as "Siren in the Maelstrom"?

TheOddOne said:
Say what you will about Activision, but they got balls:
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True, although I'm not sure why they still shipped the product when it sucked? Putting feet to the fire with an announcement is not a bad idea depending on how the contract held them to their milestones and the rights of the license holder, but if the game sucked it's not usually worth the damage it does to the brand to put out a product. (Then again, Activision has no problems associating its name with dirt when it comes to the Activision Value products, now boldly just labeled Activision, and Marvel does not seem to be eager to exercise quality control either.)
 
R

Ridley327

Member
bobbychalkers said:
Weird..I thought Nintendo owned the ED IP.
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They own the IP, but since the prototype that they were making wasn't being touched by Nintendo's hands at that point, the implication is that they could shop it around and if it got picked up, they'd rename to something else.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
MadeInBeats said:
Thank God ED2 never made it out alive. It's for the best.
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It's been speculated about for a while now, but I think the article makes it pretty damn clear that Nintendo had a much bigger hand in Eternal Darkness turning out as well as it did then I think some people (including Dyack) were willing to admit to.
 
S

Spieler Eins

Member
Ridley327 said:
Nintendo actually owns the sanity system implementation, which would mean that any potential spiritual successor to ED would have to survive on the rest of the gameplay, and I don't think anyone wants that from modern SK.
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Story, art direction, etc will be lost though. I never felt like the sanity system was the highlight tbh, though you can certainly do even more fun things with it.

Ridley327 said:
It's been speculated about for a while now, but I think the article makes it pretty damn clear that Nintendo had a much bigger hand in Eternal Darkness turning out as well as it did then I think some people (including Dyack) were willing to admit to.
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I always found Miyamoto poping up in the ED credits to be quite amusing.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
One of the underlying themes of the article is the fact that their tech stack is a mess and so throwing together playables is a very arduous task.

Might I suggest to Silicon Knights that perhaps they'd save a little time and effort if they used standard middleware to develop their projects instead of rolling their own? Unreal Engine 3 is a very versatile engine that's been used in a wide variety of games, and most people find it very quick to work and iterate with.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
That Eternal Darkness 2 bit is incredibly depressing. Still one of the most innovative and exciting games I've ever played.
 
M

Mutanthands

Member
Stumpokapow said:
One of the underlying themes of the article is the fact that their tech stack is a mess and so throwing together playables is a very arduous task.

Might I suggest to Silicon Knights that perhaps they'd save a little time and effort if they used standard middleware to develop their projects instead of rolling their own? Unreal Engine 3 is a very versatile engine that's been used in a wide variety of games, and most people find it very quick to work and iterate with.
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Ice cold, man.
 
G

Gav47

Member
Stumpokapow said:
One of the underlying themes of the article is the fact that their tech stack is a mess and so throwing together playables is a very arduous task.

Might I suggest to Silicon Knights that perhaps they'd save a little time and effort if they used standard middleware to develop their projects instead of rolling their own? Unreal Engine 3 is a very versatile engine that's been used in a wide variety of games, and most people find it very quick to work and iterate with.
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lol

I wonder what Dyacks next move will be? Bankruptcy?
 
S

ShockingAlberto

Member
Stumpokapow said:
One of the underlying themes of the article is the fact that their tech stack is a mess and so throwing together playables is a very arduous task.

Might I suggest to Silicon Knights that perhaps they'd save a little time and effort if they used standard middleware to develop their projects instead of rolling their own? Unreal Engine 3 is a very versatile engine that's been used in a wide variety of games, and most people find it very quick to work and iterate with.
Click to expand...

Ouch.

But didn't they go through great pains to make their own engine with Too Human? How did it end up such a mess that even they couldn't use it?
 
E

ElFly

Member
ShockingAlberto said:
Ouch.

But didn't they go through great pains to make their own engine with Too Human? How did it end up such a mess that even they couldn't use it?
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Because Too Human uses UE3 partially.

wikipedia said:
Silicon Knights concluded that many aspects of the game engine were inadequate and/or unexplained, and therefore the engine was not functional. Pressed to continue the game's development or lose funding from Microsoft, and no longer willing to use Unreal Engine 3, but contractually prohibited from using anything else, Dyack made the decision to start rewriting portions of the engine's code so it would behave and deliver results in ways that Silicon Knights was more familiar with and expected. Eventually, Dyack came to the idea that if they were to alter the last remaining portions of unmodified code, it would become an entirely new game engine, which he called the Silicon Knights Engine. Since the contract with Epic stated that Silicon Knights would keep and own the rights to any changes or "improvements" they made to the engine, Dyack felt that he would not be prohibited from using an engine that was composed entirely of improvements, and he also felt that he wasn't obligated to pay for an engine he considered non-functional. On July 19, 2007, Silicon Knights sued Epic Games due to "breach of contract", including "inadequacies" of Epic's support, service, and cooperation with Silicon Knights concerning Unreal Engine 3.[18][19] On August 9, 2007, Epic Games counter-sued Silicon Knights, claiming that it was using its engine as it pleased without any cost.
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Epic won that lawsuit.

We don't really know how much of ue3 is left in too human.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Fantastic article, but one aspect that's missing that I lose my bearings without is the SEGA connection. The company had two projects in the works there, were either Eternal Darkness 2 or were they both original productions or what happened to those games? There's a bit of a mention of SEGA in there but I can't tell if they have three games in the works in addition to XMD or was ED2 the only project or what was it they were trying to sell SEGA? I guess the article was just about the X-Men game technically and how game development can be shady business, but I'd like to see McMillen offer up a little knowledge about that deal (and the Canadian government investment, with or without funding) if he has insight.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
CamHostage said:
Fantastic article, but one aspect that's missing that I lose my bearings without is the SEGA connection. The company had two projects in the works there, were either Eternal Darkness 2 or were they both original productions or what happened to those games? There's a bit of a mention of SEGA in there but I can't tell if they have three games in the works in addition to XMD or was ED2 the only project or what was it they were trying to sell SEGA?
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One of them was a horror-based project called The Crucible, though it apparently had a couple of name changes during its gestation. As far as anyone knows, it had nothing to do with ED2, as I understand that ED2 was a more recent undertaking that was brought on partially out their current situation as a studio.

Well, "partially" might be an understatement.
 
S

ShockingAlberto

Member
Ridley327 said:
One of them was a horror-based project called The Crucible, though it apparently had a couple of name changes during its gestation. As far as anyone knows, it had nothing to do with ED2, as I understand that ED2 was a more recent undertaking that was brought on partially out their current situation as a studio.

Well, "partially" might be an understatement.
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I know at least one of their SEGA projects was picked up by THQ, who then dumped it. THQ paid SK to help work on Darksiders while they tried to figure out what to do with the formerly-Sega project.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
ShockingAlberto said:
I know at least one of their SEGA projects was picked up by THQ, who then dumped it. THQ paid SK to help work on Darksiders while they tried to figure out what to do with the formerly-Sega project.
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Oh man, that explains the retail failure of Darksiders 2 now; the Nintendo Curse placed on SK was contagious!
 
M

Mxrz

Member
X-men Destiny was so close to being that dream game of a full on comic book rpg, but then they royally fucked it up. It probably killed the whole premise. Now, I'll never get to select canned lines to hit on Wonder/Invisible Woman.
 
Herbspiceguy

Herbspiceguy

Member
Never played a SK game, but reading about SK is always interesting, especially insider stuff like this. Still somewhat interested in playing Eternal Darkness, but I'm not sure if it aged well.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Ridley327 said:
One of them was a horror-based project called The Crucible, though it apparently had a couple of name changes during its gestation. As far as anyone knows, it had nothing to do with ED2, as I understand that ED2 was a more recent undertaking that was brought on partially out their current situation as a studio.
Click to expand...

ShockingAlberto said:
I know at least one of their SEGA projects was picked up by THQ, who then dumped it. THQ paid SK to help work on Darksiders while they tried to figure out what to do with the formerly-Sega project.
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Thanks for the info.

I guess I just lost perspective on exactly how massive that mess of wasted time for SK was! I've been so accustomed to treating Silicon Knights projects as "Coming Soon" that it's easy to forget that the SEGA thing was way back in 2005, the Canadian funding story started in 2008 (and there are two funding stories, one from OMDC for arts, but then the big government grant proposal in 2010,) and that the Too Human saga dates back to the beginning of mankind. With so few landmarks of actual game releases to help get your bearings, it feels like all that SK-following time since MGS: Twin Snakes shipped was just a blur of waiting and outrageousness and GAF posts and confusion...
 
F

frankie_baby

Member
Boerseun said:
Shin'en have only five people working there and they turn out great games.
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Unfortunately the five employees are:


Dennis dyack,
Dennis dyack's PA
Dennis dyack's back scratcher
Dennis dyack's life coach
And the tea boy

Nah, we ain't ever getting a game from them again, lol
 
S

Sammy Samusu

Member
"They were working on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo that they could take to publishers."

So ED is not a Nintendo IP?

"The farthest they got with it when I left SK was, literally, one two-level church interior, it was really bad, as I recall. It took the side-team a long time to even get that far, a lot of key people responsible for the original Eternal Darkness are long gone."

And this is why I kept saying, I want ED2, but I don't want F5 working on it, they are garbage nowadays, just like Rare. If they hold the rights to the franchise, I'm ready to move on. If Nintendo owns the IP, give it to Retro, aren't they supposed to bring old games to new life? (Metroid, Donkey Kong)
 
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